India’s war on its history of humiliation

Abstract

Abstract In India, since Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) rise to power, socio-political discourse has increasingly been reconfigured through the lens of Hindutva (a conflation of religious and national identity). This includes the revision of history books to diminish India’s Mughal influence and rearticulate its national identity as more muscular against the enemy Other. This chapter explores how India has seen conceptualizations of war move beyond traditional border clashes towards the terrain of ideological thought, and where competing groups use language to redefine the nation’s identity. To do so, the analysis employs Bhatia’s (2015) Discourse of Illusion theoretical framework that demystifies how subjective notions of the imagined nation ( Anderson 2010 ), within which India is reconceptualized as a pure Hindu nation, are legitimized. Data analysis occurs from three aspects: historicity (drawing on the past to make sense of the present or future); linguistic and semiotic action (subjective conceptualizations made apparent through metaphorical rhetoric); and degree of social impact (rise of delineating categorizations).

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