The Rhetoric of Hindu India

This book examines the late twentieth-century rise of the urban right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology known as metropolitan Hindutva. This ideology the book assesses aspires to be a pan-Indian urban form that is home to the emerging digitally enabled technocratic middle classes of the nation. Through close analyses of the writings of a range of self-styled public intellectuals from Arun Shourie and Swapan Dasgupta to Chetan Bhagat and Amish Tripathi this book maps this new avatar of Hindutva. Finally in analyzing the language of metropolitan Hindutva it arrives at an emerging idea of India as part of what Amitav Ghosh has called a contemporary Anglophone empire. This is the first extended scholarly effort to theorize a politics of language in relation to the dangers of such an imperializing Hindutva.