It argues that the consolidation of a pan-Indian Hindu demographic and religious identity, cutting across a formidable and awry range of local devotional traditions and deities, entailed a form of modernist transcoding that was tendentially monotheistic. This essay is a wide-ranging inquiry into an early and consistent monotheistic impulse in Hindu nationalist discourses and identity formation since the late nineteenth century. Is ‘Hindutva 2.0’, endowed with global industries, new ecumenical forms and demiurgic powers, and the spectacular rise of the Hindu right, finally emerging as an electronic monotheme for the nation? The third features the mutations of this literary-cultural project in the era of finance capital, Bollywood, and New Media. The second moment involves a mode of ethno-religious nationalism adopted by 20th century ideologues like V.D Savarkar and Madhav Golwalkar in the quest of a Hindu monotheme based on territory, race, religion, culture, and language. Ambedkar’s eviscerating critique of this modern template. The first is an Indological invention of ‘Hinduism’ in the course of the long 19th century and beyond, with Bhagwad Gita as Holy book, featuring intellectuals like Rammohun Roy, Bankimchandra Chattyopadhyay, S. This book looks at three crucial moments in this project of Abrahamic modernization, exposing the purported ‘Hindu Nation” itself as a grossly orientalist vision.

It would mean the subsuming of a vast array of polytheistic, pantheistic, or henotheistic cults featuring millions of gods into a singular edifice of faith and inventing a congregational volk beyond the caste system. There had to be a Hindu providential narrative, an axiomatic church and a laity that could be parlayed into a political peopleness. Hindutva as Political Monotheism extracts a postulate from western political theologies of state and sovereignty: in order for there to be an organismic Hindu nation, there has to be a Hindu monotheism or a secular equivalent of that.

Satyarth prakash book in gujarati pdf