The Greater India Experiment

An unusual book, The Greater India Experiment is itself an experiment that stretches the limits of conventional ethnography of the kind that specialists in a variety of fields, including world Christianity, are now familiar with. Being from Nagaland, one of the highland states in Northeast India, means that the author, Arkotong Longkumer, a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, brings to his project a certain firsthand intimacy with the complexities of upland societies in this relatively understudied region. And yet without the years of multi-sited field research that went into it, the book would hardly have garnered its growing acclaim. Thus far, that acclaim has been most pronounced among South Asianists interested in, or concerned with, the emergence of the hegemonically ambitious variety of Hindu nationalism known as “Hindutva” (lit., Hindu-ness). By and large, most of the highland populations were never Hindu in the first place and nowadays several largely identify as Christian. That, however, has not stopped Hindutva organizations from propagating a kind of irredentist expansionism, premised on the “greater India” of the book’s title, an imagined civilizational unity of timeless antiquity, vaster in scope than the cartographic India of today.Hindutva missionaries (or, in its own idiom, pracāraks), mainly lowlander Indians sent and supported by the RSS (a “patriotic” affiliate of the BJP, India’s political juggernaut), and their indigenous highland converts are Longkumer’s twin foci. And, accordingly, his ethnographic quest is to understand them the way they understand themselves—a remarkable departure from the academic norm, reminiscent of Susan Harding’s brave ethnography of Falwell Fundamentalism in America. This alone makes the book worth reading, since at times nothing seems easier or more tempting than to debunk Hindutva mythology or decry its virulently antiminority rhetoric. Quite unexpectedly, the author’s findings from the Northeast, where overt Christophobia would be self-defeating, reveal a more accommodating side of Hindutva, one that is still in the process of becoming. And so, at a time when communal tensions in India are flaring at a postindependence high, the move toward radical empathy on the part of an ethnographer in the Western academy seems quite striking. Questions will remain—is Hindutva openness in the Northeast real or apparent, shallow or deep?—but the methodological approach the author exemplifies might well have wider applicability. After all, religious nationalism has emerged in many an unexpected place besides India, once widely believed to be a paradise of interreligious tolerance, no strings attached.For this reader, it was not only the searing intensity of Hindutva convictions that became more vivid after reading Longkumer’s fine-grained believer vignettes but also the salience of the logic that animates the system as a whole, regardless of its overall veracity. And for students of world Christianity, the author offers nuanced insights into lived Christianity in the Northeast, in particular its embranglement in the postindependence politics of a region famous for militant separatism that New Delhi has always found hard to govern. In the end, when the indigenes who were his informants have all had their say on complex matters of change and continuity, hope and despair, Longkumer alludes to the possibility of new forms and phases of “indigenous resistance” (275) appearing on the horizon, generated in response to Hindutva’s growing presence in the once-remote highlands. To this reader, that sounds like the hint of a sequel to the present volume. Whether that turns out to be the case or not, the two-part structure of this one comes impressively packed with a fascinating array of background information, historical and contemporary, on Hindutva, its missions and missionaries in the book’s first half, and on pre-Christian religions, indigenous movements, and the more staple forms of missionary-initiated Christianity in the second. Of these six chapters, the one I appreciated the most was the first, an introduction called “Arboreal Nation,” the title being suggestive of a well-known Hindutva metaphor (8–9) about India as an interconnected nation of diverse peoples emanating from a singular, primordial source rooted in the soil of greater India. Here, Longkumer helpfully spells out the architectonics of the book, although I would have preferred fewer invocations of theoreticians whose musings strike me as exogenous to subjects that the author himself would be more than adequate to handle.Outside of these two halves, a seventh chapter addresses a draconian piece of legislation called the Citizenship Amendment Act, which would have far-reaching consequences for the whole of India but perhaps especially for the Northeast, an interstitial region where boundaries are more fluid than fixed and easily crossed by migrants and refugees in times of turmoil and crisis. Now enacted and partially implemented, the impact of the legislation could not be taken into full account by the author, though not through any fault of his own but rather due to the book’s publication schedule. That the far-reaching ramifications initially experienced in the Northeast have begun to be felt throughout India comes as no surprise. What is surprising, however, is that new interreligious alliances have been forged in opposition to the BJP’s vision of India as “Hindu” rather than “secular,” in the specifically Indian sense of equal treatment for all religions. Accordingly, one may rightly wonder whether the loss or denial of citizenship under the act might galvanize some of the new varieties of “indigenous resistance” Longkumer alludes to at the end of his book. For a critical update on these important developments, see David Emmanuel Singh, “Emerging Cooperation among Minorities in Defense of Indian Secularism since the Adoption of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) under the BJP,” in World Christianity and Interfaith Relations, ed. R. Young (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2022)

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