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Paper short abstract

In this paper I argue that Masti - a mode of fun, playfulness, enjoyment, and light-heartedness - enables the right-wing ideology to circulate as an everyday affective practice rather than as an overtly political or party-based ideology among youth between 19 to 32 years of age.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on a multimodal ethnographic study conducted in Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India that studies the lived experiences, stories, and narratives of young people (19–32 years) as they navigate and organise their ‘everyday’ around the right-wing nationalist ideology in contemporary India. The present-day right-wing ideology in India is built upon a majoritarian religious discourse that envisions India as a Hindu (only) nation. More recently, this ideology has begun permeating everyday spaces, objects, and conversations, resulting in a routinised yet widespread idea of the discourse, that scholars are referring to as a ‘banalization of Hindu nationalism’ (Jafferlot, 2018). In this paper I argue that Masti - a mode of fun, playfulness, enjoyment, and light-heartedness - enables the right-wing ideology to circulate as an everyday affective practice rather than as an overtly political or party-based ideology. Drawing on concepts of “happy objects” and “happiness pointers” (Ahmed, 2010), the paper theorizes how the idea of a Hindu nation has been constructed as a happy object through promises of joy, optimism, and belonging. Everyday affective practices of songs, dances, pranks, and humour function as happiness pointers that accumulate positive value and orient subjects toward the right-wing ideology. By foregrounding joy and pleasure, Masti shifts the locus of the political into the realm of the ordinary, rendering exclusionary and authoritarian politics liveable, desirable, and emotionally sustaining. The paper thus contributes to debates on the politics of emotion by showing how emotions bolster quotidian cultural politics and thus normalise religious inequality and ideological violence.