Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship project
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Glob-Pop-Nat offers a new study of the transnational connections between emerging Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) and contemporary European fascism in the 1920s-30s, enabling through its globalising and comparative perspective on their relationship improvements to our understanding of both.
Moreover, by employing the still underused framework of comprehending Hindutva as a form of populist nationalism, it opens up a complementary, and crucial set of themes: of populist nationalism, so urgently and frenetically analysed in today’s world, in diachronic and also global contexts; of contemporary populist phenomena set in the light of twentieth-century historical experience.
The project, through its examination of these historical comparisons and connections, also therefore assists in the theoretical delineation of the relationship between populist nationalism and fascism, as well other radical nationalist formulations.
This project is set apart from other attempts to study Hindutva in relation to fascism by its unprecedented vernacular and historically focused interdisciplinary study of Hindutva’s birthplace, the western-Indian region of Maharashtra, whose political culture was formative on the ideology. The region’s culture is key to understanding the thought and action of those ideologues sprung from it in the 1920s and 30s, as is the peculiar pattern of its imbibing, in these crucial interwar years, of the cosmopolitan ideas and trends relating to political organisation, ethnicity’s relationship to state and nation, paramilitarism, and criticism of the liberal state – features so much at issue in the question.
The project page on the website of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice is here https://pric.unive.it/projects/glob-pop-nat/home
Recent updates:
Forthcoming publication: ‘Populist Nationalism as a Global Phenomenon’ (Bloomsbury Academic, editor Robert E. Upton)
Marie Skłodowska-Curie project ‘Glob Pop Nat’ will witness several more publications, in addition to the Oxford University Press monograph already published.
Conference: Populist Nationalism as a Global Phenomenon: Echoes of the Long Twentieth Century
May 30th-31st 2024 saw a major international conference at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, organised as the principal event of my Marie Skłodowska-Curie project, Glob-Pop-Nat.
Publication of ‘The Thought of Bal Gangadhar Tilak: An Intellectual Biography’ (Oxford University Press)
24th April 2024 saw the publication of The Thought of Bal Gangadhar Tilak: An Intellectual Biography.
Magazine interview on project research in best-selling Marathi newspaper ‘Sakal’.
I was interiewed by the Mumbai journalist Dulari Deshpande on my research into nationalism in Maharashtra, India, and around the world. A fantastically wide-ranging set of questions, and Marathi readers can read my responses in Sakal Daily here.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 10103163, (‘Glob-Pop-Nat’).
Robert E. Upton 