The South Asian Studies Council Brown Bag Series presents:
Felix Pal, Australian National University: “Tracing The Banyan Tree: Rethinking Organisational Ties In The Many-Footed Hindu Right.”
Felix is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political and Social Change at the Australian National University. She is currently visiting Yale as a Yale Fox International Fellow for 2019-20. Her work focuses on changing patterns of organization and affiliation within the Indian Hindu far-right.
As the Hindu right consolidates itself at the center of state power, it becomes increasingly clear how little we know about the organizational networks that animate it. This paper is an exploratory attempt to draw some definitional lines around the Sangh Parivar, reconceptualizing it, not as a loose network of affiliates, but as a single corporate organism. What is the Sangh? How are Sangh organizations connected to each other? What doors does reconceptualization open to those committed to challenging the violent Hindu nationalist project?