The start of this century has seen Hindu nationalism emerge as a more dominant force than ever before. Hindutva is also evolving and shifting in new, surprising, and significant ways, requiring us to reassess and reframe prevailing understandings. This special issue seeks to identify and understand the ways in which Hindu nationalism increasingly permeates into new spaces: organisational, territorial, conceptual, rhetorical. It develops and expands on the idea of 'neo-Hindutva': 'idiosyncratic expressions of Hindu nationalism which operate outside [or on the peripheries] of the institutional and ideological framework of the Sangh Parivar' [Anderson, Edward. 2015. "'Neo-Hindutva': The Asia House M.F. Husain Campaign and the Mainstreaming of Hindu Nationalist Rhetoric in Britain." Contemporary South Asia 23 (1): 45-66].The scope of the articles in the special issue reflects the diversity of contemporary Hindutva, which appears simultaneously brazen but concealed, nebulous and mainstreamed, militant yet normalised. They cover a wide range of topics and places in which we can locate new forms of Hindu nationalism: courts of law, the Northeast, the diaspora, Adivasi communities, and the internet. The special issue also includes an in-depth interview with Christophe Jaffrelot and a postscript by Deepa Reddy. These interventions, we hope, go some way to helping us make sense of contemporary Hindutva.

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The paper will examine the intersection between Sangh Parivar activities, Christianity, and indigenous religions in relation to the state of Nagaland. I will argue that the discourse of 'religion and culture' is used strategically by Sangh Parivar activists to assimilate disparate tribal groups and to envision a Hindu nation. In particular, I will show how Sangh activists attempt to encapsulate Christianity within the larger territorial and civilisational space of Hindutva (Hinduness). In this process, the idea of Hindutva is visualised as a nationalist concept, not a theocratic or religious one (Cohen 2002: 26). I will argue that the boundaries between Hindutva as cultural nationalism and its religious underpinnings are usefully maintained in the context of Nagaland because they allow Sangh activists to reconstitute the limits of Christianity and incorporate it into Hindu civilisation on their own terms.

This paper will argue that to understand Naga sovereignty, one must take into account the intimate connection between Christianity and nationalism. This relationship is centred on the idea of ‘Nagaland for Christ’, a central slogan (also seen as a covenant) for all Naga nationalist groups. It suggests that God is the primary agent in sovereignty, and that the land is connected with the idea of Nagaland for Christ. I argue that national territory is not an object or a place that can be fixed in time, but rather an act of narration and imagination with the power to shape where it belongs. I will make the case that we need to rethink modular forms of sovereignty that are based on a strong national state. Instead, it would be more useful to think about sovereign territories as the organisation of space, or territoriality (Sack 1986). Robert Sack argues that territoriality is ‘intimately related to how people use the land’, how they ‘organize themselves in space and how they give meaning to place’ (Sack 1986: 2). If history has shown us that ascertaining the precise territorial lines of national units are always a challenge, it is more helpful to try and understand how people give meaning to place regardless of boundaries.