Thomas Blom Hansen on Hindutva’s Growing Hegemony in India

Thomas Blom Hansen is the Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. He founded and directed Stanford’s Center for South Asia from 2010 to 2017. An anthropologist of political life, ethno-religious identities, violence and urban life in South Asia and Southern Africa, Hansen works across political theory, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, comparative religion, and contemporary urbanism. In this interview, he discusses the evolution and entrenchment of Hindutva hegemony and the prospects for a counter-hegemonic project.

In your 1999 book, The Saffron Wave, you argued that Hindutva gained ground through everyday practices rooted in public culture—shakhas, festivals, charity, and local networks—rather than ideology alone. A quarter century later, what do you observe about the primary site through which Hindus are remade as political subjects?

Hindutva ideology can today be found everywhere. It has become an almost hegemonic frame for talking about the nation, and also a dominant frame within which people celebrate themselves as communities and blame minorities for the country's problems, or for their own lack of success. Brahma Prakash's new book, The Spectacle State, on Hindutva's cultural politics, captures much of this "Hindutva as enjoyment" and "enjoy your hatred" phenomenon. At the same time, RSS shakhas are still happening. They remain the recruitment grounds where young boys and men are gradually drawn into Sangh culture, forging deep bonds and friendships with each other and with the seniors who lead the shakhas. RSS culture is not only about manifest ideology—Hindutva is not, in any case, a very elaborate ideological doctrine. It is about building emotional bonds among men and creating an atmosphere around basic truisms: that it is now time for "the Hindus" to rise again as in the past; that Hindus have long been oppressed and must reclaim their pride and manliness; that Hindus need to be vigilant against ubiquitous threats—their own weakness, division, Muslims, the disdain of the West. Years spent in shakhas ingrain these beliefs so deeply that they are likely to prevail even in boys who never become RSS or Sangh activists.

Where do you locate the break, if any, between Savarkar’s political Hindutva and the RSS’s cultural-nationalist praxis today? Has the core project changed, or only its packaging and technique?

I do not think there was a break. Political Hindutva came to the fore after 2014, but the cultural-nationalist work of “becoming society”—of organising what the Sangh calls “Hindu society”—remains the main goal. That will continue even if the BJP loses political power.

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You have written that the RSS’s core project is to “overcome caste divisions against a common Muslim enemy”. But post-Mandal, the BJP’s biggest gains have come among OBCs and Dalits. Is Hindutva succeeding by freezing caste, or by renegotiating it? What does the rise of Modi, an OBC, tell us anthropologically?

Hindutva is renegotiating caste rather than overcoming it. If there is one thing most contemporary anthropologists of South Asia agree on, it is that caste is dynamic and changeable, constantly readapted to new contexts while retaining core features such as an emphasis on endogamous marriage—now often within aligned caste clusters—and assertions of superiority, or of unfair subjugation, in relation to other adjacent caste formations. Caste today is less a hierarchical system than a collection of communities that behave almost as ethnic groups, competing over resources and claiming dignity and recognition. Within that dynamic, a feisty OBC can rise high in politics and society—though without the RSS, Modi would not have risen; the RSS is the key variable here—and Dalit communities can seek dignity and recognition within the Sangh, or use BJP patronage to improve their status relative to other Dalit communities, as has happened with smaller Dalit communities seeking to escape the dominance of Chamars in the north or Mahars in Maharashtra.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat during the Dhwajarohan Utsav at Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir, in Ayodhya on November 25, 2025. | Photo Credit: @myogiadityanath/X

Hindutva’s most emotional campaigns—love jihad, anti-conversion laws, population rhetoric—are all about controlling Hindu women’s bodies. Is the Hindu family now the main border that Hindutva is policing? And why is this more effective politically than economic arguments?

Because endogamy is a core principle of how social life, reputation, and morality are organised in India, the defence of women’s bodies—and the suspicion of women, and the perceived need to police one’s own women—occurs across caste communities, and within the larger Muslim community too. The sentiment expressed towards Muslims around love jihad has other sources and a long history: fear of secret plans of domination, alleged links to Pakistan, and much else. But the defence of “our women” remains a powerful and persistent sentiment, and it can be complicated by class as well. What is worse, for an upper-caste family? A Dalit son-in-law, or a fair-skinned boy from an Ashraf family?

In The Saffron Wave, you linked the liberalisation of the 1990s to urban anxiety and a space that Hindutva could fill through everyday practice. Today we have a generation born after 1991—aspirational, digital, consuming. In your fieldwork with students and young workers, is this generation’s Hindutva less about cultural anxiety and more about status, swagger, and global Hindu pride?

Yes. There are educated, mainly dominant-caste youth who have their eyes firmly set on the West, hoping for careers abroad, or for recognition of India as a properly modern and sophisticated society on a par with other developed countries. They get aggressive and defensive when one points out that this is an India for perhaps 10 to 20 per cent of the population, not for the majority. The angling for global recognition of India and Hinduism is still strong, and many, including NRIs, feel injured by what they see as a “demotion” of India by the US in favour of Pakistan, for instance, or by the Western focus on, and respectful wariness of, China, while India is somewhat taken for granted. So yes, there is swagger, but an oddly insecure one.

Wages of Violence is an account of how Mumbai’s atmosphere, dominant public languages, and power structures have changed since the 1960s. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

In your book Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Muslims were economically integrated but politically segregated. Under the BJP, we now see legal exclusion—the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), the National Register of Citizens (NRC), hijab bans. Is the goal shifting from managing Muslims to making them permanently second-class citizens? Can Indian democracy survive that?

Muslims were more integrated at that time, and yet also marginal, seeking opportunities in the Gulf. That marginality is more pronounced today, and even the Gulf is less attractive now. Yes, there is a move towards formal de-recognition of Muslims, and yes, I am afraid democracy can encompass that—it was the case in the US until the civil rights movement, and it is the case in Israel, where the country’s Arab citizens operate under different rules than Jewish citizens, and where a majoritarian democracy aggressively seeks to expel, disenfranchise, dominate, and occupy millions of Palestinians. That is the model many Hindutva activists want India to adopt, hence the close ties between the two countries. It is the same project—the pursuit of a Hindu Zion, as it were.

The state is now rewriting textbooks, renaming cities, and funding Indian Knowledge Systems. You have noted how Hindutva dismisses academic history as left-liberal. How do you see this “epistemic Hindutva”—the attempt to control what counts as truth? Is this more dangerous in the long term than any single law?

Yes, and the damage is far more durable. There is a collective dumbing-down underway, in which interesting and complex histories are overshadowed by simplistic, mostly invented, stories of hyper-masculine Hindu warriors and kings. The answer has to be that more people take an interest in local histories across India. Each region and locality holds a great deal of it, and much of it does not fit the mould of what Savarkar called “Hindu history”—a partisan account applying the perspective of unjustly injured and dominated Hindus seeking revenge and fighting back heroically.

When the Left adopts soft-Hindutva symbolism, does it legitimise the BJP’s core claim that “Hindu sentiment” is the only viable political currency? From your fieldwork, where do you see the most durable, everyday forms of resistance to Hindutva actually happening today—in villages, universities, courts, or popular culture?

India is a deeply nationalist polity, so everyone has to profess their nationalist credentials to stand a chance in the public domain. Regional sentiments clearly exist, but they are not necessarily in contradiction with the nation and can be encompassed within it, as we have seen in Maharashtra or Bengal. Cultural production outside Hindi and Bollywood is a potential site for different stories and perspectives, but there is no clear political potential there, if that is what we mean by resistance. As I see it, there is little resistance from within courts or institutions, sadly—unlike in the US—and the alternatives are more likely to grow out of frustration with the non-delivery of promises, as the current youth protests show, or out of dissatisfaction with growing discrepancies in economic development and political representation, where a handful of prosperous States effectively bankroll a major part of the country’s finances. Parts of the business community may also want less cronyism and more robust support for broad-based economic development, and a workforce with real qualifications and readiness for increasingly technological workplaces.

Most hegemonic movements are threatened from within. There are many internal fronts—corruption, which is rife; frustration that ideological hyperbole replaces actual management and economic results; a youth bulge that could turn even angrier—simmering just under the surface.

At this juncture, I do not think the defence of minorities has any potential as a strategy. Most Hindu communities are too preoccupied with themselves and their own grievances to embrace any larger or more universalist project, and even the Left is wary of explicitly embracing a pro-minority stance.

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Has Hindutva, after a decade in power, shifted from a Gramscian “war of position” in civil society to a “war of manoeuvre” through the state? Which institutions—judiciary, universities, media, electoral bodies—have proven most permeable? And if Hindutva is a civilisational project, what would a counter-hegemonic project look like? Does the Left have the conceptual vocabulary to articulate a plural, federal, non-majoritarian Indian nationhood?

All of these institutions have proven permeable, without exception, because institutional autonomy was never embraced as a value in itself. Instead, institutions, the media, and even NGOs sought access, favour, funding, and protection from the state—local and central. That made them entirely ripe for domination and takeover. The only durable counter-hegemony, as I see it, would be an argument for India as a decentralised federation of States and political entities, each with its own identity and interests, different development models, and decentralised budgets and revenue structures. Centralised power on a subcontinental or continental scale is extremely dangerous when the wrong people are in charge, as we see in Russia, the US, and India—and China, which is a different story, and perhaps the most successful centralised power in the world, and scarily so. A true civilisational argument in South Asia would be a decentralised archipelago of political, cultural, and social entities that share resemblances but also many distinctions—not Hinduism as a corporate entity with Ayodhya as its Vatican.

Abhish K. Bose, a journalist based in Kerala, with 18 years of experience, previously worked as a staffer at The Times of India and The Deccan Chronicle-Asian Age.