One of my earliest memories is watching a paramilitary parade of far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) men in khaki uniform in Gorakhpur, the heartland of Hindu nationalist India. The RSS, founded in 1925 with the explicit aim of making India a strong Hindu nation, is the ideological parent of the Indian Prime Minister’s BJP or Bharatiya Janata Party. As an academic who has debated RSS ideologues about their enablement of anti-minority violence, and whose work centers on democratic erosion in Narendra Modi’s India post-2014, I approached Luna Sabastian’s Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva with great expectations. The book delivers an ambitious and compelling account that refuses to prevaricate about the violent roots of Hindu nationalism, making substantive contributions to historical scholarship.

Scholars working on Hindutva and fascism typically adopt one of two major foci: the deep historical entanglements of militant Hindu nationalism with fascism in the first half of the 20th century or the fascist nature of the contemporary Hindutva project unfolding over the last decade. The former is available through archives (Marzia Casolari, “Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-up in the 1930s: Archival Evidence,” Economic and Political Weekly, 35(4), 2000). The latter has scholars disagreeing over the relevance of fascism as a descriptor (see Kajri Bhatty and Nandini Sundar, “Sliding from Majoritarianism toward Fascism,” International Sociology, 35(6), 2020; Achin Vanaik, Hindutva Rising: Secular Claims, Communal Realities, 2017). Global right-wing projects have prompted further analysis of the post-2014 era (Eviane Leidig, “Hindutva as a Variant of Right-Wing Extremism,” Patterns of Prejudice 54(3), 2020; Nitasha Kaul, “Rise of the political right in India: Hindutva-development mix, Modi myth, and dualities,” Journal of Labor and Society, 20(4), 2017).

Sabastian’s distinctive contribution lies in arguing that historically anti-colonial nationalist Indians developed their own theory of fascism. This bold attempt at an Indian theory of fascism focuses on early twentieth century, zooming in on the lives and contradictions in the ideas of three men, namely, the nationalist academic Benoy Sarkar, the well-known anticolonial nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, and the radical activist and theorist Manabendra Nath Roy. Sarkar viewed fascism as a bulwark for anticolonial nationalism against socialist internationalism’s threat. Bose, the ‘warrior prince’ Leftist who collaborated with Nazi Germany, proposed “samyavada” (p. 41)—a synthesis between “aggressive nationalist” fascism and “anti-national” communism—as India’s own brand of socialism, its “object lesson to the world.” Roy, founder of the Indian Communist Party and Sarkar’s student, saw fascism as reactionary and “vedantist.”

Sabastian illuminates how reinterpretations of Hindu religious and philosophical views shaped these men’s engagement with fascism, moving beyond non-violent Nehru-Gandhi nationalism and Buddhist ethos they deemed “weakening.” The themes of militant vanguards with mystical underpinnings, reactions to futurism and internationalist utopianism, disaffection with examples of plutocratic parliamentary democratic systems, reinterpretations of Hinduism as religion and philosophy run through the intellectual ferment of the time.

The chapter on “Savarkar’s Miscegenous Race” reveals how RSS founder Vinayak Damodar Savarkar reimagined orthodox Hinduism as a militant religion. To create the Hindu nation, Hinduism needed to be a “proper” militant force, widening Hindu-ness: Hindu men increasing the fold by marrying beyond religion and caste, and Muslim-married Hindu women returning through purification (“shuddhi”) rituals. Savarkar predicated Hindu sovereignty on forced marriage capture, viewing Muslims as converts and invaders who had grown by capturing, converting, raping, and marrying Hindu women. Yet Sabastian’s claim that “Savarkar predicated Hindutva on the very thing that masculinist imaginations of the nation and state exclude: consanguinity, women, and the family” (p. 71) overlooks how women’s inclusion is actually central to, not excluded from, such masculinist imaginations (Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 2014 [1990]; Dibyesh Anand on “pornonationalist” Hindutva, Hindu Nationalism in India and the Politics of Fear, 2011). The violent fantasies of Hindu nationalism remain profoundly gendered and Islamophobic.

Another chapter on “Nazi Volk against Kaste” contrasts conversations on caste linked to race and slavery in America with the German idea of Kaste as an indictment of the aristocratic dispensation of power. Sabastian focuses on the latter to illustrate how “an Indian social problem became the defining political problem of making ‘the people’ sovereign” (p. 118). Throughout the volume, the word “sovereignty” is used in multiple senses without clarification, and this is particularly problematic in the chapter on “Hindu crown” (defined often by what it is not, instead of by what it is (p. 132); or statements like “the Hindu crown did not come to rest on Nehru’s head,” p. 154). A chapter concerning early post-partition dynamics grapples with the relationship between sovereignty and space in the Hindu nationalist imagination but sidesteps work on spatial cartographic imaginaries of Hindu nationalism.

The absence of Kashmir is manifestly conspicuous (mentioned only as “a red hot issue” on p. 157, and superficially again on pp. 171, 178) given its central significance for Hindutva ideologues both then and now. Political scientists and international relations scholars may also have appreciated closer engagement with some key concepts. Despite references to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, and mentions of Carl Schmitt, there’s no systematic engagement with core concepts of sovereignty, nationalism, or state/nation relations. Hannah Arendt appears a few times, and scholars of hegemony and agonism are absent.

There is a missed opportunity in the Epilogue to engage with a growing body of contemporary scholarship from India and beyond over the last decade (with the notable exception of Christophe Jaffrelot). This matters because the current Hindutva nationalism in India directly draws upon early RSS ideologies. To wit, contemporary “Bahu Lao, Beti Bachao Andolan” (Bring in a daughter-in-law, Save your daughter) campaigns of Hindu right can be traced back to Savarkar’s views. Further, PM Modi’s mythologized role operates in historicized registers as helming a project that rescues “Hindu India” from its enemies through policies that target Muslims in citizenship, marriage, and more.

The book gives a fascinating historical glimpse into how western radicals can cluelessly champion “anticolonial” figures as progressive due to the contradictory ideological pronouncements of the “anticolonial” Right. Sabastian mentions that Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin (the Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse) reportedly conveyed his best compliments to Guy Alfred Aldred (1886–1963, British anarchist communist, later Christian humanist) before being executed. The same Aldred also advocated for Savarkar as a “suffering voice” in a global struggle against imperialism and oppression. At the same time that RSS stood for a Hindutva India in the mold of Nazi Germany, RSS founder Savarkar persuaded Aldred that he stood for humanism (pp. 163–164). The general secretary of another far-right organization (Hindu Mahasabha) made contradictory public resolutions and private statements (p. 168). A key RSS leader, Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar, wrote a book applauding the Nazi approach to Jews and later disowned it when RSS needed respectability after the murder of Gandhi (p. 177). Sabastian confronts this question of how right-wing ideologies of the RSS extol harmony and monism and yet square this with their intense hostility toward Muslims. She disregards hypocrisy as a “surface” answer, writing that “at a deeper level, the question is how Hindutva can desire to annex that which it hates” (p. 179). An analysis focused on political strategy might make more of Hindutva’s dissimulation, duplicity, and hypocrisy.

The volume nevertheless performs important scholarly work. It underlines the powerful fact that Savarkar’s Hindutva project sought not merely Muslim subjugation as second-class citizens but their incorporation, refusing to recognize the limit of even a completely subjugated “minority” (p. 84). The book reminds us that fascism discussions need not be solely anchored in Europe. Another theme that emerges is that the admiration of Hitler and Nazis in the Indian context is not merely a popular cultural anomaly (evidenced by the sale of “Mein Kampf” on pavements), but Indian political theorists, anti-colonial revolutionaries, and Hindutva ideologues have a long history of engaging with, and looking up to, fascist formations. Contemporary Indian RSS/BJP Modi-led project is neither wholly new nor an aberration; it is, as others have documented (Ashutosh Varshney, “Contested Meanings: India’s National Identity, Hindu Nationalism, and the Politics of Anxiety,” Daedalus, 1993), an enduring and now dominant strain among competing nationalisms.

Ultimately, this enriching book challenges a container view of fascist ideas while expanding their roots: “Indians took everything, from everywhere, and made it their own” (p. 14). Its core thesis, as stated in a very accessible introduction, is to illuminate the “one addition that India made to political thought: Hindutva, the ideology of Hindu nationalism…India can teach us something new about the ‘f-word’” (p. 1). In this regard, the book is certainly successful!