Deepa S. Reddy is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.

Starting from an initial ethnographic insight that highly contentious religious struggles had filtered into and transformed the politics of women's activism, Deepa Reddy's important new text moves into a broader appraisal of contemporary Indian politicalagendas and the critical intellectual discourses informing them. From a number of strategic sites in and around Hyderabad and New Delhi, she explores why and how Hindu nationalism, as espoused notably by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has emerged as acompelling response to the post-Independence secularist movements of Gandhi-Nehru dynasty of the Congress Party and of the Indian Left. She set an ambitious task for the text: creating an analytical position from which the fraught sensibilities-the innertruths-that animate Hindu nationalism can be viewed as persuasive and legitimate from the perspectives of diverse groups of activists and adherents. In so doing she must confront the secularists' positions, articulated within activist-academic circles that dismiss the aspirations of the BJP as pathological, she must also acknowledge the potential of Hindu nationalism to ignite communal violence. The astute reflexive moves that impel Reddy's analysis offer the reader multiple vantage points from which t

• Chapter 1 AcknowledgementsChapter 2 PrologueChapter 3 The Container ContainedChapter 4 Rethinking the Discourses of Religious Nationalism in IndiaChapter 5 CulturesChapter 6 Ethnicist GenealogiesChapter 7 Ethnicism as CritiqueChapter 8 BibliographyChapter 9 IndexChapter 10 About the Author

Deepa S. Reddy is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.

Starting from an initial ethnographic insight that highly contentious religious struggles had filtered into and transformed the politics of women's activism, Deepa Reddy's important new text moves into a broader appraisal of contemporary Indian politicalagendas and the critical intellectual discourses informing them. From a number of strategic sites in and around Hyderabad and New Delhi, she explores why and how Hindu nationalism, as espoused notably by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has emerged as acompelling response to the post-Independence secularist movements of Gandhi-Nehru dynasty of the Congress Party and of the Indian Left. She set an ambitious task for the text: creating an analytical position from which the fraught sensibilities-the innertruths-that animate Hindu nationalism can be viewed as persuasive and legitimate from the perspectives of diverse groups of activists and adherents. In so doing she must confront the secularists' positions, articulated within activist-academic circles that dismiss the aspirations of the BJP as pathological, she must also acknowledge the potential of Hindu nationalism to ignite communal violence. The astute reflexive moves that impel Reddy's analysis offer the reader multiple vantage points from which t

• Chapter 1 AcknowledgementsChapter 2 PrologueChapter 3 The Container ContainedChapter 4 Rethinking the Discourses of Religious Nationalism in IndiaChapter 5 CulturesChapter 6 Ethnicist GenealogiesChapter 7 Ethnicism as CritiqueChapter 8 BibliographyChapter 9 IndexChapter 10 About the Author