Customer Reviews

Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India (The Ethnography of Political Violence)

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I personally found the following book review from Choice magazine quite helpful before adopting the book for a course:

"Religious studies professor Menon (DePaul Univ.) argues that central to the popularity and success of Hindu nationalism is its willingness to accommodate groups whose beliefs and practices may be incongruous with the movement's mainstream. In particular, she argues that Hindu nationalism, which is committed to establish India as a Hindu nation, works well over time because it connects meaningfully with the daily lives of people by developing support at the grassroots level. Her ethnography, based on fieldwork in Delhi in 1999, focuses on women in several Hindu nationalist organizations, including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), and explores the way activists in these organizations gather support by recruiting followers from a variety of backgrounds by presenting such things as "gendered constructions" of history, religion, and social responsibility. Menon uses case studies to show how the movement draws in women, in particular. Finally, the author's notion of "acceptable transgressions" is a remarkable discussion of why Hindu nationalist women engage in dissonant acts and how the complex ideals and expectations they operate within are both very traditional and very bound to competing ideologies. An excellent study of a timely issue. Summing Up: Recommended. Undergraduate and graduate libraries. -
- E. Findly, Trinity College (CT)"