Book review: Sujata Patel, D. Parthasarathy and George Jose (Eds.), Mumbai/Bombay: Majoritarian Neoliberalism, Informality, Resistance, and Wellbeing
| Published date | 01 June 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/23210230241235361 |
| Author | Sushmita Pati |
| Date | 01 June 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews 149
sections of northeastern India’s population of Hindutva’s project—even as the author ‘suspends the
association of Hindutva with violence’ in his mind (p. 21) or dwells on its ‘quieter violence’ in the northeast
(p. 16)—should have been presented as a cogent line of enquiry.
Related conceptual and methodological problems of ethnographic authority permeate the text. The
description of the peace meeting in Dimapur in the aftermath of the shocking murder of the missionary
Graham Staines and his sons includes a lengthy soliloquy of a noted Sangh pracharak, Jagdish. Longkumer
neither elaborates on the context of these killings nor does he locate Jagdish’s open threats to minorities
(Christians), within the ideology of Hindutva with which the latter resonates. Instead, Longkumer summons
the authority of the ethnographer to seal the ‘truth’ about ‘Hindu hurt’ that Jagdish claims in his vitriolic
speech. By melding Longkumer’s persona of the ‘local’ Ao with that of the textualized persona of the
narrator and fieldworker, the text displays a lack of political accountability, a denial of the context of power/
history in the production of ethnographic knowledge. Such moments challenge the book’s claim of being a
historical ethnography and trouble later chapters as well. An engagement with extant literature would have
revealed the historically complex relationship between the Church, Christianity and Naga nationalism,
particularly the mediation of a modern Naga political identity by religion and the colonial and post-colonial
state. Instead, key historical moments in Naga nationalism are pegged on ‘algorithms of prophecy’ of
prayer houses—whose reach and influence significantly are never indicated to the reader. The chapter
‘Prophecy and the Hindu State’ represents Naga nationalism as a primarily religious movement, such as can
be challenged by the ideological force of Hindutva (the subject of the next chapter, ‘Christian Hindu and
Nationalizing Hindutva’). Its fieldwork as an ‘insider’ and its unprecedented reach within the Sangh make
Longkumer’s text a rich repository of contemporary oral history on northeastern India. However, its refusal
to account for the larger context of Hindutva’s divisive agenda, demonstrated by several other scholars,
leaves stories of the pracharaks uncontextualized, concepts dehistoricized, and the relationship between
personal and collective memory, unprobed. The overarching contentions regarding contemporary
ethnohistory of Hindutva made in the book are therefore unsteady and an opportunity lost.
ORCID iD
Sanghamitra Misra https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4430-9291
Sanghamitra Misra
Department of History,
University of Delhi, New Delhi, Delhi, India
E-mail: smisra@history.du.ac.in
Sujata Patel, D. Parthasarathy and George Jose (Eds.), Mumbai/Bombay: Majoritarian Neoliberalism,
Informality, Resistance, and Wellbeing. New Delhi: Routledge Publications, 2022, 257pp., `1,299.
DOI: 10.1177/23210230241235361
Mumbai has always been iconic in its urbanity. It is the ‘Maximum’ city: a city that does not sleep; a city
of gangsters and of ‘slumdog millionaires’ alike. For those of us who study Indian cities, we know
Mumbai through the most definitive studies of urban history and politics in India—Rajnarayan
Chandavarkar on the labour movements in the cotton mills; Thomas Blom Hansen on the rise of nativist
politics; and Jim Masselos on minority politics. While research works on other cities have picked up,
Bombay/Mumbai continues to be one of the most researched cities in India. It is, therefore, quite a
daunting task to bring out a fresh and nuanced volume of essays on the city.
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