Description
My research examines how Indian youth engage with Hindu nationalism through everyday spaces, i.e., homes, friendships, hostels, classrooms, media and social media. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with university students across regions, genders and castes, I trace how nationalist ideology becomes emotionally embedded not through formal indoctrination, but through intimate, affective processes and spaces.
My lived familiarity with these spaces exposes them as intensely political sites where gender roles, caste hierarchies, and communal boundaries are reproduced through mundane interactions. Growing up within the social worlds I study has attuned me to the political weight of seemingly apolitical interactions, allowing me to recognise ideology operating in spaces and processes that might otherwise be trivialised or rendered invisible. This proximity allows me to access the intimate spaces where nationalism is lived while maintaining the critical distance necessary to analyse how everyday practises create structures of inclusion and exclusion.
This paper argues that lived experience functions as an epistemological advantage, enabling access to varied voices and revealing the emotional infrastructure sustaining nationalism. By centring affect and everyday practice, I illuminate how ideology achieves durability not through top-down propagation but through horizontal circulation within peer networks and familial intimacies. Lived experience produces knowledge by revealing what realist objectivity obscures: that political phenomena are not only rationalised through institutions and policies, but felt, negotiated, and reproduced through emotional architectures. This approach challenges realist objectivity, arguing that understanding contemporary nationalisms requires researchers to engage with the emotional, subjective dimensions of political phenomena, particularly when investigating contexts we ourselves inhabit.
