Enforcing and Resisting Hindutva: Popular Culture, the COVID-19 Crisis and Fantasy Narratives of Motherhood and Pseudoscience in India

Catarina Kinnvall () and Amit Singh
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Catarina Kinnvall: Department of Political Science, Lund University, Box 52, 221 00 Lund, Sweden
Amit Singh: Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Colégio de S. Jerónimo, 3000-995 Coimbra, Portugal

Social Sciences, 2022, vol. 11, issue 12, 1-17

Abstract: This article analyzes how Hindu nationalists employ fantasy narratives to counteract resistance, with a particular focus on narratives of ‘motherhood’ and ‘pseudoscience’. It does so by first introducing a conceptual discussion of the relationship between fantasy narratives, ontological insecurity, gender, and anti-science as a more general interrelationship characterizing pre- and post-COVID-19 far-right societies and leaders, such as India. It then moves on to discuss such fantasy narratives in the case of India by highlighting how this has played out in two cases of Hindu nationalist imaginings: that of popular culture, with a specific focus on the town Varanasi and the film Water (produced in 2000), and that of the COVID-19 pandemic and the emerging crisis and resistance that it has entailed. Extracts of interviews are included to illustrate this resistance.

Keywords: resistance; COVID-19; far right; nationalism; gender; pseudoscience; ontological security; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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