Empowering Visions: The Politics of Representation in Hindu Nationalism

What roles do the modern media play in the sphere of culture, politics and governance? Christiane Brosius’ Empowering Visions: the Politics of Representation in Hindu Nationalism is an attempt to address ‘why, how and when Hindutva ideologues and pragmatics exploited the video media in order to claim power over public opinion-making and opinion-shaping’ (p 3). Grounded on the theories of popular culture, anthropology of audiovisuals and thick ethnographic analysis, Brosius brilliantly depicts the roles played by Jain Studios’ videography in representing Hindutva’s cultural nationalism as an alternative conception of modernity, nationhood and national identity against the existing morally corrupt culture of secularism. These alternative empowering visions are realized through active entwining of ‘imagination to politics and ideology, space to time, image to narrative, and agent to action’ (p 4). The author argues that the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies, since the late 1980s, have heavily exploited the modern media, particularly audiovisual technologies, to create visions of an idealized Hindu way of life. Employing Werner Schiffauer’s idea of ‘field of discourse’—‘as a sphere in which cultural agents interact with each other with regards to interpretations, norms, values, questions of style and memories’ (p 3)—Brosius argues that Jain Studio’s production and distribution of propaganda videos has helped the Bharatiya Janata Party in spreading cultural and ideological images to influence the public consciousness with a pan-Indian cultural nationalism grounded on the glories of the golden age. By depicting the people passionately participating in the saffron revolution, these images and narratives invite further participation of the audience. Key images and narratives from the domain of local popular culture were appropriated and commodified in a package to heighten ‘political marketing’ and mobilization (p 93); to influence the popular psyche of the people; and to present itself as a credible force to reshape the modern nation-state, reclaim the stolen stories and rewrite the national history. Selective use of particularistic media imaginations and narratives has colonized the public conscience, and provocative representations in the public sphere have generated antithetical feelings of ‘self’ and ‘the other’. Visual media has convincingly justified Hindutva’s agenda of Hindu cultural identity as credible, depicting Muslims as anti-nationals and a threat to the nation, and arguing that national history has been misrepresented by anti-nationals. Selfempowerment is to be achieved only by re-mapping Indianness through a return to the ‘indigenous and ‘‘true’’ history of the Hindu people’ (p 12). A sense of ‘pop patriotism’ is being crafted by softly manipulating the Hindu sentiment through devout citizenship, righteousness, self-sacrifice, sacred violence, heroism, national devotion, and the notion of martyrdom that has ‘left deep scars on the skin of civil society, and changed the mental maps of large parts of Indian citizenry for good’ (p 180). The video media, which is a part of Hindutva’s ‘cheerful revolution’, aimed at forming a powerful paternalistic state with a seemingly disciplined and infantile citizenry ever ready to sacrifice for the cause of universal brotherhood Contemporary South Asia 16(3), (September, 2008) 357–375