A revisionist account arguing that Indian nationalism served as a laboratory for fascist ideas that continue to animate the Hindutva political movement of today.

Fascism swept the world in the 1920s and 1930s, but not only because of the seductive rhetoric of Mussolini, Hitler, and their collaborators. In India as well, a distinctive brand of fascist thought emerged—influenced by Euro-American ideologies but also departing from them in critical ways. The first systematic examination of this political philosophy, Fascism in India revises our sense of what fascism can be, while demonstrating that it is very much with us in the form of Hindutva, the ethnonationalist movement at the center of Indian politics today.

Luna Sabastian offers a novel interpretation of Hindutva: both its canonical formulation by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and its reinvention by Deendayal Upadhyaya after Indian independence. Sabastian shows how Hindutva generated ideas of Hindu race and religion that had the potential to erase Muslims not through genocide or ethnic cleansing but by means of violent absorption. Focusing on aggressive miscegenation, Indian fascists proposed a singular kind of racial project, eschewing notions of purity even while maintaining a starkly eliminationist objective. Fascism in India also grapples with Hindutva ideas of caste and its relation to race—particularly in comparison with Nazi uses of these concepts—and of sovereignty, which Indian fascists envisioned beyond the “blood and soil” narrative of the nation-state. Finally, Sabastian reflects on Hindutva’s reorientation toward Hindu piety after the creation of Pakistan effectively resolved India’s “Muslim problem.”

Bringing clarity to an ideology little understood in the West, Fascism in India is an eye-opening perspective on Hindutva and a profound meditation on the proliferation and evolution of right-wing thought.