| Chapter 1: | Introduction: Technology and Nationalism in India From Colonialism to Cyberspace |
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The frame of technocultural Hindu nationalism combines these qualities such that technological expertise gets recast in terms of a Hindu cultural ability. As Chakravartty notes, “[C]orporate networks between India and the United States promote a cyber-capitalist rereading of Hindu values, locating the success of high tech Indian entrepreneurs in essential characteristics associated with ethno-religious identity.”36 “For example, Indian competence in the Internet economy,” the author observes, “is associated with the ‘web of interrelations’ that tie together Indian families across national borders.”37 Correspondingly, technocultural Hindu nationalism also rephrases characteristics of cultural identity in the idiom of a model of global significance. For example, on Hindu nationalist Web sites, “Hindu” principles and values are promoted akin to the catchphrases of global corporate capitalism.38
This overview provides a sense of the complexities of technocultural Hindu nationalism and the social groups involved in the production, consumption, and propagation of the discourse. But while developments since 1991 allow us to grasp some aspects of the more immediate history of the phenomenon, they do not tell the entire story. It is true that the Indian state has transitioned from a socialist framework to a neoliberal framework within the last two decades, that shift being one of the conditions of possibility and enabling factors for technocultural Hindu nationalism to emerge. But the other factors that influence and shape the discourse—such as the history of Hindu nationalism, the statist valorization of science and technology, the social status accorded to technological skills and occupations—also reflect longer histories and prior incarnations of the relationship between technology and nationalism.
The ideology of Hindu nationalism was formulated as a theory of state and society in the early part of the twentieth century. Marginalized in the decades after independence, it emerged again in visible and conspicuous fashion in the 1980s. Not least among the reasons for its revival were the decaying of Indian political culture under the Congress Party and the accompanying attrition of Congress hegemony in Indian politics and society.