ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents a consideration of the impact of European varieties of ‘primordialist’ thinking from mid- to late-nineteenth century colonial India. It provides a descriptive narrative of the formation, growth and successes of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh from the early 1950s, and of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led (BJP) from 1980. The book describes the origins of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in the mid-1960s, and its attempts at the mass mobilisation of Hindu religious communities since the 1980s. It examines the VHP’s novel and experimental use of religious symbols, mythologies and practices in order to dramatically transform and politicize Hindu devotional traditions and direct them to concerns landscape, territory and xenology. The book focuses on the BJP’s ‘two’ founding ideologies, ‘integral humanism’ and ‘Gandhian socialism’.
