Thomas Hansen

• Stanford University

This introduction begins with a brief overview of the three major factors shaping economic life and exchange in India, as laid out by contributions in the edited volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India : embedded exchange, contested jurisdiction, and pliable markets. The overarching logic of all the contributions is that markets in India must be...

Following the 2014 general election that brought Modi to power, enormous attention was paid by many commentators and analysts to the appeal of Modi to a young and restless electorate, particularly young men aspiring to jobs and recognition in a rapidly growing economy. It is true that the spectacular election campaign in 2014 moved the crucial few...

This collection of essays examines the phenomenon of contemporary Hindu nationalism or ‘New Hindutva’ in India, the ideology that orients the popularly elected national government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, Indian People's Party) that has been in power since 2014. There is a rich body of academic work on Hindu nationalism, but its main foc...

NEHA DIXIT is an independent journalist working from Delhi, India. Her journalism revolves around the themes of Hindu nationalism, gender, and social justice in South Asia, and her work has been published in several leading media outlets including The Wire, Al Jazeera, New York Times, Outlook, and Caravan. Her published works are available online a...

This chapter traces the origins and patterns of sovereignty and migration across the Indian Ocean that have been reproduced over centuries up to the present day. This is particularly visible in the way small, well-organized trading communities continue to dominate much of mercantile life across the Global Indian Ocean--a direct bequest of the Pax B...

What does liberal order actually amount to outside the West, where it has been most institutionalised? Contrary to the Atlantic or Pacific, liberal hegemony is thin in the Indian Ocean World; there are no equivalents of NATO, the EU or the US–Japan defence relationship. Yet what this book calls the "Global Indian Ocean" was the beating heart of ear...

Theories of sovereignty in the twentieth century are generally based on a teleological “out-of-Europe” narrative where the modern, centralized nation-state form gradually spread across the world to be the foundation of the international order. In this article, the author reflects on how the conceptualization of sovereignty may change if one begins...

Most contemporary theorization and critique of sovereignty begins from the assumption of effective violence as the hard kernel of modern sovereignty. In this afterword, Hansen reflects on how the histories of provisional, overlapping, and divisible sovereignty in South Asia and elsewhere described in the special section “Rethinking Sovereignty” aff...

Thomas Blom Hansen argues that the increasing strictures on freedom of speech in India, and the shrinking tolerance for dissenting ideas and opposition to the government since 2014, has deeper roots in how the relationship between the Indian state and the broader public has developed since the 1970s. Hansen focuses on how this relationship has been...

This article is part of a Book Forum review of Ghazala Jamil's book Accumulation by Segregation (2017). The Book Forum consists of individual commentaries on this text by four interested scholars, followed by a response by the author. The article may be read individually or alongside the other contributions to the Forum, which together constitute a...

This book is about the contemporary ascendance of Hindu nationalist dominance to establish a majoritarian state in India...

"Majoritarian State" traces the ascendance of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India. Led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP administration has established an ethno-religious and populist style of rule since 2014. Its agenda is also pursued beyond the formal branches of government, as the new dispensation portrays conventional social hierarc...

This article explores how, and why, the capacity for civic responsibility and civility of conduct became a central discursive and practical battleground in the colonial world. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in colonial and apartheid South Africa, where the putative benefits of self-government along separate racial lines became a crucial comp...

In this Afterword I argue that public authority in South Asia is produced in a dynamic interplay between ever-more segmented publics and the ubiquity of highly performative violence. Drawing on Indian examples, I suggest that the success of vernacular publics in producing a sense of cultural intimacy within language communities in turn has prompted...

India’s celebrated ‘arrival on the global stage’ as a desirable ‘emerging market’ for global investors signals the spectacular moment that is said to have ruptured the barriers between the first and third worlds. If the notion of arrival anticipates the long-awaited acceleration in the pace of history, it also harnesses a euphoric India to the limi...

The idea of citizenship has today emerged as a global horizon under which a proliferating range of claims and demands for recognition, visibility, care, moral dignity, and inclusion are made. Initially a legal concept tied to self-determination and national sovereignty, the global human rights agenda has made citizenship less tied to the nation-sta...

Most scholarship on international migration focuses on the incorporation of ethnic and religious minorities into societies in Europe and North America. Much of this work overlooks that a very substantial part of contemporary flows of migration happen within well-trodden pathways of language, commercial ties and cultural imagination established by c...

In anthropology and the social sciences more broadly, religion and urban life have conventionally been seen as somewhat incongruent entities. Religion was for most of the twentieth century regarded as something belonging to the realm of “tradition” and even antithetical to what was broadly regarded as an inherently secularizing force of modern urba...

The end of apartheid in 1994 signaled a moment of freedom and a promise of a nonracial future. With this promise came an injunction: define yourself as you truly are, as an individual, and as a community. Almost two decades later it is clear that it was less the prospect of that future than the habits and horizons of anxious life in racially define...

This chapter examines how the space of the township gradually became marked and coded as a space that was interior to Indian life. It traces the emergence of the figure of the charou in the township as the constant other of the emergent, respectable Indian community in Chatsworth. Mainly based on archival material, narratives, and ethnographic mate...

The end of apartheid in 1994 signaled a moment of freedom and a promise of a nonracial future. With this promise came an injunction: define yourself as you truly are, as an individual, and as a community. Almost two decades later it is clear that it was less the prospect of that future than the habits and horizons of anxious life in racially define...

This chapter focuses on the rise of new forms of cultural mobility in the postapartheid city, particularly, the rise of the kombi taxi and its massive sound system as the most striking innovation in the urban landscape. While the private taxi industry has been at the center of much violence and criminal networks, it has also been important in provi...

This concluding chapter reflects on how much of the situation described in the book may have wider applicability across community, location, and class in South Africa. It also speculates briefly on how Jacob Zuma's presidency is altering predominant styles of politics and public culture toward a more ordinary, imperfect, but also culturally intimat...

This chapter looks at the new economy of diasporic imagination that hit South Africa after 1994. It begins by examining a range of narratives of roots tourism whereby thousands of South African Indians each year travel to India in search of the village of their ancestors and for shopping and/or spiritual purification. These journeys are often compl...

This chapter explores how the process of reevaluating one's past and reaching for a future beyond a clear ethnoracial definition is played out among the thousands of ordinary working-class Indians in Chatsworth and elsewhere who convert to Pentecostal Christianity. These conversions, which have gathered significant force since 1994, reflect a desir...

This chapter narrates the story of how the Asiatic question was configured in South Africa from the 1860s to the present as a question of necessary containment of culturally alien people. It describes how the township of Chatsworth was set up, imagined, and framed as a purely Indian space over decades of tense and often antagonistic tussle between...

This chapter analyzes the quest for religious purification that arose from the Indian middle class in South Africa. It talks about the power and attractiveness of neo-Hindu movements in South Africa and how new and more standardized Brahmanical forms of Hinduism today clash with the popular customs and traditions that still inform ideas of belief a...

This chapter examines the development of political institutions of autonomy that were designed for Indians during the apartheid years. It unravels the pervasive sense of unreality and absurdity that accompanied the heavily circumscribed functions of these bodies and how this consolidated an already pervasive disengagement from the world of politics...

This chapter studies the theme of racism and fear of Africans among people of Indian origin. The relationship between indentured Indians and Zulu speakers in the province of Natal was tense and contentious throughout the twentieth century. The large riots in 1949 in Durban when Indian homes were attacked by African workers, as well as subsequent co...

This chapter discusses the deployment of secularism in India in order to contain sectarian violence following the 1947 Partition. In the shifting boundary between the “cultural” and the “political,” this chapter analyzes how the valorization of the two domains has evolved. It describes the continued importance of emotions and passions to modern pol...

Many people today place great hope in law as a vehicle for the transformation of society and accept that law is autonomous, universal, and above all, secular. Yet recent scholarship has called into question the simplistic narrative of a separation between law and religion and blurred the boundaries between these two categories, enabling new account...

Cities are charismatic entities. Both in and of themselves by virtue of their history and their mythologies, but also as sites where charismatic figures emerge on the basis of their capacity to interpret, manage and master the opacity of the city. The specificity of the urban can neither be understood through the city's functions nor the dynamics o...

9/11 and its aftermath have shown that our ideas about what constitutes sovereign power lag dangerously behind the burgeoning claims to rights and recognition within and across national boundaries. New configurations of sovereignty are at the heart of political and cultural transformations globally. Sovereign Bodies shifts the debate on sovereign p...

Thomas Hansen spreekt in zijn oratie over overtuigingen. Het hebben van een overtuiging wordt geassocieerd met principes en waarden die mensen aanhangen, omdat zij overtuigd zijn door hun waarheidsgehalte of ethische superioriteit. Een overtuiging is dus iets anders dan het geloof in religieuze of bovennatuurlijke krachten. Een overtuigd mens is ie...

What are we to make of the fact that most violence in India rarely has any visible or clear actors? Why is most violence represented as 'pure events' without identifiable actors – but as 'mobs', as spontaneous combustion, as spontaneous rage that arises from perceived collective grievances and insults? Why in a country saturated in political rhetor...

Sovereignty has returned as a central concern in anthropology. This reinvention seeks to explore de facto sovereignty, i.e., the ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity. The central proposition is a call to abandon sovereignty as an ontological ground of power and order in favor of a view of sovereignty as a tentative and always emerg...

The apartheid city perfected colonial forms of governance by converting race to space. Each of the country’s four race groups (Africans, whites, coloureds, and Indians) inhabited separate neighborhoods, shopped in separate shopping areas, and schools, religious institutions, and leisure were almost completely separated. The only points of contact w...

The police force was the most hated and visible representation of South Africa's apartheid state. The massive crime wave after 1994 and the new anxieties in a democratic South Africa have made security the primary concern in everyday life in the country. This article explores the paradoxes of policing, state violence and community involvement in se...

NAMING AND PUBLIC SPEECH IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICA “Why can’t you just call yourself African Indians?” asked the then president-elect Thabo Mbeki in May 1999 at a meeting with self-styled community leaders drawn from the so-called “Indian community” in Durban. The meeting was held at a beachfront hotel a few weeks before the general elections in...

As I began fieldwork in Chatsworth, a large, formerly Indian township outside of Durban in South Africa in 1998, I was immediately struck by two features of everyday life there. The first was a pervasive sense of loss and displacement in the face of the new freedoms afforded by the country’s tense but gentle transition to democracy in 1994. While t...

Acronyms vii Introduction: The Proper Name 1 Chapter 1: Deccan Pastoral: The Making of an Ethnohistorical Imagination in Western India 20 Chapter 2: Bombay and the Politics of Urban Desire 37 Chapter 3: "Say with Pride That We Are Hindus": Shiv Sena and Communal Populism 70 Chapter 4: Thane City: The Making of Politcal Dadaism 101 Chapter 5: Riots,...

Most of the debate about secularism and the secular state in India has remained at a general level, leaving a great many gaps in our knowledge of the actual meanings and practices associated with secularism in India. This article argues that secularism in India is premised on an unstable separation of a realm of politics from a supposedly unpolitic...

People always think of their city, their neighbourhood or their locality as a place in the world. They have more or less elaborate notions of a larger ‘global horizon’ that enframe what they do and say, and how they make sense of their own lives. Such horizons are formed and produced by a range of knowledge, fragments of narratives, images, icons —...

People always think of their city, their neighbourhood or their locality as a place in the world. They have more or less elaborate notions of a larger ‘global horizon’ that enframe what they do and say, and how they make sense of their own lives. Such horizons are formed and produced by a range of knowledge, fragments of narratives, images, icons —...

The paper analyses how the lively tradition of Indian community theatre has reflected and contributed to the formation and contestation of identities among Indians in Durban since the 1960s. Starting from a popular piece of political satire, Mooidevi's Muti, staged in 1998, the recent history of South African Indian theatre is described as the emer...

Analyzing Indian receptivity to the right-wing Hindu nationalist party, this book also explores its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which claims to create a policy based on "ancient" Hindu culture. The author places the BJP within the context of the larger transformation of democratic governance in India. The text goes on to argue...

Many contemporary critiques of 'modernity' target a caricatured construction of 'modernity-as-universalist-reason'. Such critiques are often blind to the constitutive splits and tensions within the philosophical and political horizons of modernity between a rationalist and a romanticist episteme. These critiques are therefore also oblivious to the...

The recent conquest of political power in Maharashtra by the Shiv Sena-BJP combine was premised upon the advances made by these parties into the rural districts of the state in the late 1980s. This political expansion was made possible by a growing dissatisfaction with the immobility of the Congress organisation, which in the course of the 1980s pr...