Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa is an erudite and elegiac exploration of Hindu nationalism in India today. It offers a revealing account of Hindu militant mobilizations as an authoritarian movement manifest throughout culture, polity, and economy, religion and law, class and caste, on gender, body, land, and memory. Tracing the continuities between Hindutva and Hindu cultural dominance, this book maps the architectures of civic and despotic governmentalities contouring Hindu nationalism in public, domestic, and everyday life. In chronicling concerted action against Christians and Muslims, Adivasis and Dalits, through spectacles, events, public executions, the riots in Kandhamal of December 2007 and August-September 2008, the planned, methodical politics of terror unfolds in its multiple registers.

This pioneering research was conducted between 2002-2008 in urban and rural settings in the eastern state of Orissa, a primary arena for the onslaught of organized Hindu majoritarianism. Through situated reflection, storytelling, and ethnographic accounts, this genealogical excavation examines Hindutva/Hindu supremacist proliferations in manufacturing imaginative and identitarian agency for violent nationalism.

At the intersections of Anthropology, Postcolonial, Subaltern, and South Asia Studies, Angana P. Chatterji asks critical questions of nation making, cultural nationalism, and subaltern disenfranchisement. As a Foucauldian history of the present, this text asserts the role of ethical knowledge production as counter-memory.

ANGANA P. CHATTERJI is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Her work spans issues of cultural survival, nation/nationalisms, gendered violence, and postcolonial critique. Her recent writings include two forthcoming books, Land and Justice: The Struggle for Cultural Survival, and a co-edited volume, Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present.

Cover Art: Arpana Caur. in the name of god. 2008.

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