Weaponizing Language

Ila Nagar is Associate Professor at The Ohio State University. Her recent publications include Being Janana: Language and Sexuality in Contemporary India (Routledge, 2019). She studies how language represents familiar and unfamiliar social hierarchies.

'Nagar's lucid and compassionate volume introduces 'linguistic trickery' as a powerful analytic for understanding the subtle yet consequential maneuvers that so often characterize political discourse. Encompassing a range of rhetorical strategies, the concept reveals how India's Hindu right has weaponized language to construct threatening images of Indian Muslims-paving the way for the tragedies of the nation's ethnonational present.' Janet McIntosh, Professor of Anthropology, Brandeis University

• Acknowledgments; Author's Notes; Political Parties, Alliances, and Abbreviations; Chronology; Introduction; 1. Cartographies of Language and Citizenship; 2. Where God Was Born: Ramajanmbhoomi and Babri Masjid; 3. From Shah Bano to Sharaya Bano: Indian Muslim Women as Subjects of Rights; 4. Gifts that Keep on Giving: Kashmir, Article 370, and Pakistan; 5. Who Is a Citizen of India? Citizenship Amendment Act, Minorities, and Termites; Postscript; Appendix; Glossary; References.