Periodic Reporting for period 2 - GLOB-POP-NAT (Populist nationalism in 'global' western India, 1920-1939)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-07-01 bis 2024-06-30
Glop-Pop-Nat offers a new study of the transnational connections between emerging Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) and contemporary European fascism in the 1920s-30s, enabling through its globalising and comparative perspective on their relationship improvements to our understanding of both.
Moreover, by employing the still underused framework of comprehending Hindutva as a form of populist nationalism, it opens up a complementary, and crucial set of themes: of populist nationalism, so urgently and frenetically analysed in today’s world, in diachronic and also global contexts; of contemporary populist phenomena set in the light of twentieth-century historical experience.
The project, through its examination of these historical comparisons and connections, also therefore assists in the theoretical delineation of the relationship between populist nationalism and fascism, as well other radical nationalist formulations.
The examination of the populist right in global, comparative, and historical perspectives is a pressing issue for society at the European and global level.
This project is set apart from other attempts to study Hindutva in relation to fascism by its unprecedented vernacular and historically focused interdisciplinary study of Hindutva’s birthplace, the western-Indian region of Maharashtra, whose political culture was formative on the ideology. The region’s culture is key to understanding the thought and action of those ideologues sprung from it in the 1920s and 30s, particularly as regards such features as its self-conscious ‘martial’ masculinity and its associated imagined historical traditions; as is the peculiar pattern of the region’s imbibing, in these crucial interwar years, of the cosmopolitan ideas and trends relating to political organisation, ethnicity’s relationship to state and nation, paramilitarism, and criticism of the liberal state – features so much at issue in the broader question.
Moreover, by employing the still underused framework of comprehending Hindutva as a form of populist nationalism, it opens up a complementary, and crucial set of themes: of populist nationalism, so urgently and frenetically analysed in today’s world, in diachronic and also global contexts; of contemporary populist phenomena set in the light of twentieth-century historical experience.
The project, through its examination of these historical comparisons and connections, also therefore assists in the theoretical delineation of the relationship between populist nationalism and fascism, as well other radical nationalist formulations.
The examination of the populist right in global, comparative, and historical perspectives is a pressing issue for society at the European and global level.
This project is set apart from other attempts to study Hindutva in relation to fascism by its unprecedented vernacular and historically focused interdisciplinary study of Hindutva’s birthplace, the western-Indian region of Maharashtra, whose political culture was formative on the ideology. The region’s culture is key to understanding the thought and action of those ideologues sprung from it in the 1920s and 30s, particularly as regards such features as its self-conscious ‘martial’ masculinity and its associated imagined historical traditions; as is the peculiar pattern of the region’s imbibing, in these crucial interwar years, of the cosmopolitan ideas and trends relating to political organisation, ethnicity’s relationship to state and nation, paramilitarism, and criticism of the liberal state – features so much at issue in the broader question.
An initial ‘onboarding’ period at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice occurred, during which the Fellow liaised remotely with the Netaji Institute for Asian Studies in Kolkata on the organisation of the research plan; research missions to archival collections on modern India within the UK were also held in this period. Training on various research aspects, and in the Italian language, was also undertaken to prime the Fellow for both the Outgoing and Return phases of research.
In India, the Netaji Institue, though it had stood in at short notice to provide hosting environment, provided it a stimulating and well-fitted home, with a highly relevant intellectual focus and encouraging research community. Most of the research remained focused on Mumbai and Maharashtra, a challenge for the project, met by research missions to archives and higher education institutions there. More positively, the Kolkata base broadened the intellectual network and range of perspectives brought to bear on the project. Jadavpur University, and The Goethe-Institut, Kolkata, in particular, provided stimulating events and networking opportunities. In Maharashtra, the Fellow used the Maharashtra State archives extensively, as well as private collections, in Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur; and much archival work, involving period newspapers, private papers and institutional collections, was done at the (since renamed) Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi.
During the return phase, Missions to Germany were undertaken to enhance the Fellow’s scholarly network and to share ideas on research questions relating to fascism, Nazism, and the radical right, and also to present his research: the Freie Universität Berlin and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München were key venues for this.
A workshop was co-organised on ‘Populist Nationalism as a Global Phenomenon’ at the University of Oxford in July 2023, where the Fellow was joined by scholars from the university as well as from the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, Missouri. This was a great success, and fed into the much larger, final event of the Fellowship, a two-day international conference at Ca’ Foscari in May 2024 on the same theme, subtitled ‘Echoes of the Long Twentieth Century’, with scholars from institutions in seven different countries. A book proposal for an edited volume from this conference is under consideration now, which will include the Fellow’s own analysis of the long-term trajectories of populism in relation to Hindu nationalism, throughout the period.
The Fellow was able to redevelop and extend an existing body of research to produce the first major published output on Maharashtra’s political and intellectual history, an intellectual biography entitled ‘The Thought of Bal Gangadhar Tilak’ (Oxford University Press 2024), which speaks to the project’s objectives strongly in examining the attachment of Tilak’s memory, and the meanings of this, to the ‘Hindutva movement’ of the 1920s.
In India, the Netaji Institue, though it had stood in at short notice to provide hosting environment, provided it a stimulating and well-fitted home, with a highly relevant intellectual focus and encouraging research community. Most of the research remained focused on Mumbai and Maharashtra, a challenge for the project, met by research missions to archives and higher education institutions there. More positively, the Kolkata base broadened the intellectual network and range of perspectives brought to bear on the project. Jadavpur University, and The Goethe-Institut, Kolkata, in particular, provided stimulating events and networking opportunities. In Maharashtra, the Fellow used the Maharashtra State archives extensively, as well as private collections, in Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur; and much archival work, involving period newspapers, private papers and institutional collections, was done at the (since renamed) Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi.
During the return phase, Missions to Germany were undertaken to enhance the Fellow’s scholarly network and to share ideas on research questions relating to fascism, Nazism, and the radical right, and also to present his research: the Freie Universität Berlin and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München were key venues for this.
A workshop was co-organised on ‘Populist Nationalism as a Global Phenomenon’ at the University of Oxford in July 2023, where the Fellow was joined by scholars from the university as well as from the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, Missouri. This was a great success, and fed into the much larger, final event of the Fellowship, a two-day international conference at Ca’ Foscari in May 2024 on the same theme, subtitled ‘Echoes of the Long Twentieth Century’, with scholars from institutions in seven different countries. A book proposal for an edited volume from this conference is under consideration now, which will include the Fellow’s own analysis of the long-term trajectories of populism in relation to Hindu nationalism, throughout the period.
The Fellow was able to redevelop and extend an existing body of research to produce the first major published output on Maharashtra’s political and intellectual history, an intellectual biography entitled ‘The Thought of Bal Gangadhar Tilak’ (Oxford University Press 2024), which speaks to the project’s objectives strongly in examining the attachment of Tilak’s memory, and the meanings of this, to the ‘Hindutva movement’ of the 1920s.
The project fills a major gap in vernacular knowledge in the state-of-the-art, through its in-depth insights on the Hindutva-fascism relationship in Hindutva’s birthplace for the first time; and it establishes some limits to this relationship through this, viewing the relationship as not formative. Moreover, it exploits an interdisciplinary study of various aspects of vernacular culture, studying Maharashtra’s imaginative and artistic culture of the period. The current literature’s timeframe has also been expanded to look at women’s relationships to Hindutva in the 1920s-30s, linking it to that on women's participation in politics in India generally; and also to broader work on the relationship of women with right-wing extremism in comparative perspective.
In terms of populist nationalism, the scope of this study has been drastically extended (existing studies of the phenomenon in India engage with the period from the 1970s only) to look at its intimacy with pre-independence Indian nationalism. And the relationship of populist nationalism to fascism has been further explicated through the research and the discussions of the final conference, pointing up the importance of the distinctness of the phenomena, and of the longer-term trajectories of populism than of fascism, and the specificities of the conceptual language required to understand them both.
The project's main outputs of a monograph, and a volume planned as emerging from the major international academic conference, can realistically be said to not only have a significant impact on academic research in this area of great public and contemporary societal concern, at a time of populist upsurge in politics globally; but because of this, and the communication of the outputs beyond academia, to have a wider societal implication directly and indirectly.
In terms of populist nationalism, the scope of this study has been drastically extended (existing studies of the phenomenon in India engage with the period from the 1970s only) to look at its intimacy with pre-independence Indian nationalism. And the relationship of populist nationalism to fascism has been further explicated through the research and the discussions of the final conference, pointing up the importance of the distinctness of the phenomena, and of the longer-term trajectories of populism than of fascism, and the specificities of the conceptual language required to understand them both.
The project's main outputs of a monograph, and a volume planned as emerging from the major international academic conference, can realistically be said to not only have a significant impact on academic research in this area of great public and contemporary societal concern, at a time of populist upsurge in politics globally; but because of this, and the communication of the outputs beyond academia, to have a wider societal implication directly and indirectly.