Nation branding, soft Hindutva, and ecotraditionalism in anti-plastics discourses in India

Abstract

A recent dimension of India's nation-branding project, by which it aims to attract investment, trade, human resources, and tourists to the country, has been a focus on a 'green' India as a global leader in sustainable development. As part of this strategy, messages aimed at a national and external audience are aligned, and a line is drawn between the country's putative ecologically sensitive past and a green future. Such messages highlight selective, sanitised, and idealised Hindu texts and praxis related to the environment as evidence of India's innate ecological sensitivity. The environment thus becomes a domain for the permeation of a seemingly apolitical strand of Hindutva rhetoric, which emphasises the civilizational wisdom of Indian (coded as Hindu) thought and presents it for consumption by national and global audiences. In this paper, using anti-plastics discourses as a lens, I investigate the cultural politics of this emerging stream of Hindutva-linked 'ecotraditionalism'.

Navigating Crises of Scale in the Anthropocene

“…To be taken seriously when 'studying up' (Nader 1972) and talking to scientists, policymakers, and industry executives, we had to familiarise ourselves with technical terms, the basic chemistry of synthetic polymers, and their lifecycle. Exploratory fieldwork among environmental activists, industry representatives, and consumers of plastic packaging helped us gauge public perceptions of the harms and affordances of plastics and the semantic fields associated with them; media analyses allowed us to understand representations of plastic pollution and plastic control (Pathak 2020a(Pathak , 2022aPathak and Nichter 2021).…”

Ecocommunicability, citizenship, and discourses on plastic control in India

“…Representations of cows were also associated with a wider field of discourses indexing Indian thought and practice that emphasizes the relationship between the moral, ecological, and cosmological order (Gold, 1998;Nichter, 2001;Pathak, 2020c). The lionization of a putatively ecologically friendly Indian past-based on selective, sanitized, and idealized Hindu discourse and praxis-was common, as were efforts to "reclaim" alternatives to consumer plastics from that past (Pathak, 2021). The last half decade has seen the emergence of a wide array of consumer products that market themselves as aiding plastic-free lifestyles and as being "traditional."…”