1 week ago
Book Review Examines Hindutva’s Use of Culture and Violence
Brahma Prakash wrote a book about how Hindutva shapes culture and people’s feelings.
He says cultural events can sometimes be used to show power and aggression.
The book discusses festivals, music, dance, bulldozers, swords and lynchings.
Prakash describes a Ram Navami procession in his Bihar village that deeply upset him.
He felt shocked because people close to him joined an event connected to ideas he was protesting.
He uses ideas from B.R. Ambedkar to explain Hindutva as a revival of an older social hierarchy.
He also uses Walter Benjamin’s idea that politics can be turned into a dramatic spectacle.
The review says the book studies how violence and cultural performances can become mixed together.
Brahma Prakash’s book examines how Hindutva appropriates cultural forms and turns them into symbols of assertion and violence.
The review describes aggression as a recurring feature of Hindutva-associated dance, music, festivals and public rituals.
Prakash uses B.R. Ambedkar’s revolution-counter-revolution framework to interpret Hindutva as a revivalist movement seeking an older hierarchical social order.
Drawing on Walter Benjamin, the book presents the bulldozer, sword and lynching as examples of the aestheticisation of politics.
Spectacle State: How Hindutva Shapes Feeling and Culture is published by HarperCollins, runs 263 pages and costs Rs 599.
- Who
- Brahma Prakash, a theatre and performance studies teacher at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the Hindutva movement examined in his book.
- What
- A review of Spectacle State: How Hindutva Shapes Feeling and Culture, which analyzes Hindutva’s use of cultural forms, spectacle and violence.
- Where
- The discussion includes Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a Ram Navami procession in Prakash’s village in Bihar.
- When
- The review does not specify a publication date.
- Why
- Prakash examines how Hindutva reshapes cultural practices and turns symbols, bodies and acts of violence into forms of political assertion.
Key facts
- Book
- Spectacle State: How Hindutva Shapes Feeling and Culture
- Author
- Brahma Prakash
- Publisher
- HarperCollins
- Length
- 263 pages
- Price
- Rs 599
- Main subject
- Hindutva’s influence on feeling, culture and political spectacle
- Frameworks used
- B.R. Ambedkar’s revolution-counter-revolution paradigm and Walter Benjamin’s analysis of fascism’s aestheticisation of politics
Quotes
Brahma Prakash
Author and JNU theatre and performance studies teacher
“What does an art installation do? It transforms a space into an immersive experience for the spectators… Yet, this does not mean that there is no difference between an art installation and a lynching. Hindutva tends to merge the differences together by aestheticisation of the body and violence. It installs bodies to stage a lynching. It carries out the lynching like an installation work.”
deccanchronicle.com
“while I was protesting the Hindutva violence under the banner of Not in My Name, my own people were participating in the same processions, chanting the same name, which I was protesting. Seeing this sort of procession happening on my home turf, in front of me, shocked me beyond the point of belief.”
deccanchronicle.com
Sources
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