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Abstract

This paper examines contemporary resistance to far-right Hindu nationalism, typified by the currently-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has maintained a majority in the Indian national government since 2014. Hindu nationalism (Hindutva)’s project can be roughly defined as Hindu majoritarian, privileging a normative body politic that is upper-caste, masculinist, and chauvinist (Banaji 2018), towards an imaginary of India’s multivalent communities standardized under a “Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan” nexus (Pandey 1992; Pandian 2000). I focus on political resistance in the contemporary landscape of Dravidian politics in the state of Tamil Nadu, which, despite the considerable literature on Hindutva, its project, and its antagonistic resistances, has been undertheorized. I argue that recent mass protests in Tamil Nadu articulate political claims that straddle a liminal space between a politics of recognition, as theorized by Charles Taylor (1992), and a politics of refusal, as theorized by Audra Simpson (2012). This ambivalent politics draws from a long history of 20th century Tamil resistance and hostility to the Indian national government for its infringement on Tamil identity, but departs from it in distinct ways. In addition to articulating discursive claims between recognition and refusal, participants in recent Tamil protests are, I argue, attempting to forge a nascent paradigmatic shift in notions of Tamil identity itself. By speaking with dual, simultaneous reference to recognition and refusal, protesters distance themselves from both the Hindutva national government and the space of electoral politics in Tamil Nadu, instead positing Tamil ontology as a site of ongoing struggle.

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