<i>Which</i> god’s own country? A spatial history of Hindu-Christian tensions in modern Kerala
S. Harikrishnan
What the paper says
Kerala has long resisted the ambitions of the Bharatiya Janata Party in India; a state where despite a large grassroots presence of the Sangh Parivar, the BJP has enjoyed little electoral success. Previous scholarship has attributed this to the peculiar demography in Kerala which makes it difficult to consolidate Hindu sentiment, or to a ‘secular political culture’ nurtured by the socio-religious reform movements and the strong presence of communism. In recent years, the BJP in Kerala has tried to remedy this through outreach to Christian communities to position them as allies against a common ‘Muslim other’. This article looks at Hindu–Christian encounters from the nineteenth century to the present to argue that these attempts can be read productively as rhetorical and strategic. Through an analysis of key incidents, I argue that historically, advocates of Hindutva forces have considered Kerala to possess a ‘sacred geography’ for Hindus, where other identities are seen as invasive.
7 citations
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.47 × 0.4 = 0.19 |
| M · momentum | 0.68 × 0.15 = 0.10 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.