ABSTRACT
This article contests the role that India as a ‘motherland’ plays in the circulation of neo-Hindutva sentiments by exploring the relationship between reterritorialisation, affect and citizenship identities among Surinamese Hindus in the Netherlands. Following Jones (2016, 2014), this article posits that Surinamese Hindu citizens are ‘conditional’, which causes some community actors to strategically reterritorialise Hindu practices and identity as part of the Dutch landscape. Other groups protest their place as conditional citizens as they see their religious practices under threat by cultural and neo-colonial appropriations. In this way, what it means to be Hindu is circulated through a neo-Hindutva affective economy (Ahmed 2004). By presenting ethnographic data that explores the importance of pride and offense as ways to ‘be Hindu’ at an HSS shakha summer camp in 2016 and during a Hindu protest campaign in 2015, this article aims to make sense of the ways in which neo-Hindutva sentiments associated with reterritorialisation strategies respond to citizenship regimes that exist in the Netherlands today.
