Introduction

In 2023, the prevalence of Hindutva in the virtual space and its link with social media has been the subject of inquiry for various academic studies. Communalism and the process of ‘othering’ has a long history in colonial India. [i]  The production of a Hindu identity in practices of marking a distinction from the ‘other’ thus has a long history going back to the colonial period with the acts of lynching cow herders, often Muslims (however, involving instances of Dalits too), as well as the public spectacle of Ram Navami processions, usually going through Muslim localities to show a sense of religious domination by the majority.

If this is a long story what is it that makes Hindu nationalism and acts of aggression distinct in the contemporary period? This essay using Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art, in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, aims to comprehend the changing nature of fascistic incorporation of aesthetics and its politicisation, especially of already existing historical phenomenons such as Ram Navami processions and cow herder lynching in contemporary India, and analyse how, the act of aggression has changed from physical reproduction, in the frame of producing merely structural violence to aggression performed now also producing a sense symbolic violence, where aggression is done by aggressors for mechanical reproduction on social media.

The Normalisation of the Simulation of Violence and Hate

In the serialised short essays published in 1991, Jean Baudrillard argued that while materially the events of the Gulf War were taking place, was it justifiable to call these events a war? The events of the Gulf War seemed mapped, practised, mechanised and played out in such swiftness that Baudrillard believed it felt more like a simulation of a hegemonic power, displaying its dominance onto an enemy force, which could not even comprehend what was happening. “We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual.”^[ii] Essentially, for Baudrillard, the war was a simulacrum for the hegemonic power along with its nexus of media propaganda to display the simulation of war in an almost scripted performance on live TV where the exercise of violence onto Iraqi bodies became part of a hyper-real virtual simulation without them even having the agency to resist.^[iii]

In contemporary India, the rise of Hindutva cannot be viewed merely as a one-time event. There exists a history that historians, sociologists and political scientists have systematically studied through methodical seriousness. Taking the dual case of movements of cow protection and the Ram Navami processions, a plethora of research has systematically argued that such cow protection movements and Ram Navami processions have had a legacy being traced back to the late colonial period, where the ideological coherence along with an opportunity for an organisational effort, provided the setting of the practising of a discourse of difference and rise of nationalism which seeks its imagination in a collective religious experience and anxiety of being different from the ‘other’, thereby requiring protection and display of internal homogeneity onto the ‘other’ who threaten this coherent homogeneity vis. a vis. ‘Muslim’ as the ‘other’.^[iv]

While existing research has methodically studied the colonial origins of the creation of homogenous identities,^[v] how does one bring these debates onto the contemporary rise of Hindu Nationalism acquiring a direct political and civic legitimacy in the world of tech?^[vi] Here, the idea of simulation becomes influential, for such simulation is happening on pre-existing historical schisms, but because of the ubiquitous nexus of the media and the state, where the state cannot claim anymore to be ‘above’ and ‘over’ the society, it has become an active participant in the hegemonic exercise of violence.

Work of Art, Mechanical Reproduction And Fascism

Walter Benjamin, in his early 20^th-century essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, systematically provided keen insights into the structural changes that art has gone through with the rise of replication, photography and film. Benjamin believed that art before mechanical reproduction had a sense of tradition and history attached to it, where the physical existence of the work of art could not be replicated, for with each manual replication of that work of art, a sense of authenticity which Walter Benjamin labels ‘Aura’, was lost.

Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye…To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose sense of the universal equality of things has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.^[vii]

Such authentic artefacts maintained the ‘aura’, which led to them achieving a cult value and being used for religious and magical purposes. However, with the rise of replication and photography, the purpose of such works of art changed dramatically. For the first time, it was more important to be able to exhibit it. The purpose of such art, especially photography and films, was not the authenticity of it but to display for mass replicability. “Instead of being based on ritual, it [art] begins to be based on another practice—politics.”^[viii]

For politics, replication of the work of art, such as photographs, is done for mass consumption and pleasure, along with politicisation. Walter Benjamin specifically elaborates how this politicisation of the work of art is something so central to fascistic politics that it provides a medium through which the proletariat masses can give way for their expression and participation in mass culture without changing property relations. The spectacle of the work of art therefore through mechanical reproduction always maintains amongst its consumers the desire to be spectacled. This, however, always leaves them in a state of perennial dissatisfaction even after being entangled in the chasm of propaganda.^[ix]

The linkage of fascism to the rise of mechanical reproduction is important to comprehend how a newer medium is exploited for propaganda and dissemination of hatred, for it becomes a medium through which the anxious masses are first made to recognise their anxieties then, later made to link their anxieties onto unreal and mythical claims. Benjamin’s essay is seminal to making sense of what is happening in contemporary India, where the display of mob lynchings and exertion of domination through Ram Navami processions on social media is tied to a repetitive simulation of violence where the subject of domination has become a part of the reproduction of the internal enemy for the masses.

Arvind Rajagopal in ‘Politics after Television’ complicates the relationship between the rise of the television sets at home, the serialised display of Ramayana and the mass mobilisation of Hindu nationalists for Ramjanmbhoomi movement and the subsequent destruction of the Babri Masjid.  In the late 1980s, serialised displays by the state-sanctioned Doordarshan channel on TV created a sense of simultaneity amongst the mass viewers. It was in a sense, the extension of the ‘imagined communities’ argument, where the imagination of the ancient collective past, through the chasm of visual representation, reinvigorated through mythology the feeling of racialised and religious collective belonging.^[x] Thus, Ramayana as mythology which becomes a spectacle of meaning-making, provided the Hindu nationalists to mobilise the discontentment of the people into the Ramjanmbhumi movement, with the Muslims as the internal enemy and the elite state as a promoter of a false sense of secularism.

Social Media, Hindutva and Practice

In the 21^st century, the rise of Hindu majoritarianism under Narendra Modi was facilitated by the efficient use of social media by the Bhartiya Janta Party in spreading disinformation, party propaganda and false myths about the Muslim threat and inaccurate historical accounts to promote a mass hysteria of Muslims ‘enemy’, the compromising of the Congress because its impurities and elite politics. The efficient usage of Whatsapp not merely for propaganda but for vigilante organisations, especially by the Bajrang Dal and Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) to threaten inter-religious couples and false cow transport instances culminating in the lynching of mostly poor Muslim men and the moral policing of Hindu women shows the efficient manner in which social media is used beyond the consumption of propaganda to active participation in virtual hate campaigns.

But what makes this mechanical reproduction distinct from Walter Benjamin and Arvind Rajagopal? Here, I believe, the reproduction of the videos of Muslims being lynched, inter-religious couples being morally policed and quashed and Ram Navami processions being carried out as a show of dominance in front of mosques, display that such acts, despite an origin in the historical longue duree, have become in a sense the ideological practice of the discourse of aggression. These displays of aggression, which can be viewed as emanating from an understanding of masculine and sexual anxieties, are different in one fundamental way; the intricate manners in which social media and communication have become part of our everyday existence. These acts of aggression have become not a once-in-a-time objective exertion of aggression but reproduced aggression for mass replicability. What I mean by this is that, often before the act of being lynched or display of domination such as shouting ‘Jai Sri Ram’ or making the Muslim shout the same, where one would assume that the aggressor is riled up with hatred, that such state of aggression would make one forget the idea to record such act. However, within this form of aggression, taking out the phone and recording the display of aggression has become the imperative precursor to exercising aggression. Reporting on the 2015 lynching of Mohammad Riyaz, Muhammad Ali went and did a detailed interview with Premi, the current head of the local Shamli unit, about how he lynched Mohammad Riyaz on the suspicious grounds of possible cow slaughtering. In the article Muhammad reports, right before the lynching “Together with a crew of his fellow militants, Premi bound Reyaz’s hands behind his back and paraded him through the most crowded street in Shamli. A large mob formed, smartphones at the ready, as Premi beat the man into semiconsciousness and flogged him with a belt for more than an hour. “Cow killer! Cow killer! Cow killer!” Premi shouted like a man possessed. Before long, the mob overflowed the banks of the physical marketplace, as videos of Premi’s public torture of Reyaz went viral on WhatsApp and YouTube.”^[xi]

In colonial times, cow protection movements became the ideological practice of collectivisation to organise a sense of collective Hindu identity. In post-colonial India, such riots, often with more Muslim casualties while products of historical schisms, were also an effect of state negligences. At the time of the rise of Television, the state became an active participant in mythological propaganda. The aggrieving body filled with hatred displayed exercising of that hatred through the Ramjanmbhumi movement in riots and destructions. However, social media has created a perennial state of anxiousness, where the siren of notification, as reported by Muhammad Ali for Premi, the Bajrang Dal activist, means time for the protection of Hindu women and cows from the ‘Muslim’ vulture; with the activist’s phone receiving more than 400 notifications in Bajrang Dal groups each day, keeping them in a constant state of anxiety and action to protect Hindu ‘honour’.

Construction of Symbolic Violence and Conclusion

The insidious process in which aggressors are engaging in simultaneity by recording the act of aggression on Muslim bodies for mass consumption, validation and reproduction is also acting very well with the creation of a newer sphere of helplessness for Muslim subjects. This bombardment of videos and news of aggression by vigilantes and state actors correlates with the legitimation of what Pierre Bourdieu would call symbolic violence. For Bourdieu, “In the routine flow of day-to-day life, power is seldom exercised as an overt physical force: instead, it is transmuted into a symbolic form, and thereby endowed with a kind of legitimacy that it would not otherwise have”.^[xii] Thus, symbolic power does not exist in isolation but rather interacts with physical and structural forms of violence. It acts as a way in which the domination established through violence is legitimised in everyday discourse.

These markers of aggression and domination have taken a scripted form at this point, becoming pretty much a simulation, where one has become so desensitised to hearing the act of killing Muslim bodies. However, while the outer display of normalisation does exist, the simulation of a play displaying aggression there, establishing symbolic violence, creates the perennial state of anxiousness for Muslim consumers of media too. Each year, the Ram Navami procession brings calls and acts of violence and a manner which has been seen before, but with the mechanical reproduction of that violence, the form in which the aggressors participate has changed significantly for them to be constant, simultaneous participants in the creation of the imagined community of the Hindu nationalism.

References:

Abu-Lughod, L. (1990). The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women. American Ethnologist, 17(1), 41–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/645251

Ali, M. (2020). The Rise of a Hindu Vigilante in the Age of WhatsApp and Modi. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/indias-frightening-descent-social-media-terror

Arvind Rajagopal. (2005). Politics After Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. Cambridge University Press.

Baudrillard, J. (1995). The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Indiana University Press.

Benjamin, W. (1969). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf

Benjamin, W. (2019). “Thesis on the Philosophy of History.” Www.sfu.ca. 2019. https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewfCONCEPT2.html

Bourdieu, P., Thompson, J. B., Raymond, G., & Adamson, M. (2003). Language & Symbolic Power. Harvard University Press.

Freitag, S. B. (1980). Sacred Symbol as Mobilizing Ideology: The North Indian Search for a“Hindu” Community. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22(4), 597–625. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500009567

Gyanendra Pandey. (2012). The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Oxford University Press.

Marx, K. (1996).Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin.

[i] Shereen Ilahi “Sectarian Violence and the British Raj: The Muharram Riots of Lucknow”

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14736480701493088?journalCode=find20

^[ii] Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Gulf War Will Not Take Place in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’, p. 27

^[iii] Ibid, p. 35

^[iv] Sandra Freitag, “Sacred Symbol as Mobilizing Ideology: The North Indian Search for a “Hindu” Community”

^[v] Gyanendra Pandey, “The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India”

^[vi] It’s not as if contemporary India has never had legitimacy of Hindu nationalism as has been argued by most scholars that the history of India in the 20th century is one which cannot be viewed without analysing the intricate manners in which the state legitimised vigilantism. However, India under NDA post 2014, has removed any masquerading effect of even dis-acknowledging the distinction between and support for such ideology and practice.

^[vii] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, pp 5-6

^[viii] Ibid, p. 6

^[ix] Ibid, p. 20

^[x] Arvind Rajagopal, “Politics after Television : Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public”, p. 24

^[xi] Muhammad Ali, “The Rise of a Hindu Vigilante in the Age of WhatsApp and Modi”

^[xii] Bourdieu, Pierre, “Language & Symbolic Power‌”, p. 23

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Arman Hasan is pursuing an MA in Sociology at South Asian University (SAU).