How music, machines and myth turned Hindu nationalism into a mass aesthetic
A new book argues that India's ruling ideology has embedded itself less through doctrine than through spectacle
For most of the four decades that Indian journalists have covered the rise of Hindutva, the Hindu-nationalist project has been analysed the way political scientists analyse most things: through manifestos, election results and organisational charts. Brahma Prakash, a professor of cultural studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, thinks that lens misses the point. In his book, Spectacle State: How Hindutva Shapes Feeling and Culture, and in a recent interview on the online outlet The Federal, he argues that Hindu nationalism's most effective vehicle in the past decade has not been ideology at all, but sensation: sound, colour, motion and touch, deployed at a scale and with a coordination that has no real precedent in Indian public life.
This is a claim worth taking seriously, and one worth interrogating rather than simply relaying.
A performative tradition, newly industrialised
Mr Prakash does not claim to have discovered religious spectacle. Public Hindu festival culture has a documented lineage: Bal Gangadhar Tilak's transformation of the private Ganesh Utsav into a public procession in 1890s Maharashtra; the shift of Durga Puja from household ritual to neighbourhood sarbojanin celebration in Bengal around the same period; the Vishva Hindu Parishad's 1983 Ekatmata Yagna, which paraded "sacred" river water across the country in truck-mounted chariots; and the cassette-driven Ram Shila Yatras of 1989, whose devotional songs and political speeches sold in markets regardless of the seller's own religion.
What Mr Prakash argues is new is not the form but the industrial scale and synchronisation of it since 2014 — the year Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) first won a parliamentary majority. Where earlier religious spectacle was episodic, tied to specific campaigns such as the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, he contends today's version is continuous: a rolling calendar of festivals, processions and symbols that requires no single organising event, because it has become self-sustaining cultural infrastructure. This is a testable claim, in principle — it implies a measurable increase in the frequency, funding and media amplification of such events since 2014 — though the book, at least as summarised here, offers illustrative examples rather than the kind of quantitative trend data that would make the "unprecedented scale" argument fully persuasive.
The bulldozer as case study
The book's most concrete evidence is object-level. Mr Prakash tracks the transformation of the bulldozer — an unglamorous piece of municipal machinery associated in recent years with the demolition of Muslim-owned properties in BJP-governed states — into a cultural artefact: toy bulldozers marketed to children, bulldozer-shaped water guns sold during Holi in Varanasi, bulldozers deployed as backdrops at weddings, and a genre of song praising Uttar Pradesh's chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, as "Baba Bulldozer." He draws a comparison with Israel's informal nickname for one of its armoured bulldozers, "teddy bear," as an example of how an instrument of demolition is aestheticised into something approachable.
The analytical claim embedded here is specific: that a symbol of state coercion against a religious minority has been successfully repackaged as an object of popular affection and consumer desire, which — if the pattern holds — represents a more durable form of political normalisation than a policy or a court ruling, because it operates below the level of conscious political judgment. This is a plausible and well-observed thesis. It is also, notably, a one-sided reading of an object whose meaning is genuinely contested: to BJP supporters, the bulldozer signals swift administrative action against illegal construction, a framing the book does not examine on its own terms so much as treat as symptomatic.
Music as delivery mechanism, not just message
Mr Prakash's more original argument concerns music. He distinguishes between Hindutva merely using music as propaganda and music enabling participation that ideology on its own could not achieve. Catchy devotional pop and DJ-driven festival tracks, he argues, draw people — including, he says, many from subaltern and minority communities — into dancing and celebrating without requiring ideological commitment. The implication is that cultural participation and political conviction are separable, and that the former can quietly manufacture the conditions for the latter — communities that dance at a Ram Navami procession one day may, in his account, be drawn into communal violence connected to the same event.
This is a serious analytical claim about radicalisation pathways, and it deserves scrutiny rather than acceptance at face value: correlation between festival participation and later violence is not evidence of a causal pipeline, and the interview offers ethnographic illustration (citing the scholar Kunal Purohit's fieldwork) rather than systematic data on outcomes. It is a compelling hypothesis about how mass culture lowers the threshold for political mobilisation; it is not, on the evidence presented, a demonstrated mechanism.
Wound and glory, held together
The book's account of Hindutva's emotional architecture rests on what Mr Prakash calls a "civilizational wound" — a narrative of historic Hindu subjugation, concentrated in the medieval period, used to license present-day assertion. He notes the apparent contradiction this requires: Hindutva discourse simultaneously claims ancient civilizational glory and unhealed medieval humiliation, reconciled through symbols of restitution such as the sword — chosen, he argues, over modern weaponry specifically for its historical resonance rather than any practical utility.
Mr Prakash extends this argument back to the RSS's founding shakhas, citing B.S. Moonje's admiration for the aesthetics of Mussolini's Italy and arguing that shakha drills trained not just bodies but a notion of racial purity through disciplined movement. This is a stronger historical claim than the cultural-studies observations elsewhere in the book, and it rests on well-documented history — Moonje's 1931 visit to Italy and his writings on physical culture are a matter of record — though readers should note that scholars dispute how directly RSS discipline was modelled on European fascism versus indigenous akhara (wrestling-gymnasium) traditions that predate it.
A counter-current, underdeveloped
The interview ends on a more contingent note than the rest of the argument. Mr Prakash points to the 2025 student protests at Jantar Mantar and to counter-Hindutva DJ tracks emerging from Maharashtra as evidence that the same aesthetic tools — music, spectacle, meme culture — can be redirected against the movement that popularised them. His diagnosis of the political landscape is candid: regional and opposition parties, he argues, have simply under-invested in cultural production relative to the Hindu right, leaving the aesthetic field uncontested rather than won.
The analytical bottom line
Spectacle State's strongest contribution is methodological: it insists that a political movement's power can reside in sensory experience that operates independently of, and sometimes in advance of, ideological conversion — a claim consistent with a broader academic literature on fascist aesthetics (Susan Sontag's essay on the subject is invoked directly). Its weaker point is evidentiary: the book, at least as presented in this interview, argues largely through illustrative anecdote and case study rather than comparative data, leaving open the question of how much of what it describes is genuinely new versus a more visible, better-documented version of processes with a much longer history in Indian religious life.
It is also worth flagging plainly, in the interest of even-handedness, that this is one interpretive lens on a highly contested political phenomenon. Supporters of Hindutva would reject the framing of festival culture and administrative bulldozing as "spectacle" in the pejorative sense used here, seeing instead cultural revival and governance in action. The book's analytical value lies in describing a mechanism — aestheticisation as political strategy — not in adjudicating whether that mechanism is, on balance, benign or dangerous; that judgment remains a matter of political position, not cultural analysis.
Comments
Post a Comment