• Date: January 17th, Friday, 2020 15:30-16:30
• Location: Room 406, SNUAC (Bldg. 101)

Hindutva is a concept that directly links to the identity of Indians who believe in Hindu nationalism as political thought, Hindu as a national religion, and Hindu, and is thus the most important keyword in understanding the politics and religion of India in the 20th century. This presentation is an attempt at examining the line of thoughts on Hindutva and drawing a genealogy of those thoughts. It will explain how Hedgewar and Golwalkar who greatly contributed to the Hindu nationalist thought after Savarkar, who popularized the term “Hindutva”, established the concept or the ideology of Hindu states. We will see what kind of a role that the ideology of Hindutva will play in 21st-century Indian politics, as we also examine Narendra Modi who played an important role in politics (or even Advani).

The current state of India seems to be in great turbulence. As the ruling party, BJP, seems to be planning to continue its long-term rule by expanding Hindutva, the Hindu nationalist concept, and state authorities exert such great pressure even on the academy, so that related research is difficult within India.

In this lecture by Dr. Jieun Lee, we examined how the modern ideology of Hindu nationalism, Hindutva, was born from Dayananada Saraswati, the cow protection movement of Arya Samaj, and the shuddhi movement. Also, we saw how theorists/politicians Savarkar, Golwalkar and others led Hindutva to be exclusive and belligerent toward Christianity and Islam, and how the attitude toward minorities has changed until today since then.

Photos by DooWon Chang (Academic Reporter)