In this seminar, Moyukh Chatterjee discusses the ways in which Hindu nationalist activists and the wider public engage with state-sanctioned Hindu nationalist iconography, focusing on the relationship between the subaltern body and the authoritarian frame in India. While a range of media forms, including posters, television, and audio and video cassettes, have long been an integral part of the Hindu nationalist movement, Chatterjee suggests that the digital affords new ways for right-wing activists and the wider public to insert themselves into a state-sanctioned aesthetic regime. Using two examples – a right-wing propaganda film and the inauguration of the Ayodhya temple – Chatterjee shows how devalued and subaltern male bodies co-produce authoritarian consensus. More broadly, this talk is an invitation to think about authoritarianism beyond static binaries of production/reception and online/offline by returning to elementary encounters between the body and the image.
Moyukh Chatterjee is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
