Guest post by R. Srivatsan

Contemporary India is something of a conundrum for most political theorists.  What is it?  How does it hang together?  What do people believe in?  Given the large canvas, I’d like to focus here on one small aspect of belief in Hinduism and Hindutva today.  Towards this objective, I’ll take up a somewhat old pronouncement by the foremost BJP leader and prime minister, in 2014, during a conference of doctors and other professionals that there must have been plastic surgeons in ancient India who attached an elephant’s head on a human body and created Ganesha.  And, that Karna’s extra uterine birth suggested that there was a knowledge of the science of genetics during that period.  The scientific community and those adept at history were appalled, rolling their eyes in dismay at the confusion between true history and mythology.  Is such a response, i.e., a scorn or embarrassment about the unscientificity of the claim regarding the existence of these ancient sciences/events, adequate to the statement made?  Did the prime minister actually believe this?  What is it that is being said by Hindutva politicians, ideologues and thinkers when such pronouncements are made, or for example, that vedic mathematics was the progenitor of mathematics as a discipline?  And what about the rewriting of history books to valorize the Hindu past, erasing a “dark medieval period” and denigrating Muslim “invaders”? Continue reading Belief in contemporary India: an essay in the constitutive imagination: R Srivatsan →