Cleansing the Nation: India, the Hindu Modern, and Mediations of Gender [Paperback]

InCleansing the Nation, Raka Shome explores the logics of governmentality of contemporary Hindu nationalism in India by advancing the concept of the “Hindu modern.” Analyzing a national cleanliness program and other development projects, Shome shows how the Hindu modern—a form of national governmentality that disciplines and regulates individual subjects to create desirable “clean” citizens—inscribes Hindu nationalism in India. Focused on security, progress, and development while celebrating and protecting the figure of the upper-caste Hindu woman, the Hindu modern works toward a religious and casteist cleansing of the nation that rewrites Indian modernity as a purified and cleansed Hindu modernity. It shores up caste and religious inequalities around who is authentically Indian, reproducing historical violence against and exclusions of caste, gender, and religion, especially toward Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis. By outlining how the Hindu modern sutures Hindu-ness to the contemporary Indian national project of modernity, Shome helps us further understand projects of national purification and cleanliness within global populist authoritarian movements.USRaka Shome explores the logics of governmentality of contemporary Hindu Nationalism in India and the ways it inscribes Indian modernity as a purified Hindu modernity.Raka Shome is the Harron Family Endowed Chair and Professor of Communication at Villanova University and author ofDiana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture.“Raka Shome’s formative account details the violent apparatus of erasure that is normalized, castefied, and minoritized by the Hindu nationalist state and movement through a national cleanliness program, a pervasive vehicle to gender and racialize Hindu modernity.”Angana P. Chatterji, author of,Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in Indias Present

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