The claim that India is a country of staggering dimensions where opposites are simultaneously true bears the dull verity of a cliché. Way back in 1989, shortly before economic liberalisation ripped open great gulfs and greater paradoxes within the nation, Ved Vyas, the fictional narrator of Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel, opened his story with a striking statement whose ominous political implication we are yet to outgrow: “India is not a developing country. It is a highly developed country in an advanced state of decay.”

Ways of imagining India have been both capacious and conflicting. But even within this shape-shifting landscape, it is shocking to realise that the self-conception of the nation now accommodates, indeed, foregrounds, both the calm, saintly superiority of the vishwaguru and the bloodthirsty violence of Dhurandhar. One is rooted in the nationalist rhetoric of the party at the helm of the nation and the other is the in-your-face militant nationalism of a popular Bollywood film. Distant as they seem from each other, they share something far more ominous than a faith in the invincible superiority of (a certain) India. They present an amalgam of how dominant politicians and pop-culture vendors have collectively conjured a national image that is as delirious as it is dangerous and, yet, almost gravitational in its magnetic pull on millions and millions of Indians.

If the quickest look at domestic development statistics and the ferment in our neighbouring nations bares the delirium, Dhurandhar’s Rs 1000-crore-plus pillage of the box office, at a time when people are dumping the multiplex for their phones, reveals the dizzying force of this magnetism. But even more than the anomaly between rhetoric and reality, what is deeply unsettling is how closely the vishwaguru and the Dhurandhar have now become mutually kindred in dominant conceptions of India.

India’s self-description as vishwaguru is deeply embedded in the hierarchical authority of the caste system. We are reminded of this in a recent article by the scholar and activist, Anand Teltumbde, who reads this national self-image as a projection of a domestic Brahminical superiority on the global stage. In this formulation, “India frames itself as the world’s teacher, the bearer of knowledge the rest of humanity supposedly lacks.” Such is how boastfulness comes to replace capability. “Instead of proprietary technology, industrial depth, or strategic leverage, slogans perform the work of achievement.” The uniqueness of this rhetoric is that while the rest of the world speaks of power, India speaks of “destiny, mastery, and the world awaiting our instruction”. The sad consequence is the displacement of importance on multiple registers — from the urgency of the present to the imagined and the projected glory of the past
and the future, from the material and the demonstrable to the spiritual and the emotional, and, most damningly, the delegitimisation of all critique as ‘anti-national’.

This is not without historical precedent. Partha Chatterjee has argued that anticolonial nationalism in 19th-century India claimed superiority in the ‘inner domain’ of national culture, that of the mind and the spirit, while conceding defeat to the British in the ‘outer domain’ of economy and statecraft. Thinkers and activists have pointed to the many pitfalls of such binaries and, yet, it is perhaps impossible to deny that one of the most celebrated movements of political resistance in the modern age, that of Gandhian non-violence, drew some inspiration from the narrative of India’s internal spiritual resistance.

But in today’s India, the narrative of spiritual superiority claims blood-kinship with masculinist violence. This kinship is glorified in the widest spectrum of canvases, from popular culture to the quotidian reality of our streets. Intolerance is now, of course, a worldwide phenomenon, triggered in no small part by digital technologies and their techno-feudal guardians — from WhatsApp venom to bots and trolls to Andrew Tate and Elon Musk and the AI-driven Facebook algorithms that ended up accelerating the Rohingya massacre. But none of that fully explains how the dominant self-imagination of India has brought together civilisational superiority with the glorification of vindictive and ‘correctional’ violence against its ‘enemies’ scattered across time and space, from the Mughals to Pakistan. The genre of the propaganda film, once dismissed as poor art, now a formidable box-office phenomenon, has the blessings and the support of the nation’s dominant political authorities. In a strange twist of irony, the spirituality of the vishwaguru now also sustains, and is sustained by, the blood-lust of the Dhurandhar. Most alarmingly, top-down political rhetoric has now found mass-celebration.

Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s 2023 film, Animal, established the spectacular appeal of visceral violence rarely seen before in Indian cinema. Dhurandhar brings that appeal to the celebration of nationalism in a way that recalls the chilling distinction drawn by the social psychologist, Ashis Nandy — if patriotism is the love for one’s country, nationalism is the character of that love once it finds an enemy to hate. Adolf Hitler’s favourite film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, made films, such as Triumph of the Will (1935), Olympia Part One (1938) and Olympia Part Two (1938), which, the writer, Uttaran Das Gupta, reminds us, draw from German mythology to portray the Führer as the national leader. For us, it is India’s close neighbours and historical alter egos slashed by religion where anti-India and anti-Hindu emotions rise to a ferment, making the subcontinent a boiling cauldron. How else to justify our narratives of violence but as the Kshatriya, bow-and-arrow clasping arm next to the scripture-wielding fingers of the Brahminical vishwaguru? The sanctimonious maleness of the Brahminical guru sees a natural ally in the masculinist violence of the demon-slaying Kshatriya. Omniscient and invisible, India emerges as an unsullied, upper-caste, male fantasy.

Sadly, the ultimate home truth is that violence is the symptom of failure. In India, the middle class spits moral disgust at the working-class man who returns home, failed, humiliated, and emasculated, to take out his drunken delusions in violence against his woman and children. How can we not see the failure of the vishwaguru in the brutality of the Dhurandhar?

Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony