Maya Nandakumar
PhD Student, Political Science
This talk traces transformations in the language of vulnerability, victimhood, and collective trauma across four phases of Hindu nationalist thought from 1820 to 2022. Since the BJP’s rise to power in 2014, politicians, educators, and activists have drawn greater attention to shared trauma in Hindu collective memory. To understand what prompted this “trauma turn,” I investigate the language of collective suffering in the publications and speeches of influential Indian thinkers, like Swami Dayanand Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Madan Mohan Malviya, V.D. Savarkar, and M.S. Golwalkar, among others.