Dr. Mimasha Pandit is a Humboldt Experienced Researcher Fellow at Department of Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology, University of Muenster.

My Humboldt research project is titled Anthropology of Performance of People’s Identity: Case Studies of Politics, Religion, Violence and Digitized Popular Cultures in India 2014-2024. It seeks to understand the violent expression of collective identity by ordinary people in the Indian virtual popular space. Since 2014 when one of the largest political parties in India, Bhartiya Janata Party, won a mandate in the Indian legislature, politics of identity in the Indian subcontinent began to function through a hyper-nationalist appeal, based on xenophobic otherization of minority groups. This new brand of politics of identity was labelled as “Hindutva”. Through strategic propagation of misinformation/disinformation in digital popular culture in the form of concocted digital gossips, rumours, and manipulative narratives of hate, erstwhile secular narrative is subverted in favour of a unidirectional majoritarian narrative. It encourages acts of collective animosity, digital mob-trolling, misogynist character shaming, coded-lingo of dark humour that justifies or dilutes the use of violence by a particular religious community over the other. Varied forms of digital popular cultural mediums are mobilized to disseminate such narratives like hashtags, dark humorous memes, digital trolling, tweets and retweets, YouTube videos. etc. Scholarly attention to the digital ecosystem, and the impending threat that it holds for the religious minority due the network of misinformation and disinformation spewed by the Hindutva narrative, believes it to be the result of the unidirectional flow of the discourse disseminated by the Bhartiya Janata Party, and the cadres of the saffron brigade. Much attention has been paid by scholars to the rise of digital-cultural vigilantes, identified as trads (or traditionalists), who patrol the digital ecosystem with their hardline narrative of Hindutva identity and rigid otherization of religious minority through various digital popular culture.

Scholars attentive to the development of such hardline Hindutva cadre-ship, and the narrative of hate that it generates in the digital sphere that often spills into the public sphere, miss out the finer point of enactment of the identity. My project attempts to address the very question left unanswered in most of the previous academic engagement with the question of Hindutva identity- performance of Hindutva as an identity by the ordinary people of India. The project argues that the digitized popular space offers an alternate space to the people (not cadres, not party members) to express their transcript of collectivity through performance of verbal and gesticulatory violence towards an otherized religious group that does not always follow the discursive route of the political mentor-the BJP. It often customises and personalises the grammar of Hindutva to a brand of violence that is rooted in the personal worldview of the people thereby giving rise to a micropolitics of identity. Virtual sphere plays a crucial role in this understanding because the territorially delimited nature of the temporality and spatiality of the digital ecosystem makes space for a ritualistic transition into a collectivity endorsed by a social value system not wholly exclusive to the religion.

The primary objective of the study is to identify and interrogate the emergent entanglement of religion and politics in the South Asian virtual sphere and ascertain whether it can be treated as an interbraided offshoot of the emergent global virtual sphere. An anthropological intervention into the field through the lens of ritualistic performance and expression would interrogate public/virtual sphere where the performers and audience gather voluntarily. Such observations and critical analysis of the virtually expressed opinions can help develop an anthropological understanding of the virtual sphere as a space of entanglement of religion and politics, and everyday expression of the collective identity borne out of it.