GLOB-POP-NAT · Populist nationalism in 'global' western India, 1920-1939
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-10-01 → 2024-06-30
- EU contribution
- €193,759
- Participants
- 3
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Populist nationalism in 'global' western India, 1920-1939
Glop-Pop-Nat offers a new study of the transnational connections between emerging Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) and contemporary European fascism in the 1920s-30s, enabling through its globalising and comparative perspective on their relationship improvements to our understanding of both. Moreover, by employing the still underused framework of comprehending Hindutva as a form of populist nationalism, it opens up a complementary, and crucial set of themes: of populist nationalism, so urgently and frenetically analysed in today’s world, in diachronic and also global contexts; of contemporary populist phenomena set in the light of twentieth-century historical experience. The project, through its examination of these historical comparisons and connections, also therefore assists in the theoretical delineation of the relationship between populist nationalism and fascism, as well other radical nationalist formulations. The examination of the populist right in global, comparative, and historical perspectives is a pressing issue for society at the European and global level. This project is set apart from other attempts to study Hindutva in relation to fascism by its unprecedented vernacular and historically focused interdisciplinary study of Hindutva’s birthplace, the western-Indian region of Maharashtra, whose political culture was formative on the ideology. The region’s culture is key to understanding the thought and action of those ideologues sprung from it in the 1920s and 30s, particularly as regards such features as its self-conscious ‘martial’ masculinity and its associated imagined historical traditions; as is the peculiar pattern of the region’s imbibing, in these crucial interwar years, of the cosmopolitan ideas and trends relating to political organisation, ethnicity’s relationship to state and nation, paramilitarism, and criticism of the liberal state – features so much at issue in the broader question.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
GLOB-POP-NAT proposes a new study of the transnational links between emerging Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) andcontemporary European fascism in the 1920s-30s. Comprehending Hindutva as a form of populist extremism, throughexamining these thinks the project aims at a better understanding of the transnational nature of the radical populist right inthe interwar period; and through this it seeks a better understanding of the radical right in comparative and historicalperspective, and of global fascism as a concept. This project speaks to areas of vital current concern for the EuropeanUnion. It reflects the Horizon 2020 Work Programme’s response to the challenge of fostering ‘inclusive, innovative andreflective societies’, itself a response to the remarkable growth in populist movements in Europe and globally in recent years.It refers in particular to the European Union policy on 'Racism and Xenophobia’ under its strategic priority of Justice andFundamental Rights. The relationship between Hindutva and fascism, which emerged at the same time, has been subject torecent work, not least because of its timeliness to India’s own politics, and rise to power of the Hindu Nationalist BharatiyaJanata Party (BJP) since 2014. But this work lacks a focus on the geographical and cultural area which gave birth toHindutva: Maharashtra, its western Indian heartland, which gave rise to its major institutions and founding ideologues.GLOB-POP-NAT fills this major gap in knowledge exhibited in the current state-of-the-art, proposing a vernacular studyto offer in-depth insights on this relationship in Hindutva’s birthplace for the first time, and which the Experienced Researcheris expertly placed to undertake. The project is also innovative in blending regional and linguistic expertise with aninterdisciplinary study of other aspects of vernacular culture to form a totalizing, holistic understanding of its regional politicalculture in the 1920s-1930s.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
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Data: CORDIS, © European Union