Paper short abstract:

This paper details the 10-year journey of an anthropologist studying the contemporary Hindu nationalist movement in India, detailing how access of the researcher and the changing nature of the movement were reflected in an inversely proportional relationship to the power the movement was acquiring.

Paper long abstract:

My doctoral thesis is titled ‘Hindutva Self-Fashioning: Young Hindu Nationalists of India’. In this study, I sought to show the socialisation processes and everyday lives of members of India’s largest Hindu nationalist coalition, the Sangh Parivar (Sangh Family). For this I studied the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP; All India Students’ Committee). ABVP is the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS; National Volunteers Corp). The RSS is the most influential ideological fountainhead of the Hindu nationalist movement. ABVP was founded in 1949 and currently has three million members, operating largely in universities in India. It is the largest students organisation in the world. The ABVP has two goals: its primary goal is to work to further the Hindu nationalist movement on university campuses. Its secondary goal is to work as a student party on university campuses to raise issues for students’ benefit. Through the ABVP, the ideology has been able to reach other sets of demographics that were previously inaccessible to the Sangh: university students, distinct caste groups, women with access to higher education, and students coming from a non-Sangh habitus. These are student Hindu nationalists who describe themselves as ideological warriors and political agents.

In this paper, I will discuss my method, explicitly focussing on a decade-long fieldwork to understand the nature of Hindu nationalist power today. Through this, I will show how studying powerful movements may not be in the hands of the fieldworker after all.