b2o: boundary 2 online

Month: November 2021

  • Dominique Routhier — Picasso’s Drone

    Dominique Routhier — Picasso’s Drone

    by Dominique Routhier

    This article has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial board.

    “Je suis oiseau, voyez mes ailes. Vive la gent qui fend les air!

      … Je suis souris: vivent les rats!”[1]

    A pigeon in a mural. In early August 2011, the American street artist Shepard Fairey paints a mural in Copenhagen, Denmark, on a wall adjacent to the “ground zero” of a recently demolished squat called Ungdomshuset (the Youth House). Fairey could hardly have chosen a worse spot in the city to sport his ready-made design of a pigeon hovering over the word “peace”: shortly after the mural’s completion, graffiti writers defaced what Fairey refers to as “my Peace Dove mural.”[2] Their message was clear: “no peace” and “go home yankee hipster.” To make matters worse, Fairey ended his trip to Copenhagen with a “black eye and a bruised rib” after a violent assault.[3]

    Today, Fairey’s pigeon—a take on Picasso’s famous peace dove—is still aloft in the mural high above the vacant lot, a serene emblem of triumphant peace. Unlike Hito Steyerl’s parable of contemporary art in “A Tank on a Pedestal”—where she recounts how pro-Russian separatists drove a Soviet battle tank “off a World War II memorial pedestal” to use it in guerilla warfare—the pigeon was never hijacked from its mural and redeployed as a war machine.[4] Or was it? Considering Fairey’s controversial mural from the combined perspective of art history, the history of counterinsurgency, and late-modern warfare prompts a series of questions that pertain to our “hypercontemporary” moment in much the same way that Steyerl’s example of a tank on a pedestal does: is the mural a theater of war? Picasso’s peace dove, a drone?

    Shepard Fairey’s “Peace Dove Mural”, Copenhagen, August 2011.

    In this essay, I consider Fairey’s pigeon in a mural as an art-historical index for the “bodies of beliefs, images, values and techniques of representation” that characterize the “historical situation” of US drone warfare under the Obama administration.[5] By analyzing the peace-dove motif, and situating it in the broader context of drone warfare, I argue that the pigeon-cum-peace-dove emerges as an instrument of war alongside its mechanical double, the drone. The pigeon in the mural, then, is more than some helpless animal caught in the crossfire of a chance conflict: it is also a cipher for late capitalist war.

    In what follows, I begin from the controversy surrounding Fairey’s Copenhagen peace dove mural before zooming out to reconsider how the peace dove motif relates to the conduct of war and politics from the end of the Second World War to the age of drone warfare—and beyond. As I show, the peace dove motif is historically at the center of an “image war” in which opposing political ideologies struggle for mastery in the realm of representations.[6] The story of the peace dove from Picasso through to Fairey, in other words, is the story of how an “icon of the left” was detached from its origins and aligned with a triumphant conception of liberal peace: one that effectively helped obscure US military aggression in the era of drone warfare.[7] Ultimately, then, the image conflict traced and contextualized in this essay points toward the historical limits of what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in a seminal essay from 1795, called the “sweet dream of perpetual peace.”[8]

    I

    “You don’t have to be Picasso, you just need to be inspired by Barack Obama.”[9]

     To the Copenhagen Youth House activists, Fairey’s artistic peace statement was unwanted because it literally and symbolically erased the traces of conflict from the site of a year-long struggle that revolved around systemic dynamics of capitalist gentrification, political repression, and police violence. But the activists’ fury—as the tag line “go home yankee hipster” suggests—was equally fueled by their perception that Fairey’s peace message converged with President Obama’s rhetoric in the US-led war on terror by other supposedly more “peaceful” means, mostly drones.

    On the street address Jagtvej 69 in Copenhagen where the Youth House once stood, there is now an empty, graffiti-covered lot. The house that once stood there, by contrast, was a vibrant hub for radical politics and dissidence for more than a century. Historical figures like Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin would pass through to give political speeches and conspire with local revolutionaries and exiled comrades. It was also here, in August 1910, that the German Marxist Clara Zetkin proposed the annual celebration of what is now known as the International Women’s Day.

    After the eclipse of the historical workers’ movement, the building was temporarily abandoned. In 1982, in the wake of severe street confrontations, the Copenhagen municipality surrendered the disused building to the “BZ-movement” of young squatters, dropouts, and punks.[10] People started referring to the building as Ungdomshuset (the Youth House), which became a crucial countercultural node for the European punk movement and radicals of various stripes.

    Around the turn of the millennium, the Copenhagen municipality sold off the estate to a Christian sect. The sale technically turned the building into an illegal “squat,” as its users refused to acknowledge the change of ownership. Instead, existing tensions rose, and conflicts about “the right to the city” developed into riots. The militants responded to eviction notices and a sensation-hungry press by hanging a banner from the windows of the occupied building, reading: “For sale, including 500 autonomist stone-throwing violent psychopaths from hell.”[11]

    Early one morning in March 2007, one of the most carefully planned and most spectacular police operations ever carried out in Denmark took place. In scenes resembling a film, police helicopters lowered a team of special operations agents onto the Youth House, broke through barricaded windows with power tools, and filled the house with tear gas to evict the militants and clear the house for demolition. As news of the eviction spread, Copenhagen’s streets became ablaze with anger. Hundreds of militants from all over Europe joined the struggle. In their effort to “keep the peace,” while facing some of the most severe riots Denmark had ever seen, the Copenhagen police department mustered reinforcements from neighboring districts, and even neighboring countries.[12]

    The state forces far outnumbered protesters and rioters, who could not prevent the Youth House’s eventual demolition.[13] Still, the riots, protests, and demonstrations carried on relentlessly after the demolition, and every single Thursday for several years, thousands of protesters would ritually march through the city. Even though in 2008 the municipality yielded to the pressure and allotted another building in the city’s outskirts to activist purposes, the Thursday protests carried on unrelentingly for several years. The original battle cry—nothing forgotten, nothing forgiven—still resounded among a discontented youth when Shepard Fairey made his cameo appearance in 2011.

    When Fairey flew in to decorate the city—Fairey’s stint as a Copenhagen street artist included an art show at the self-styled “street art gallery,” V1, and no fewer than seven murals in prime locations across the city—the Youth House struggles were still recent memory. In a blog post, Fairey recalls being aware that “the mural location in question had a controversial history” but says he thought to himself: “what a shame, I hope I can do something that is a symbolically positive transformation.”[14] Apparently, some activists thought differently. Even before the mural was completed it was destroyed by graffiti.

    The destruction of the Copenhagen mural and the ensuing image conflict soon attracted international media attention. The Guardian, for instance, reported that Fairey’s mural “appeared to reopen old wounds, with critics accusing Fairey of peddling government-funded propaganda.”[15] Fairey, in turn, insisted that his mural was non-political, stressing that he was merely promoting a universal message of peace, and went back to restore his mural. Just as quickly as he restored it, however, someone destroyed it anew.

    V1, Fairey’s local art gallery, stepped in to mediate by inviting some artists, who supposedly represented the Youth House, to repaint the bottom half of the mural in a design of their own choice. Fairey recalls:

    It was a powerful scene of hostile riot police like those who had evicted the Youth House dwellers and it incorporated one of the paint bombs on the mural as if it had been thrown by a riot cop. I thought it was a brilliant solution reflecting the history of the site and keeping my pro-peace message intact, but adding additional emphasis to the idea that peace is always facing attack from injustice that I felt was already more subtly implied by placing the dove in a target.[16]

    These changes did little to help, and the mural kept getting attacked. And so too, unfortunately, did the artist. Soon, a mock version of the famous Obama posters the artist created for the 2008 US presidential election appeared on Copenhagen street corners. Instead of a picture of Obama, the poster now featured Fairey, with a bruised eye, over the familiar caption: HOPE. But why such vehement opposition? And “how”—as the artist asked—“is a mural advocating global peace inflammatory”?[17]

    To understand the antagonism toward Fairey, one needs to consider how Fairey glossed over decades of struggles between local activists and a repressive state apparatus parading as the apotheosis of liberal democracy. As the mock poster amply suggests, the activists’ perception of Fairey as a useful idiot for American cultural imperialism originates in the street artist’s world-renown campaign to help elect Obama for president.

    In 2008, Fairey created and distributed thousands of stickers, posters, T-shirts, and other merchandise to support the future president. Fairey even painted an “Obama mural” in Hollywood, photographed from a spectacular bird’s eye view. Across these images, the graphic form of Obama’s face is invariant. Fairey’s instantly recognizable aesthetic, which borrows in equal parts from political propaganda, pop art, and advertising, led The New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, to extol Fairey’s Obama HOPE poster as “the most efficacious American political illustration since ‘Uncle Sam Wants You.’”[18]

    Obama too, recognized the poster’s political efficacy. In a letter of appreciation to the street artist, Obama said: “I would like to thank you for using your talent in support of my campaign. […] Your images have a profound effect on people, whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign. I am privileged to be a part of your artwork and proud to have your support.”[19] Soon after, with a little help from his “poster boy,” as the media later dubbed Fairey, Obama was elected. He was sworn into office on January 20, 2009. The rest is history. A history of hope, among other things.

    Looking back from the recent Trump era, Obama’s presidency might appear to embody the progressive march towards what Kant, in 1795, had called “perpetual peace.”  But the “sweet dream of perpetual peace,” as Kant stressed—to shield himself from allegations of subversive intent—remains precisely that: a philosopher’s dream, to which the “worldly statesman” does not need to “pay […] any heed.”[20] And though the worldly statesman Obama rhetorically advocated peace, he didn’t shy back from using military force.

    One of President Obama’s first military campaigns, what became known as the “Obama-surge,” consisted in ramping up US troops in Afghanistan by an additional 17.000 soldiers. Later Obama’s military strategy shifted toward a series of so-called “small wars” or military interventions in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among other places, that most certainly violated key philosophical articles in Kant’s treatise on peace – e.g. intervening forcibly in another state and employing “assassins.”[21] Advanced weapon technologies or “drones” for carrying out assassinations were instrumental to what some would describe as the Obama administration’s transformation of “the whole concept of war,” along with its attendant relationship to peace.[22]

    However, Obama was not yet another “war president” but rather an example of a statesman who carefully paid heed to the dream of lasting peace and whose chief political task, accordingly, was to engineer this peace by all means necessary. One of the most potent tools that Obama inherited and redefined was the infamous US drone program. However, while new technology may have changed the reality of warfare, it takes more than technical advances to change social conceptions of war. Critics have rightly exposed the ambiguities in Obama’s peace rhetoric.[23] But which other “instruments” may have helped transform our understanding of war and its relationship to peace?

    Key here, I believe, is how state and non-state actors ideologically supercharge artworks to wage “image war.”[24] One of the most famous examples of image war occurred when US officials, prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, deemed the reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica that was hanging in the UN Security Council chamber an inappropriate backdrop and ordered it to be concealed behind a curtain before the media arrived. According to the Retort collective’s analysis, this incident illustrates how states “struggle for mastery in the realm of the image.”[25] Can we pursue this analysis one step further to explore forms of image war that do not directly involve the state’s micromanagement of the “means of symbolic production”?

    The advent of blogs, social media, and algorithms has challenged traditional top-down approaches to the politics of representation. As the Situationist Guy Debord pointed out at the dawn of our networked era, new decentralized or “diffuse” forms of control in the realm of the image exist side by side with more “concentrated” forms of spectacular representation.[26] State power no longer relies to the same extent on micromanaging appearances. Instead, as in the case of the Obama administration’s quasi-official endorsement of Fairey’s artwork, state power now benefits equally from artists-as-influencers who more or less wittingly align their aesthetics with the ideological exigencies of those in power.

    Fairey placing his pigeon in a target to “subtly” imply, in his own words, “that peace is always facing attack from injustice” is an example of how ideology exists, independently of overt state control, in the expanded realm of art.[27] Fairey’s idea of a fragile and easily victimized peace—as not-so-subtly underscored by the white-feathered creature placed in a target—thus readily exposes a key ideological component of the liberal reasoning behind late-modern warfare: that perpetual peace requires an advanced pre-emptive “security” regime to ward off potential attacks from the enemies of peace.

    In the liberal conception of peace, “keeping the peace” does not mean waging war indiscriminately but protecting the international community’s fragile state of equilibrium from external threats. What the US-led international community refers to as “peace” is not just a misnomer for perpetual war but also, in a historically specific sense, the precondition for newfangled forms of pre-emptive state violence, the urbanization of drone warfare, and the policing of racialized “surplus populations.”[28] From war power to police power, in other words.[29]

    From such a perspective, Fairey’s pigeon dovetails with what Mark Neocleous calls the “liberal peace thesis.”[30] Now “a standard trope in the political discourse of international theory,” Neocleous argues, the liberal peace thesis is an untenable “claim for capitalism’s essentially pacific grounds.”[31] Since its inception in eighteenth-century political philosophy, the proponents of the liberal peace thesis have ignored evidence that contradicts the idea that free markets are an effective antidote to armed conflict. The constitutive violence at the heart of the liberal peace thesis, Neocleous notes, is encapsulated in ahistorical interpretations of Kant’s essay:

    Liberalism, and thus many international lawyers, like [sic] to cite Kant’s essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ as a key philosophical document outlining the liberal foundations of peace, yet usually omit the fact that the essay was published in October 1795, just one month after the military suppression of the revolt in Poland led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Poland’s partition by Russia and Prussia, and about which Kant had nothing to say.[32]

    Likewise, proponents of the liberal peace thesis in the age of drone warfare typically have little to say about the lethal violence undergirding the “peace” discourse of the Global North. Obama is, again, a case in point. As one of the most popular American presidents ever, Obama was—and to some extent still is—primarily perceived as the embodiment of liberal democracy. In terms of US politics, Obama is something close to the incarnation of the liberal peace thesis: a champion of the most politically progressive values, with “peace” chief among them.

    Eleven months into his presidency, in December 2009, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping the US to play a more constructive role in world politics and for preferring “dialogue and negotiations” as “instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts.”[33] The news that the 44th American president had received the world’s most prestigious peace prize resonated globally. Prefiguring Fairey’s pigeon mural, the Spanish newspaper El Pais published a cartoon picturing Obama as a “black peace dove.”[34]

    But the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate admitted to having “instruments” other than just “dialogue and negotiations” in his peace arsenal. In his acceptance speech, Obama acknowledged that, as “the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars,” he was “filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace.”[35] The answer to these “difficult questions,” as is now well known, took the form of the drone.

    As Daniel Klaidman stated in his contemporaneous bestselling book Kill or Capture: the War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, “[b]y the time Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, he had authorized more drone strikes than George W. Bush had approved during his entire presidency.”[36] According to estimates produced by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Obama oversaw “ten times more” air strikes than his predecessor, amounting to “a total of 563 strikes, largely by drones,” in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen among other places. The corresponding death-by-drone casualties logged by the bureau amount to somewhere “between 384 and 807 civilians,” and counting.[37]

    In his Nobel Peace Prize remarks, Obama gauged the “costs of armed conflict” in relation to the “imperatives of a just peace” and concluded: “So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.”[38] Obama’s closing remark?

    Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace. We can do that—for that is the story of human progress; that’s the hope of all the world; and at this moment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth.[39]

    Leaving aside the question of whether the US-led, drone-based peace campaign is the story of human progress, it is clear that Obama’s work on Earth changed how we think about war and international conflict. Touting promises of “hope,” “progress,” and “change” (incidentally, the words that Fairey interchangeably used on his iconic HOPE posters), the Obama administration helped transform the concept of warfare into a logic of global “security.” As Grégoire Chamayou, in his instant classic of the drone age, pointed out, “in the logic of this security, based on the preventive elimination of dangerous individuals, ‘warfare’ takes the form of vast campaigns of extrajudiciary executions.”[40] As Chamayou remarks, “the names given to the drones—Predators (birds of prey) and Reapers (angels of death)—are certainly well chosen.”[41] So, is the pigeon in Fairey’s mural a bird of prey? The peace dove, an angel of death? Let’s examine in more detail the history of this magically ambiguous motif.

    II

    In 2010, the year before Fairey painted his “Peace Dove mural” in Copenhagen, there had been a global celebration of Picasso’s work. The temporary closure of the Picasso Museum in Paris, which sent many of Picasso’s works on tours of the global museum circuit, enabled major Picasso retrospectives in Moscow, New York, Münster, Seattle, Zürich, Vienna, and Liverpool.[42] The Liverpool exhibition, which took place at the Tate Liverpool gallery, was called Picasso: Peace and Freedom.

    The exhibition frontispiece sported one of the artist’s iconic peace dove designs. According to the exhibition statement, this would be the first exhibition “to examine in depth the artist’s engagement with politics and the Peace Movement,” and it would “reflect a new Picasso for a new time.”[43] A new Picasso for a new time—but what “new time,” exactly? A time before Brexit, Boris Johnson, and Trump. A time of “hope,” for sure. A time that embodied all the most progressive values and hopes of Western liberal democracies. But how did Picasso’s peace dove become an emblem for an overarching liberal narrative of progress, peace and freedom?

    Exhibition flyer ©Tate, Liverpool, 2010.

    While the dove has been a symbol of peace since ancient times, it was in the hands of the twentieth century’s most famous artist, Pablo Picasso, that it acquired its status as the quasi-official symbol of world peace. Appropriately to our story, Picasso’s peace dove originated, it is not often noted, as a fusion of street art avant la lettre and political propaganda. According to art historian Sarah Wilson, Picasso’s peace dove first appeared on the world stage in a poster on the streets of Paris announcing the World Congress for Peace, Paris-Prague, in 1949. It was the French communist and founding member of Surrealism, Louis Aragon, who, during a visit to Picasso’s studio, had chosen “Picasso’s pigeon—a soft wash drawing on a black ground” as a symbol for the upcoming international peace congress.[44]

    Thanks to mechanical reproduction techniques, Picasso’s pigeon or La Colombe (1949)—originally intended as a limited edition lithograph of 50 prints—was being churned out by the thousands. Under the French Communist Party (PCF) auspices, Picasso’s delicate peace dove motif thus evolved into what specialist in political imagery Zvonimir Novak fittingly describes as a machine de guerre graphique, a graphical war machine.[45]

    In response to the PCF’s “extremely successful billboard campaign,” French anti-communists, covertly sponsored by the CIA, formed a movement called Paix et Liberté (peace and freedom), with the sole purpose of discrediting the communist peace campaign that symbolically centered on Picasso’s wildly popular peace dove motif.[46] Did the 2010 Tate exhibition, Picasso: Peace and Freedom, perhaps intend some historical pun by alluding to the anti-communist propaganda of Paix et liberté in their exhibition title? It is difficult to tell, especially given that there was also a pacifist communist group with that name in the interwar years.[47] The changing ideological valence of the terms “peace and freedom” notwithstanding, the recuperation of Picasso’s peace dove exemplifies how art and politics intertwine in ways that exceed artistic intent. Much like Picasso’s Guernica was detached from its historical origins in “exchange for its continuing topicality”—as O.K. Werckmeister argued in his seminal book Icons of the Left—so too did his peace dove evolve into an all-purpose image of a politically non-descript peace. [48]

    The original Paix et liberté group is an essential component in the history of Picasso’s peace dove. It was the French socialist politician, Jean-Paul David, who in 1950 founded Paix et liberté together with fellow partisans of the North Atlantic Treaty. To their concern, the signing of the treaty had been “effectively eclipsed” in France by the press coverage of the first communist peace congress.[49] The group’s aesthetic counter-offensive launched a flood of “posters supplemented by newsletters, brochures, pamphlets, stickers, and tracts that used the words, themes and symbols of the Communist Party to counter their message.”[50] In the climate of tense ideological antagonism that characterized the early phases of the Cold War, Novak recalls, the Parisian “walls were a site for a permanent war between billposters, the streets a battlefield scattered with paper tracts.”[51] A recurrent feature of the anti-communist campaign was how it exploited a deep-seated cultural sense of ambiguity about birds to draw attention to the two-faced nature of the communist peace symbol.

    In a popular fable by Jean de La Fontaine, “The Bat and The Weasels,” a bat is caught by a weasel with an appetite for mice. The poor creature cunningly escapes death by convincing the predator that it is “not of that species” at all: “I, a mouse? No, no, some people must have told you merely out of malice. Thanks to the creator of the universe, I am a bird: behold my wings. Long live the nation that skims the air.” A little later, the same bat is caught again by another weasel, this time one that harbors an “enmity” toward birds. Again, the clever bat escapes. But this time by refusing to be a bird, insisting that, surely, it is the feathers that make the bird, not the mere ability to fly. La Fontaine’s fable—which, as one can imagine, also lent itself to French anti-Semitic political caricatures—was used against the communists to present them as morally suspect.

    Because much of the support for the PCF in the 1940s and 1950s stemmed from the glory of the communist resistance movement’s fight against fascism during the Second World War, the Fontainesque anti-communist propaganda centered on undermining the idea that communists could be French republican patriots. One particular tract, a precursor to the Paix et liberté variations that followed in its path, gets this message across: recto, there is a winged creature draped in the French colors, with a caption that reads “I am bird, behold my wings”; verso, the creature reveals its true colors, a deep communist red, hammer and sickle on its chest, with the caption now reading “I am a mouse! Long live the rats!”

    Perhaps the most successful attack of this kind was the poster, La colombe qui fait boum, which ingeniously transformed Picasso’s peace dove into an explosive device. According to Wilson, “the explosive slogan was soon pasted all over the walls of Paris as Picasso’s Dove had been: the print run was purportedly 300,000.”[52] As Wilson notes, Picasso’s voluminous FBI file references the satirical poster along with a press clipping from The Washington Post, February 17, 1952:

    The back, the pouting breast and the belly made the form of a tank: the tail feathers were exhaust fumes. The head was a turret and the beak a cannon, the hammer and sickle brand was on the shoulder. There was a simple five word caption: ‘The Dove that goes Boom’. All Paris laughed and the Communists were ridiculed.[53]

    Paix et liberté, Anti-communist poster, France, 1950. ©Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

    The satirical attacks may have harmed the PCF’s image momentarily, but Picasso’s peace dove took off to become the quasi-official mascot of the world peace movement. From today’s perspective, however, the peace dove of the Picasso: Peace and Freedom exhibition at Tate Liverpool Gallery stands, along with Fairey’s peace dove mural, at the end of the historical arc of triumphant liberalism.

    Retrospectively, 1989 was a hinge moment. On this crucial threshold from the “modern” to the “contemporary,” Francis Fukuyama famously trumpeted the “end of history” based on the alleged “fact that ‘peace’ seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world.”[54] In the prominent political scientist’s global peace narrative, “Western liberal democracy” had revealed itself to be the “endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution.”[55] The future, from this perspective, was canceled. The only significant task left to humankind would be to come to terms with the past, a perpetual historical curating. Or, in Fukuyama’s own words: “In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”[56] But the “modern” constraints and contradictions of the pigeon-cum-peace-dove were carried over into the age of drone warfare and continues to shape our hypercontemporary—and oddly Fontainesque—condition.

    III

    Imagine this. Just as Shepard Fairey puts the finishing touches to his mural in Copenhagen, a mysterious mechanical bird crashes to the ground. But Fairey, in deep concentration, perhaps mulling over whether to include an olive branch in the pigeon’s beak, doesn’t notice it at all. The street artist is so immersed in his work that he forgets where he is. Los Angeles, New York, Reykjavik, or perhaps Tel Aviv? When Fairey looks around to see what the commotion is about, it is nightfall in Balochistan Province, Pakistan. A man, lit up by the headlights of a parked car, holds up what “looks a bit like a silver bird,” while another man stands guard with a Kalashnikov.[57] What’s going on here? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? A toy? No, it’s “a small combat-proven spy drone.”[58]

    Of course, Fairey painting his peace dove mural and the “weird, birdlike mystery drone” falling from the sky were two separate events that happened in two different places. Fairey wasn’t magically beamed into Pakistan. Sheer historical coincidence brings these two birds to the fore at this exact historical moment (August 2011). But there is something uncanny about these twin events that brings to mind the work of the Egyptian artist Heba Y. Amin, who in As Birds Flying (video, 2016) and The General’s Stork (mixed media, 2016–ongoing), mines the contemporary drone imaginary through an aesthetic exploration of the historical and ideological overlaps between birds and drones.

    Amin does not discuss Shepard Fairey’s peace dove, but she does refer to the Pakistan “mystery drone” as an example of how drones are nested in deep-seated cultural imaginaries about birds flying. In The Generals Stork, Amin relates the crashed mystery drone to its commercial twin, the then much-hyped “SmartBird” by Festo engineering, and brings these two birds-as-drones into a larger media narrative about how, in 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork on suspicions of espionage because it was equipped with an electronic tracking device. A device that, as it transpired, merely registered the bird’s migratory patterns.

    To Amin, the Pakistan spy-drone crash highlights the progressive obscuring of the boundaries between natural beings and military artifacts that characterize situations of drone warfare and creates the conditions of possibility not only for storks being detained but also for generalizing a sense of paranoia that pervades everyday life under drone surveillance: “Imagine the confusion of finding such an object in a place where people are so accustomed to drone attacks. What happens when we can no longer differentiate a machine from a living thing?”[59]

    Amin critically addresses the projected drone future where birds-as-drones and other similar creatures “naturally” circle the sky above. And Festo’s “smart bird,” to be sure, marks a historical threshold. The “SmartbBird” has since inspired a flock of cheaply available “bionic” or “bio-mimetic” drones, so called because they are engineered to mimic birds and other living creatures. In 2016, for instance, Amazon patented new drone technology that would allow future delivery drones to perch “like pigeons” on streetlights, church steeples, and other vertical urban structures.[60] When the world’s largest online retailer jumps on the bionic drone bandwagon, we can start to imagine what the drone future might bring.

    Indeed, if one is to believe the media hype, bio-inspired drones might be the next big thing. One 2019 NBC news report rubric reads: “Inspired by the aerial abilities of birds, bats and insects, researchers are crafting a new generation of ultralight drones that lack propellers and are equipped not with fixed wings but with flapping ones.”[61] More recent examples confirming this trend are legion. In contemporary robotics, common pigeons of the kind that inspired Picasso’s peace dove motif are being anatomically dissected to teach semi-autonomous machines to perform more like their feathered brethren.[62] The common pigeon that inspired Picasso’s peace dove is, essentially, a proto-drone.[63]

    Amin’s art project, As Birds Flying, further instructs us about the historical and symbolic crossovers between birds and their mechanical counterparts, the drones, and crucially brings colonialism into the frame. Amin’s film is based on found drone footage of locations in the Middle East, including views of Israeli settlements, and poetically reinterprets how religious myths, colonial wars, airpower, spy birds, surveillance technologies, and late-modern drone warfare historically interlock.

    In the artistic research project The General’s Stork, Amin recalls the story of Lord Allenby’s seizure of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks in 1917 to show how deep the bird-as-drone imaginary reaches into the historical texture of orientalism and colonialism:

    [Lord Allenby] launched an attack based on a biblical prophecy found in the book of Isaiah 31:5, which states: “As birds flying, so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem; defending also he will deliver it; and passing over he will preserve it.” By reason of this prophecy, he sent as many planes as possible to fly over Jerusalem, forcing the Turks to surrender the city. So, when Allenby marched into Jerusalem, it was seen as a prophecy fulfilled. Right at the core of this prophetic figure, or augury, is the symbolic and actual presence of the avian, the prophecy of the birds flying over Jerusalem, the birds mutating into airplanes, the airplanes mutating into drones, and the menace of predictive drone technology metastasizing into the specter of aerial bombardment. This prophecy has become predictive in terms of drone technology, envisioning what will be and what is yet to come.[64]

    Amin’s examination of “the symbolic and actual presence of the avian” in the historical ascendance of the drone underscores how the realms of the symbolic and the real overlap. Just as the biblical prophecy helped Lord Allenby visualize and ultimately legitimize Jerusalem’s destruction, the liberal peace thesis provides ideological justification for the US-led drone program. Lord Allenby’s prophecy materialized as mechanical birds flying over Jerusalem dropping bombs while Picasso’s peace dove, in turn, participates in an ongoing image war with no less deadly consequences. As diverse as these different historical contexts of killing may be, they are equally grounded in deep-seated cultural narratives with a near palpable orientalist subtext.

    Heba Y. Amin, As Birds Flying (2016, still from video) © Courtesy of Heba Y Amin.

    Seen from an art-historical perspective, the migration of the common pigeon (Colombia livia)—from Picasso’s 1949 ink-wash drawing through to Fairey’s 2011 peace dove mural and further still—forms an irregular pattern across history that culminates symbolically at the height of the age of drone warfare and resonates into our present moment. Today, there is a more-than-symbolic sense in which Picasso’s peace dove mutates into a drone—or a swarm of drones, to be exact.

    In December 2016, as Obama’s presidency was coming to an end, the skies above the Disney World theme park “dazzled with drones” in a spectacular night-time show: “For Starbright Holidays’ finale, the drones form a dove. With the music swelling, the sequence packs an emotional punch.”[65] In an article in USA Today, Ayala, one of Disney’s so-called Imagineers (that is, an imagination engineer) notes that “his team originally animated the word, ‘peace,’ but later removed it. The dove, the Imagineers figured, transcends language and culture. ‘We have the symbol of peace,’ notes Ayala. ‘What better way to show it than from the stars themselves—from the universe?’”[66]

    Although arbitrary to the events recounted in this essay, the Disney show appears as a grand finale of the ideology of liberal peace as epitomized by the drone. It also bespeaks what Andrea Miller calls the “specter of the drone,” an example of how “diffuse histories and geographies of war are folded into the sign of the drone” in new forms of entertainment.[67] The proliferation of drones as a tool of entertainment since 2016 practically refutes its reputation as an aggressive instrument of US neo-imperialist war in ways that are most certainly conducive to the drone industry. President-elect Joe Biden’s drone fireworks celebration in November 2020 testifies to this historical shift—and raises important questions about what the drone future might hold.[68] So where are we now? And what happened to the pigeon in the mural?

    *

    In 2013, Shepard Fairey fell out of love with his former political icon, Obama, and became an outspoken critic of drone warfare (if not of liberal peace).[69] As Fairey’s criticism of Obama’s use of drones became known to the public, one blogger quipped: “End of a Fairey Tale: Poster Artist Says Obama’s Drones Killed ‘Hope’.”[70] A 2015 Washington Post op-ed took a similar line: “Obama’s done. It’s the perfect metaphor for the Obama administration for Republicans. That widespread enthusiasm for Obama in 2008 has eroded, and with less than two years left in office, one of his most visible supporters, the guy who made the most iconic image of the Obama years has even turned on him.”[71] The commentator turned out to be correct: Obama was done. The Fairey Tale of perpetual peace ended, as we now know, with the brutal awakening in 2017 to the Trump era and the spectacular rise of late-capitalist fascism.[72]

    The story about the destruction of Fairey’s peace dove mural in Copenhagen now belongs in a backroom of Fukuyama’s “museum of human history.” And no one paid much attention to Shepard Fairey’s peace dove after its attempted assassination by graffiti writers in 2011. After Fairey returned to the US, the partly destroyed mural was left to its own devices; an aesthetic prop in the staging of a “radical chic” image that accompanies Copenhagen’s ongoing gentrification. To this day, Fairey’s pigeon remains intact in its mural, hovering peacefully above street level commotion. Its mechanical double, however, is as busy as a bee.

    The Covid 19-pandemic has rekindled interest in “bionic” drones inspired by flying creatures such as birds, bats, and bees. In China, for instance, drones disguised as white doves surveil the population, firing up the imagination of conspiracy theorists worldwide.[73] In the US and in many other countries, a new breed of Fontainesque drones with and without feathers are operating daily outside of the military context. In addition to commercial drones and drones operated by amateur hobbyists, so-called “pandemic drones” are now performing various roles: delivering medical supplies, sanitizing streets, or “shouting” at people to keep their distance.

    According to statistics from the Bard College Drone Center, more than 500 public safety agencies acquired drones between 2018 and 2020, bringing their total number close to 1,600—and counting. If the US is a bellwether of a global tendency for public safety agencies to add drones to their “peace arsenal,” the question remains whether this peace is preferable to what was called, once upon a time, by a more recognizable name: war.

    Taking recent political unrest in the US and elsewhere into consideration one can fear that the mainstream adoption of drones—under continuing capitalist relations of production—will reinforce rather than challenge existing systems of technologically enabled oppression. It is crucial to remember, as scholar of surveillance Simone Brown notes, that oppressive forms of surveillance did not arrive with new technologies such as drones. Instead, drone surveillance is but a new expression of the same racism and anti-blackness that undergird existing power structures.[74] Whether we are dealing with “ghetto birds” or drones disguised as white peace doves, racist police power is still, to paraphrase James Baldwin, policing black communities like occupied territories.[75] The “sweet dream of perpetual peace,” in other words, still weighs heavily on the brains of the living.[76]

    _____

    Dominique Routhier is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the research project Drone Imaginaries and Communities (Independent Research Fund Denmark) at the University of Southern Denmark. His first book With and Against: the Situationist International in the Age of Automation, is forthcoming with Verso Books in 2023.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] Jean de La Fontaine, Fables choisies, mises en vers par J. de La Fontaine, vol. 1 (Paris: Desaint and Saillant, 1755), 53, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1049428h.

    [2] Shepard Fairey, “Obey Copenhagen Post 1 (Good),” Obey Giant (blog), August 11, 2011, https://obeygiant.com/obey-copenhagen-post-1-good/.

    [3] Xan Brooks, Dominic Rushe, and Lars Eriksen, “Shepard Fairey Beaten up after Spat over Controversial Danish Mural,” The Guardian, August 12, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/aug/12/shepard-fairey-beaten-danish-mural.

    [4] Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art (New York: Verso, 2017), 1–8.

    [5] T. J. Clark, “The Conditions of Artistic Creation,” Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1974, 562.

    [6] The term “image war” has been used in various theoretical contexts since the Gulf War. Perhaps most famously, Jean Baudrillard theorized “the birth of a new kind of military apparatus which incorporates the power to control the production and circulation of images” in a series of essays that appeared in English translation under the title The Gulf War did not take place (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 5.  Dora Apel in War Culture and the Contest of Images (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univeristy Press, 2012), W.J.T. Mitchell in Cloning Terror: The War of Images (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), and, of course, the Retort collective in Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (New York: Verso, 2005) all use the term (or corelates) in their analysis of the spectacular nature of late modern warfare.

    [7] In terms of methodology, I rely on Otto Karl Werckmeister, Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the Fall of Communism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).

    [8] Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, ed. Pauline Kleingeld, trans. David L. Colclasure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 67.

    [9] Shepard Fairey, “Manifest Hope,” Obey Giant (blog), August 11, 2008, https://obeygiant.com/manifest-hope/.

    [10] For a more detailed historical contextualization of the Youth House, see René Karpantschof and Flemming Mikkelsen, “Youth, Space, and Autonomy in Copenhagen: the Squatters’ and Autonomous Movement, 1963-2012,” in The City is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements from the 1970s to the Present, eds. Bart van der Steen, Ask Katzeff, and Leendert van Hoogenhuijze (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 179-206.

    [11] As chronicled by CrimethInc Ex-Workers Collective, “CrimethInc. : The Battle for Ungdomshuset : The Defense of a Squatted Social Center and the Strategy of Autonomy,” CrimethInc., April 7, 2021, https://crimethinc.com/2019/03/01/the-battle-for-ungdomshuset-the-defense-of-a-squatted-social-center-and-the-strategy-of-autonomy. The following description of the Youth House events relies partly on the account by CrimetInc.

    [12] Anna Ringstrom, “Danish Police Battle Protesters,” Reuters, March 3, 2007, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-danish-clashes-1-idUSL0349757520070303.

    [13] Kate Connolly, “Tearful Protesters Fail to Save Historic Centre,” The Guardian, March 6, 2007, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/mar/06/topstories3.mainsection.

    [14] Shepard Fairey, “Obey Copenhagen Post 2 (Bad),” Obey Giant (blog), August 12, 2011, https://obeygiant.com/obey-copenhagen-post-2-bad/.

    [15] Brooks, Rushe, and Eriksen, “Shepard Fairey Beaten up.”

    [16] Fairey, “Obey Copenhagen Post 2 (Bad).”

    [17] Ibid.

    [18] Peter Schjeldahl, “Hope And Glory,” The New Yorker, February 23, 2009, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/02/23/hope-and-glory.

    [19] Shepard Fairey, “Thank You, from Barack Obama!,” Obey Giant (blog), March 5, 2008, https://obeygiant.com/check-it-out/.

    [20] Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” 67.

    [21] “Targeted killing” using drone airstrikes is arguably state assassination by another name. Thanks to Tim Carter for helping me clarify my argument here.

    [22] Christi Parsons and W. J. Hennigan, “President Obama, Who Hoped to Sow Peace, Instead Led the Nation in War,” Los Angelses Times, January 13, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-pol-obama-at-war/.

    [23] See, for instance, Joshua Reeves and Matthew S. May, “The Peace Rhetoric of a War President: Barack Obama and the Just War Legacy,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2013, pp. 623-650.

    [24] For an excellent discussion of this term in relation to the task of art history, see James Day, “Review Essay: Art History in Its Image War: Ten Recent Publications on Image-Politics in Relation to the Possibility of Art Historical Analysis,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 24, no. 48 (2015), doi:10.7146/nja.v24i48.23071.

    [25] Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts (Retort), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (New York: Verso, 2005), 19.

    [26] See Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London ; New York: Verso, 1990).

    [27] Fairey, “Obey Copenhagen Post 2 (Bad).”

    [28] See Ian G. R. Shaw, “The Urbanization of Drone Warfare: Policing Surplus Populations in the Dronepolis,” Geographica Helvetica 71, no. 1 (February 15, 2016): 19–28, doi:10.5194/gh-71-19-2016.

    [29] Mark Neocleous, War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

    [30] Ibid., 90.

    [31] Ibid., 90.

    [32] Ibid., 221n3.

    [33] “The Nobel Peace Prize 2009,” NobelPrize.Org, accessed February 2, 2021, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2009/press-release/.

    [34] Stephanie Busari and Claire Barthelemy, “Obama Peace Prize Win Polarizes Web,” CNN World, accessed April 21, 2021, https://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/10/09/obama.nobel.peace.reaction/index.html.

    [35] Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize” (Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway, December 10, 2009), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-acceptance-nobel-peace-prize.

    [36] Daniel Klaidman, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 117.

    [37] Jessica Purkiss and Jack Serle, “Obama’s Covert Drone War in Numbers: Ten Times More Strikes than Bush,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 17, 2017, https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush.

    [38] Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize,” December 10, 2009, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-acceptance-nobel-peace-prize.

    [39] Ibid.

    [40] Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 2015), 35.

    [41] Ibid.

    [42] Ina Cole, “Pablo Picasso and the Development of a Peace Symbol,” Art Times, May/June 2010, https://www.arttimesjournal.com/art/reviews/May_June_10_Ina_Cole/Pablo_Picasso_Ina_Cole.html.

    [43] Tate, “Picasso: Peace and Freedom – Exhibition at Tate Liverpool,” Tate, accessed April 21, 2021, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/picasso-peace-and-freedom.

    [44] Sarah Wilson, Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 131.

    [45] Zvonimir Novak, Agit tracts: un siècle d’actions politique et militaire (Les Éditions L’échapée, 2015), 210.

    [46] Anastasia Karel, “Brief History of Paix et Liberté,” Princeton University Libraries, accessed February 11, 2021, http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/mudd/online_ex/paix/.

    [47] Novak, Agit tracts, 210.

    [48] See Otto Karl Werckmeister, Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the Fall of Communism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 78.

    [49] Wilson, Picasso/Marx, 132.

    [50] Karel, “Brief History of Paix et Liberté.”

    [51] Novak, Agit tracts, 207.

    [52] Wilson, Picasso/Marx, 142.

    [53] Ibid., 122.

    [54] Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3.

    [55] Ibid., 4.

    [56] Ibid., 18.

    [57] Spencer Ackerman, “Weird, Birdlike Mystery Drone Crashes in Pakistan,” Wired, August 29, 2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/08/weird-birdlike-mystery-drone-crashes-in-pakistan/.

    [58] David Cenciotti, “New Images of the Mystery Bird-like Drone Crashed in Pakistan. Taken in Iraq,” The Aviationist, September 14, 2012, https://theaviationist.com/2012/09/14/bird-drone/.

    [59] Heba Y. Amin, General’s Stork (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020), 137.

    [60] Kelsey D. Atherton, “Amazon Patent Lets Drones Perch On Streetlight Recharging Stations | Popular Science,” Popular Science, July 20, 2016, https://www.popsci.com/amazon-patent-puts-drones-on-streetlight-recharging-stations/.

    [61] Kate Baggaley, “Forget Props and Fixed Wings: New Bio-Inspired Drones Mimic Birds, Bats and Bugs,” NBC News, July 30, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/forget-props-fixed-wings-new-bio-inspired-drones-mimic-birds-ncna1033061.

    [62] Eric Chang et al., “Soft Biohybrid Morphing Wings with Feathers Underactuated by Wrist and Finger Motion,” Science Robotics 5, no. 38 (January 16, 2020), doi:10.1126/scirobotics.aay1246.

    [63] The “animal prehistory” of drone technology is comparatively well-rehearsed, see Stubblefield, Drone Art, especially chapter 4, “The Animal Remainder: Excavating Nohuman Life from Contemporary Drones.”

    [64] Anthony Downey, “Drone Technologies and the Future of Surveillance in the Middle East” (interview with Heba Y. Amin), The MIT Press Reader, January 6, 2021, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/drone-technologies-future-of-surveillance-middle-east/.

    [65] “Drones Dazzle at Disney World in a New Holiday Show,” USA Today, accessed April 14, 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/experience/america/theme-parks/2016/12/20/disney-springs-holiday-drone-show-starbright-holidays/95628500/.

    [66] Ibid.

    [67] Andrea Miller, “Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible in Preemption,” in Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, ed. Ruha Benjamin (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 86.

    [68] For an excellent analysis of Joe Biden’s drone fireworks in the shifting historical context of drones, see Caren Kaplan “Everyday Militarisms: Drones and the Blurring of the Civilian-Military Divide During COVID-19” Forthcoming in Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, eds. Michael Richardson and Beryl Pong, Open Humanities Press.

    [69] A more recent incident in France testifies to Fairey’s continued commitment to the liberal cause and his knack for appealing to world leaders with his propaganda art. Briefly told, Fairey painted a gigantic Marianne-mural, that, in an echo of the 2011 Copenhagen incident, was destroyed by anonymous graffiti artists. See HIYA! Rédaction, “Un Crew Anonyme Fait «pleurer» La plus Grande Marianne de France! #MariannePleure,” HIYA!, December 14, 2020, https://hiya.fr/2020/12/14/inedit-un-crew-anonyme-fait-pleurer-la-plus-grande-marianne-de-france-mariannepleure/.

    [70] Warner Todd Huston, “End Of a Fairey Tale: Poster Artist Says Obama’s Drones Killed ‘Hope,’” Wizbang, October 1, 2013, https://www.wizbangblog.com/2013/10/01/end-of-a-fairey-tale-poster-artist-says-obamas-drones-killed-hope/.

    [71] Hunter Schwarz, “The HOPE Poster Guy is Done with Obama. And Republicans Now Have Their Metaphor,” Washington Post, May 28, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/05/28/the-hope-poster-guy-just-handed-republicans-their-ideal-metaphor-for-obamas-presidency/.

    [72] For a forthcoming analysis of “late capitalist fascism,” see Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022).

    [73] See for instance the self-declared international movement “Birds Aren’t Real,” which absurdly claims that all birds are government-controlled drones. Whether or not these “activists” are serious about their claims is hard to tell.

    [74] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 8.

    [75] James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” July 11, 1966, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/report-occupied-territory/.

    [76] I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and insightful criticisms that have helped me greatly improve this essay.

    _____

    Works Cited

  • Amit R. Baishya — Passions of the Political (Review of Anustup Basu’s Hindutva as Political Monotheism)

    Amit R. Baishya — Passions of the Political (Review of Anustup Basu’s Hindutva as Political Monotheism)

    a review of Anustup Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism (Duke, 2020)

    by Amit R. Baishya

    This article was peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 Editorial Collective.

    “In studying its (Hindutva as political monotheism) long genesis, my objective is not to advance toward a prognostic reading of the present…My purpose will instead be to explore, with some degree of speculation, the ground of the present.”

    (Anustup Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism, 10)

    The sentences above are crucial for approaching the novelty of Anustup Basu’s approach in his monograph Hindutva as Political Monotheism. Studies of Hindutva usually focus on its historical geneses, its sociological impact, and its anthropological dimensions.[1] Basu’s monograph is a path-breaking attempt to trace its genealogy as a political monotheism. This effort, he says, is not “a presentist elaboration of what we are witnessing now, but a deep search of its (Hindutva’s) historical origins” (2). The key analytical optic he deploys to understand Hindutva as a political monotheism, as an ideology that seeks a “unifying ethnocultural consistency rather than a theological unity,” and as “a monotheme of religiosity rather than religion itself” are the works of the hard-right thinker and one-time Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt (5). Schmitt’s theses on the concept of the political assists Basu in drawing out a “tacit monotheistic imperative in European organic theories of religious and ethnocentric nationhood” that he explores in detail in his first chapter (5). This monotheistic impulse utilizes the colonial epistemological category of “Hinduism” to invent it as a “jealous” political and national identity that eventually colonizes the apparatus of the post-colonial state. In an introduction and four subsequent chapters, Basu traces the development of this monotheistic impulse as a literary and cultural project in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its eventual replacement by “Hindutva 2.0”—an advertised and informational experience of urban modernity—in the contemporary period. Basu does not conduct this inquiry by presenting a chronological narrative of the development of core Hindutva ideas; rather, the word “speculation” in the epigraph above signals his eclectic and creative juxtaposition of multiple primary sources to trace a genealogy of Hindutva as a political monotheism.

    Hindutva as Political Monotheism (henceforth Hindutva) locates the search for a fully developed political monotheism in India in relation to two dimensions of inquiry. The first is the colonial epistemological invention of “Hinduism,” the larger arcs of modernity in India, and the drafting and implementation of post-colonial India’s constitution in 1950. The second places the contemporary rise of Hindutva within the broader global crisis of liberalism and the concomitant rise of ethic-national chauvinisms. Two conceptual terms serve as touchstones in the four chapters. The first is axiomatic that is derived from William Connolly’s work on American evangelical-capitalism in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (2008). The axiomatic, Basu writes, is a “singular religious passion that does not necessarily depend on theological consistency” (5). This observation connects with his argument broached earlier that Hindutva is more about religiosity than about religion per se. He further specifies that the axiomatic is “a techno-social regime of governmentality than simply a theologico-pastoral formation” (5). The second term is parabasis, which he draws from Gayatri Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999). This term emerges from classical Greek theater and refers to the duration in the play when the actors leave the stage, and the chorus addresses the audience. Basu deploys parabasis to explore the “historical roots of a relatively recent voice of a wider urban consensus beyond usual suspects such as the ardent disciple of (M.S.) Golwalkar or the angry foot soldier of (Narendra) Modi” (9).[2] This urban consensual voice, while constituted by dissonant timbres, converges in crucial aspects to consolidate and sustain “the increasing metropolitan revision of regional eccentricities and the fervor for security and techno-financial growth” (10). The genealogical precedents and rise to prominence of this “electronic Hindu political monotheism,” which surpasses the older impasses of print capitalism, is the central knowledge-object Basu focuses on in Hindutva.

    Chapter One—“Questions Concerning the Hindu Political”—lays the theoretical foundations by elaborating some key concepts from Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (2007) and Political Theology (2006). The key extension that he makes to Schmitt’s vitalistic conceptualization of the political as the realm defined by the friend-enemy antagonism is by reading it as a “fundamentally monotheistic calling” and not via the German thinker’s observation that all secular concepts are at their base sublimated religious ones (14). This austere notion of the political is a “mythopoetic automaton” that enables the imagination of a unified people and the state only after having “categorically distinguished the believer from the infidel” (14). This “passion” is monotheistic by “secular transposition, because it has to be a singular impelling of devotion to the nation and the state” (14). In the colonial/post-colonial Indian context, this monotheism is conceived by the Hindu right as constitutively Hindu, an axiomatic that is then opposed to rival monotheistic axiomatics like Islam and, to a lesser extent, Christianity. A fiction of a primordial, prepolitical Hindu India is, thus, disseminated which has supposedly survived and persisted despite Islamic, and later, British colonization of what is now a nation-state.

    Basu states that he isn’t interested in an “instrumental” reading of the Indian context in Schmittian terms (23). Schmitt’s theorizations are not used as a mechanical explanatory model applied to the Indian context; rather, his “sparse” invocation is useful in highlighting three important themes of particular pertinence to nation-thinking and imaginaries of sovereignty: “the modern understanding of religion, the romance of the past, and the concomitant monotheistic imperative of political theology” (14).  Basu is interested in mining the connection between Schmitt’s notion of the political and Hindutva for three specific reasons. First, there has been a consistent monotheistic impulse in the discursive invention of “Hinduism” from the nineteenth century onwards. The Abrahamic cast endowed to Hinduism from that period paves the way for its consolidation as a political and nationalist identity that desires the state form. Second, Hindu nationalism is thoroughly Eurocentric and Orientalist at its core, a fact underscored rather risibly, as reported in the news portal The Wire (2021), in a recent revision to the history curriculum of Delhi University where the Mughal emperor Babur’s entry into India is termed “invasion” while the East India Company’s rule is couched under the more benign term “territorial expansion.” Third, when Hindu nationalism became institutionalized as a political movement in the 1920s and 30s, it was directly influenced by European fascisms and Herderian romantic-organicist formulations (17). But what makes Schmitt particularly relevant to Basu’s project is his identification of the passion of “jealousy” as the core of the monotheistic distinction between friend and enemy in the realm of the political. This passion facilitates the imagination of a Hindu India as “an organic whole rather than an associational pact” and is often summoned to judge the contrarian pressures of regionalism or to condemn secularism and federalism in the Indian context (151).

    Let us tarry with some of the distinctive features of Basu’s reading of the passion of “jealousy” in Schmitt awhile. In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt argues that the friend-enemy distinction is the central antagonism in the political sphere. Given Basu’s focus on “grounds,” it is crucial to note the way he distinguishes Schmitt’s friend-enemy antagonism and its relation to sovereign decisionism from the Hobbesian model of decisionism. Hobbes begins from the contractualist fiction and not the primordial time-space that precedes the contract. In contrast, for Schmitt, this primordial is the settlement of the question of friend and enemy. Thus, the friend-enemy antagonism and its settlement prior to social contracts or associations constitutes the very grounds of the political. Basu writes:

    The political is decided by a primal pathology prior to self-conscious peopleness; it…has to be an already-there organic unity. It cannot be associational or contractual precisely because it must express a singular and undivided will before reason and talk can proceed. Schmitt’s political theology therefore necessarily defines the bearer of the political as a monotheistic congregation, jealous of any apostates, pagans or heretics in its midst. (18)

    The passion of jealousy points us towards the chilling imperative that a war for extermination between both parties is possible at any time. The purpose of the state is to respond to this fear at every step. When the juridical resources of the state cannot fulfil this expectation, a “secular miracle” is called for—the exception.[3] This sovereign decision can either be a war against “internal” enemies or a “perpetual civil war as an index of relentless determination or purification” (18). The chilling imperatives of Hindutva as political monotheism, which can be conducted both as a war on internal enemies and a permanent civil war, echo these Schmittian postulations.

    Chapter Two (“The Hindu Nation as Organism”) is the core of Hindutva. This chapter juxtaposes philosopher Bimal Krishna Matilal’s work on Indic “little traditions” with modern Hindutva’s organismic invented “grand” tradition that attempts to subsume a massive plurality of identities via a “unifying ethnocultural consistency rather than a theological unity” (5). Basu deploys Aamir Mufti’s Enlightenment in the Colony (2007) to caution that there is no “pristine truth of pluralism” to contrast with the pristine truth of monotheism—both desires are sullied by the colonial modern. They gesture to a lost excess beyond the organizing frames of colonial taxonomies. But what is missing, Basu writes, in Hindutva discourses is the “critical admission of irony and amnesiac mourning—an understanding of the bygone as necessary fiction with a phantom aspect…” (34). This differentiates Hindutva’s monotheistic search for lost origins from the double consciousness that marks scholars like Matilal, Mufti, and, indeed, works like Hindutva itself.

    In contrast to Hindutva’s modernist desire for a theistic unity and consistency in line with the Abrahamic traditions, Matilal’s works on “little traditions” show that while the numerous South Asian scriptural traditions have “involved themselves with logic and epistemology, religious duties and rituals, metaphysics and soteriology,” they have hardly ever “furnished a constitutive moral worldview” (38). This seeming lack of a constitutive, coherent moral worldview and a massive polyphony of voices within what is called the Hindu tradition has led many Western thinkers to posit that “Indian religion was inseparable from Indian mythology” (Hegel) or that there was “no concept of morality in Sanskrit” (Max Weber) (39-41). To make Hinduism “necessarily Brahminical and resolutely monolingual,” as Hindutva attempts to do, would involve the negation of the dynamic osmosis among the tremendous babble of “little traditions” into a “manufactured and jealous ‘Epic of Traditions’…in order to institute a masculine, Savarna national morality robbed of all errant and queering energies” (41). This is a project still in the making, but one which has become more prominent and public in recent times.

    The other insuperable bottleneck that Hindutva faces is that of caste. While Hindutva discourse insists on the “original Varna as a recognition of merit over birth,” the questions of Jati and Varna are always complicated by plural traditions that are “artisanal, ecological, and based on everyday customs and pieties” (44-6). The problem here lies in Hindutva’s uncritical adoption of the Western anthropological category of religion itself. As Basu says, quoting Matilal: “‘The social reality [called] religion did not exist in ancient or classical India’—at least in a core, etymological root sense of the word, as reliq, or that which binds and relegates” (47). Responding to this absence, Hinduism is invented as a monotheism and as resolutely monolingual by Hindutva. The valorization of Brahminical theodicy in this monolingual reformulation is a manifestation of the desperate desire of Hindutva historicism to respond to and rectify the purported lack posited by the Orientalizing gaze of the big colonizing Other.

    The tour de force in this chapter is Basu’s analysis of the “pieties” of Hindutva discourse and the problems it encounters in endowing the nation an organismic cast. For Hindutva thinkers like MS Golwalkar and Deen Dayal Upadhyay, the Hindu nation in its essence is paradoxically predicated on “terrestrial homogeneity as well as cosmogonic inequity” (32). Once this promised Hindu punyabhumi (consecrated land) is achieved via the revival of Hindu virtue:

    …this nation, in its perfection, will be marked by a balanced metabolism of natural caste patrimony and a principled docility of the lower orders. Citizenship shall be defined by selfless service and sacrifice, not by individual rights and interests. The state here can only be an organic expression of an originary Brahminical peace; it may not be a profane artifice to ward off a natural state of (caste) war. (32)

    This invocation of Brahminical peace and caste war leads directly to Basu’s fascinating consideration of Hindutva’s “primal origin myth” and evocation of “deep time” that he conducts via an elaboration of four themes: “Time and Origins,” “Race and Law,” “Territory, Imaginative Geography, Identity,” and “Language, Countermemory, and Culture.” I won’t go into the details of each theme but will explicate Basu’s theorization of Hindutva “deep time” through a contrast with an interesting moment in a well-known South Asian fictional text. Nirmal, a central character in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2006), tries to explain how he will attempt to communicate the vastness of geological timescales to a group of rural children in Bengal:

    It’s not just the goddesses—there’s a lot more in common between myth and geology. Look at the size of their heroes, how immense they are—heavenly deities on the one hand, and on the other the titanic stirrings of the earth itself—both equally otherworldly, equally remote from us…And then, of course, there is the scale of time—yugas and epochs, Kaliyug and the Quaternary. And yet—mind this!—in both, these vast durations are telescoped in such a way as to permit the telling of a story. (150)

    Nirmal’s homology between myth and geology shows how the vastness of geological time is conceptualized by different epistemological formations in varied yet comparable ways. As the medievalist Jeffrey J. Cohen (2015) writes—“Every historical period works with the conceptual tools it inherits but is never bound by that heritage to the replication of that which is already known” (83). Nirmal seems to intuitively understand the connection between such different epistemological attempts at comprehending the vastness of temporal scales. He uses this understanding and tries to channel it creatively towards a pedagogical goal—how to make his students grasp the vastness of the temporal scales of geohistory.

    Is the Hindutva homology, or rather the erasure of the gap between myth and history the same as what Nirmal institutes between myth and geology? Time, as Basu says, in its Hindu-Aryan naissance “is geological” (49). Basu succinctly distinguishes imaginaries of temporal scale in Puranic cosmologies and the way Hindutva banalizes them for statist ends. Deep time in Puranic texts is not quantifiable in literal terms, and function as “pure magnitudes to invoke fear, shame and reverence…” (51). Such pure magnitudes create an “existential distance between humans of the present and the Dharmic exemplum” (52). Time-reckoning in the ancient era could simultaneously exist as cyclical in terms of cosmology and linear in terms of the moment of the here and now. The problem with Hindutva thinking lies in “making the two identical, and then vectorizing the whole thing in terms of statist mythography” (52). The complexities of the temporal imaginaries that so invigorate Nirmal to help his students encounter questions of geological scale is rerouted via colonial historiography by Hindutva discourse into “coarse positivisms of rise and fall” (53).  Invocations of deep time in Hindutva discourse is not a contention with different timescales, but a negation of timeliness and metric history, as for example in Golwalkar’s rhetorical flourish that Hindus ruled India for ten thousand years before a “foreigner” set foot in it (54-5). Metric time and history are conceptualized as a form of rupture. The original period of Hindu glory cannot be located within temporal frameworks; instead, history begins with a curving towards Kaliyuga (end times). Secular history is a fall from a myth of origins, while the myth of the golden Hindu past exists in a time before time.

    This conceptualization of deep time before historical time proper is also imagined as a period of Brahminical peace. The invocation of a mythic past in terms of Varna is necessary for Hindutva because it is predicated “in the form of a Jati revenge against Islam, not Jati parity within Hinduism” (56). The monotheme of a jealous Hindu identity ranged against rival axiomatics can only be consolidated by “foreclosing the emergence of countermemories and competing fictions of Jati identity” (56). Deploying Michel Foucault’s ideas on race war from Society must be Defended (2003), Basu argues that for this Hindu monotheme to emerge and to anticipate a possible future when this essence is restored, the link between history and caste-war must be actively denied or forgotten:

    No matter how far back one goes, profane historical knowledge does not present nature, right, order, or peace for Hindutva. Hindutva’s historicism is therefore founded on an idealism that knowledge and truth belong to the order of Brahminical peace; that they cannot belong to the side of violence, miscegenation, and relentless caste war. (62)

    Besides the potential extermination of the enemy and forgetting of caste war, this narrative of Hindu redemption is predicated on the concurrent remembering of an ideal Hindu subject that is “apparently different from the profane, modern one, yet one that is lost in an ever-receding past that in itself cannot be viewed other than through the prism of the modern” (86). This ideal Hindu subject, simultaneously ancient and modern, must be reinstated as sovereign among the plurality of identities in the subcontinent. This is one of the core elements of the Hindutva project.

    Chapter Three—“The Indian Monotheism”—moves away from Hindutva discourse to an analysis of “normative Hinduism,” a secularized, albeit Hinduized, sensus communis that has been the bedrock of the post-colonial nation-state. This discourse of “soft” Hinduness ranges across a spectrum from “benign to sharp.” It also oscillates between a patronizing benevolence towards Islam and a paranoid hauteur directed towards the jealous monotheism of Hindutva (124). In recent decades, Basu writes, this “apparently benign Hinduness has increased its powers as a psychological parabasis for a majoritarian nation” (88).  Chapter Three looks at “discursive antecedents” in the “broader nineteenth-century Indological identification of ‘Hinduism’ and the discourses of Hindu reform, Hindu anthropology, jurisprudence, and history” (7). This “benign” discursive trajectory of a Hindu monotheme has increasingly been replaced with “ritualized pathological expressions” (88). The fact that benign Hinduness and ritualized pathological Hindutva are often substitutable with each other reveal that they are secret sharers drawing from the same wellspring of the Hindu monotheme.

    In terms of specifics, “The Indian Monotheism” considers a broad “constellation of moments”—the Vedantic reform of Raja Rammohan Roy, the literary moment of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s universalization of the caste question, and the “pacific paternalism” of M.K. Gandhi (146).  Crucial to this discursive project of a “monothematic Hindu becoming in anticipation of the nation-state” is the furnishing of “imagined communities and personages with a subjectivity and a historical agency pertinent to the overall invention of a Hindu past” (147). This occurred in several ways—the elevation of neo-Vedantic monism as a counter to the messy facts of polytheism in Hindu practices (evident, for instance, in the literary interventions of Roy), the institutionalization of the Bhagawad Gita as the holy book of the Hindu people (a reading very prominent in Bankim), and the portrayal of figures like Rama and Krishna as prophetic personages greater than Christ or the Buddha. In each case, the development of the Hindu monotheme necessitated arguments with colonial Reason and the subsumption of ambiguous and scattered elements within the ambit of “antiquarian or monumental” histories that corresponded to nationalistic desires (147). All these moments of argumentation had major differences with Hindutva—for instance, Rammohan Roy’s Hindu monism as universal religion bypassed the passion of jealousy altogether, while Radhakrishnan’s pragmatic defense of Varna differs from the theologico-cosmogonic cast that Hindutva ideologues like Golwalkar posited. What unites them though is the deep desire for a quintessentially Hindu-Indian axiomatic.

    The discussion of the trajectory from Roy to Radhakrishnan is bookended by Hegel’s philosophical critique of the Gita on the one hand and B.R. Ambedkar’s critique of Hinduism on the other. Hegel’s 1827 civilizational diagnosis that the “absence of a monotheistic esprit de corps” in the Gita compromises the nation’s “security in a world of lordship and bondage,” serves as a foil for the intellectual ripostes by Rammohan Roy and Bankim (101). Much more interesting though is Basu’s discussion of Ambedkar’s Jacobin critique of Hinduism. I will highlight one aspect of Ambedkar’s radical critique of Hindu monotheism through a contrast with Radhakrishnan. For Radhakrishnan, caste became a means to contain race conflict in India. The genius of the Indian caste system, for Radhakrishnan, was the prevention and containment of race war (which was supposedly common in all societies) via a process of harmonization rather than the alternatives of enslavement or extermination (129). Caste, thus, is presented as not ontologically unique to Indian society. According to Radhakrishnan, it is a feature of all societies. It is just that it happened to be a practical and harmonious way to stave off race war perfected in the Indian context.  This universalization of the caste question and its specific flowering in Indian climes produced a “democracy of spirit,” although it was not amenable to the accumulation of wealth or political power (129).

    Ambedkar, Basu says, rejects the “naturalistic, race-based exoneration” of caste in the Gandhi-Radhakrishnan trajectory of Hindu reformism. The caste imaginary’s strict adherence to notions of purity and endogamous marriage went against a phenomenology of biological race—a fair-skinned lower caste person would still be ostracized while a dark-skinned Brahmin would not (136). From a political economic perspective, caste was not division of labor, but “a calibrated division of laborers” that could not be encompassed by economism alone (137). The essence of caste does not depend on a naturalistic explanation but is a “sublimation in time” (137). It shifts and mutates in a historical field “pertaining to shifts in custom, culture, production, theology, or the aesthetics of self-making” (137). Caste discrimination was a disciplinary framework that combines “a libidinal economy of desire with a political one of interest” (140). This notion of disciplining the caste other is fundamentally inimical to the idea of democracy that Ambedkar draws from his teacher John Dewey—“…a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (142). The problem with Indian nationalism, suffused by reformism of the Gandhi-Radhakrishnan type, is that it short-circuited social revolution in favor of a political one (143). In doing so, “soft” Hinduism suffused with the “lure of temperate Brahminism” became the raison d’etre of the post-colonial state. This constituted the “parabasis of the new Hindu normal” whose affective power rendered the “Indian constitutional revolution passive by foreclosing a constitutional morality” (145). Hegemonic Indian nationalism viewed the spiritual work of the nation as already complete millennia ago—all that was necessary was reform and revival (149). Rare exceptions like Ambedkar and Rabindranath Tagore, whom Basu considers briefly at the end of this chapter, went against the grain of this Hindu-normative common sense.

    Chapter Four—“Hindutva 2.0 as Advertised Monotheism”—considers Hindutva monotheism from the other end of the temporal spectrum: “in terms of millennial mutations in the era of information and globalization” (7). This chapter is a return to familiar turf for readers familiar with Basu’s earlier work on film and media cultures. The two key conceptual terms in this chapter—“Hindutva 2.0” and “advertised modernization”—fuses the analysis of contemporary media ecologies with considerations of affect. Thus, the assemblage of Hindutva 2.0 presumes a “neuropolis of populations” and sustains itself on “industrialized instincts of jealousy and anxiety” (166). As a mediatized phenomenon, predicated on the rapid proliferation of cellphones, the internet and digital technology, it does not depend on some of the established avenues of modernity like newspapers, books or university spaces. It is not dependent on “traditional” orders like shakhas or temples either. Instead, it works “primarily by way of loose, fungible distributions of affect, spectacle and…the substance of the advertised” (158). In an age of Whatsapp forwards, or what is colloquially called the “Whatsapp University,” it hollows out historical consciousness and reduces it to the syncopated form of a meme or a short message that can be forwarded virally. Hindutva 2.0 also establishes new synergies between “being Hindu and neoliberalism, one taking place on a plane of marketable desires and terrors” (158). In doing so, it spreads both soft and hard versions of the Hindu normal across the entire digital spectrum.

    The other key term—advertised modernization—draws on trajectories of affect studies that point towards “a neuropolitics of the twenty-first century in which multidirectional stimulations, attention spans, diversions, ennui, or boredom become potent political factors” (180). “Advertised” is a conceptual metaphor which goes beyond questions of truth and falsehood; instead, it renders “an innocuous ‘take away,’ a ‘feel good’ sensation, or in some cases, a consumable fear” (180). In such an advertised scenario, which is also necessarily majoritarian, there is “no narrative obligation to truth or closure”; rather, it is the affect it evokes and the sense of belonging it creates to a particular brand that counts (180). Probably its most well-known global manifestation in recent times is the “pure gesture” of the Trumpian lie. As is obvious, most of what Trump (or Modi) utter in public can be debunked with minimal fact-checking; yet, for the devout Trump or Modi follower, they operate as “pure gestures advertising a new covenant between tradition and modernity, rather than as dialectical matters of an Aristotleian politics aimed at virtue…” (181). The Trumpian statement itself may be outrageously false, but it comes straight from the heart for legions of acolytes.

    The Trump-Modi performatives also thrive in a changed scenario of the advertisement. The older model of the fifteen to thirty second advertisement emerging from “vertical models of mass culture” is passé. What has taken its place is an “order of convergence marked by nondirectional flows between platforms, instant audience migrations, and corporate cooperation” (181). In this changed scenario, political campaigning itself becomes interactive and is constituted by feedback loops and the processing of data that occur 24/7—consider here, for instance, the use of holograms and selfies during Modi’s 2014 campaign. The political personality becomes a brand that proliferates across a wide mediaverse circumnavigating a multidirectional circuit of affect. Branding, in Basu’s words, “becomes a matter of controlled chaos, leveraged in order to achieve critical densities of affect, recall value, or regularities of reference” (182). In this altered mediascape, the monotheme of Hindutva does not operate through a straightforward invocation of jealousy against the infidel; instead, congregations of believers coalesce in “virtual affinity spaces” that cut across older divides of city and country.

    Basu also provides a contrast between two different historical constellations to outline the specificity of Hindutva 2.0. This contrast is set up through his discussion of the journalist Akshaya Mukul’s book Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015) at the beginning of the chapter. Mukul’s fascinating book received a fillip when he came across the “Poddar papers,” a massive archive of correspondence, pamphlets and manuscripts by, on or written to Hanuman Prasad Poddar, who along with Jaydayal Goyandka founded the Gita Press in Gorakhpur in 1923. Mukul writes:

    As Gita Press stands within striking distance of a century, the only organization that may be said to parallel its success is the Bible Society. No other publishing house in India has marketed religion so successfully. (430)

    Through cheap editions of Hindu religious texts in multiple languages, its Hindi monthly Kalyan (first published in 1927) and its English avatar Kalyana-Kalpataru (first published in 1934), Gita Press made deep inroads throughout India, even into Hindu homes that wouldn’t identify necessarily with Hindutva. Espousing conservative upper caste-Hindu values and functioning as a foot-soldier of the Sangh Parivar, despite its claims that it maintains a safe distance from politics, Gita Press also managed to get a wide spectrum of notable figures of varying ideological proclivities, ranging from Golwalkar to Gandhi, to write for Kalyan. The notable absentee unsurprisingly was Ambedkar, a figure Kalyan was scathingly critical of.  Often deploying what Basu calls a “paranoid style” (155), Gita Press at various times has also effectively deployed the language of hate and insular religious identity.

    While Gita Press is still influential, Basu extensively discusses Mukul’s book to show how Hindutva 2.0 is a massive shift in amplitude in the era of new media forms and the neoliberal order. This is especially evident with the rise of Narendra Modi as a media phenomenon—a process that demonstrated “the advertised realignment of tradition and modernity” for a “virtual Hindu congregation” (182). In this new distributional matrix of information, the divergent energies constituting the virtual Hindu congregation could touch the “Brahminical sensible” [a term Basu reworks from Jacques Ranciere’s idea of the distribution of the sensible from Dissensus (2015)] at various points without being subsumed within a monolingual Hindutva discourse. Basu concretizes the difference between Hindutva 2.0 and the older model of print capitalism thus:

    That older revivalist discourse, as have seen in the case of Gita Press…struggled to subsume the modern disciplines and the physical sciences into an apex Hindu vision. It had to world the caste question afresh in an altered universe of rights, freedoms and irreverent democratic tempers. It attempted, at every turn, to reconcile mythology with history, science and realism, or theodicy with justice. Such discursive efforts—rarely sublime, often ludicrous—have had a long history and continue to this day. However, in this new ecology, they acquire fresh powers of particularization and shooting through. (183)

    The neuropolitical dimension in this new informational ecology enables the collapse of traditional distinctions between city and country and epistemologies like Vedic cosmogony and astrophysics. The public this ecology subsumes can react in a variety of ways within the frame of this Hindu normativity—ranging from indulgence to outright dismissal, from neurosis to humor. But the key difference between this moment and the “traditional” print capitalist one, as Basu says, is that “it can bravely ‘touch upon,’ without obligation, many matters that traditional Hindu nationalist discourse has either avoided or approached gingerly” (183).

    In a broader spectrum of culture, advertised modernity is also evident in the shifts in the fantasy machine of Bollywood in the era of neoliberalization. Basu’s earlier work on the “geo-televisual aesthetic” (2010) is particularly relevant here in mapping these shifts.[4] On the one hand, post-1990 Bollywood films are marked by the gradual disappearance of the rural sphere, the poor, Dalit or Muslim character, and an obliteration of what film scholar Ranjani Mazumdar (2007) calls, the presence of the street; on the other hand, we notice the gradual rise to prominence of what Mazumdar calls the “lifestyle mythology” of the urban elite (143). Basu argues in Hindutva that advertised modernization operates at “the level of colors, saturations, textures, magical transportations, luminosities, and sonorous resonances” by which the “new, urban Hindu elite…[presents]…its life and aspirations as artwork” (191-2).  Vedic and Puranic cosmologies exist side by side with a muscular patriotism and an open (and opulent) celebration of right-wing mythologies as in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s controversial film Padmavat (2018).

    The underside of this glossy normative Hindu advertised fantasy is the proliferation of gritty, stylish films usually about Bombay’s underbelly. The “encounter” film—which revels in vigilante justice and extrajudicial killing meted out to characters from the underworld—has become a sub-genre in its own right. Basu reads it as a symptom of a persisting fascination with sovereign decisionism and of vigilante violence (especially against Muslims and Dalits, phenomena that spill from reel to real life) in the Indian context. A good example here would be Shimit Amin’s 2004 noir film Ab Tak Chappan (Till Now Fifty-six), which valorizes the life of the “encounter specialist” of the Mumbai Police Force, Daya Nayak. The title refers to the “encounter score” of fifty-six extrajudicial killings that Nayak purportedly participated in.

    This acceptance of extrajudicial violence, of course, is not a new phenomenon in Indian public life as the long and controversial histories of legal instruments like the AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) and TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act) easily illustrates. What the contemporary “encounter” film does though is to stage the majoritarian desire for sovereign decisionism with a “cool” dressing of the gritty, seductive style of noir. At the level of cultural fantasy, the proliferation of such films signals two things. First, it “presents a metropolitan caste Hindu existence as the only form of life worth living” (199). Islam enters this cultural fantasy only when assimilated into “an overall civic religiosity of the (Hinduized) market” as in the celebration of figures like former President APJ Abdul Kalam or the three superstar Khans—Shahrukh, Aamir and Salman—of Bollywood (199). Otherwise, the Muslim is completely othered. Second, such fantasies also present the “urban caste Hindu existence as the only secure form of life worth living” (200). In this variation of the fantasy, the Muslim becomes the security threat against which society must be defended. As Basu writes, this “perception of Islam as an absolutist ethics is important for the cult of the encounter because it authorizes the state to respond with fearful symmetry and an instant theodicy of its own” (200). The bleed between reel and real could not be more chilling than this.

    No account of the urban Indian fascination with sovereign decisionism can be complete without reference to the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In one respect, Modi represents the open vocalization of certain desires that lay immanent before 2014: the fascination with a strong leader, alternative history scenarios where Vallabhbhai Patel or Subhash Chandra Bose led India instead of the “soft” Nehru, and the long-standing admiration for Hitler’s works in many middle-class Indian homes. Basu’s focus, however, is only incrementally with the personality of Modi and more with the images projected of Modi as a media phenomenon. What interests Basu is how the new “congregational plane” of advertised modernization “animated by instantaneous and wide dissemination” effectively negated an old truism about India as a coalition at the altar of Modi’s charismatic aura. At another level, this proliferating form of advertised modernization also brought together two elite urban population categories that had hitherto remained apart. Basu calls these two population subsets the Gentoo (the colonial term for “Hindu” that draws on the Portuguese gentio—pagan) and the Dehat (the Hindi term for rustic). The Gentoo is the technocratic elite enamored with neoliberal development. Within this category there is a spectrum of possibilities: the Gentoo wedded to hard Hindutva, the Gentoo who imagined the metropolitan good life as indistinguishable from Hinduness, and finally, the secular-neoliberal who conditionally supported Modi’s economic “reform” persona without going the whole hog with his cultural nationalist project. The Dehat, on the other hand, was the vernacular elite that emerged from the rich farming and privileged caste groups.

    Before 2014, at best only a provisional and uneasy Gentoo-Dehat coalition could be imagined. The media phenomenon that Modi became from around 2006 onwards with the celebration of the mythologized “Gujarat model of development” brought these two subsets together on the congregational plane. For the Gentoo especially, “Modi was a Dehat who could talk the talk of the Chicago boys and talk it well” (173). The public personality of Modi that was projected coalesced the images of the neoliberal messiah who would turbocharge the Gentoo model of development, the “strong” and decisive Hindu leader who would not compromise on national security against internal and external enemies, and the “saintly” man of sewa (service) who rose above petty politicking and remained untouched by the profanity of corruption. This could not have happened without the new media ecology that was “marked by speedy informational flows and feedback loops independent of traditional institutions of news and veracity” and where “one could freely disperse affects and expressions without disciplinary enunciation or narrative form” (170). In short, Hindutva 2.0 as advertised monotheism.

    Hindutva is an eclectic and multidimensional work that makes major interventions in multiple knowledge-fields like media and cinema studies, religious studies, postcolonial studies, South Asian studies, studies of nationalism and affect studies. Readers of Carl Schmitt can also deploy Basu’s reading of “jealousy” to read the mutation of the German thinker’s later work such as his theorization of the “absolute enemy” in The Theory of the Partisan (2007). Schmitt’s work, written in the wake of guerrilla movements and anticolonial revolutions during the Cold War period, prefigures how the contemporary juridical category of the “terrorist” envisaged as a figure relegated outside the sphere of the law, follows the tracks of earlier legal categorizations like “pirate” or “guerrilla.” Schmitt’s underlying argument that the contemporary partisan (or “terrorist”) is no longer an enemy, but a “satanic pursuer” who attempts to create ex nihilo (quoted in Ulmen 2007, xviii), would be useful to analyze via Basu’s categories of the passion of jealousy and its relation to the primordial settlement of the political.

    Moreover, while anchored strongly in the Indian context, Hindutva also has global relevance. While analyses of phenomena like the Trumpian lie clearly illustrates the broad reach of Basu’s work, his conclusion clearly shows how the insights of Hindutva can be utilized to contend with our current global conjuncture. I highlight one passage from the conclusion as an illustration:

    In a world dominated by a cartel of international banks, a transnational plutocracy, and North Atlantic military powers and their constable states, the nation is no longer the seat of those two immense themes of the liberal tradition: self-determination and the rights of the people. Yet paradoxically, and perhaps precisely because of this, the nation has to be defined as a progressively more insular cosmology of justice. It has to be relentlessly purified and made to close in upon itself; the country has to be at once achieved and repeatedly taken back. (206)

    This paradoxical movement of simultaneous achievement and the repeated taking back of the spectral nation is not limited to Hindutva 2.0 and the rise of Narendra Modi alone. With proper contextualization, these insights can also apply to Trumpian America, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Duterte’s Philippines, Orban’s Hungary, Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey among others. Indeed, as Basu writes, twenty-first century “fascism is about focalizing…intense localisms and threading them into a nationalist politics of rage and revenge banks” (206). The strongman (and it is usually a man, with Marine Le Pen one of the exceptions) is he who cuts through the patina of incessant talk (what Schmitt in an earlier Fascist conjuncture criticized about procedural liberalism) by monopolizing widespread public skepticism about corruption and about information culture. He promises to replenish the masculinity of the nation by simplifying discourse and identifying the enemy clearly.

    That said, I advance one critique of Hindutva from my own location as a scholar of the borderland region of Northeast India. While I grant that Northeast India isn’t the focus of Hindutva, there is a missed opportunity here for framing a more complicated account of the political in the South Asian context. In the first chapter, Basu writes that the specter of the concentration camp “hovers around the National Register of Citizens (NRC) project that the present Hindu nationalist government in India has reactivated in the Indian northeastern state of Assam” (19). I do not disagree that the ruling BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) has weaponized the NRC as a pan-Indian phenomenon, and that detention centers are a grim reality in Assam today. But the word “reactivated” above, to use Basu’s own terms against himself, seems to make Hindutva the only player in town in Assam (204). The BJP is a relative late entrant into the NRC process. The genealogy of the NRC predates the BJP becoming a major player in this borderland state and has to be located in the complex politics of what the political essayist Sanjib Baruah in In the Name of the Nation (2020) calls a “settlement frontier” of the erstwhile colonial state (47-75). As Ornit Shani (2018) writes in her book on the creation of independent India’s first set of electoral rolls:

    In Assam…ethno nationalist attitudes manifested particularly towards the non-Assamese ‘floating population,’ many of whom are Bengali speaking Hindus from East Pakistan. Local authorities expressed a view of membership from a state that was defined by a descent group and delimited to ‘children of the soil,’ who were eligible to have full rights. Thus, ethno nationalist conceptions were not necessarily on the basis of religion. (72)

    This long history shapes the institutionalization of the NRC as a discriminatory citizenship regime. These facts show that the grounds of the political in such borderland contexts are not exclusively determined by religious binaries and its attendant passion of jealousy familiar to scholars of mainland South Asia.

    To be sure, there have been synergies between ethnonationalism and Hindutva in recent times. But the completion of the NRC process also reveals the faultlines between Hindutva and ethnonationalist politics. When the NRC was published in 2019, for instance, the BJP was disappointed that many Hindus were included in the list. They have recently promised a new, updated NRC. This faultline between Hindutva and ethnonationalism has hardened with the implementation of the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) in December 2019 which proposes to give citizenship to Hindu refugees, even though the BJP went on to win a majority in the state elections in 2021. None of these complexities are however mentioned in Basu’s account. In fact, in footnote twenty-five of Chapter One, the only source Basu cites about the NRC is an NPR report. He also writes in that same footnote that after “lying dormant for decades, it (the NRC) became politically relevant once more after Modi came to power” (213). Anyone familiar with Assam’s political scenario would be quick to point out that this discourse has not been dormant in the region at all, and that while Modi’s coming to power may have made it visible to mainstream Indian political discourse, the Northeastern borderlands have long been wrestling with this issue prior to 2014. In comparison to the eclectic historical and theoretical sketch of Hindutva, one is left wishing for a more complex rendering of the political in a borderland space such as Assam in this portion of Basu’s book.

    By way of a conclusion and drawing further from my own location in Northeast Indian studies, I initiate a brief conversation between Basu’s book and another major book on Hindutva that was published recently: Arkotong Longkumer’s ethnographic study The Greater India Experiment (2021). Hindutva is essentially correct, I think, in drawing a genealogy of an urban Hindu normativity. But what about Hindutva’s spread in locales beyond the Gentoo-Dehat urbanscape, especially in places that have been to a large extent inimical to the idea of India such as the borderland Northeastern region?  In his fascinating discussion of Hindutva worldings in the Northeastern region, Longkumer shows how within the larger monotheme of Hindu religiosity that Basu identifies, actual Hindutva practices are defined by shape-shifting and flexible positionalities as it tries to draw the divergent cosmologies of “tribal” religions within its fold. Of particular interest here is how Hindutva actors in Northeast India deploy the language of global indigeneity, polytheism and paganism to show connections between indigenous religions in the region and Hinduism. For instance, Longkumer writes that a 2005 BJP party document titled “Evolution of the BJP,” draws on the works of anthropologists on local and global aspects of indigeneity to argue that:

    …paganism relates, crucially, to local gods and ancestors of the land based on ideas of polytheism…In summing up the basic overlap between paganism and Hinduism, the BJP text says: ‘In a sense at the basic level Hinduism is a pagan religion. As Paganism allows for evolution Hinduism too allows for evolution. Since Paganism is belief in many Gods there is generally no fight over Gods. This is the greatest virtue of Polytheism…Once Hinduism is expressed along these lines, then, it has the potential to relate with other native traditions that are intimately connected to land. (115-16)

    While Hindutva proselytization in Northeast India is still an ongoing and contested process, such sentiments about polytheism are often invoked by Hindutva activists on the field to contest the animosity that monotheistic faiths like Christianity display against “pagan” and animist belief systems. An urban Hindu monotheme that has become dominant with advertised modernity and a flexible deployment of polytheism as a proselytizing strategy in the borderlands—these are two torn halves that do not constitute a whole, but gesture towards a larger and still developing story of why Hindutva has become the dominant political discourse in India today.

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    Amit R. Baishya is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival (Routledge, 2018) and the co-editor of Northeast India: A Place of Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Postcolonial Animalities (Routledge, 2019), and a special issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies titled “Planetary Solidarities: Postcolonial Theory, the Anthropocene and the Nonhuman” (2021-22).

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] For examples, see Jaffrelot (1995); Hansen (1999); Vanaik (2017).

    [2] M.S. Golwalkar (1906-73) was a prominent early ideologue of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), the apex body in what is called the “Sangh Parivar.”

    [3] Schmitt’s views on the connection between exception and miracles comes out most clearly in his reading of Chapter 37 of Hobbes’ Leviathan in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1996). Schmitt says—“A miracle is what the sovereign state authority commands its subjects to believe to be a miracle; but also—and here the irony is especially acute—the reverse: Miracles cease when the state forbids them” (55).

    [4] Basu defines the geo-televisual as a cinematic idiom that emerged from the mid-90s onwards and which cannibalized and combined heterogenous elements (MTV, video games, international travel, spiritualism et al) in a “fungible yet sensuous style—one that begins to operate at the level of the tissue and the nerve” (7). We notice an early intimation of the neuropolitical here.

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