Anustup Basu’s Hindutva as Political Monotheism is a rich exploration of discourses and principles that form the ideological ground of Hindutva, defined as the political monotheism that puts forward a sense of pan-Indian Hindu unity. In the author’s definitional terms, “[t]he modern project of a Hindu political monotheism has been to induct the privileged and the pariah into a universal, congregational plane of Hindu identity” (p. 2). The book traces a genealogy of Hindutva in these terms, starting from “the colonial epistemological invention of ‘Hinduism,’ the broader arc of Indian modernity itself, and India’s own constitutional revolution of 1950” and culminating in an analysis of present-day “mediatic and urban Hindu normative” (p. 2) against the backdrop of the current global context of the liberal crisis and ascension of the far-right. Somewhat unexpectedly, and certainly originally, the book first turns the attention to Nazi jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1988–1985), examining his theories of religious and ethnocentric nationhood as well as how such ideas played a role in the shaping of Hinduism to accommodate and domesticate all things Indian, including “caste divisions, regional eccentricities, gender segregations, and practices of untouchability” (p. 4).

Chapter 1, “Questions Concerning the Hindu Political,” dives into Carl Schmitt’s political theology and examines it against the backdrop of notions of Hindu sovereignty and nationhood. Here, the author lays the ground of the book’s conceptual framework, explaining the concept of political monotheism and how it came about in Schmitt’s argument that the secularization of theology informed the theorization of the modern nation-state, therefore implying an austere association between monotheism and sovereign nation-building. The author explains how such theorizing took place in the case of India, where first—in the nineteenth-century—the idea of the Indian nation had to be geopolitically invented, which took place via an orientalist, Indological apparatus that shaped the demographic, cultural, and juridical image of a Hindu people. The author justifies the examination of Schmitt by stating that, besides the fascist connection, “Hindutva as an ideology is almost entirely orientalist in its roots” (p. 5). In this sense, the book’s original perspective is an important addition to a longstanding—though not always referenced to 1—scholarship that has investigated the making of “India” and “Hinduism” through postcolonial, orientalism-critical lenses.

Chapter 2, “The Hindu Nation as Organism,” explores how Hindutva, in its nationalistic imaginations, was aligned with “a German tradition of organismic thinking” that conveyed a sense of a nation-state’s Kultur, a mono-cultural unity (p. 30). The chapter explains how this sense of a Kultur, also interpreted as Tradition, was useful for the establishment of a timeless imaginary of the “One Hindu Nation” (p. 33). The author eloquently shows how Hindutva’s discourse desires “to emerge from the deeper origins and then conquer and transcend history altogether” (p. 86). Thereby, the chapter gives special attention to issues pertaining the dimensions of temporality, religion, nation-building, territoriality, and affect, while also analysing discussions around the Aryan figure. The chapter eloquently explores the nuanced tensions and contradictions of this religious-nationalistic discursive construction between its appeal to a timeless mythical tradition and its interlocking with the modern nation-state as well as with colonial scholarship, with its urge to simplify and reduce the plurality of the subcontinent. The chapter culminates in the appealing summarizing critique that “India can never be a Hindu nation, only a Hindu empire” (p. 87).

Chapter 3, “The Indian Monotheism,” examines the literary-theological project of elaboration of a Hindu “religion” as a “matching template for nationalism” (p. 7). It discusses the works of several Indian writers that the author locates within this project of modern Hindu reform, including M. K. Gandhi. The chapter explores how “[m]odern Hindu reform involved scriptural reinterpretation, historical-sociological transcriptions of mythic material and dogma, and anthropological understandings of traditional institutions” (p. 147). In contrast, the author analyses critics of this discourse, most notably the Dalit scholar and jurist B. R. Ambedkar, who made evident “the limits of this Hindu Reason and its crippling impasses” by pointing at the “schizophrenic order” of what was called Hinduism (p. 146). In sum, the chapter unpacks the tensions regarding the plurality of caste and religiosity in its unease relation to the Hindu nation-building project.

Chapter 4, “Hindutva 2.0 as Advertised Monotheism,” visits the transformations that the cultural project of Hindu nationalism has undergone given the technological and informational developments in urban India in the last decades. It argues that, different from earlier Indological all-encompassing conceptualizations of Hinduism, Hindutva 2.0 “does not in essence seek long-pending, final resolutions for stories of becoming; nor does it present a unified worldview. Instead, it combines obscurantism with smart technophilia, the idea of financialization and progress with atavistic imaginations of time” (p. 8). Here, one could wonder if the painted picture of the messy, less-coherent, and less-cohesive discursive formations of the present is exacerbated due to its contrast vis-à-vis a (perhaps unavoidably) simplified account of the past. If the author’s position as a media studies scholar (which is something that the book could have been clearer about) can explain their attention to the mediatic and informational world in this last chapter, it might also be a reason why the author’s treatment of the past is rather explorative and somewhat abbreviated (to the detriment of perceiving the messy and contradictory ways that the analysed discourses might have emerged).

Therefore, the author’s genealogical approach can be situated, in a historiographic sense, rather in a mode of identifying overlapping ideas or, in their words, “the institutional and discursive affinities” (p. 29) between Schmitt and Hindutva, than actually following, and analysing with detail, specific practices of knowledge circulation or transmission. As the author put it, the book’s purpose is “to explore, with some degree of speculation, the ground of the present” (p. 10). The anthropologist or the historian of knowledge/science might find this approach wanting in terms of historical and praxeological detail. It is not entirely clear how Schmitt’s ideas eventually impacted Hindu nationalistic thinking in the practice, nor if Schmitt could be taken as a proxy for a wider web of culturally monotheist and nationalistic ideas circulating from Germany (for he surely did stand alone in this German tradition of fascist thinking).

Nevertheless, the picture painted by the author, even if perhaps granulated in terms of historical linearity, is an analytically rich and textured exploration of ideas that are, and have been, at the core of Hindutva. The book offers an important insight into Hindu nationalism, a phenomenon that still deserves more attention in scholarship—also due to its political severity and contemporaneity. In this sense, the book joins other recent important contributions to the understanding of Hindutva2 by offering various new critical insights, with a careful and rich attention to nuances and impasses in its discourse. Furthermore, although the author does not highlight this contribution, the book is indeed an important addition to the growing scholarship on India–Germany knowledge entanglements.3

Notes:
1 See, for an emblematic example of this scholarship that nevertheless was not discussed in the book: Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India, Bloomington 2000.
2 See, e.g.: Banu Subramaniam, Holy Science. The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism, Seattle 2019.
3 See, for example: Thiago P. Barbosa, Racializing a New Nation. German Coloniality and Anthropology in Maharashtra, India, in: Perspectives on Science 30, 1 (2022), pp. 137–166; Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement. German and Indian Intellectuals ccross Empire, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2014; Heike Liebau, Networks of Knowledge Production. South Asian Muslims and German Scholars in Berlin (1915–30), in: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 40, 2 (2020), pp. 309–321.