The rise of Hindu nationalism – or Hindutva – is often regarded as the apotheosis of religious ethno-nationalism in India. Adherents of Hindutva insist that theirs is a secular ideology but this seemingly paradoxical claim is poorly understood beyond a crude majoritarian calculus. In focussing on the architect of Hindutva, V. D. Savarkar, this paper reconstructs his political thought to show that secular ideas of glory and humiliation were foundational to his understanding of how and why Hindu-ness ought to be actualised as a sovereign political category.

Accomplished populists are researched from distant quarters, long after they turned populists. Yet, populism—the attempt to represent the people through being the people—is not an overnight decision; it results from a gradual self-fashioning welded to the political trajectory of their bearer. This contribution proposes to explore populism diachronically as a political career. It builds on a 7-year ethnography of Indian student activism gravitating around the figure of Govind, a secular left student leader turned politician in North India during the 2019 parliamentary elections.

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College, at University of Chicago. He is also the Faculty Director, University of Chicago Center in Delhi (2018-2021), a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (2004-present), an associate of the Department of English, and by courtesy, a faculty member in the Law School.

This talk focuses on colonial statues in the British empire that were replicas. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, replicas worked to represent art, antiquities, and history for those who might not travel to see the putatively "real" statue. From the Lincoln statue in Parliament Square to the statue of John Lawrence on Waterloo Place, doubles helped to mark the empire's reach in Britain and abroad.

In this talk, I will offer some reflections on what it has meant for me as a professional academic trained in the putative secular discipline of history to write over the past couple decades about a series of modern goddesses of modern India who have succeeded in capturing my imagination, in disturbing the terms of my engagement with official documentary archives, in troubling the text-saturated categories of my analysis, and in redirecting my work along new paths permeated by the power of the image.

Hasyarnava or The Ocean of Mirth, a medieval Sanskrit political satire, delineates two compelling themes that require serious consideration. First, the Indic traditions underline the centrality of order in a polity. This preoccupation is underlined by the supremacy of the Rajadharma-dandaniti framework. A great deal of violence and cruelty inheres within this framework. Second, if the order is the site for violence and force, it follows that a glimpse of freedom, unshackled from the conventional implications of the purusharthas can only be had in upholding the desirability of disorder.

Bringing political thought to bear upon one of the world’s most pressing geopolitical problems, this paper explores Kashmiri engagements with nature and how these served late colonial attempts to concurrently champion two nations: ethno-linguistic and almost homogenous Kashmir, and heterogenous but organic India. Disconnected from human endeavour and, therefore, astonishingly unreliant on other ideas to define Kashmir’s distinctiveness, the idea of natural purity had something in common with the earlier New World nationalisms of colonial white settlers who sought to remake conquered lands.

This talk will be about making sense of people's history and their understanding of what "our history" means. I will argue that history as shared by a group, community or society in a place arises as a lived experience of the everyday social. Thus, the ontology of their histories are related to the ontology of their everyday social. As Guru and I argue in our book 'Experience, Caste and the Everyday Social', the everyday social in societies, particularly in Asia and Africa, can only be understood through a deep engagement with sensory experiences.

If we think about emotions today, we tend to imagine them as interior to a subject with well-defined boundaries, deciding which emotions to let in and which expressions to let out. The history of emotions in South Asia has contributed to destabilize this notion. Until the 19th century at least, subjects saw feelings as floating between porous subjects.

This talk focuses on the idea of spolia, which has a long and illustrious genealogy in political discourse, beginning with the display of objects seized and monuments destroyed or assimilated into new structures as emblematic of military conquest, but in a more expansive sense, as a practice fundamental to the establishment of new regimes―not only a visceral exercise of power, but also as symbolic appropriation of the strength of one’s enemies and predecessors.