For more than two decades the apocalyptic Indian imagination has been enriched by such Hindu nationalist exploits as the destruction in 1992 of the sixteenth-century Babri mosque and the nuclear tests in 1998. Celebrating the latter in a speech titled ‘Ek Aur Mahabharata’ (‘One more Mahabharata’), the head of the RSS claimed that Hindus, an ‘extremely intelligent and talented’ people who had thus far lacked proper weapons, were now sure to prevail in the forthcoming epic showdown with ‘demonic anti-Hindus’ (a broad category that includes Americans, apparently the most ‘inhuman’ people on earth).
Until this cosmic battle erupts, and India knows true splendour, Hindu nationalists discharge their world-historical responsibilities to Bharat Mata in the only way they can: by attacking various alien and hostile powers that stand in their way, such as cosmopolitan intellectuals and Muslims with transnational loyalties. In the anti-Muslim pogrom supervised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Gujarat in 2002, a fanatic called Babu Bajrangi seemed to have fulfilled Savarkar’s fantasy of mutilating foreign bodies: he claimed to have slashed open with his sword the womb of a pregnant woman while leading a mob assault on a Muslim district that killed nearly a hundred people. He also crowed to a journalist in 2007 that Modi sheltered him repeatedly. Eventually sentenced in 2012 to life imprisonment, Bajrangi has spent, since Modi’s ascent to power in 2014, most of his time outside prison.
Meanwhile, Modi stokes Savarkar’s shame and rage over more than a ‘thousand years of slavery’ under Muslim and British rule. Even Naipaul, celebrated for his destruction of Third Worldist illusions, succumbed to the pathology of mimic machismo he had once feared and despised. He hailed the vandalizing by a Hindu mob of a medieval mosque in 1992, which triggered nationwide massacres of Muslims, as the sign of an overdue national ‘awakening’. As though trying to transcend his ‘savourless’ and ‘mean’ life in England, Naipaul also endorsed the Ossian-ish history peddled by Hindu nationalists.
Back to the Future?
Nineteenth-century Germans showed how the Volk, or the people, became a sentimental refuge from the arduous experience of modernity; many sank deeper into resentment and hatred of the existing order while waiting for true national grandeur. Vagueness about how true grandeur was to be achieved proved to be the perfect recipe in Italy as well as Germany for an escalating anxiety and despair, which no amount of genuine endeavour and gradual progress seemed able to heal. Even educated classes in serenely imperialist and powerful countries such as England succumbed to jingoism (the word was coined in 1878) – to what J. A. Hobson, encountering it for the first time, called a ‘strange amalgam of race feeling, animal pugnacity, rapacity, and sporting zest’, a ‘primitive lust which exults in the downfall and the suffering of an enemy’.
Many more billions of individuals, struggling to find a place in the world, or defeated by the whole gruelling process, and resigned to failure, boost their self-esteem through identification with the greatness of their country. Whether glory in the arena of sports or entertainment, a Nobel Prize, or military victories, the triumphs of a few seem to infuse many with pride. Leaders standing up to Western elites perceived as arrogant and interfering can always count upon a historical reserve of ressentiment. President Putin’s popularity at home actually rose after Europe and America imposed sanctions on Russia, causing an economic crisis.
So it would be a mistake to see jingoism as a creation of political rabble-rousers alone. Popular culture has long promoted it. Bollywood films actually prefigured the insistent cultural nationalism of India’s new rulers and intelligentsia. Modi’s claim that India is poised to be a ‘world guru’ and lead the world does not seem so puzzling after watching the blockbuster, Kal Ho Naa Ho (Whether Tomorrow Comes or Not), whose protagonist introduces Indian values to unhappy white American families. Millions of Indians have long been exposed to the televised demagoguery of the yoga instructor Baba Ramdev, India’s answer to Jahn, the German inventor of calisthenics. Now serving as a guru to the Indian government, Ramdev proposes mass beheadings of all those who refuse to sing the glories of Bharat Mata.
The anti-Western cinema and literature produced during Mao’s rule over China could be dismissed as communist propaganda. Chinese bookshops today, however, are awash with such xenophobic polemics as China Can Say No. Wolf Totem, the biggest-selling book in China after Mao’s Little Red Book, laments how timid Chinese peasants fell prey to canny Westerners who, as ‘descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons’, have the blood of wolves in their veins. In 2016 the celebrated Chinese pianist Lang Lang led a patriotic Chinese upsurge against an international tribunal’s ruling in favour of the Philippines and condemning China in the maritime dispute involving the two countries.
Religion in Russia, officially banned during the Soviet period, now summons a mostly Christian population to battle against such alleged imports of Western liberalism as homosexuality. One of Putin’s closest allies runs Tsargrad TV, a Russian Orthodox TV channel, which aims to give voice to ‘traditional’ values. Turkey’s highest-grossing film, Conquest 1453, which describes Mehmed the Conqueror’s conquest of Istanbul in 1453, led to a revival of Ottomanism, which is manifested as much by Burger King’s Sultan meal combo (a TV ad features a Janissary devouring a Whopper with hummus) as by Turkish foreign policy. President Erdogan invokes the Ottoman Empire in order to justify Turkey’s involvement in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Kosovo, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Myanmar and Somalia: ‘Wherever our forefathers went on horseback,’ he claims, ‘we go, too.’ He plans to build a new mosque in Cuba, claiming bizarrely that Muslims settled the island long before it was spotted by Christopher Columbus.
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