Empowering Visions

Empowering Visions: The Politics of Representation in Hindu Nationalism
Christiane Brosius
London: Anthem Press, 2005
ISBN: 1-84331-135-6

What roles do the modern media play in the sphere of culture, politics and governance? Christiane Brosius’ Empowering Visions: the Politics of Representation in Hindu Nationalism (London: Anthem Press, 2005) is an attempt to address ‘why, how and when Hindutva ideologues and pragmatics exploited the video media in order to claim power over public opinion-making and opinion-shaping’ (p. 3). Grounded on the theories of popular culture, anthropology of audiovisuals and thick ethnographic analysis, Brosius brilliantly depicts the roles played by Jain Studios’ videography in representing Hindutva’s cultural nationalism as an alternative conception of modernity, nationhood and national identity against the existing morally corrupt culture of secularism. These alternative empowering visions are realized through active entwining of ‘imagination to politics and ideology, space to time, image to narrative, and agent to action’ (p. 4).

The author argues that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies, since the late 1980s, have heavily exploited the modern media, particularly audiovisual technologies to create visions of idealized Hindu way of life. Employing Schiffauer’s idea of ‘field of discourse’– ‘as a sphere in which cultural agents interact with each other with regards to interpretations, norms, values, questions of style and memories’ (p. 3) – Brosius argues that Jain Studio’s production and distribution of propaganda videos has helped the BJP in spreading cultural and ideological images to influence the public consciousness with a pan-Indian cultural nationalism grounded on the glories of the golden age. By depicting the people passionately participating in the saffron revolution, these images and narratives invite further participation of the audience. Key images and narratives from the domain of local popular culture were appropriated and commodified in a package to heighten ‘political marketing’ and mobilization (p. 93); to influence the popular psyche of the people; and to present itself as a credible force to reshape the modern nation-state, reclaim the stolen stories and rewrite the national history.

Selective use of particularistic media imaginations and narratives has colonized the public conscience and provocative representations in the public sphere have generated antithetical feelings of ‘self’ and ‘the other’. Visual media has convincingly justified Hindutva’s agenda of Hindu cultural identity as ‘credible’ and depicted Muslims as anti-nationals and a threat to the nation. It argues that the national history has been misrepresented by the anti-nationals and a self-empowerment could be achieved only by re-mapping Indianness through a return to the ‘indigenous and “true” history of the Hindu people’ (p. 12). A sense of ‘pop patriotism’ is being crafted by softly manipulating the Hindu sentiment through devout citizenship, righteousness, self-sacrifice, sacred violence, heroism, national devotion, and the notion of martyrdom which has ‘left deep scars on the skin of civil society, and changed the mental maps of large parts of Indian citizenry for good’ (p. 180). The video media, which is a part of Hindutva’s ‘cheerful revolution’ aimed at forming a powerful paternalistic state with a seemingly disciplined and infantile citizenry ever ready to sacrifice for the cause of universal brotherhood and moral community (p. 93). Since 1998, the Internet has decentralized the power of representation and disseminated Hindutva ideology on a wider scale. The presentation of imaginary and narratives in cultural production has, thus, played a significant role in redefining identity, history, nationhood, governance and politics.

The only shortcoming of the book would be its overemphasis on the cultural ‘production’ of image and narratives and not the ‘reception’ of it by the people. Despite this, the book is an admiral contribution to the Anthem South Asian Studies series. Its uniqueness lies in its provocative and telling arguments embedded in ethnographic description and provides a valuable contribution to the field of popular culture and anthropology of iconography.
______________________

@ Reviewed by Sarbeswar Sahoo, Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 16, No. 3, September 2008, pp. 357-358.