Hindutva: Making of a Civilisation State | Ali Javed

From census to Anandamath

Opening a new Nous Podcast series called First Principles, devoted to political theory and Islamic intellectual history, the host turned to the researcher Ali Javed to trace how Hindutva evolved from a loosely defined communal sentiment into what Javed argues is now a fully worked-out political metaphysics. He located its origins in the decades after the collapse of Mughal authority following 1857, when British colonial census-taking made Indians newly aware, in stark demographic terms, of exactly how the subcontinent's religious populations were distributed. That anxiety sharpened dramatically around the 1905 partition of Bengal, Javed said, which colonial administrators justified partly on the discovery of just how large the province's Muslim population actually was.

Javed pointed to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's 1882 novel Anandamath as an early and consequential act of myth-making. The novel, he said, dramatised an anti-colonial rebellion while erasing the historical role Muslim fakirs had actually played alongside Hindu ascetics in resisting British rule — reconstructing the resistance as purely Hindu, and recasting a Muslim nawab as the British administration's collaborator. "History is what your next generation reads," Javed said, in explaining why he treats this kind of narrative reconstruction as consequential rather than incidental.

Building an identity to mobilise

From that founding myth, Javed traced a longer institutional genealogy: the Arya Samaj reform movement, its associated Shuddhi conversion campaigns, and the founding of the Hindu Mahasabha, all working — in his account — to construct a mobilisable Hindu identity around symbols like Durga Puja and the song Vande Mataram. He was careful to note that responsibility for communal polarisation in this period does not run in only one direction. He pointed specifically to the economic dimension of the 1905 Bengal boycott movement, in which store and market closures organised for nationalist purposes disproportionately hurt poorer Muslims and Dalits who depended on that trade, turning what began as an anti-colonial economic protest into what he described as a class struggle as much as a religious one — a dynamic, he said, that helped push Muslim political organising toward the eventual formation of the Muslim League.

Savarkar's territorial turn

The decisive theoretical shift, in Javed's account, came with Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who moved Hindutva from a loose sentiment into a stabilised political theory demanding an exclusive, bounded territory — a conception of India as "Bharatvarsha," an organic civilisational body whose "sacred geography" alone could produce authentically indigenous philosophy and belonging. Muslims, Christians and other traditions arriving from outside that geography were, in this framing, permanently marked as foreign impositions on the land, regardless of how many centuries their communities had lived there.

A parallel with Zionism

Javed drew an extended comparison between Hindutva and Zionism as ethno-nationalist projects that, in his reading, share a structural logic: each imagines a religiously or ethnically defined homeland, each frames Islam as a shared adversary, and each has built material cooperation on that convergence — arms trade, homeland-security training exchanges, and intelligence-sharing technology such as the Pegasus spyware among them. He noted that Indian labourers have increasingly filled agricultural and service jobs in Israel previously done by Palestinian workers, particularly since 2023, tightening the economic relationship between the two states.

He was careful to distinguish degrees of severity even while drawing the parallel, saying explicitly that Israel's current conduct in Gaza is, in his assessment, more severe than the current Indian state's conduct toward its own minorities. But he argued both projects share an underlying organising logic he traced partly to M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS's second leader, who wrote approvingly, in Javed's characterisation, of Nazi Germany's approach to its Jewish minority as a model for how a majority might treat a minority it does not fully trust — a comparison Javed offered as an argument about ideological structure, not a claim of moral equivalence in current practice.

Pluralism as a problem to manage

Much of the conversation turned on a more abstract philosophical claim: that Hindu metaphysics, because it accommodates multiple gods and multiple schools of thought, is internally pluralistic in a way that makes enforcing political "oneness" — one law, one territory, one national culture — considerably more difficult and effortful to sustain than in a tradition organised, like Islam's tawheed, around a single unifying principle. He suggested this is why the Hindutva project, in his view, ultimately requires far more sustained institutional and coercive effort to hold together than a monotheistic nationalist project like Zionism does, even though the ambition looks superficially similar from the outside.

The state becomes the body

Javed's account of what he called "New Hindutva" centres on the years since 2014, when he argues the project stopped needing a standing movement like the RSS to carry its ideas and began embedding them directly into state institutions instead — citing the Supreme Court's Triple Talaq verdict, the push for a Uniform Civil Code, the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir, and the citizenship framework built around the CAA and NRC as examples of the state itself becoming the vehicle for what a mass movement once had to argue for from outside government. In that account, Muslims are left with a shrinking political role that Javed summarised starkly: "what is left is just enough for a votebank."