About Hindutva

 Since the consolidation of the Sangh Parivar in the 1990s and its subsequent ascendancy to power in 2014, there has

been a signicant rise in the studies and commentaries on Hindu nationalism and the Hindutva discourse in India.

These studies have emphasized the nature of Hindutva ideology, its history, its organizational structure, its

transnational nature, its fascist and Nazi underpinnings, its complicity in violence towards minorities, its subversion of

democracy and its digital advancement. Arming that Muslimness is the other of the Hindutva project, few studies

have also focused on the violence (misnamed as communal riots) and the marginalization of Muslims in India (Brass

2005, Jarelot 2012).

However, what remains uninterrogated in these studies is whose language is compromised or erased. Such

theorizations often locate the Muslim as a victim rather than an autonomous subject, whereby the potential of Islam

is relegated, and Muslim political subjectivity is disciplined. Subsequently, the Muslim political responses to Hindutva

are discarded using the explanatory power of extremism, foreclosing political legitimacy and debates around Muslim

autonomy. This framing results from a particular arrangement of Muslim subjectivity post-independence facilitated

through a preference for a so-called secular interpretation of Islam. A critique would necessitate the problematization

of existing categories, concepts and importantly the ontological and epistemological presuppositions they are

founded on.

The special issue aims to interrogate the construction of these presuppositions, thereby aiming to provide a more

extensive historical and complex political background to the debates on what is happening in India. We invite articles

positioning the political back into the plane of discussion not to merely de-pathologize Muslim political experiments

in India but also to think through the conditions of possibility that constitute a Muslim self that is capable of a radical

political imaginary.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

To apply, please mail your abstract (300 – 400 words) to:

Shaheen Kattiparambil: s.kattiparambil@leeds.ac.uk | Thahir Jamal Kiliyamannil: jamalkm@uohyd.ac.in

Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit a working paper of 3000 words for presentation in an online

writing workshop. This workshop is to facilitate discussions of ideas and arg