Muslim Community in Bengal, 1884-1912

Gordon, Leonard A.; Jones, Kenneth W.; Ahmed, Sufia

doi:10.2307/1850101

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Meanwhile, the guru is shown showering water on bare-bodied men. The sequence recalls the shuddhi (purification) ceremonies performed by the proto-Hindutva Arya Samaj socioreligious organisation that brought converts back into the Hindu fold (Jones 1976), symbolised by the transformation of the Adivasis into 'clean' villagers. After being made to stop drinking mahua (local fruit-based liquor) and enter the structure of north Indian kinship relations, Adivasi men and women are shown marrying before the guru.…”

Section: Hindutva's Guru Logicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hindu Nationalism, Gurus and Media

Copeman,

Duggal,

Longkumer

2023

Religions

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This commentary offers a reflection on the triangular interactive relationship between Hindutva, gurus and media. It suggests that Hindu nationalists understand gurus to be a specific form of valued Hindu cultural good, which helps to explain mediatised activist attempts to defend gurus from legal and media scrutiny, and historicises the theme of guru domination, caste politics and Hindutva through the optics of matter and media, exploring both the mass remediation of Brahmanical guruship models that attended Hindutva’s rise in the 1990s and the oppositional response it provoked, which we term ‘the subaltern counter-publicity of the guru’. It discloses how Hindutva is itself structurally composed of guru logics at different scales; it embodies a kind of ‘fractal guruship’. However, if Hindutva mediates principles of guruship, we also see how a multitude of public gurus mediates principles of Hindutva. This ‘bi-instrumentalism’ of Hindu nationalism and some gurus is witnessed in the instances we describe of gurus—and the idea of India as a guru—being used as a means of branding in order to convey and normalise the ‘Hindutva idea of India’. We suggest, in light of the frequent mutual mediation of gurus and Hindutva, that continued investment by devotees and commentators in gurus as figures embodying hope and the promise of post-communal amity can aptly be described using Berlant’s evocative phrase ‘cruel optimism’.

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Section: Hindutva's Guru Logicsmentioning

confidence: 99%