Awakening Bharat Mata: The Political Beliefs of the Indian Right is a literary collection by Swapan Dasgupta, published by Penguin Random House in 2019. [1] [2] [3] The book is about the rise and beliefs of right-wing politics in India. [4]
Awakening Bharat Mata: The Political Beliefs of the Indian Right is a literary collection by Swapan Dasgupta, published by Penguin Random House in 2019. [1] [2] [3] The book is about the rise and beliefs of right-wing politics in India. [4]
Hindu nationalism is one of the predominant political beliefs prevalent in India. According to the author, the book is not about Hindu nationalism as a power, but as a social and political movement. [5]
Awakening Bharat Mata: The Political Beliefs of the Indian Right is a 2019 literary collection by a Bharatiya Janata Party politician Rajya Sabha and Padma Bhushan award recipient Swapan Dasgupta. The book was published by Penguin Random House and contains 440 pages. [6]
Dasgupta wrote the first three chapters of the book, which are: The Political context; Motherland, Religion and Community; Politics and the Hindu Narrative. The book then provides a collection of essays which are divided into three categories: The Motherland and Nation Building, History, and Fault Lines.
The latter section of the book contains essays written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Sister Nivedita, Sri Aurobindo, R. C. Majumdar, Jadunath Sarkar, Veer Savarkar, Mahadev Govind Ranade, Sardar Patel, Sita Ram Goel, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Ramananda Chatterjee, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, L. K. Advani, Girilal Jain and S. Gurumurthy.
Rishi Raj, reviewing for the Financial Express, called the book a "timely book". [1] According to Raj, in India's left liberal dominated discourse, BJP and Hindutva politics have been given distaste in intellectual and academic circles. [1] Besides tracking the rise and success of Hindutva politics, the book also examines its faultlines. [1] Raj praised the essays selected by Dasgupta but expected the author's own analysis on its relevance in today's times. [1] In the end of review, Raj suggests to give the book to liberal historian Ramachandra Guha when he rues about absence of India's conservative intellectuals. [1]
Ravish Tiwari, writing for The Indian Express , observed that the book teases out different strands of Hindu cultural nationalist belief. [2] According to him, the book's introductory chapters form the context of the book but specific context is lacking on why the essays were chosen. [2] For The Week , Vijaya Pushkarna wrote that book is an attempt to identify some of the ideas, attitudes and beliefs of conservatism in India. [3] "Anecdotes and stories in the book," wrote Pushkarna, "are interesting to read." [3] She observed that Dasgupta's chapters in the book are more about Narendra Modi and his contributions to economic intellect and ideas for the BJP. [3]
Hindutva (transl. Hinduness) is the predominant form of Hindu nationalism in India. As a political ideology, the term Hindutva was articulated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923. It is used by the organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other organisations, collectively called the Sangh Parivar.
Bhārat Mātā is a national personification of India (Bharat) as a mother goddess. In the visual arts she is commonly depicted dressed in a red or saffron-coloured sari and holding a national flag or a saffron-coloured flag; she sometimes stands on a lotus and is accompanied by a lion.
Vande Maataram is a poem written in highly sanskritized Bengali by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in 1870s, which he included in his 1882 Bengali novel Anandamath. The poem was first sung by Rabindranath Tagore in the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress. The first two verses of the song were adopted as the National Song of India in October 1937 by the Congress Working Committee prior to the end of colonial rule in August 1947.
Koenraad Elst is a Flemish right wing Hindutva author, known primarily for his support of the Out of India theory and the Hindutva movement. He has also engaged himself with the Flemish movement, for direct democracy and Flemish secession.
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, known among followers by the honorific prefix Veer, was an Indian politician, activist, and writer. He developed the Hindu nationalist political ideology of Hindutva while imprisoned at Ratnagiri in 1922. He was a leading figure in the Hindu Mahasabha.
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee CIE was an Indian novelist, poet and journalist. He was the author of the 1882 Bengali language novel Anandamath, which is one of the landmarks of modern Bengali and Indian literature. He was the composer of Vande Mataram, originally in Sanskrit, personifying India as a mother goddess and inspiring activists during the Indian Independence Movement. Chattopadhayay wrote fourteen novels and many serious, serio-comic, satirical, scientific and critical treatises in Bengali. He is known as Sahitya Samrat in Bengali.
Akhand Bharat, also known as Akhand Hindustan is a term for the concept of a unified Indian subcontinent. It posits that modern-day India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet Autonomous Region, Sri Lanka and Myanmar is one nation.
The Bengal School of Art, commonly referred as Bengal School, was an art movement and a style of Indian painting that originated in Bengal, primarily Kolkata and Shantiniketan, and flourished throughout the Indian subcontinent, during the British Raj in the early 20th century. Also known as 'Indian style of painting' in its early days, it was associated with Indian nationalism (swadeshi) and led by Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951), but was also being promoted and supported by British arts administrators like E. B. Havell, the principal of the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata from 1896; eventually it led to the development of the modern Indian painting.
Asaduddin Owaisi is an Indian politician, who is the President of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen. He is a four-time Member of Parliament (MP), representing the Hyderabad constituency in Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament. For years, he has been regularly listed among the 500 Most Influential Muslims of the world.
Indian nationalism developed as a concept during the Indian independence movement which campaigned for independence from British rule. Indian nationalism is an instance of territorial nationalism, which is inclusive of all of the people of India, despite their diverse ethnic, linguistic and religious backgrounds. It continues to strongly influence the politics of India and reflects an opposition to the sectarian strands of Hindu nationalism and Muslim nationalism.
Swapan Dasgupta is an Indian journalist and politician. He is influential within the Indian right wing, writing columns for leading English dailies espousing Hindu nationalism. He is a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha the upper house of the Parliament of India. He had resigned as MP to contest the 2021 West Bengal Legislative Assembly election with a BJP ticket and lost to AITC candidate Ramendu Sinha. He was renominated as MP again on 1 June 2021.
Walter K. Andersen is an American academic known for his studies of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – an Indian volunteer service organization. He currently serves as Senior Adjunct Professor of South Asia Studies at Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and is a part of the faculty of Tongji University, Shanghai (China). Previously, he taught comparative politics at the College of Wooster before joining the United States State Department as a political analyst for South Asia specializing in India and Indian Ocean affairs. Additionally, he was an adjunct professor at The American University in Washington, D.C.
Abhinav Bharat Society was an Indian Independence secret society founded by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and his brother Ganesh Damodar Savarkar in 1904. Initially founded at Nasik as "Mitra Mela" when Vinayak Savarkar was still a student of Fergusson College at Pune, the society grew to include several hundred revolutionaries and political activists with branches in various parts of India, extending to London after Savarkar went to study law. It carried out a few assassinations of British officials, after which the Savarkar brothers were convicted and imprisoned. The society was formally disbanded in 1952.
Abhinav Bharat is a Hindu organization founded by retired major of Indian Army Ramesh Upadhyay in 2006 in Pune, India. It has a large base in Madhya Pradesh. The organization is believed to be the revived form of the pre-Independence era Abhinav Bharat Society. The activities of the organisations received widespread attention after Maharashtra Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) arrested its member for the 2006 Malegaon bombings case. It has no relationship to the Mumbai-based charitable trust of the same name.
Saffron terror refers to terrorist acts which are committed by extremists motivated by Hindutva. The term comes from the symbolic use of the saffron colour by many Hindu nationalist organisations.
Meera Nanda is an Indian writer and historian of science, who has authored several works critiquing the influence of Hindutva, postcolonialism and postmodernism on science, and the flourishing of pseudoscience and vedic science. She currently is a visiting faculty of humanities and social sciences at IISER Pune.
Hindu nationalism has been collectively referred to as the expression of social and political thought, based on the native spiritual and cultural traditions of the Indian subcontinent. "Hindu nationalism" or the correct term Hindū rāṣṭravāda is a simplistic translation and it is better described with the term "Hindu polity".
Baṅgamātā, Bangla Maa, Mother Bengal or simply বাংলা/ Bangla, is a personification of Bengal created during the Bengali Renaissance and later adopted by the Bengali nationalists. In Bangladeshi poetry, literature and patriotic song, she has become a symbol of Bangladesh, considered as a personification of the Republic. The Mother Bengal represents not only biological motherness but its attributed characteristics as well – protection, never ending love, consolation, care, the beginning and the end of life.
Jyotirmaya Sharma is a public intellectual, political philosopher and professor of political science at the Department of Political Science at the University of Hyderabad, Telangana, in India. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Germany. Between September 2015 and June 2016, he was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria. Earlier, between January–June 2012, he was a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and Fellow of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany, in 2012-13. He was also a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the French Network of Institutes for Advanced Study, RFIEA between 2013 and 2016. In January 2015, he was appointed member of the scientific advisory board of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen.
Savarkar is a two part biography about Indian politician and writer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, written by biographer Vikram Sampath and published by Penguin Viking. The first part is sub-titled Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924 and the second part is A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966.