Upcoming seminar: V.D. Savarkar on Maps, Empires & History (21 December 2011, NMML, Delhi)

The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

cordially invites you to a Seminar

at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, 21 December 2011

in the Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building

on

‘Hindutva Beyond the Borders: V.D. Savarkar on Maps, Empires & History’

by

Dr. Vinayak Chaturvedi, University of California, Irvine, USA

Abstract:
As one of the intellectual founders of Hindu nationalism, V.D. Savarkar provided a key discussion of the territorial boundaries of the Hindu nation in his seminal political treatise Essentials of Hindutva published in 1923. Hindutva is often cited as the most influential text in the Hindu nationalist cannon in defining a Hindu as a person who identifies the nation between the Indus River and the seas as both the ‘father-land’ and the ‘holy-land’. The purpose of this paper is to examine Savarkar’s later writings on cartography and mapping from the 1930s and 1940s to reconsider his own thinking of the Hindu nation beyond the boundaries he defined in the 1920s. It will also consider Savarkar’s interpretations of ‘Greater India’, ‘Asia’, and the ‘pan-Hindu-Buddhist alliance’ that expand his own arguments about the geography of the nation, while simultaneously providing out an agenda for the future of empires in world history.

Speaker:

Dr. Vinayak Chaturvedi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India (2007) and the editor of Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (2000). His articles have appeared in Past and Present, Social History, Modern Intellectual History, WerkstattGeschichte, Left History, and Historische Anthropologie. He is presently working on a book on the intellectual history of V.D. Savarkar and the making of political thought in India.