This presentation is part of a research project in the NYU Global Asia Program on Troubled National Territories. Over many centuries, mobile imperial powers and settlers produced mobile territories where fixed borders of national sovereignty were imposed. This produced numerous troubled national territories where conflicts persist in old imperial frontiers, where national states impose their will by force in the name of national identity, unity, and security. We have been studying areas all across Asia where troubled post-colonial states have used violence against people inside their borders to pursue national unity and security inside the global legal framework of national sovereignty. Each case is unique, with its own history and meanings, but when seen together they reveal features of national territory that enrich understandings of Asia’s globalization.
My presentation briefly mentions post-colonial French and Dutch territories (Algeria, Vietnam, and Indonesia), but focuses on territories in the former British Empire (mentioning Malaysia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Israel), and I concentrate on India, where the relationship of recent economic globalization and the rise of religious ethnonationalism is particularly pronounced and well studied.
BBC. 5 December 2017
“Death threats sent to participants of US conference on Hindu nationalism,” The Guardian, 9 Sept 2021
Scholarship to read:
Mathias Le Bossé, “Ethnonationalism” in Oxford Bibliographies: Geography
3. Context.
David Ludden, Making India Hindu: Community, Conflict, and the Politics of Democracy. Preface to the Second Edition, OneWorld Publishers, 2005, 10pp.
Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi’s India : Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2021, PART 1, pp. 1-30, 148-154.
Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiya, “Despite Modi, India Has Not Yet Become a Hindu Authoritarian State,” Cato Institute (2020). (PDF online) 21pp
Rebecca de Souza, “Hindutva and Ethnonationalism in the Indian American Diaspora,” Oxford Online Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. (PDF 23pp)
Reference:
“The Nazification of India,” Justice for All report April 2023.
“When the state Bombs its own people,” CounterCurrents.org April 2023.
- “The Decline of Buddhism and militant Hindu Territorial Hegemony, circa 950-1250.
- An Agrarian History of South Asia, pp.69-96
- India and South Asia: A Short History, pp.228-269.
- Making India Hindu.