ABSTRACT
Despite championing a Gandhian ethos and prioritizing secular socialism in its nation-building efforts, today’s India continues to casually consume not just Nazi memorabilia, but also the cult, conceptions, and policies of Hitler, which often get normalized in popular culture. Why does this bizarre trend perpetuate in an Internet-age democracy? Is it owed to certain fetters of ethno-nationalism from the past or an underlying structural causality that merits empirical substantiation? Divided into three sections, this paper attempts to outline India’s prevalent misbeliefs about Hitler and establish its link with shortcomings in the country’s schooling on Nazism and the Holocaust. First, while tracing the familiar political affinity between Indian and German nationalists since the First World War, India’s perceptions of the Third Reich are contextualized through the lens of its colonial-era aspirations. Second, the persistent present-day negotiation of Hitler’s legacy and its trivialization in everyday and colloquial contexts in India are scrutinized. Third, samples of India’s state-prescribed high school history textbooks are subjected to content analysis with the intent of finding the flaws in the very foundation of the nation’s memorialization of the Nazis and their atrocities.
