Militant Publics in India: Physical Culture and Violence in the Making of a Modern Polity [Paperback]

Offers readers a telling glimpse of the social world in which militants are made, explaining how group physical training and technico-ethical experiments with it have created a powerful religious nationalist movement in Gujarat that has been held responsible for carrying out spectacular episodes of ethnic cleansing against Indian minorities.PART I: MODALITIES OF POLITICAL MOBILIZATION?? Efficacies of Political Action: Physical Culture and the Kinesthetic Politics of Gandhian Nationalism?? Preparatory Training and Disciplined Satyagraha in Bardoli (1928)?? Militant Peacekeeping and Subterfugic Violence of the Quit India Movement (1942)? PART II: ELABORATING POLITICAL ITINERARIES?? Physical Culture, Civic Activism, and Hindu Nationalism in the City Physical Training, Ethical Discipline, and Creative Violence: Zones of Self-Mastery in the Hindu Nationalist Movement

'In this remarkable book, Valiani looks at the horrific 'saffron' violence of Gujarat in 2002 squarely in the eye and sets out to understand through first-hand encounters with participants how disciplined physical training not only makes tragedy possible but also shapes moral dispositions, new forms of sociality, and civic engagement. In the archival-based historical chapters, he shows us the roots of this training in the nationalist movement and the permeability between Gandhian practice and the violence of the Hindu Right. This absorbing study is a major contribution to understanding modern political life in India.' Barbara D. Metcalf, author of Husain Ahmad Madani: The Jihad for Islam and India's Freedom (2009) and president of the American Historical Association (2010)

'Valiani draws on rich and extensive fieldwork to theorize a series of unexpected links between Mahatma Gandhi, bodily self-fashioning, and performative politics with erudition and verve. He attributes contemporary Hindu nationalism, and the violence of contemporary electoral politics in India more generally, to tlc‡