This dissertation is accessible only to the Illinois State University community.

  • Off-Campus ISU Users: To download this item, click the "Off-Campus Download" button below. You will be prompted to log in with your ISU ULID and password.
  • Non-ISU Users: Contact your library to request this item through interlibrary loan.

Date of Award

4-14-2014

Document Type

Thesis-ISU Access Only

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Department of Politics and Government: Political Science

First Advisor

Kam Shapiro

Second Advisor

Ali Riaz

Abstract

In this thesis I theorize Indian revolutionary V.D. Savarkar's seminal text "Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?" (1923), comparing related themes in Carl Schmitt's Weimar writings: national myth (1923) and the friend-enemy distinction (1932). Responding to the first phase of mass-mobilization in India, and Gandhi's politics of non-violence and religious sentimentality, Savarkar promoted a political consciousness based on the revolutionary violence of a "Hindu" as India's authentically patriotic inhabitant. In the link between the mythic Hindu name, people, and territory, Savarkar put forth three qualifications of the Hindu national myth Hindutva: common fatherland, common blood or race, and exclusive attachment to Hindu civilization. He argued that Indian Muslims and Christians, because of their adoption of foreign religions, do not own Hindutva fully. I reflect on the rhetorical making of the Hindutva national myth and I probe the three qualifications of Hindutva that Savarkar sets up in the text. I ask why there is a need for different qualifications, and whether these are additive, or if they modify each other. Moreover, I seek to explore the sense of impossibility that marks the rhetoric of Hindutva. By impossibility I mean a dynamic combination of antagonism and circumspection in the rhetorical deployment of the language of the people in a given text or instance. It is this reflexivity that I seek to recover in Savarkar's Hindutva by a Schmittian reading.

Comments

Imported from ProQuest Sanadhya_ilstu_0092N_10251.pdf

DOI

http://doi.org/10.30707/ETD2014.Sanadhya.V

Page Count

78

Off-Campus Download

Share

COinS