“Modern/Colonial Resignifications” in a Postcolonial Context: Constructing Global Hindutva Indigeneity and Decoloniality

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

What enables right-wing Hindu nationalists in India and the diaspora to deploy indigeneity and decoloniality – concepts historically mobilized by marginalized groups? I argue that based on the historical complexities of questions of indigeneity in India, Hindu nationalists today draw upon a culturalist framing of indigeneity and decoloniality – thereby resignifying these concepts, framing Hinduism as an indigenous religion and themselves as part of a global indigenous movement. Against an interpretation of this process as “appropriation” and extending earlier work on “colonial resignification” in settler-colonial contexts, I offer a novel conceptualization of this phenomenon as “modern/colonial resignification” in a postcolonial context. I define “modern/colonial resignification” as the ideological process by which signs and symbols of indigenous communities, especially indigenous faiths and religions, are conscripted in service to Hindu nationalist claims to decoloniality and indigeneity. This process, I argue, sustains bourgeois and upper caste dominance, involves immense material investment, and is always materialized in its practices and effects. Drawing upon archival work and ethnographic data on a diasporic Hindu nationalist organization working amongst indigenous communities in India and globally and on a prominent Hindu nationalist intellectual, I show how “modern/colonial resignification” works, highlighting the complex and contradictory processes at work in the reproduction of Hindu nationalist hegemony. Specifically, I show how Hindu nationalists draw upon indigenous signs and make them hyper-visible, embedding them in a larger metanarrative of the European colonization of the Americas, while temporalizing both indigenous communities and themselves as “ancient traditions and cultures” and naturalizing nation-states as the locus of decolonization. This paper illuminates the multiple trajectories and faultlines along which the concepts of indigeneity and decoloniality travel and thereby brings into conversation postcolonial and decolonial critical traditions.

Author

• Upasana Goswami, University of Massachusetts-Amherst