Thought World of Hindu Nationalism

Description

This book makes two major contributions. First, it analyses textual material and qualitative data on Hindu nationalism: in doing so, it reveals the co-existence of several self-other category relations and of more elaborate schemas of interpretation in a transnationally circulating discourse often reduced to a cognitive pattern of binary us versus them distinctions (frequently dominant though this logic is). Second, the analysis is theoretically informed by a newly constructed framework; critically revisiting Claude Lvi-Strausss legacy, the author argues that a neo-structuralist paradigm capable of illuminating the structures and workings of (ethno-nationalist) discourses of identity can be constructed if the classically Lvi-Straussian indebtedness to structural linguistics is replaced by conceptual borrowings from social and cognitive psychology. The result is a theoretical approach capable of addressing the blind spots in traditional structuralism structural diversity, meaning, history and agency. Further complemented by recent work on identity and the cognitively informed study of ethnicity, the analysis reveals the structural possibilities and schemas underpinning the discourse of Hindutva , conceptualizes the latter as a way of interpreting, and acting in, the world, and stresses the role of human agency in relation to a particular specimen of the kind of identity politics that has shaped recent history.