Description
This paper examines how Hindu nationalism operates not primarily through institutional channels or formal political mobilisation, but through the affective microprocesses of everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Indian university students across regions, genders, and castes, I trace how nationalist ideology becomes emotionally embedded through intimate spaces like homes, friendships, hostels, classrooms, and social media interactions.
Rather than studying nationalism as a top-down political phenomenon, I centre the mundane practices through which young people experience, negotiate, and transmit nationalist affects. I argue that understanding contemporary nationalisms requires analytical attention to what is termed 'affective infrastructure' - the emotional sustenance of political ideologies through horizontal circulation within intimate spaces, and processes, including the home, friend group, classrooms, etc. These microprocesses, even a casual joke invoking communal boundaries, gendered expectations naturalised through family and school, caste hierarchies reproduced in friendship formations, reveal how ideology achieves durability through feeling rather than formal indoctrination.
By foregrounding affect and everyday practice, I demonstrate how seemingly ‘apolitical’ interactions function as intensely political sites where power operates through emotional registers. This methodology illuminates what realist objectivity obscures: that political phenomena are not only rationalised through policies and institutions, but felt, embodied, and lived. The paper contributes to emotions scholarship by demonstrating how ethnographic engagement with microprocesses reveals the intimate mechanics through which religious nationalism becomes a durable ‘common sense’.
