Spectacular Politics: Performative Nation-building and Religion in Modern India

Spectacular Politics: Performative Nation-building and Religion in Modern India

By- Clemens Six and Rekha Kamath Rajan

How does one explain the historical processes through which abstract ideas such as the idea of a nation become a motivation for mass mobilization, political re-organization and even violence on a large scale? This book seeks to find answers to this question in the context of India’s modern history during its long eventful twentieth century.

Starting from the early stages of Gandhian mass mobilization after the First World War and subsequently proceeding to more recent examples of Hindu-nationalism, the book analyses ‘spectacular politics’ as a distinct form of political communication. It thereby seeks to understand not only how the idea of the nation turned into the most powerful political idea in modern India, but also how political communication and mobilization work in an extremely heterogeneous and fragmented society. As Indian society becomes more and more involved globalization and internationalization, many seemingly self-evident paradigms of India’s self-understanding such as its national identity, democracy, or secularism are once again subject to intense political controversies and social confrontations.

Finally the example of religiously motivated terrorism illustrates the profound ambivalence of performative politics between inclusive, even participatory effects on the one hand and destabilizing, even destructive consequences of those political discourses, which emphasize their form as much as their content.

Clemens Six is Assisstant Professor at the Department of History, University of Berne, Switzerland.

Rekha Kamath Rajan is Professor of German, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

ISBN  978-81-7304-886-9    2010   264p.   Rs.725/ pounds 45

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