A ZNet Book Interview
By Angana Chatterji | ZNet, July 31, 2009
Angana Chatterji’s ZSpace Page
A Book Interview on Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa
Can you tell ZNet, please, what your new book, “Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa” is about? What is it trying to communicate?
‘Violent Gods’is an exploration of Hindu nationalism in India today. It details the mobilization of Hindu militant organizations as an authoritarian movement manifest throughout culture, polity, state, and economy, in religion and law, and class and caste, on gender, body, land, and memory… across the nation. The book explores that ways in which Hindu cultural dominance is manufacturing India, an emergent empire, as a ‘Hindu-secular’/Hindu majoritarian state.
As a woman of postcolonial India, of Hindu descent, ‘mixed’ caste heritage, the book is a journey in speaking with history. In freeing itself from British dominion in 1947, the Indian nation was shaped, in great part, by the will of the Hindu majority. Hindu cultural dominance has substantially defined what constitutes the ‘secular’ and ‘democratic’ in India today. Accountability demands that those of us with privilege in relation to ‘nation’ speak up, intervene. Telling a story of Hindu dominance in India is an intervention, ‘telling’ is a call to action.
Can you tell ZNet something about writing the book? Where does the content come from? What went into making the book what it is?
This book maps what I have witnessed — the architecture of civic and despotic governmentality contouring Hindu majoritarianism and nationalism in public, domestic, and everyday life. It chronicles the sustained and unchecked violences against minority Christian and Muslim communities, Adivasis (tribals) and Dalits (former ‘untouchable’ groups), and women, as well as sexual identity groups and children.
The book is a genealogical exploration of Hindu nationalism in India, with an ethnographic focus on Orissa, in eastern India, where Hindu nationalism’s terror has been prevalent since the 1990s, and where planned riots against minority peoples were carried out in 2007 and 2008. The research was conducted between 2002-2008 in urban and rural settings across Orissa in 66 villages, 11 towns, and four cities. The book records spectacles, events, public executions, the riots in Kandhamal of December 2007 and August-September 2008, as we witness the planned, methodical politics of terror unfold in its multiple registers.
In writing the book, I have made eighteen research trips to Orissa, and engaged in advocacy work on the issue. In 2005-2006, I convened the Orissa People’s Tribunal on Communalism, which was targeted, and its women members threatened with violence, by Hindu militant groups. See Human Rights Watch:
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2005/07/12/does-rss-have-any-moral-standards
The book is situated at the intersections of Anthropology, Postcolonial, Subaltern, and South Asia Studies, and asks questions of nation making, cultural nationalism, and subaltern disenfranchisement. As a Foucauldian history of the present, this text asserts the role of ethical knowledge production as counter-memory. Through situated reflection, experimental storytelling, and ethnographic accounts, it excavates Hindutva/Hindu supremacist proliferations in manufacturing imaginative and identitarian agency for violent nationalism.
What are your hopes for “Violent Gods”? What do you hope it will contribute or achieve, politically? Given the effort and aspirations you have for the book, what will you deem to be a success? What would leave you happy about the whole undertaking? What would leave you wondering if it was worth all the time and effort?
At the release of the book in Orissa in April 2009, I was asked if the book would provide solutions for undoing Hindu militancy and dominance in India. Books, if we are so fortunate, complicate matters further. I remain hopeful that “Violent Gods” will energize discussion, debate, contemplation about India’s present and future, the role and violence of majoritarian states and groups globally, about privilege and subalternity, security, rights, and entitlements, about freedom and dissent. I remain hopeful that the many and powerful subaltern voices and narratives in the text will compel reflection.
The learning and advocacy that led to the book has engulfed and motivated me since 2002, and facilitated shifts in my thinking, empowered me to act, to take risks as an intellectual and activist. And, for people with prolific courage that supported its writing, with their stories, their lives, at risk of reprisal — I am grateful.
In India, we witnessed the ethnic cleansing of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere in 1984, genocidal violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, calculated and sustained brutality against Christians in Orissa in 2007 and 2008, and the continued subjugation of Indian-administered Kashmir. On and on… We need to think, act, change. NOW.
“Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present” by Angana P. Chatterji, from Three Essays Collective, released March 2009. More information at:
http://www.threeessays.com/titles.php?id=40
To look inside the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Violent-Gods-Nationalism-PresentNarratives/dp/8188789453/ref=ed_oe_h
Peace and Justice Post 
Rape and murder in Indian-held Kashmir
August 11, 2009Militarization of Kashmir with impunity
By Angana Chatterji | ZNet, Aug 8, 2009
On May 29, 2009, as has been variously attested, Asiya Jan and Neelofar Jan were subjected to rape, reportedly by more than one perpetrator, and murdered. Ms. Asiya Jan and Mrs. Neelofar Jan were Muslim residents of Shopian town, in Shopian district, in Indian-administered Kashmir, and 17 and 22 years of age, respectively.
The security forces of India were implicated in the brutalization and death of Asiya Jan and Neelofar Jan.
For our report, and related photographs, short video clip, map, and secondary resources, see:
http://www.kashmirprocess.org/shopian
The events in Shopian of May-July 2009 are contextualized within a continuum of past violences and violations by the Indian military and paramilitary, and reciprocal relations between heightened militarization and social and gendered violence in Indian-administered Kashmir. The population of Shopian district numbers 2,00,000-2,50,000. The population of Kashmir was recorded at approximately 69,00,000 in 2008, with Muslims constituting approximately 95 percent of the population. Across Jammu and Kashmir, which includes Ladakh, approximately 67 percent of the population was of Muslim descent. Shopian town is home to approximately 60,000-70,000 residents. The military and paramilitary are hyper-present in and outside the town. At its limits are the police and paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) camps. Beyond, the locality is surrounded by the Rashtriya Rifles (military) and various camps of the CRPF, in Gagaran, Batpora, Balpora and on Mughal Road. The Rashtriya Rifles stage flag marches and the CRPF regularly patrols the area. Since May 29, 2009, the CRPF established another camp near the site of the incidents, close to the police residential quarters, across the Rambi-Ara nullah (a tributary of a stream) beyond the edge of Shopian town. Approximately 3,000 police and personnel of the Special Operations Group (SOG) monitor the area. Further, about 20,000+ security forces personnel are deployed across Shopian district.
What is the ‘truth’ of the matter, who are in the know, and what is being shielded? While investigations into the events of May-June 2009 in Shopian have emphasized the procedural conduct of the police in their handling of the investigation, they failed to focus on the actual crimes that were committed, or the conduct of state institutions. The investigations in Shopian have not focused on the identification and prosecution of perpetrators or on addressing structural realities of militarization in Kashmir that foster and perpetuate gendered and sexualized violences, and undermine rule of law and justice. The investigations have instead concentrated on locating ‘collaborators’ and manufacturing scapegoats to subdue public outcry. ‘Control’ rather than ‘justice’ has organized the focus of the state apparatus, including all processes related to civic, criminal, and judicial matters.
Beginning May 30, 2009, throughout June, until July 16, 2009, for forty-seven consecutive days, civil society protests continued in Shopian town, led by the Majlis-e-Mushawarat and other groups, seeking justice, joined, in solidarity, by others across Kashmir. Daily life remained interrupted, economic and social life overrun. Through non-violent means, civil society continued to dissent the horrific events that transpired, the relationship of these events to military and paramilitary forces, the actions and impassivity of security forces and institutions, and those of the state. Civil society members reiterated that civil disobedience was the sole mechanism available to them via which to seek justice.
The events in Shopian and the broader structural and sustained context of militarization portray the reach of the security apparatus in Kashmir under what is not termed ‘military rule’. The conflict in Jammu and Kashmir has been ongoing since October 1947. A will to peace in Kashmir requires an attested commitment to justice, palpably absent in the exchanges undertaken by the Government of India and its attendant institutions with Kashmir civil society. The premise and structure of impunity connected to militarization, and corresponding human rights abuses, bear witness to the absence of accountability inherent to the dominion of Kashmir by the Indian state, and a refusal to take seriously the imperative of addressing these issues as the only way forward to a just peace. The international community continues to engage India in trade, commerce, military, nuclear, and cultural relations, without insisting on answerability for the violations committed by its government and military and paramilitary forces.
The events in Shopian marked the inability of the state apparatus to deliver justice in Kashmir. It remained incumbent on civil society institutions and international human rights groups and those working with issues of social justice to seek accountability.
Angana Chatterji is Convener of the International People’s Tribunal in Indian-administered Kashmir and Professor, Anthropology, California Institute of Integral Studies.
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Tags:Angana Chatterji, Asiya Jan, India, Indian security froces, Indian-administered Kashmir, Neelofar Jan, rape and murders, Shopian, violence
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