Mythopolitics in South Asia: The Lifetimes of Powerful Stories

Struggles around identity form the major challenge in global politics today. To understand the formation of ethnic and religious identity, we must pay closer attention to narratives of belonging or mythological stories: stories one grows up listening to, stories that buttress one’s communal identity as an insider vis-à-vis an outsider, stories that tell one what it means to be human, and stories that teach one how to do the right thing. As we witness the rise of ethno-nationalisms, and the fear of the outsider—the common public enemy—in parts of Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia, these narratives of belonging become particularly crucial. In India, the current ruling Hindu nationalist party has been using Hindu mythologies- particularly the ancient Indian epic Ramayana- to reinforce its moral authority in the democratic politics for decades. But since 2011, social movements led by so-called lower castes have used traditional propaganda and social media campaigns to deconstruct this Hindu mythos- baring its hierarchies and misogyny in the public sphere—to delegitimise the moral authority of the Hindu nationalists. Project MYTHOPOL will analyse this mythopolitics, as produced in contemporary political moment, in the context of the existing mythological narratives, by the Hindu nationalism and its resistance as the primary tool of creating narratives of identity and belonging.

To understand the shifting terrains of authoritarianism in global politics, we need to understand the storyworlds, the metanarratives or the mythological nuclei of cultures. At the core of this project is the conflict between history and myth, or the historical and mythological registers of temporality. The main objective of this project is to produce a cogent theory of how mythological narratives underpin identity in the political field in the contemporary world.

Struggles around identity form the major challenge in global politics today. To understand the formation of ethnic and religious identity, we must pay closer attention to narratives of belonging or mythological stories: stories one grows up listening to, stories that buttress one’s communal identity as an insider vis-à-vis an outsider, stories that teach one what it means to be human, and stories that teach us how to do the right thing. As we witness the rise of ethno-nationalisms, and the fear of the outsider—the common public enemy—in parts of Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia, these narratives of belonging become particularly crucial. In India, the current ruling Hindu nationalist party has been using Hindu mythologies-particularly the ancient Indian epic Ramayana-to reinforce its moral authority in the democratic politics for decades. But since 2011, social movements led by so-called lower castes have used traditional propaganda and social media campaigns to deconstruct this Hindu mythos-baring its hierarchies and misogyny in the public sphere—to delegitimise the moral authority of the Hindu nationalists. Project MYTHOPOL will analyse this mythopolitics, as produced in contemporary political moment, in the context of the existing mythological narratives, by the Hindu nationalism and its resistance as the primary tool of creating narratives of identity and belonging. To understand the shifting terrains of authoritarianism in global politics, we need to understand the storyworlds, aspects of which have been referred to as the meta-narrative for groups of people, as ‘mythscapes’(Bell 2003), and as the “mythopoetic nuclei” (Ricoeur and Kearney 1978)of cultures. While myths are understood as repetitive, ‘timeless’ narratives, the timeline of political regimes is embedded in historical time. MYTHOPOL will address the conflicting temporalities of mythological time, historical time, and the time of political crisis. The main objective of this project is to produce a cogent theory of how mythological narratives underpin identity in the political field in the contemporary world.