Transcript: Mythopolitics in South Asia

KBN: Interviewer - Kenneth Bo Nielsen

MS: Moumita Sen

SLE: Silje L. Einarsen

TT: The’ang Theron

GWS: Guro W. Samuelsen

00:00:02

              This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

00:00:10

KBN       Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast Collaboration Sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. My name is Kenneth Bo Nielsen. I'm an associate professor of social anthropology in Oslo and also the coordinator of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. In this episode, we focus on an exciting new research project at the MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society in Oslo, a project that bears the name Missile Politics in South Asia. The Lifetimes of Powerful Stories. I'm joined today by the members of the Myth of Politics team by Moumita, Associate professor of Culture Studies, and also the project Lead for Myth or Politics. Silje and Samuelsen are both postdoctoral fellows with the project, and The’ang is a doctoral fellow. Each of them work on their own individual projects within the Overall Myth of Politics project. And it's really wonderful to have the entire research group here today. So welcome to all of you and thank you so much for joining us. As mentioned, we are here to learn more about the Missile Politics Research Project and brief. This is funded by the Norwegian Research Council and seeks to understand the role of hegemonic Hindu story worlds in the contemporary political field. It consists of several subprojects that analyse the political significance of Hindu myths and mythic narratives to Hindu nationalism, but also to the grassroots level movements that seek to deconstruct these story worlds. So in short, I guess what you're interested in is how mythological narratives underpin identity in the political field, in the contemporary world. And we'll hear more substantially about this very soon. But first Moumita, I wanted to ask you, how did this project begin?

00:02:10

MS

Well, I was an overworked and wild post-doc, wandering the hallways of the University of Oslo looking for a job and thinking of how to sustain my career. And at the time, I was working on a postdoc project which looked at an anti cost movement. It's a large formation of Dalit Bahujan and Adivasi activists or caste minority activists, which was trying to debrief me noise the minds of the actual majority of the nation, only Hindus who are not upper caste. Now, what they were doing was that they were reading all scriptures and interpreting them as violent, immoral and misogynist on social media. At the same time, they were also trying to uncover the hidden or lost histories of oppressed caste heroes against the grain of the archive, if you will. And they were doing this all on social media, right? I mean, some of the posts these guys had. Oh, my God. There was a famous one which was of Brahma, you know, the Hindu deity from who was, shall we say, being intimate with his own daughter, Saraswati. And it was all pretty jarringly iconoclastic. So at the time I went to Sylvia, you know, my friend, an expert on the subject, and I told her that, you know, I think what these people are doing is a kind of mix of politics, or as in it's a kind of political formation around myths. And look at how they're using the scriptures. I said that, you know, they're not expert philologists like cilia or others, but what exciting political hybrid tactics or hermeneutics never know how to say that word. But I was like, Wait just a minute. This is not technically incorrect, what they're doing. And she told me that even the hegemonic form is a kind of position reading what the upper caste Hindus do with their own scriptures.

00:03:52

              And that sort of alarms in my brain. It was also around the same time that I was having lunch with Guru, and I told her that, you know, I have this idea for politics with all discussed activism. And she immediately suggested that the way the idea of Modi magic as a term operates in the Indian media has also a lot to do with these kinds of mythic ideas. So that's how the project took shape. And the Norwegian Research Council, thankfully, really liked our project. And when we advertised for the doctoral position, Huang here came with a really cool idea about a new religious movement in the Northeast in an indigenous context. None of us had any idea about that. But I mean, in general, in the context of the larger subject, which is beyond the subprojects, I guess it has to do a little bit with the fact that I have been an academic without a home in any discipline. I think I belong to visual studies, but that's housed nowhere and barely recognized. So I think that kind of background has given me a space to experiment with transdisciplinary forms of theorizing. It's been ten years, which I understand an academic year is not that long. I have been very upset about why Jacaranda here is our only go to if we want to study aesthetics, politics and religiosity together, not as reified categories in South Asia. Why don't we have our own theory? I would say that I'm trying to find a transdisciplinary space for the study of the religious, the political and the aesthetic in South Asia. I think that's a long answer to that question.

00:05:30

KBN       Thanks. Thanks so much. I was planning to ask you actually about the timing of the project also, given that it's happening now. I was wondering, what is it that makes a project such as this so timely right now? I mean, what are the developments in the world today, that myth or politics is out to understand or I mean, maybe to be even more specific? What is happening in South Asia that makes this project both urgent and timely, given that all of your projects are also focused on South Asia?

00:06:09

MS

Well, I think the rising religious nationalism or ethnic nationalism, as different people have called it in South Asia right now, I mean, it's giving us sleepless nights. Right? And one of the things that I thought is we need to really update our understanding of the interaction of religious and political aspects, institutions and processes. And I suppose that's what we can do as scholars sitting so far away from, you know, what goes on in terms of activism on the grounds of salvation politics. I don't know what else we can really do. But I think for my individual subproject, it was very important to show that the opposition to Hindu nationalism also generously uses religious symbols and mobilizes religious efforts. You know, one of my interlocutors, he's a Ph.D. student or used to be a Ph.D. student in general. He told me, you know, madam, you're the book lift. So you have all these hang ups about religion. I mean, people on the ground don't have these kinds of elite problems. And he also told me that, you know, the left needs to get over its allergy towards religious forms if it hopes to survive in the contemporary political military. And that was also a big jolt for me to hear that. And I thought, yeah, okay, maybe we need to go back to our books and see where we can change our assumptions about religion and politics during the period of my fieldwork and realized it's more complex. It's not just elite people who struggle with the way religion and politics mix, but I guess that that's that's a different conversation. Hopefully we can come back to that another time. But I think that one of the other things that I thought makes the project relevant is. How it's perhaps clear all over the world that there is an important question of stories, how stories are told.

              And how people believe if something is true. I think in the context of South Asia, it's maybe deeper. Chakraborty who uses bots idea of the mythical as historical. So in other words, when so much research is devoted to fake news, that is how known facts are established as facts. I was more interested in forms of telling in a broader context, not just as fake news as we understand it now. I think what the project tries to ask is how do we know what is true and what is fake in our history and how that is somehow in the telling.

00:08:25

KBN       Right. And we'll come back to this question very soon. But as I've come to understand that you think of this myth politics as a phenomenon that exists also outside of South Asia. I mean, in the sense that while each of you ground your own work in the South Asian context, what you find is perhaps likely to resonate also outside of that context, too.

00:08:54

GWS

I would absolutely say so. And this is perhaps something that we are all willing to pursue later on. But the developments that we've seen in India over the past decade are, of course, very much part of a wider global turn towards right wing populism and increasing autocrat ization. But the emergence and growth of right wing populism and its relation to different forms of neo nationalism in the US and in various European countries, at least in political science. This is what has put populism back on the map as a phenomenon that, you know, it tends to take us all by surprise and we realize that we have an urgent need to understand it better. But these debates have been characteristically Eurocentric, which may not come as a great surprise, but they have also been especially blind to both the contemporary and also the historical experiences from Asia, Latin America. Figures in populism debates. But Asia has been very large. Blindspot. And I'm thinking, for example, then of this concept that has emerged of secular or cultural Christian ism where you try to understand the the populist appropriation of religion in the West in recent years. As far as I know, this has not been brought into any substantial conversation with the existing literature on Hindutva, which similarly sees Hinduism as not merely a religion, but as a culture, a civilization, and a way of life. And, you know, while of course, there are great differences between the continents in terms of histories and political trajectories and differences between the religions and the languages in which these narratives are spoken, visual and as well as written languages. This is really a conversation that needs to happen in terms of my individual sub project as well. The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra modi, well, he is just one of this host of emerging and more or less established strongmen or messianic leaders whose modes of mobilization and operation tend to defy materialist and rational voter explanations that we tend to fall back on.

              But he is also particularly powerful and particularly successful example of this wider phenomenon. That's another aspect that should warrant attention beyond area studies and political scientists that are working in the region.

00:11:35

KBN       Thanks. Thank you, Guro Samuelsen. But let's let's return to the question of narratives, which is a core concept in this project. I mean, the lifetimes of powerful stories is even in the official project name. How are you thinking about storytelling in this project?

00:11:54

TT          Thank you for that question. I often find it difficult to answer because there's so many ways to look at it. It's just that from my limited understanding, I think that narratives or stories are innate in the evolution and in the coming of human societies in general. And storytelling can be understood as the oldest mode of knowledge transmission. And it is the origin, or we can say foundation for any culture that predates the written culture. As for me personally, since I come from an oral tradition. So I mean, narratives are really important. There's so many stories like anecdotes, fables, parables, ballads, lemons, epics. So I mean, you can go on naming these genres and and then the thing is written, history is or histories are just, you know, a byproduct of these oral narrative. And aside from these narrative genres that I just spoke of, myth is the single most essential genre among all narratives, and it's always placed at the top. Most when you talk about myth, because myth enables or is still enabling the course of human building trajectories and myths. Explain the course for how, what and why and the world around us came to be. And it also gives agency to the people talking about themselves and can be widely found in all nation building processes. Although the interesting thing is the central characters in myths are always supernatural beings or entities like gods. So it is interesting to find this intersecting meta politics because stories are told in truth. I heard someone say.

00:13:48

GWS      Hmm. So speaking of stories and nation building processes, so in the context of Hindu nationalist nation building, the stories of the Hindu scriptures become central. And this is where my sub project comes into play. So Hindu narrative scriptures such as the put on us and the Hindu epics, these are narrative text that comprise myths of the Hindu gods, and they present mythic human worlds that become ideal world. And scholars have argued that these texts testify to political and social changes of their time and that they reflect cultural exchange between, on the one hand, Sanskrit for mythical culture and on the other hand tribal morals, local indigenous cultures. And as such they were instrumental in the spread of feminism and the formation of fremen hegemony. So in these scriptures, in the put on us various identities and various aspects of non-veg cultures or non Sanskrit cultures were subsumed into the biomedical hierarchy in the way that a number of medical traditions found their way into the texts and reappeared US Sanskrit myths.

00:14:56

SLE        Yes. And what we are seeing is that these myths and narratives are also central to the formation of hegemony. Today, as is well-known around this table, the Hindu nationalist movement in India itself rests on a tradition of reshaping Hindu mythological narratives for the purpose of political mobilization. So if we look at party politics from from being a marginal force in the political landscape until the 1980s, the currently ruling party of Janata Party and its affiliated organizations have, over the two past elections, succeeded in building a popular mandate and a position of dominance that we have not seen in a long time. And they use this position to challenge and undermine long standing independent institutions of the state and also the founding principles of the republic. And for us, then what is important is that this very journey began with the mass mobilizations of people in support of the Iran Janmabhoomi campaign in the late 1980s. And the claim here was that a 16th century mosque in a North Indian pilgrimage town had been built over the remains of an ancient Hindu temple. And moreover, that this temple marked the birthplace of Lord Rama. So in short, these popular political religious campaigns succeeded in. Making claims of historical wrongdoing against a mythic figure in a mythic past into a salient political question. And I think what we're seeing today is that the current majoritarian regime is similarly buttressed by this kind of intensive labor of political myth building.

00:16:56

MS         Yeah. And I think even, you know, in my subproject, we're looking at this kind of political kind of battleground because what I'm studying, this other movement, the main purpose is to break the political mythical base of Hindu nationalism. Now, let me just give a little bit of background about who are sort of. You know, they can be seen as the adversaries to the gods. It's more complicated and full of philological and historical terms. But colloquially, I mean, hegemonic myths, they are the demons. And one of the most well-known assaults is Mahesh Azar, who is the enemy of the goddess Durga. Now, what we see in North India is this whole thing around Rome. But you can also see it around the Hindu goddess Durga. She becomes the model around which the nation goddess and part of mother is modelled. Right. So one of the things that the Assam movement does as a social movement is that they claim that all these demons are in fact historical persons. So Mysore is a historical character. And they also subvert the hegemonic narrative around him being a demon and being evil and all that. And they say that he's a great king, a noble man, like all the other assholes are demons, and that the gods were, in fact scheming people that took away the lands and the waters illegally in a way from the so-called demons of today, that these were land wars. And in a way, what they're doing is that they're creating or, as I say, uncovering alternative myths, what they call histories about my childhood and other assaults. And they are putting it all out on social media in addition to traditional propaganda, by the way, in villages are also face to face meetings, flyers, posters, people go door to door and, you know, so, yeah, it's a hugely mediated kind of campaign around who are Sorcerer and the real story that both breaks and builds at the same time.

00:18:56

KBN       You mentioned Now a moment are both the sort of traditional media or traditional ways of propagating a message, but also social media in this contemporary political scenario. What more specifically are the means through which these myths are being both constructed but also circulated? I mean, how does the media transmission itself affect these myth making processes that all of you study in your different projects?

00:19:25

SLE        Well, I could give an example from my sub project where one of the. Bodies of materials that I'm looking at is what I called the model, had geographies that is collection of tellings of the tale of the Prime Minister's life comes in a variety of popular cultural media. There are movies, TV, serials, cartoons, various kinds of online content, mobile gaming apps. And since you mentioned propaganda moment, I this is something that interests me because of course these tellings are they closely resemble her propaganda, to put it nicely. These are very sort of congratulatory and celebratory and one sided versions of the story, but it's not propaganda in the very traditional sense. It's not produced or overseen by a central state institution. It's more of a situation where snippets are reproduced and the overall narrative is to some extent organically construed. It's a free flowing and open process where the story is told from many different sources at the same time. So to be more concrete, there is a basic narrative structure that is mostly recognized and adhered to. But these filmmakers and social media accounts and cartoonists and whatnot, they can add, you know, poetic, dramatic, moral and political emphasis and elaboration where they wish. So this is also a creative space in the space that is utilized for a variety of individual purposes. People do this also to make money, perhaps to acquire some level of fame or to draw some attention to themselves. And in my view, this form of openness is an important similarity between the production and the media, the uses of media that comes across in the narratives that contribute to the Hindu nationalist story world, but also in the narratives that contest the same the same story world.

00:21:46

GWS      Yes. So new media also allows activists opposing the Hindu nationalist vision to use the same stories to to speak to the same story world in order to create counter hegemonic narratives. So whereas we've seen that Hindu nationalists have capitalized on the national broadcast of the Epic Ramayana as a television series and on the power of new media and communication technologies to turn such Hindu narratives into the narratives of the nation. Now, social media provides opportunities for other voices to be heard. So here anti caste or anti Hindutva activists spread names, images or short video clips in social media where they present alternative interpretations of these familiar stories. So an example is how they used the motive from the Ramayana of Ram's mutilation of the Demon Serpent Akure. According to the epic, the Sanskrit epic Serpentico wanted to marry Ram and threaten him and his companions. And as a punishment, Ram cuts off her nose. But in the alternative stories spread by political activists, Serpent is not a demon, but an indigenous woman. And Ram is not a god king but an upper caste oppressor abusing the indigenous population. So instead of creating entirely new stories, it is perhaps more potent or powerful to refer to the same Hindu nationalist of world in creating a anteriormente political message.

00:23:17

KBN       And at the same time, we know that in this age of of neo hindutva marking and also indigenous communities are also touched by the long arm of Hindu nationalism in quite insidious ways. FANG If I'm not mistaken, this issue is at the core of your research project. Could you tell us a little more about this particular religious movement that you're studying?

00:23:43

TT          Thank you for that question. So I'm starting this new religious movement by the name Lockheed Martin. And at first, when it emerged, it went by the name Orion Kimi, which in Karbi language literally translates to new reforms. And in the literary traditions of the movement at present, it's known as Lockman Song. And it's a version of White Sect. And they emerged in the late fifties in the Caribbean along District of Assam. And initially, it was founded by Local 19 six, who is also the supreme leader and who is simultaneously known as Lukman himself. And followers revere him as the supreme leader and of that of Bishnu. And the embodiment of all these who has this amazing miracle performing feats. And the difference between the new religious movement and the Karbi traditional practice is that the Lockman followers think that the old Karbi traditional belief practices are irrelevant and outdated. And the interesting thing is that the followers of him on yeah, they put on dress codes which are like very uniform beats, and they engage in routine worship of the leader, which is. Not in the likeness of Hindu worship, but it is Hindu worship.

00:25:14

KBN       So how is this religious movement tied to the growth of Hindutva, and what role do you find that myth is playing here?

00:25:23

TT          Like how I understand it is that the myth of Lockman is just one of the many cases that you will find in the north eastern part of India. I mean, not just in north east, but like all over India. Because and the interesting thing is there have been a lot of these sorts of processes of war and recession and to name a few, the mighty people of Manipur is the product of Hindu to position or Sanskrit position or however you might want to put it. But now coming back to the lock in one religious movement is that it garnered its legitimacy and recognition after associating itself to a more prominent myth from a dominant religion, which is of course, the mainstream or Hinduism. And this movement is a form of organized and institutionalized religion with deep and direct affiliations to RSS and BHP. And it can be seen from the lock in movement. It can be seen as an act of soft assertion of new religious identity reform politics, which is backed by state agencies and religio political actors in the making. And at this point, my focus is to look at the asymmetrical power relations and how the idea of belongingness is perceived at the margins, which are karbi and the vernacular based, which is in one and the mainstream. And here's where myths act as intersecting that from the media is all these tree agents.

00:27:08

KBN       Yes. And when we speak of hierarchies of power and power differentials in the sphere of myths and narrative, I can see this also a question of languages here that can be said to occupy different hierarchical positions. I mean, always dealing with Hindi the and more meta operating with regional languages and clearly you're dealing with the Sanskrit. What kind of place would you say that this language occupies in India today? And what does it signify?

00:27:38

SLE        Yes. So I would say that since BJP's victory in 2014, we see that the position of the Sanskrit language and Sanskrit as culture or Sanskrit culture has been strengthened through policies such as, for example, the new education policy of 2020, where Sanskrit is, is to be mainstreamed in school and incorporated in higher education in the Indian institutions of technology, and also strengthened in political discourse. So here we see that Sanskrit is not so much treated as a classical language, as it is a powerful symbol of the greatness of the Hindu civilization, which we need to turn to in order to build a prosperous future. So the important role language plays in the formation of nationalist ideologies is something that is probably very familiar from studies of nationalist nationalism. But I think less focus has been given to the role of ancient and classical languages in modern nationalist politics and propaganda. These are languages that are not necessarily spoken and used for communication day to day fashion, but they become symbols of the culture of the nation in its most idealized form and therefore important in the making of the myth of the nation. So we see clear parallels between how Sanskrit is used politically today to, for example, how Latin was used under Italian fascism. As a colleague of us, Hahn Llamas at the University of Ulster is working on So Latin phrases and tropes were, for example, used in fascist Italy. They were used in inscriptions, in speeches and slogans under and and by Mussolini to establish connections with ancient Rome. And similarly, when Modi uses Sanskrit phrases, tropes and symbols in his speeches and on Twitter, this establishes a link between the glorified ancient Hindu past and the political moment of the present. So Sanskrit texts are full of politically powerful symbols, and the language itself also becomes the symbol not only of the past, but also for the future that the Hindu nationalists promise to build.

00:29:57

KBN       Okay. So clearly, both symbols and symbolism also play an important role here.

00:30:04

GWS      I think that is something that is shared among the sub projects. In my case, Narendra modi himself has over the years been made or turned himself into a symbol in many ways. He is an icon or a brand. Some prefer to see him. So there has been this extreme level of of personification. Perhaps the foremost characteristic of his rise to power wear, his his appearance, his face, his name as been made into an acronym. His face is replicated in all sorts of images of visual representations and also in masks, rubber masks that people wear when they go to his political meetings. You can buy them on Amazon and then in slogans and so on. So there is across the span of, let's say, Chandra, of political communication, there is an apparent simplicity that also contains a fundamental ambiguity. There is an openness of symbols that is something that this modern political language and the language of religious myths has in common. And this is also a language that has turned out to be highly efficient in the both online and the offline world of contemporary South Asian politics, which is saturated with images and slogans and one liners that are, on the one hand loaded with meaning. But on the other hand, very open ended so that various audiences thinking of the diversity of of this audience, that various groups and various individuals can interpret them according to their own aspirations and needs. And I think the Indian right wing has a very keen understanding of such ambiguous forms of communication. We also see now that the deeds and the symbols of hindemith's are used by, as mentioned by opponents of Hindu Twi, a way that we have not seen earlier. So we've already mentioned the names of Hindu gods that are circulated on social media that ridicules the gods and points out oppressive or misogynist aspects of hindemith's. And for example, I already mentioned a very cherished motive for these means which centers around the relationship between the God Brahma and his wife Saraswati, which, according to some put on Ignis, is incestuous and sometimes also rapist. According to some of these texts, Brahma is the God of creation, and he created first a daughter, Saraswati, who later became his wife, and they got children. So anti caste activists use this motive in social media to create the counterculture, which they do by deconstructing and breaking the symbols of the dominant Hindu culture. So Brahman strategy to stick with this example, they symbolize the sacred from initial knowledge of the video scriptures, the very culture and everything that is satanic or pure and righteous. They embody parts of Hindu culture that were and still largely are reserved for a narrow rabbinical elite. So in the icons of Brahma, he holds symbols of Vedic rituals like spoon for pouring ablations into the fire, for example, and he holds the scriptures. So he is the defied version, or we can say the embodiment of the power of the Brahman and by extension of the entire Brahman class. So these very symbols are then used and remixed in means, and they are remixed in a way that dismantled his purity and by extension, the purity of from ethnical culture. Yeah, but you know, what's interesting is also that it's not as if the response to all this is free of misogyny. Right. So my sub project is all about breaking and building icons and symbols.

00:34:08

MS         And a lot of this is about, as you said, the moral place of duty as the symbol. Right. And when I started studying this, which was the whole thing around Durga and oh my God, the talk around Durga, you know, as prostitute, as honey trap, as, you know, some sort of scheming woman when she's dangerous and powerful or really stupid. The other way of thinking and, you know, was naive and brainwashed, so I don't know. But the thing is that because Hindu duties are symbols are invested with so much moral value, breaking them down also becomes politically significant. So precisely because the Hindu goddess Durga is such an icon of chastity, virtue, strength and so on, which she basically symbolizes all that is pure and good in the woman and the nation. In the Hindu nationalist imagination. But that's precisely why the cost activists break her down with so much vitriol and vengeance. Perhaps the same is true for satisfy the. I think what people often miss, because there's a lot of talk about misogyny, you know, around this kind of counter-culture as well. But I think what people don't see is that everyone shares these ideas about female honor and chastity. It's almost like strategy in a great game, like football. You attack your opponent at their most vulnerable point. I was actually a policeman in a village in Perugia, in West Bengal, who gave me this analogy, the football match. He said that, you know, Durga is the football in all this and he is writing all the chastity and honor of the female body. Is the football in this? But yeah, I mean, in general, I think the power of symbols is absolutely at the core of what we are studying. And the way I see it more and more is the symbolic is held up by the mythic or the narrative.

00:35:55

GWS      That is what that that's the matrix. And there is a more general point to be made here, as well as religious symbols and myths often play a key role in political and nationalist movements where this nostalgia for glorified past or a lost a lost golden age is central to political mythmaking. And with the global rise of religious nationalism, it is crucial to understand both these myths and the various mechanisms that play into their making. And this is what we're trying to do in mythic politics.

00:36:26

KBN       It's been it's been truly wonderful to have you with us in this episode. The Myth of Politics Research Team. Thank you so much for joining us and also for shedding light on what myth of politics in South Asia is all about. A new research project at the MFA, the Weekend School of Theology, Religion and Society. And we look forward to following your work. Overcoming many. Yes. Thanks so much. My name is Kenneth Nelson and thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in Studying Asia and. You have been listening.

00:37:03

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