Three words dominate the argument about culture in the Modi era, and they sound like one word spoken three times. Hindi names a language. Hindutva names a doctrine of cultural and religious identity first defined in print by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923. Hindostan names a land, the territory between the Indus and the seas, imagined as the home of a civilisation. The Hindi Hindutva Hindostan triad is the organising formula of the Modi era’s politics of culture, and the triad poses a question that none of its three terms poses alone: whether a language commitment, an identity commitment and a territorial commitment can be fused into a single account of what India is, and what a state that attempts the fusion does to the settlements it inherited in 1947, 1950 and 1956. This article defends the integrated-triad reading of that question. The claim is namable: the Hindi-Hindutva-Hindostan triad poses the substantive cultural question the Modi era forces, and the integrated triad captures what fragmented language, religion or territory framings cannot.

The three terms share a root, and the shared root is a river. Sindhu, the Sanskrit name for the Indus, passed through Persian as Hindu, the name for the people and the land beyond the river, and through Greek as Indos, the source of India itself. Hindostan joined the Persian suffix stan, a place, to the same stem. Hindi marked the speech of the land of Hind. Hindutva, the youngest of the three words, attached the Sanskrit abstract suffix tva, the suffix of essence and quality, to Hindu, producing a term for Hindu-ness itself. The philology produces an appearance of unity: one root, one family, one civilisational substance flowing from language to identity to land. The appearance misleads. A language is spoken, taught and administered. An identity is claimed, ascribed and contested. A territory is governed, bounded and defended. The Modi era’s politics of culture becomes legible only when the three are read together and read precisely: the Hindi commitment, to elevate one language into the nation’s common speech; the Hindutva commitment, to anchor the nation’s identity in Hindu civilisation; and the Hindostan commitment, to describe the state’s territory as a civilisational homeland rather than a purely political jurisdiction. Each revisits a named settlement. Each operates through a distinct mechanism. The argument of this article is that the coherence attempt across the three, pursued through education policy, official communication, ceremony and citizenship law between 2014 and 2024, is the substantive fact that rival readings of the period fragment and miss.

The method of the article is documentary and comparative. Each is tested against the settlement it revisits, clause by clause and file by file, using the instruments the brief for this study designates as primary: the National Education Policy of 2020, the curriculum documents of the Ministry of Education and the NCERT between 2017 and 2024, and the communications on questions of culture from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Home Affairs after 2014. Where a claim in the argument rests on a contested characterisation, a motive, a label, an accusation of majoritarian design or a defence of civilisational recovery, the characterisation is attributed to its named holder and stated at its strongest, because a reading that survives only against weakened opponents has adjudicated nothing. Where the record is a date, a text, a vote or a judgment, the article states the record plainly and marks the points where the record itself is disputed as disputed.

Scholarship on the period divides into three readings, and each reading seizes one strand and mistakes the part for the whole. The continuous-Hindutva reading, stated in its most documented form by Christophe Jaffrelot in Modi’s India (2021), treats the Modi era as the electoral arrival of a doctrine fixed in 1923, so that language and territory register as instruments of a religious project. The post-2014-rupture reading, carried in essays by Aishwary Kumar and other political theorists after 2019, treats the period as a break in the republic’s moral grammar, so that doctrine registers as raw material for a new kind of state. The electoral-strategy reading treats Hindutva as a mobilisation technology whose civilisational content is interchangeable, a claim whose strongest documentary support comes from Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle’s The RSS: A View to the Inside (2018), an account of an organisation that has repeatedly subordinated doctrinal display to organisational expansion. The integrated-triad reading defended here incorporates the evidence each rival reading assembles, and it corrects the shared error: the Modi era pursues three projects at once, through three distinct state mechanisms, and the pursuit of coherence among the three is the era’s distinctive civilisational act. The sections that follow walk the three in turn, map them against their settlements, separate the triad from three earlier nationalisms, and then weigh the four readings against the record.

One Root, Three Words: Hindi, Hindutva and Hindostan in the Modi Era

The etymology matters because the triad’s political force depends on a confusion the etymology encourages. Sindhu named a river before it named a people. Old Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenid period rendered the trans-Indus province as Hindush, and the Greeks who received the word dropped the aspirate, producing Indos for the river and India for the land beyond it. Arab and Persian usage settled on Hind for the land and Hindi for its people and their speech. Hindostan, in Persian and then in Mughal and British administrative usage, named northern India and, by extension, the subcontinent as a geographic whole; the anthem Iqbal published in 1904, Sare Jahan se Achha Hindostan Hamara, used the word for the homeland of every Indian, a usage no single community owned. Hindi, as a language name, gathered the cluster of north Indian vernaculars that administrators and linguists grouped around the Khari Boli dialect of the Delhi region, standardised in the Devanagari script during the nineteenth century. Each word, that is, began as an outsider’s geographic label and acquired an insider’s content over centuries.

Do the words Hindi, Hindutva and Hindostan mean the same thing?

No. The three words share the Sindhu root and diverge in reference. Hindi names a language, standardised around Khari Boli and written in Devanagari. Hindostan names a land, the subcontinent imagined as one geographic whole. Hindutva, coined as an abstraction in 1923, names a quality, the essence of being Hindu as Savarkar defined it.

Hindutva is the exception in the family, and the exception is datable. Hindi and Hindostan accumulated their meanings across a millennium of usage; Hindutva was defined, in a single text, at a single moment. Savarkar composed Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? during his internment at Ratnagiri, and the text appeared in 1923 under the pen name A Maratha. The suffix did the decisive work. Where Hindu named a person, Hindutva named the condition that made the person what the definition required: attachment to the land between the Indus and the seas as pitribhumi, fatherland, and as punyabhumi, holy land. The definition was deliberately a matter of culture and territory rather than theological. Savarkar, who described himself as a rationalist with no belief in ritual religion, built the category so that a Hindu needed no creed, no priesthood and no single scripture, only the double attachment to the soil as fatherland and as sacred geography. The corollary, drawn in the text itself, excluded Indians whose holy land lay outside the territory: Muslims, whose punyabhumi the definition located at Mecca, and Christians, whose holy land the definition located in Palestine, could hold India as fatherland but not, on Savarkar’s test, as holy land, and the definition therefore placed them outside the Hindu nation it constructed. Defenders of the 1923 text reply that Savarkar wrote a category of culture rather than a category of religion and that the exclusion follows from geography, not faith; critics reply that the geography was chosen precisely to produce the exclusion. Both positions are stated here at their strength because the Modi-era argument turns on which description of the definition the state has acted upon.

M.S. Golwalkar, the second chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, extended the doctrine in We, or Our Nationhood Defined (1939) and in Bunch of Thoughts (1966), the compilation of his speeches and writings that the Sangh treats as its doctrinal handbook. Golwalkar’s version pressed the nation, defined by culture, toward organic unity, describing India as a Hindu nation whose minorities would flourish by absorbing the national culture, a formulation his critics quote for its assimilationist demand and his defenders contextualise as a plea for national cohesion in a partitioned decade. The distinction between the two founders matters for the triad reading. Savarkar supplied the identity doctrine in 1923. Neither Savarkar nor Golwalkar built a language policy or a territorial programme of state: the Jana Sangh and later the Bharatiya Janata Party inherited Hindutva as one inheritance among several, and the Hindi and Hindostan commitments carry genealogies of their own, running through the Constituent Assembly’s language debates and through the geography of Partition. The triad is a Modi-era assembly of three older inheritances, not a single doctrine unfolding from 1923, and that assembly is what the next three sections document, commitment by commitment.

Hindostan’s career through the twentieth century’s hardest argument confirms the word’s availability to every camp. Iqbal’s anthem of 1904 had made Hindostan the shared homeland of a composite patriotism. By 1937 the word had been conscripted into the two-nation argument from both directions: Savarkar, in his presidential address to the Hindu Mahasabha at Ahmedabad in 1937, declared that India could not be assumed to be a unitary and homogeneous nation and spoke of two antagonistic nations, Hindu and Muslim, living side by side; Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League, in the same years, used Hindustan to name the Hindu-majority India from which Pakistan would be carved. A word that a composite anthem, a Hindu Mahasabha president and the League’s separatism could each claim was never one community’s property; it was the subcontinent’s oldest common noun for itself, waiting for a state to give it an official meaning. The Constitution of 1950 pointedly declined to use it, naming the Union India, that is Bharat, in Article 1, and assigning Hindostan to the anthem shelf of civil memory. The Modi-era move’s quiet radicalism is to have drawn the word back from civil memory toward official description, through mural, motto and citizenship law, without ever proposing it for the constitutional text.

Hindi or Hindustani: The Argument the Assembly Settled in 1949

One preliminary dispute must be settled before the Hindi project can be measured, because its object was itself contested at birth. The language the Constituent Assembly adopted in 1949 was the winner of an argument between two candidates for the nation’s common speech. Hindi, in the form the Hindi movement’s organisations championed, meant the Sanskritised register written in Devanagari, purged of the Persian and Arabic vocabulary that ordinary north Indian speech carried. Hindustani meant the spoken continuum itself, the bazaar and camp language of the Gangetic plain, writable in Devanagari or in the Urdu script, and it carried the sponsorship of Gandhi, who had founded the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha at Madras in 1918 to carry the common speech southward, and of Nehru, whose preference for Hindustani as the national language runs through his correspondence of the 1930s and 1940s. Granville Austin’s The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (1966) records how narrow the settlement was: the language debates of 12 to 14 September 1949 were the Assembly’s most bitter, an amendment touching the numerals divided the house 77 votes to 77 and fell to the President’s casting vote, and the Munshi-Ayyangar formula that finally carried named Hindi in Devanagari as the official language while postponing every hard consequence for fifteen years.

The choice of Hindi over Hindustani matters to the triad reading for one reason: the Hindi that the Modi-era project promotes descends from the Sanskritising candidate, not from the spoken continuum. Article 351’s direction, that Hindi draw its vocabulary primarily on Sanskrit, wrote the 1949 victor’s preference into the Constitution itself, and the project’s institutional acts follow the same line, from the Central Sanskrit Universities Act 2020 to the National Education Policy’s placement of Sanskrit as an offered language at every stage. The Census arithmetic that the project’s advocates cite carries the same construction inside it: the Census of 2011 grouped fifty-six mother tongues, among them Bhojpuri, Rajasthani and Magadhi, under the Hindi heading, producing the 43.6 percent figure that Hindi’s advocates quote as a demographic mandate. Linguists of the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, the survey Ganesh Devy directed and published from 2013, answer that the grouping manufactures the majority it reports, folding distinct languages with literatures of their own into a single census bloc. The dispute is not pedantry. If Hindi names a family of speech forms aggregated by census convention, the nation-language claim rests on an administrative artefact; if Hindi names the natural common speech of the north, the claim rests on demography. The triad reading takes no side in the linguistic question and notes the political one: the project proceeds as if the second description were settled, and builds on it.

The Hindi Commitment: A Nation Language Pursued Without a Proclamation

The Hindi commitment revisits the post-1956 multilingual settlement, and the settlement deserves exact statement before its renegotiation can be measured. The Constituent Assembly adopted Hindi in the Devanagari script as the official language of the Union on 14 September 1949, under the Munshi-Ayyangar formula that paired the adoption with a fifteen-year continuation of English and with a promise that Parliament would decide the question again in 1965. Article 343 of the Constitution carried the formula into force on 26 January 1950. Article 351 directed the Union to promote the spread of Hindi and to develop it as a medium of expression for the composite culture of India, drawing for its vocabulary primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on the other languages of the Eighth Schedule. The Schedule itself began with fourteen languages and grew by amendment, Sindhi entering in 1967, Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali in 1992, and Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali in 2003, to reach twenty-two. The constitutional design, in other words, recognised multilingual India as the permanent fact and assigned Hindi a directive to grow inside that fact, not a licence to override it.

When did Hindi become an official language of the Indian Union?

Hindi became the official language of the Union on 26 January 1950, when Article 343 of the Constitution took effect. The Constituent Assembly had adopted the Munshi-Ayyangar formula on 14 September 1949, naming Hindi in the Devanagari script the official language and continuing English for fifteen years.

The second element of the settlement was an assurance, and the assurance was tested almost to destruction. Jawaharlal Nehru told the Lok Sabha on 7 August 1959 that English would continue as an associate official language for as long as non-Hindi-speaking Indians wished, and the Official Languages Act 1963 wrote a version of the promise into statute as the 1965 deadline approached. Madras State answered with the Hindi-imposition resistance and 1963 Act crisis of January and February 1965: student-led agitations across Tamil-speaking districts, deaths by self-immolation and in police firing counted in the dozens, and a Congress government in Madras confronting the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s charge that the 1963 Act’s permissive wording betrayed Nehru’s pledge. The Union government of Lal Bahadur Shastri retreated, and the Official Languages (Amendment) Act 1967 converted the assurance into durable law: English would continue alongside Hindi until the legislatures of every non-Hindi state and both Houses of Parliament resolved otherwise, a consent structure no Union government has since attempted to satisfy. The three-language formula, adopted in the National Policy on Education 1968 on the Kothari Commission’s recommendation, completed the architecture by asking Hindi-speaking states to teach a modern Indian language, preferably a southern one, in exchange for Hindi teaching in non-Hindi states. The formula’s reciprocity was honoured unevenly, and Tamil Nadu settled into a two-language policy of Tamil and English that every Tamil Nadu government since 1968 has defended.

How many languages does the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution list?

The Eighth Schedule lists twenty-two languages. The Schedule opened with fourteen in 1950. Parliament added Sindhi by the Twenty-first Amendment in 1967, Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali by the Seventy-first Amendment in 1992, and Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali by the Ninety-second Amendment in 2003.

The Modi-era Hindi commitment works inside this architecture without touching its load-bearing walls, and the mechanism is promotion by weight rather than amendment by law. The opening signal came within days of the government’s formation: a Ministry of Home Affairs circular of May 2014 directed Union ministries to give Hindi priority on official social-media accounts, and the ministry narrowed the direction to Hindi-speaking states after Jayalalithaa, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, protested to the Prime Minister in writing. Narendra Modi himself made the civilisational version of the argument in the Rajya Sabha in June 2014, replying to the debate on the President’s address, when he spoke of some twelve hundred years of slavery having carved a slave mentality into the Indian mind, a diagnosis that cast language hierarchy as a colonial residue rather than a federal bargain. Census arithmetic supplied the demographic premise the project invokes: the Census of 2011 recorded about 43.6 percent of the population returning Hindi as mother tongue, the largest single language bloc, with Hindi speakers concentrated in the states where the Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral strength lay.

The education file carried the commitment’s hardest test. The draft National Education Policy released on 31 May 2019 by the committee chaired by K. Kasturirangan prescribed the three-language formula in terms that required students in non-Hindi-speaking states to learn Hindi, and Tamil Nadu’s parties, the DMK in opposition and the AIADMK in government among them, read the clause as imposition by curriculum. The committee revised the draft within days, striking the named requirement, and Kasturirangan stated publicly that no imposition had been intended and that flexibility was the policy’s governing idea. The National Education Policy approved by the Union Cabinet on 29 July 2020 kept the three-language formula and rewrote its terms: the languages to be learned would be chosen by states, regions and students, at least two of the three would be native to India, and the policy stated in terms that no language would be imposed on any state. The same text directed that the medium of instruction until at least Grade 5, and preferably until Grade 8, be the home language, mother tongue or regional language of the child, a direction that strengthened regional languages in the primary classroom at the very moment the formula pressed a third language upon the secondary one. Sanskrit received institutional elevation in the same season: the Central Sanskrit Universities Act 2020, in force from 30 April 2020, converted the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan in Delhi, the Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha in Delhi and the Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha at Tirupati into central universities, and the 2020 policy offered Sanskrit as an option at every level of schooling and higher education, honouring Article 351’s instruction that Hindi draw its vocabulary primarily on Sanskrit.

Official communication supplied the commitment’s second mechanism. Home Minister Amit Shah used Hindi Diwas, 14 September 2019, to argue that one language could unite the country and that Hindi was that language, a statement opposition leaders in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Karnataka condemned as a one-nation-one-language project and Shah subsequently qualified by describing Hindi as a friend of every Indian language. Presiding over the thirty-seventh meeting of the Parliamentary Committee on Official Language on 7 April 2022, Shah restated the project in administrative form: Hindi should be accepted as an alternative to English rather than to local languages, seventy percent of the Union Cabinet’s agenda was by then prepared in Hindi, twenty-two thousand Hindi teachers had been recruited in the eight states of the North East, and those states had agreed to make Hindi compulsory in schools to Class 10, as the Home Minister reported the agreements. Critics, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin among them, answered that compulsory Hindi in any classroom was imposition whatever the framing; defenders answered that displacing English, the one language no Indian community owns, is the federal opposite of displacing Tamil or Bengali. The dispute is recorded here in both forms because the triad reading depends on the mechanism, not on the verdict: no amendment to Article 343 has been moved, the 1967 assurance stands unrepealed, and the Hindi commitment advances by agenda paper, teacher recruitment, curriculum formula and ministerial exhortation, a partial reversal of the post-1956 settlement’s spirit that leaves its text untouched.

The Language of Command: Hindi Inside the Union’s Own Machinery

Before the Hindi commitment can be judged as politics, its administrative chassis deserves a section, because the drive advances further inside the Union’s own offices than in any state’s classroom. Article 344 required the President to appoint an official language commission five years after the Constitution commenced and again at ten years; only the first was ever appointed, the commission of 7 June 1955 chaired by B.G. Kher, whose 1956 report recommended a phased advance of Hindi and whose recommendations a parliamentary committee under G.B. Pant then moderated. No second commission followed, and the Union built instead a permanent promotional machinery: a Department of Official Language under the Ministry of Home Affairs from 1975, Hindi advisory committees in every ministry, town implementation committees in government offices, and the Official Language Rules 1976, which divided the country into Region A, the Hindi-speaking states where Union correspondence runs in Hindi; Region B, states including Gujarat, Maharashtra and Punjab where Hindi advances alongside the regional language; and Region C, the rest, where English carries the Union’s business. The machinery’s ritual calendar, Hindi Pakhwada each September, its awards for Hindi noting and drafting, and its annual progress reports to Parliament, normalise a direction of travel inside the state itself, independent of any government’s ideology; Congress and coalition governments ran the same machinery for decades at a tempo their critics called ceremonial.

The Modi era quickened the tempo and said so. The Parliamentary Committee on Official Language, whose volumes had appeared at long intervals in earlier decades, sent three volumes of its report to the President within a single tenure after 2019, a pace the Home Minister cited as a joint achievement when he addressed the committee’s thirty-seventh meeting in April 2022. The same address converted the machinery’s statistics into the project’s claims: seventy percent of Cabinet agenda papers prepared in Hindi, Hindi teachers recruited in the North East by the thousand, Devanagari adopted for the scripts of nine tribal languages of that region. Article 348, which fixes English as the language of the Supreme Court and the High Courts until Parliament provides otherwise, marks the machinery’s hard frontier; demands to open the higher judiciary to Hindi recur in the period’s debates, in Parliament and in the bar councils of the Hindi states, and the frontier held, because a change there requires the judiciary’s consent as well as Parliament’s. The pattern is the Hindi project in cross-section: a promotional state apparatus, built by the settlement generation itself, driven harder after 2014 in every corridor where the Union is sovereign over its own paperwork, and stopped at each door where another institution’s consent, a state’s, a court’s, a classroom’s, is constitutionally required.

Sanskrit: The Classical Keystone of the Triad

Sanskrit is the load-bearing element that joins the triad’s three strands, and its position is paradoxical enough to expose the whole structure. As a mother tongue it is nearly extinct: the Census of 2011 counted 24,821 Indians returning Sanskrit as their mother tongue, fewer than a medium town, a figure revivalists cite as scandal and linguists cite as the natural condition of a classical language. As a civilisational instrument it is everywhere in the project’s architecture. Article 351 instructs Hindi to draw its vocabulary primarily on Sanskrit, so the nation language’s growth is constitutionally routed through the classical tongue. The sacred geography the Hindutva project anchors, the tirthas, the epics’ landscapes, the temple liturgies, is textual in Sanskrit before it is anything else. The classical name of the territorial whole, Bharatvarsha, the land between the Himalaya and the sea of the Puranic geography, is a Sanskrit cosmographic term. A governing structure that needed a single medium in which language, identity and territory could be described as one inheritance found that medium ready-made, and the Modi-era state has invested in the medium accordingly: the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, founded in 1970, became the nucleus of the central-university conversions of 2020; the National Education Policy offered Sanskrit at every level of education and counted it among the classical languages whose study the policy commends; and revivalist practice celebrates sites like Mattur in Karnataka, the village publicised for conducting daily life in conversational Sanskrit.

The classical file also supplies the era’s most instructive complication, because the state’s classicism did not stop at Sanskrit or at Hindu texts. The category of classical language, created in 2004, had recognised Tamil in 2004, Sanskrit in 2005, Kannada and Telugu in 2008, Malayalam in 2013 and Odia in 2014. On 3 October 2024 the Union Cabinet extended the status to five more: Marathi, Pali, Prakrit, Assamese and Bengali. Pali is the language of the Theravada Buddhist canon, Prakrit of Jain texts and Ashokan inscriptions; neither is a Hindu liturgical language, and their elevation widened the classical frame beyond any single tradition at the moment of its greatest expansion. The critics of the classical turn read the file whole: Kancha Ilaiah, in Why I Am Not a Hindu (1996) and his later essays, argues that Sanskrit-centred revival restores a Brahminical hierarchy in which the classical is the caste order’s alibi, and that the vernaculars of labour, including the Dravidian and tribal tongues, are demoted by the same gesture that elevates the classical. The defenders answer on the record: a frame that honours Pali beside Sanskrit, and the Tamil classics beside both, describes a civilisation plural in its sources and singular only in its geography, which is the triad’s own claim about itself. The dispute over Sanskrit is therefore the triad dispute in miniature, and its resolution matters beyond philology: if the classical keystone is one tradition’s property, the triad is a Hindu project in the strong sense Jaffrelot alleges; if the keystone is a shared classical inheritance administered evenhandedly, the triad’s defenders hold their strongest exhibit. The 2024 expansion is evidence for the second description; the curriculum deletions of 2022 remain evidence for the first; the adjudication in this article holds both in view.

The Hindutva Commitment: A Civilisational Anchor Without a State Religion

The Hindutva commitment revisits the settlement that the religion-state founding tension produced between 1947 and 1950. The Constituent Assembly refused both a state religion and a wall of separation on the American pattern, and built instead a plural-civilisational architecture: Article 25 guaranteed freedom of conscience and the practice and propagation of religion, Article 26 secured denominational autonomy, Article 27 barred religious taxation, Article 28 regulated religious instruction in state institutions, and Articles 29 and 30 protected minority culture and minority educational institutions. The Preamble carried no religious adjective until the Forty-second Amendment of 1976 inserted the words socialist and secular during the Emergency, and the Supreme Court read secularism into the Constitution’s basic structure in Kesavananda Bharati (1973) and affirmed the reading in S.R. Bommai (1994). The settlement’s premise was that India housed several civilisations of faith and that the state would stand at an equal distance from each, intervening for reform, as temple-entry legislation and the Hindu Code Bills of 1955 and 1956 had intervened, without adopting any one tradition as the nation’s civilisational core.

When did Vinayak Damodar Savarkar publish his definition of Hindutva?

Savarkar’s Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? appeared in 1923, printed at Nagpur under the pen name A Maratha. Savarkar had composed the text during his internment at Ratnagiri. The definition it laid down, a Hindu as one who holds the land from the Indus to the seas as fatherland and holy land, governed the doctrine’s later career.

The Modi-era Hindutva commitment renegotiates that settlement by anchoring rather than by establishing: no clause of Articles 25 to 30 has been amended, no religion has been declared the religion of the state, and the Preamble’s secular adjective survives untouched. The anchoring works through what the state teaches, what the state celebrates and whom the state’s ceremonies centre. Education carried the first load. The National Council of Educational Research and Training notified a syllabus rationalisation in June 2022, presented by the Council as a reduction of student load after the pandemic years and executed across the textbooks of Classes 6 to 12. The deletions, catalogued in the Council’s own rationalisation lists and contested in Parliament and the press through 2022 and 2023, removed the chapter on the Mughal courts from the Class 12 history textbook Themes in Indian History Part II, references to the Gujarat violence of 2002 from the Class 11 sociology and Class 12 political science textbooks, passages treating the Emergency of 1975 to 1977, and passages in the Class 12 political science textbook recording that Gandhi’s pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity had provoked Hindu extremists and that organisations like the RSS had been banned for a time after his assassination. NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani defended the exercise in April 2023 as rationalisation against overlap and irrelevance, and attributed the absence of some deletions from the original notification to oversight. Historians of the Indian History Congress tradition answered that the pattern of deletions fell overwhelmingly on Mughal rule, on communal violence and on the Hindu right’s own historical embarrassments, a selection they read as civilisational editing rather than load reduction. Both accounts are documented; the triad reading notes only the direction of travel, from a plural-civilisational syllabus toward one organised around Hindu civilisational continuity.

The framework documents extended the same direction from deletion to construction. The Ministry of Education released the National Curriculum Framework for the Foundational Stage in October 2022 and the National Curriculum Framework for School Education in August 2023, the first full revision of the school framework since 2005, and the 2023 framework organised school knowledge around Indian knowledge systems, rooting curriculum content in Indian intellectual traditions as a stated design principle. The first textbooks written under the new framework reached Class 6 classrooms in 2024. The Ministry of Culture ran the parallel file in the public sphere: Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, the commemoration programme the ministry led from March 2021 to August 2023, framed seventy-five years of independence as a civilisational celebration, and the Prime Minister’s own ceremonial calendar centred Hindu sacred geography in state ritual, at the inauguration of the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor at Varanasi on 13 December 2021 and at Ayodhya on 22 January 2024, where Modi led the consecration ceremony of the Ram temple built on the site the Supreme Court’s judgment of 9 November 2019 had awarded for a temple. Defenders of the ceremonial turn, in the government’s own statements, describe a state recovering confidence in the majority civilisation after centuries of diffidence, and point out that the same Prime Minister hosted members of the Christian community at his residence at Christmas 2023 and has performed the republic’s honours in every community’s geography. Critics, Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s post-2014 essays among the most cited, describe a majoritarian state culture in which the minority citizen watches the republic’s highest office perform another community’s rites. The constitutional text arbitrates neither description, because the project’s managers have been careful never to present the text with a clause to judge: the anchor is implicit, set in syllabus, framework and ceremony, and its implicitness is the mechanism, not an accident of drafting.

The Classroom as the Triad’s Workshop: The Curriculum Files, 2000 to 2024

Curriculum is the terrain where the Hindutva commitment does its deepest work, and the terrain has a history that evenhandedness requires in full: every governing coalition of the republic’s recent decades has treated the school textbook as an instrument, and each has accused the other of abusing it. The National Curriculum Framework of 2000, produced under the BJP-led government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee with Murli Manohar Joshi as education minister, drew charges of saffronisation from historians and opposition parties, who objected to deletions and framings in history textbooks of that round. The National Curriculum Framework of 2005, produced under the Congress-led government, reversed the direction and drew the mirror-image charge from the BJP, that a secular-left establishment was editing the nation’s past to its own taste. The pattern teaches one lesson the triad reading builds on: control of school knowledge is a standing ambition of Indian governments, not a Modi-era invention. The question the curriculum files of 2014 to 2024 pose is therefore comparative, and the comparison turns on scale, direction and the framework’s own stated aims.

The Modi-era sequence ran in three waves. A first revision round in 2017 and 2018, under NCERT director Hrushikesh Senapaty, adjusted references across the political science and history lists, inserting the Union government’s flagship programmes into civics teaching. The second wave was the rationalisation of 2022 and 2023 catalogued in the previous section, whose deletions fell on the Mughal court, on the Gujarat violence, on the Emergency and on the circumstances of Gandhi’s assassination. The third wave was constructive rather than subtractive: the National Curriculum Framework for School Education of August 2023 wrote the direction into doctrine, organising school education around rootedness in Indian knowledge systems and the recovery of Indian intellectual traditions as a design principle, and the new textbooks that followed, the Class 6 social science volume Exploring Society: India and Beyond of 2024 at their head, presented the child’s first organised past inside the civilisational geography of the subcontinent. Defenders of the sequence, in the statements of the Education Ministry and the NCERT leadership, describe a curriculum shedding a colonial and postcolonial habit of narrating India through its invaders and its failures, and restoring proportion to three millennia of Indic achievement. Critics, the historians who petitioned against the 2022 deletions among them, describe a syllabus engineered so that the Muslim centuries shrink, the Hindu right’s embarrassments vanish and the majority civilisation stands alone as the nation’s author. Both descriptions cite the same lists. The triad reading observes what the lists themselves show: the deletions and the framework pull in one direction, toward the civilisational anchor the Hindutva project names, and the direction is consistent across a decade, three NCERT directors’ tenures and two distinct instruments, subtraction and construction. Consistency of direction across instruments is the signature that separates a governing project from a series of editorial accidents, and the classroom files carry that signature more plainly than any other file in the triad.

The Hindostan Commitment: A Cultural Map Inside Settled Borders

The third commitment revisits the territorial settlement of 1947, the settlement whose costs the constitutional consequences of Partition recorded in the Constitution’s first articles. The republic defined itself territorially, by the First Schedule’s list of states and territories inside the Radcliffe and Mountbatten boundaries, and politically, by citizenship rules in Articles 5 to 11 that assigned membership by birth, descent, migration and registration rather than by faith, with Parliament empowered to legislate the subject thereafter. A Muslim who remained in India in 1947 was a citizen on the same terms as a Hindu who remained; a Hindu who crossed from Lahore was a migrant under the same articles as a Muslim who crossed from Amritsar’s other side. The settlement made territory a jurisdiction and citizenship a legal status, and it made no use of the civilisational geography that the word Hindostan carried in older usage, where the land from the Hindu Kush to the seas formed one whole of shared culture regardless of the sovereignties that divided it.

The Modi-era Hindostan commitment re-describes the jurisdiction as a homeland without moving a single boundary pillar, and the territorial-political renegotiation moment of August 2019 supplied the demonstration. The Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act 2019, effective from 31 October 2019, extinguished the state whose accession terms had preserved a separate constitutional position since 1947 and divided its territory into two Union Territories administered from Delhi, a use of Parliament’s Article 3 power that treated the last surviving asymmetry of the accession era as an anomaly to be normalised. Four months later the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, passed by Parliament on 11 December 2019, assented to on 12 December 2019 and brought into force on 10 January 2020, wrote religion into the citizenship code for the first time in the republic’s history: Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who had entered India from Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan on or before 31 December 2014 would no longer be treated as illegal migrants and would receive a shortened path to citizenship, a protection the Act’s defenders framed as rescue for persecuted minorities and its critics framed as the first statutory sorting of Indians-to-be by faith, with Muslims absent from the list. The amendment’s rules, notified on 11 March 2024, completed the religion-citizenship renegotiation moment in administrative form. Territory constant, membership re-described: the Hindostan commitment’s signature is already visible in the pairing.

The discourse that names the commitment operates at the same register. Akhand Bharat, the undivided India of Sangh geography, appears in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh usage as a civilisational concept, the claim that the subcontinent’s peoples share one civilisation whatever their passports say. Ram Madhav, a national general secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party drawn from the Sangh, gave the distinction its canonical statement in a television interview of December 2015: the RSS, he said, held that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, separated seventy years earlier for historical reasons, would one day join together through goodwill, not conquest, because the civilisational unity preceded and survived the political division. Successive RSS chiefs have repeated the framing in terms of culture and disavowed any programme of annexation, and no Indian government document has ever claimed a neighbouring state’s territory. The discourse met its defining episode on 28 May 2023, at the inauguration of the new Parliament building in New Delhi, where a mural mapping the ancient subcontinent, its cities labelled from Takshashila in present-day Pakistan to Lumbini in present-day Nepal, drew formal objections from Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi posted the mural’s photograph with the words, in Hindi, that the resolve was clear: Akhand Bharat. Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar answered the objections on 8 June 2023 by stating that the mural depicted the extent of the Ashokan empire and the idea of responsible, people-oriented governance, and Pakistan’s foreign office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch answered in turn that the assertion of Akhand Bharat manifested a revisionist and expansionist mindset. The exchange is the Hindostan commitment in miniature: a cultural map hung in the legislature’s seat, read by the ruling party’s ministers as civilisational resolve, read by neighbours as territorial claim, and defended by the state in the vocabulary of ancient history, with the borders of 1947 untouched by any of it.

When was the Akhand Bharat mural in the new Parliament building unveiled?

The mural was unveiled with the building itself on 28 May 2023, the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the new Parliament House in New Delhi. Its map of the ancient subcontinent, naming Takshashila and Lumbini among its cities, drew objections from Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh within days.

Read together, the three Modi-era acts of the territorial file share one grammar. The reorganisation of 2019 removed an internal boundary’s constitutional protection in the name of full integration. The citizenship amendment of 2019 and its 2024 rules sorted prospective members by the civilisational criterion of faith for the first time. The mural discourse of 2023 projected the cultural map outward while the foreign minister held the political map still. None of the three revised the territorial-political settlement’s formal core, the First Schedule and the boundaries it schedules. Each revised the meaning the settlement carries: the state the Constitution built as a jurisdiction over a defined territory increasingly describes itself, in statute, ceremony and cartography, as the political form of a civilisation whose extent the territory only partly captures. That redescription, pursued without territorial revisionism, is the Hindostan commitment, and it completes the triad whose map the next section draws.

The Ceremonial State: Culture as Governance Beyond the Files

Between the files sits a stratum of acts that no ministry owns and every citizen sees: the ceremonial calendar of the Modi-era state, where the Hindutva project appears in its most public form. The sequence began with soft instruments. Narendra Modi proposed an International Day of Yoga from the podium of the United Nations General Assembly on 27 September 2014, the General Assembly adopted the resolution on 11 December 2014, and the first observance on 21 June 2015 placed a practice of Hindu spiritual genealogy at the head of India’s diplomacy of culture, framed by the government as a gift of Indian civilisation to the world and received by its critics as the state’s adoption of one tradition’s discipline as the national brand. The Statue of Unity, inaugurated on 31 October 2018 at Kevadia in Gujarat, raised Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the Congress home minister whom the Sangh tradition had long claimed as a kindred nationalist, into the tallest statue on earth, an act of commemorative appropriation that Patel’s own party protested and could not answer in kind. The installation of the Sengol, the sceptre the Modi government presented on 28 May 2023 beside the Speaker’s chair in the new Parliament, carried the ceremonial file into the legislature itself: the government’s account held that emissaries of the Thiruvaduthurai Adheenam had presented the sceptre to Nehru on 14 August 1947 as a symbol of the transfer of power, historians disputed elements of the account in print within days, and the dispute itself, conducted over a Tamil Shaivite monastery’s ritual object at the republic’s seat, demonstrated how completely the ceremonial vocabulary of state had been re-sourced.

The temple-corridor programme gave the ceremonial file its bricks and mortar. The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, inaugurated on 13 December 2021, rebuilt the precinct between the Vishwanath temple and the Ganga ghats at Varanasi, the Prime Minister’s own constituency, clearing hundreds of buildings to open a processional axis between shrine and river. The Mahakal Lok corridor at the Mahakaleshwar temple in Ujjain followed on 11 October 2022, a second monumental precinct opened by the same hand in a second sacred city. State governments led by the BJP announced further corridor projects at other contested or celebrated shrines in the years that followed, and the opposition’s dilemma recurred at each inauguration: to boycott was to concede the sacred geography to the ruling party’s custody, and to attend was to ratify the custody. The corridor is the ceremonial project’s characteristic artefact because it converts devotion into infrastructure and infrastructure into custody, permanently, in stone; a syllabus can be rewritten by the next government, as the files of 2000 and 2005 show, but a demolished and rebuilt precinct does not revert. The triad’s acts divide accordingly into the reversible, the contestable and the built, and the built category grows by one precinct at a time.

The Ministry of Culture’s programme architecture ran beneath the spectacles. Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, the seventy-fifth anniversary commemoration the ministry led from March 2021 to August 2023, organised the freedom struggle’s memory as a civilisational festival, and the culture track of India’s G20 presidency in 2023 carried the same framing to an international circuit under the campaign line that culture unites all. The recovery of antiquities from foreign museums, which official statements counted in the hundreds across the decade, supplied the programme with a restitution narrative: objects carried away in the colonial centuries returning to a civilisation reasserting custody of its past. None of these acts amends a text, spends a large sum beside the state’s other expenditures, or compels a citizen to do anything. Their work is atmospheric, and the atmosphere is the point. A state that opens its Parliament with a monastery’s sceptre, brands its diplomacy with yoga, and counts its recovered gods has told its citizens which civilisation the state believes itself to be, in a register that no court can review and no opposition manifesto can easily answer. The ceremonial stratum is where the implicit anchor of the Hindutva project is set deepest, precisely because nothing in it is justiciable.

The Triad Abroad: Civilisational Diplomacy and the Diaspora

The Hindostan commitment has an external face, and the Modi era showed it to three audiences. The first was the diaspora, addressed by the Prime Minister in stadium settings from Madison Square Garden in New York on 28 September 2014 to the Howdy Modi rally at Houston on 22 September 2019, in speeches that cast overseas Indians as the civilisation’s ambassadors and the homeland’s civilisational confidence as the diaspora’s inheritance. The second audience was the neighbourhood of the cultural map itself: the Ramayana Circuit and the Buddhist Circuit, announced among the thematic circuits of the Swadesh Darshan scheme of 2014 and 2015, organised tourism infrastructure around the epics’ and the Buddha’s geographies across state and national borders, and Narendra Modi’s visit to Lumbini on 16 May 2022, where he laid the foundation stone of an India International Centre for Buddhist Culture and Heritage beside the Buddha’s birthplace in Nepal, performed that map as pilgrimage diplomacy. The third audience was the world’s governments: India’s G20 presidency of 2023 ran under the motto Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the world is one family, drawn from the Maha Upanishad, and the New Delhi summit of 9 and 10 September 2023 conducted the republic’s diplomacy under a Sanskrit civilisational sentence where the language of international relations ordinarily runs to formulae no civilisation owns.

Critics of the external face, in the foreign-policy commentary of the period, read the civilisational framing as the Hindostan project exported, a soft-power idiom that costs neighbours and minorities nothing abroad and signals everything at home. Defenders, in the External Affairs Ministry’s own presentations, read the same acts as a civilisation-state recovering the vocabulary of culture that decolonising states from China to Turkey had never surrendered, and note that the motto’s source text preaches universal kinship rather than Hindu exclusiveness, a reading the Upanishadic sentence supports on its face. Both readings confirm the triad’s presence in the external file: the argument between them is not whether the state speaks civilisational language abroad, but what the speaking means. A fragmented treatment files the G20 motto under diplomacy, the Lumbini foundation stone under neighbourhood policy and the Houston rally under diaspora outreach; the integrated reading files the three under one project, the redescription of the Indian state as the political form of a civilisation, conducted at home by statute and abroad by motto, with the borders unmoved in both registers.

The Name of the Country: India, Bharat and the Naming Contest of 2023

The Hindostan commitment surfaced in its purest form in September 2023, in an argument about what the state may call itself. Article 1 of the Constitution names the Union in two registers at once: India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States, a formula that has carried the Persianate-external name and the Sanskrit-internal name in harness since 1950 without ranking them. The G20 summit at New Delhi disturbed the harness. The dinner invitation issued by Rashtrapati Bhavan for 9 September 2023 styled the host the President of Bharat, the Congress party’s Jairam Ramesh publicised the wording on 5 September 2023 as evidence of an impending deletion of India from the Constitution, and the Prime Minister’s nameplate at the summit table itself read Bharat. Ministers of the government replied that Bharat stood in the Constitution’s first article and in the civilisation’s oldest geography, and opposition leaders replied that a name borne by the anti-colonial republic was being retired to make room for a civilisational one. No amendment followed, no renaming was moved, and the state’s two names continued in harness; the episode’s content is the argument itself, the discovery by both camps that the country’s name had become a project-bearing question, arguable in the vocabulary of 1950 and of Bharatvarsha at once.

The opposition’s counter-performances of the same season confirm that the naming contest is a contest over the triad’s object, not a quarrel about stationery. Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra, the foot march from Kanyakumari beginning 7 September 2022 to Srinagar on 30 January 2023, some 3,570 kilometres by the Congress party’s account, was staged as a pilgrimage of the plural idea, its very name joining Bharat to the verb of union, and its speeches framed the march as the defence of an India of many languages and faiths against a politics of division, the Congress’s attributed characterisation of the ruling project. The opposition alliance constituted at Bengaluru on 18 July 2023 named itself with the other word, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, whose acronym spelled INDIA, a deliberate seizure of the external name against the government’s internal one. Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India (1997) had given the plural side its canonical text a generation earlier, the argument that the republic’s achievement was an idea, a political invention held against the country’s civilisational gravities; the Modi-era counter-claim, stated across the government’s communications on culture, is that the idea was never an invention but an inheritance, and that the state of 2014 onward is the inheritance recovering its name. A reader who files the invitation wording, the nameplate, the march and the acronym under public relations misses their common substance: each is a move in the argument over whether the Indian state is a jurisdiction that happens to sit on an old civilisation or a civilisation that has acquired a state, and that argument is the Hindostan commitment stated as a question of nomenclature.

The Three-Commitment Cultural-Political Map

The evidence assembled for the three commitments can be drawn as a single exhibit, and the exhibit is this article’s citable artifact: the three-commitment cultural-political map (Table 1). Each row of the map names one commitment, the founding settlement that commitment revisits, the dated decisions and institutional shifts that populate the commitment, and the consequence the map records. The map’s entries rest on documents a researcher can open without mediation: the National Education Policy text of 2020, the National Curriculum Framework volumes of 2022 and 2023, the NCERT rationalisation lists of 2022 and 2023, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 and its rules of 2024, and the published communications of the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Home Affairs. Most of that documentary trail circulates as office files, and an office file viewer for Excel, DOCX and PPTX documents opens the spreadsheets, drafts and presentations in which the trail survives. Later studies of religion and politics in this series cite the map by its three rows, and readers testing the integrated-triad reading should begin by testing the rows: if a row’s named decisions do not belong to the commitment the row assigns them, the reading fails at that row.

Table 1: The three-commitment cultural-political map

Commitment	Settlement revisited	Named post-2014 decisions and institutional shifts	Consequence the map records
Hindi as nation language	The post-1956 multilingual settlement; the Official Languages (Amendment) Act 1967 and its indefinite continuation of English	Home Affairs circular of May 2014; draft NEP Hindi clause and its revision, June 2019; National Education Policy 2020 three-language formula; Central Sanskrit Universities Act 2020; Parliamentary Committee on Official Language proceedings of April 2022	Promotion without proclamation: Hindi gains institutional weight in agenda, classroom and recruitment, and the bilingual architecture of 1967 stands unrepealed
Hindutva as civilisational identity	The plural-civilisational settlement of Articles 25 to 30 and the Preamble	NCERT syllabus rationalisation of 2022 and 2023; National Curriculum Framework for School Education 2023; Kashi Vishwanath Corridor inauguration, December 2021; Ayodhya consecration, January 2024	Implicit anchoring: school knowledge and state ceremony tilt toward Hindu civilisational continuity, and no state-religion clause is proposed
Hindostan as territorial-cultural state	The territorial-political settlement of 1947 and 1950; citizenship by legal status under Articles 5 to 11	Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act 2019; Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 and rules of March 2024; Akhand Bharat mural in the new Parliament, May 2023	Settled borders, re-described membership: territory constant, citizenship and internal asymmetry renegotiated on civilisational criteria

Two features of the map deserve emphasis before the comparison with earlier nationalisms begins. The first is asymmetry of mechanism. The Hindi row runs through education ministries, language committees and recruitment boards, institutions whose consent structures include state governments that can and do refuse, as Tamil Nadu refused the draft clause of 2019. The Hindutva row runs through a curriculum council, a framework committee and a ceremonial calendar, institutions a Union government commands directly. The Hindostan row runs through Parliament’s legislative power over territory and citizenship, the most centralised instruments of the three. A reading that treats the triad as one doctrine with one transmission belt will misjudge all three rows; a reading that treats the rows as unrelated files will miss the pattern the rows share, which is the second feature. Every row moves in one direction, from a settlement that described India in plural or legal terms toward a description in civilisational terms, and every row moves by the same technique: the settlement’s text is left standing, and its operative meaning is renegotiated around it. The technique is the Modi era’s signature across the integrated three-tensions framework that the pillar’s opening study laid down, where Tension One, the religion-state tension, and Tension Two, the federal-unitary tension, are engaged jointly by a language file, an identity file and a territory file that no fragmented treatment holds in one frame.

The Deferred File Executed: Personal Law and the Uniform Civil Code

One file tests the Hindutva commitment against the founding settlement more sharply than curriculum or ceremony, because it lies inside the settlement’s own text. The Constituent Assembly reformed Hindu personal law within a decade of independence, through the Hindu Marriage Act 1955 and the Hindu Succession Act, Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act and Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act of 1956, while leaving Muslim, Christian and Parsi personal law substantially untouched, and it placed the uniform civil code in Article 44 among the Directive Principles, a promise deferred to an unspecified future. The asymmetry was the plural settlement’s price: reform where the majority’s own law was concerned, autonomy where minority law was concerned, uniformity postponed for all. The price recurred as politics for seventy years, in the Supreme Court’s Shah Bano judgment of 1985, which granted a divorced Muslim woman maintenance under the criminal procedure code, and in the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act 1986, by which the Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi legislatively reversed the judgment’s effect, an episode the BJP’s tradition cites as the plural settlement’s corruption into appeasement and the settlement’s defenders cite as the autonomy the Constitution promised.

The Modi era executed the deferred file in stages, and the stages show the project’s technique in legal form. The Supreme Court’s judgment in Shayara Bano (2017) set aside instant triple talaq by a majority of three to two, and the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act 2019 converted the practice into a criminal offence, the state reforming minority personal law by penal statute where the founding generation had reformed majority law by codification. The Twenty-first Law Commission’s consultation paper of 2018 had advised that a uniform civil code was neither necessary nor desirable at that stage, recommending reform inside each personal law instead; the Twenty-second Law Commission reopened the question with a public notice in June 2023. Uttarakhand, governed by the BJP, enacted the republic’s first state-level uniform civil code in February 2024, brought into force in January 2025, covering marriage, divorce, succession and live-in relationships for the state’s residents with the Scheduled Tribes exempted. Defenders of the sequence, in the government’s statements, argue from gender justice and from Article 44’s own instruction, holding that a republic cannot indefinitely run citizens’ most intimate rights through community codes of unequal content. Critics answer, at their strongest, that uniformity drafted in a majoritarian season defaults to majority practice as the neutral template, that the Uttarakhand code’s registration demands on live-in couples extend state surveillance in the name of equality, and that reform imposed on one community’s law by another community’s majority repeats, in reverse, the founding asymmetry it claims to cure. The dispute is the Hindutva commitment’s legal frontier, and it is unresolved in the only forum that could close it, since challenges to the code’s provisions travel the same slow judicial road as the citizenship petitions. What the file establishes for the triad reading is narrower and firmer: the third item of the 1998 deferral list, after Ayodhya and Article 370, has moved from manifesto to statute book within the same decade and by the same method, settlement text left standing, operative meaning renegotiated beneath it.

Three Differences From Earlier Indian Nationalisms

The triad’s distinctness is clearest against the three nationalisms it is most often confused with. The first difference separates the Modi-era triad from the cultural nationalism of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Aurobindo Ghose. Tilak’s public Ganapati festival, launched at Poona in 1893, and his Shivaji festival of 1895, built a Hindu idiom for anti-colonial mobilisation under a foreign state that the idiom’s organisers did not control; Aurobindo’s editorials in Bande Mataram in 1907 cast nationalism itself as a religion and the nation as a goddess demanding sacrifice, again from outside a state held by an empire. The Tilak-Aurobindo generation’s assertion through culture was insurgent speech against alien rule, judged by its power to move subjects into citizens. The Modi-era triad operates from the opposite position: it is a programme of culture run by the state itself, executed through the state’s own textbook council, language committee and legislative majority. A festival organised against the Raj and a curriculum revised by the ruling party’s own ministry belong to different species of act, and any reading that files both under cultural nationalism without the distinction mistakes a protest vocabulary for a governing one.

The second difference separates the triad from the Hindutva of its own doctrinal founders. Savarkar wrote as the ideologue of a movement that held no state; Golwalkar built the RSS as a cadre organisation that formally renounced political power and cultivated society over decades, a vanguard patience that Andersen and Damle document across the Sangh’s history. Doctrinal Hindutva in its founding form was a theory of the nation awaiting a state that would embody it, propagated by an organisation that distrusted electoral cycles. The Modi-era triad legitimises itself through the opposite instrument: two consecutive single-party Lok Sabha majorities, 282 seats in 2014 and 303 seats in 2019, won in general elections whose campaigns placed that programme’s elements, the temple at Ayodhya, the integration of Kashmir, the citizenship law, before the electorate as promises and then executed them as verdicts received. Whatever else the triad is, it is Hindutva that has passed through democratic authorisation twice, and the authorisation changes the doctrine’s mode of existence from vanguard creed to governing mandate, a change the continuous-Hindutva reading understates when it treats 2014 as the mere arrival of 1923.

The third difference separates the triad from the Vajpayee era’s politics of culture, and the separation is the one the 1998 NDA’s tactical retreat on cultural-political commitments makes measurable. The National Agenda for Governance adopted in March 1998, the price of coalition with parties that rejected the Bharatiya Janata Party’s cultural programme, shelved the construction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya, the abrogation of Article 370 and the enactment of a uniform civil code, the three pledges the BJP’s own manifesto carried. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s governments governed for six years inside that deferral, and the party’s constituency, mobilised on questions of culture, received the deferral as the arithmetic of coalition, not as doctrine revised. The Modi era reversed the deferral item by item: the Jammu and Kashmir reorganisation of 2019 executed the Article 370 pledge, the citizenship amendment of 2019 added a commitment the 1998 agenda had never listed, the Ayodhya consecration of 2024 closed the temple pledge on the Supreme Court’s title award, and the language and curriculum files advanced pledges the coalition years had left untouched. The difference is not intensity of belief, for the Vajpayee generation’s belief is documented in its own manifestos; the difference is that the triad pursues, as a single integrated programme, an integration its predecessor was structurally required to postpone. Coalition arithmetic explains the postponement, as the three-tensions reading insists, and majority arithmetic explains the pursuit, and the two explanations together are the third difference.

The Counter-Archive: Courts, States and Scholars Defending the Settlements

An adjudication that weighed only the commitments’ advance would fail its own charter, because the settlements under renegotiation have defenders with instruments of their own, and the decade’s record includes their victories. The courts supplied the first line. The citizenship amendment faced more than two hundred petitions within a year of its passage, the state of Kerala carried the first state challenge under Article 131 in January 2020, and the petitions stood pending before the Supreme Court through 2024, a pendency that neither validated the Act nor annulled it and that both camps claim as evidence, the government of legality unrefuted, the petitioners of a question too grave to close. The religion-state settlement produced its own live litigation: the Karnataka hijab dispute reached a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court that divided in October 2022, one judge upholding the classroom restriction and one striking it down, leaving the plural settlement’s meaning formally unresolved; and on 8 November 2024 a seven-judge bench overruled the 1967 Azeez Basha holding in the Aligarh Muslim University reference, ruling that a university’s minority character under Article 30 turns on who established it rather than on the statute that incorporated it, a judgment the plural settlement’s defenders read as the architecture of 1950 still bearing weight.

The states supplied the second line, through the language veto documented in the federal evidence above and through assembly resolutions against the citizenship amendment passed by Kerala on 31 December 2019 and followed by Punjab, Rajasthan and West Bengal in the opening months of 2020. The historical profession supplied the third line, in the joint statement of April 2023 in which Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib and scores of other historians condemned the NCERT deletions as the communalisation of the school syllabus, and in Thapar’s longer body of work, The Past as Present (2014) at its head, arguing that Hindutva historiography manufactures a monolithic Hindu past the sources do not contain. The counter-archive matters to the verdict because it fixes what the triad has and has not achieved. The plural settlements of 1950, 1956 and 1967 survive as law, as litigation and as organised professional and federal resistance; the renegotiation proceeds against them, around them, and at speeds their veto points dictate. A triumphalist version of the triad reading, in which the settlements simply fall, is false to the record; so is a dismissive version, in which nothing has moved. The movement and the resistance are the era’s joint product, and the readings weighed in the next section are graded by how much of both they explain.

Four Readings of the Same Record, Weighed on the Evidence

The named disagreement this article must adjudicate can be stated cleanly at this point, because each reading has been given its evidence in the sections above. The continuous-Hindutva reading holds that the Modi era is Savarkar’s doctrine reaching state power after a ninety-year march, and its strongest exhibit is real: the 1923 definition’s fatherland and holy-land test describes, with uncomfortable precision, the citizenship amendment’s sorting of faiths ninety-six years later. Christophe Jaffrelot’s Modi’s India (2021) gives the reading its canonical form, arguing that India under Modi became an ethnic democracy in Sammy Smooha’s sense, a regime where the majority community is equated with the nation and minorities hold citizenship of a diminished grade, de facto where Israel’s version runs de jure. The reading’s limit is the language and curriculum files. A doctrine fixed in 1923 explains why a state might sort citizens by faith; it does not explain why that state would stake political capital on Sanskrit universities, on a three-language formula rewritten in a week under Tamil pressure, or on deleting Mughal court chapters from a history textbook, none of which the 1923 text contemplates and all of which belong to projects with genealogies independent of Savarkar.

The post-2014-rupture reading holds that the period breaks the republic’s grammar rather than continuing any doctrine, and its strongest exhibit is the technique the map records: a state that renegotiates settlements without amending them, ruling through institutional capture and ceremonial redefinition, is doing something the founders’ categories do not name. Aishwary Kumar’s Radical Equality (2015), his study of Ambedkar and Gandhi and the risk of democracy, supplies the reading’s theoretical root, the claim that Indian equality was always argued in civilisational idioms and was therefore always exposed to a civilisational counter-claim; Kumar’s essays after 2019 press the rupture case against the citizenship law’s season. The reading’s limit is continuity of personnel and text. The doctrine the state acts upon was written in 1923 and 1966, the organisation that carries it was founded in 1925, and the promises executed after 2014 were printed in manifestos decades old; a rupture that arrives carrying century-old documents is a strange species of break, and the reading must explain away the archive to sustain itself.

The electoral-strategy reading holds that Hindutva functions as mobilisation technology, its content chosen for coalition-building across caste and region, and its strongest documentary support is Andersen and Damle’s The RSS: A View to the Inside (2018), whose inside account shows an organisation repeatedly trimming doctrinal display to organisational need, from the Jana Sangh’s founding compromises of 1951 to the coalition deferrals of 1998. On this reading, that programme is the price of a winning coalition and would be traded away if the arithmetic changed. The reading’s limit is the costliness of the evidence. A government pursuing strategy alone does not spend its second-term capital on a citizenship law that triggers months of street protest, on a curriculum fight with the historical profession, or on a language formula that endangers its southern alliances, when cheaper mobilisations through welfare delivery and leadership appeal were already winning elections in 2014 and 2019. Strategy explains the timing of the cultural acts, the manifesto sequencing and the retreat on the draft language clause of 2019; strategy does not explain their content or their persistence after the votes were counted.

A cross-cutting amendment, which each reading must absorb and none owns, is the personalisation of the programme in the Prime Minister’s ritual persona. Jaffrelot’s own subtitle for the French original of Modi’s India named the phenomenon national-populism, the fusion of the doctrine with a leader who embodies it directly before the electorate. The file on culture carries the fusion in its details: the consecration at Ayodhya in January 2024 was preceded by the Prime Minister’s eleven-day fast and pilgrimage to temples associated with the Ramayana, a discipline the government’s communications publicised as personal devotion and the opposition read as the head of government performing the chief celebrant’s role in a rite of one tradition. The continuous reading absorbs the persona as the doctrine’s vehicle; the rupture reading absorbs it as the new state’s liturgy; the strategy reading absorbs it as branding of unusual discipline. The integrated reading assigns it a precise place: the persona is the coherence device at the level of performance, the single body in which language of address, civilisational identity and sacred territory are enacted together on the ceremonial calendar, performing the integration that the ministries execute only in parts. A programme whose unity is performed by its leader and documented in its archive has two carriers, and an analysis that tracks only the archive or only the performance holds half the evidence.

The integrated-triad reading, defended here, incorporates what each rival proves and refuses what each overclaims. From the continuous reading it takes the archive: the doctrine is old, and its 1923 test illuminates the 2019 statute. From the rupture reading it takes the technique: settlements renegotiated around unamended texts mark a governing method the founding generation did not practise. From the strategy reading it takes the mechanism of legitimation: the programme advances through electoral verdicts and retreats where electoral and federal costs bite, as the draft clause of June 2019 retreated. What the integrated reading adds is the object itself: three commitments, Hindi, Hindutva and Hindostan, each revisiting its own settlement through its own institutional mechanism, pursued simultaneously as one project of language, identity and land whose coherence is the era’s wager. The namable claim follows: the Hindi-Hindutva-Hindostan triad poses the substantive question of culture the Modi era forces, and the integrated triad captures what fragmented domain framings cannot.

Three Commitments, Three Speeds: The Federal Evidence

The map’s rows move at different speeds, and the speedometer is federal. The Hindi commitment, which travels through state classrooms and state consent, has met the triad’s only sustained defeats. Tamil Nadu’s two-language policy, adopted by the DMK government of C.N. Annadurai in 1968 and held by every successor government of both Dravidian parties, stood untouched through the entire Modi decade: the draft clause of 2019 died in a week, the 2020 policy’s flexibility language conceded the point in writing, and Tamil Nadu’s governments continued to refuse the three-language formula in terms while accepting Union education funds under protest at its conditions. Karnataka supplied the street version of the same veto in July 2017, when pro-Kannada organisations protested the Hindi signage of the Bengaluru metro, masked the Hindi lettering on station boards, and drew a letter from Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to the Union government demanding parity for Kannada; the metro’s signage practice adjusted, and the episode entered the southern parties’ permanent brief against imposition. Even the Bharatiya Janata Party’s own alliances carried the friction: the AIADMK, the BJP’s Tamil Nadu ally in 2019, defended the two-language policy against the draft clause in the same week the clause was withdrawn, and no BJP state unit south of the Vindhyas has campaigned for compulsory Hindi since.

The Hindutva commitment travels faster because its instruments are the Union’s own. A curriculum council in Delhi does not require a state legislature’s signature, a framework committee’s report binds through the textbook market’s gravity, and a ceremonial calendar is set by the Prime Minister’s office alone; its obstacles are professional and judicial, slower and weaker than federal ones, and the deletions of 2022 survived their controversy intact. The Hindostan commitment travels fastest of all where Parliament’s competence is plenary: the reorganisation of a state’s territory under Article 3 and the amendment of citizenship law required only the majorities the government already held, and the 2019 acts were law within months of the verdict that authorised them, with the Supreme Court’s validation of the reorganisation arriving, in December 2023, after the fact. The gradient is itself evidence for the integrated reading, read carefully. A fragmented account sees three unrelated policies and three unrelated oppositions. The triad account predicts the gradient: one project-structure, pressed through three consent-structures of descending resistance, produces exactly the pattern the decade shows, rapid advance where the Union acts alone, negotiated advance where professionals and courts mediate, and stalemate where state governments hold a veto the Constitution gave them in 1956 and 1967. The settlements, that is, still govern the speeds; the projects govern the direction; and the era’s cultural politics is the product of the two.

The Strongest Objection, and the Verdict It Survives

The strongest objection to the integrated-triad reading is not partisan; it is mechanical. The three commitments run through institutions with different masters, different clocks and different veto points, and a sceptic can reasonably ask whether the integration exists anywhere outside the analyst’s diagram. Language policy in India is a concurrent and state-dominated field in practice: Tamil Nadu’s two-language policy has survived every Union formula since 1968, the draft clause of 2019 died within a week of its publication, and the 2020 policy’s concessions to state choice were extracted, not volunteered. Curriculum runs through a council and a committee system where professional historians contest every deletion in public. Citizenship and territory run through Parliament, where a majority is sufficient and no state’s consent is required. On the sceptic’s account, the three files share a government and a decade, nothing more; calling them a triad imposes coherence on coincidence, and the honest description of the Modi era is three separate policies on language, faith and land proceeding at three separate speeds, one of them repeatedly stopped by federal resistance.

The objection identifies the correct test, and the record passes it at the level where the triad reading locates the integration. The reading has never claimed integration of mechanism; the map’s own rows assign each project a distinct institutional route and a distinct consent structure. The claim is integration of purpose: a single account of what India is, stated in the ruling movement’s texts from Savarkar’s geography of 1923 to the Home Minister’s language speeches of 2019 and 2022, which assigns the language, the identity and the territory their places in one civilisational description, and which the state then executes file by file as each file’s arithmetic permits. The evidence for the single account is the sequencing and the mutual reinforcement of the acts. The territorial and citizenship acts were paired within four months of the 2019 verdict, as one legislative season’s work. The language formula, the curriculum framework and the Sanskrit universities moved through one ministry in one policy cycle between 2019 and 2023. The ceremonial calendar crowned the sequence at Ayodhya in January 2024, on ground the territorial file had cleared. A coincidence theory must treat the pairing, the cycling and the crowning as three accidents; the triad reading treats them as the visible joints of a programme whose text, the movement’s own archive, announces the joints in advance.

The reading also states its own falsification conditions, as an adjudication must. The integrated-triad reading would fail if the three files were shown to be driven by unrelated ministries without a common textual source in the movement’s archive; the archive exists, from the 1923 definition to the 1998 manifesto’s deferral list, and names all three commitments in advance of their execution. The reading would fail if the commitments advanced identically regardless of consent structure; the federal evidence shows the opposite gradient, which the reading predicts and its rivals do not. The reading would fail if a Modi-era government, given a free hand, traded that programme away for a cheaper coalition; the decade shows the programme retained through protest, litigation and alliance friction, at measurable cost. And the reading would need revision if the commitments were reversed by their own authors, if a future BJP government restored the deleted chapters, repealed the citizenship filter or returned the language formula to the settlement’s terms; nothing in the record to 2024 points that way, and the personnel, texts and institutions that carry the programme are built to outlast a single Parliament.

The verdict, then, is measured. The integration is real and incomplete, and its incompleteness is part of the finding: the Hindi commitment remains the weakest of the three precisely where the federal veto survives, the Hindutva commitment advances furthest where the Union acts alone, and the Hindostan commitment has redrawn membership and internal symmetry while leaving the external map untouched. What no rival reading supplies is a frame in which the weakness and the advance belong to the same phenomenon. The founding generation built three settlements, on language, on religion and state, and on territory and membership, and the founding settlement of 1950 held the three apart by design, assigning each to its own articles and its own politics. The Modi era’s substantive cultural act is the refusal of that separation: one civilisational account, pressed simultaneously into the classroom’s language, the syllabus’s history and the citizen’s legal definition. Whether the coherence attempt succeeds is the question the era leaves open, and the question is substantive precisely because the attempt is documented, dated and still contested in the institutions where it began.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does Hindutva mean today?

Hindutva carries three distinct meanings in Modi-era usage, and disputes about the word are usually disputes about which meaning governs. The first is Savarkar’s definition of 1923: the quality of being Hindu, fixed by holding the land from the Indus to the seas as both fatherland and holy land, a test of culture and territory rather than a theological one. The second is the usage of the Union government and the Bharatiya Janata Party, which present Hindutva as civilisational confidence, the recovery of an Indian self-understanding said to have been suppressed by colonial rule and postcolonial diffidence, and cite the Supreme Court’s 1995 description of Hindutva as a way of life. The third is the usage of the doctrine’s scholarly critics, Christophe Jaffrelot at their head, for whom Hindutva names a majoritarian ideology that equates the Hindu community with the nation and grades every other community’s citizenship. The three meanings coexist in the same debates, and the Modi-era state’s practice, in curriculum, ceremony and citizenship law, is the evidence each side reads to prove that its meaning is the operative one.

Q: What is Hindi-Hindutva-Hindostan?

Hindi-Hindutva-Hindostan is the triad of commitments through which this study reads the politics of the Modi era. Hindi names the drive to elevate one language into the nation’s common speech, revisiting the multilingual settlement of 1956 and 1967 by promotion rather than by law. Hindutva names the drive to anchor national identity in Hindu civilisation, revisiting the plural-civilisational settlement of Articles 25 to 30 by implicit anchoring in curriculum and ceremony rather than by the adoption of a state religion. Hindostan names the drive to describe the state’s territory as a civilisational homeland, revisiting the territorial-political settlement of 1947 and 1950 by re-describing membership while leaving the borders untouched. The three words share the Sanskrit root Sindhu, the river Indus, and diverge in everything else: a language, a doctrine and a land. The triad’s claim is that the Modi era pursues the three as one project, and that the pursuit of coherence among them, not any single commitment, is the era’s substantive cultural act.

Q: How is Modi-era cultural politics different from earlier nationalism?

The differences are three, and each separates the Modi-era triad from a named predecessor. Against the cultural nationalism of Tilak and Aurobindo, which asserted a Hindu idiom against a foreign state from outside it, the triad operates through the state’s own institutions, its textbook council, language machinery and legislative majority. Against the Hindutva of Savarkar and Golwalkar, a doctrine propagated by a movement that held no state and distrusted electoral time, the triad legitimises itself through two consecutive single-party Lok Sabha majorities, in 2014 and 2019, executing manifesto promises as verdicts received. Against the Vajpayee era, whose National Agenda for Governance of March 1998 shelved the temple, Article 370 and the uniform civil code as the price of coalition, the triad pursues the integration that the coalition years deferred, item by item, within a single decade. Earlier nationalisms asserted, awaited or postponed; the Modi-era formation governs, and governs in the cultural register first.

Q: Is India becoming a Hindu Rashtra?

The formal record answers one way and the functional readings divide. No constitutional amendment has declared a state religion, the Preamble retains the word secular inserted in 1976, Articles 25 to 30 stand unamended, and no instrument of the Indian state proclaims a Hindu Rashtra. On that record, the answer in law is that no such state has been created. Scholars who answer yes argue from function rather than text: Christophe Jaffrelot’s Modi’s India (2021) describes an ethnic democracy, de facto rather than de jure, in which the majority community is equated with the nation through curriculum, ceremony, citizenship law and vigilante tolerance; Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s essays describe a majoritarian state culture achieved without constitutional rupture. Defenders of the government answer from the same record that elections remain competitive, courts continue to rule against the state, federal vetoes have stopped the language programme’s hardest clause, and a Hindu Rashtra that must ask Tamil Nadu’s consent is a strange species of theocracy. The question is therefore best answered as the scholars’ dispute itself: de jure, no; de facto, contested at full strength on both sides.

Q: What is the Akhand Bharat discourse?

Akhand Bharat, undivided India, is the discourse in which the subcontinent appears as one civilisational geography temporarily partitioned among several states. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, where the usage is doctrinal, frames the concept as cultural rather than territorial: Ram Madhav, a BJP general secretary drawn from the Sangh, stated in a television interview of December 2015 that the separated peoples would one day reunite through goodwill because their civilisational unity preceded the political division, and Sangh chiefs have repeated that framing while disavowing annexation. No Indian government document claims a neighbour’s territory. The discourse’s defining public episode came on 28 May 2023, when a mural of the ancient subcontinent in the new Parliament building drew objections from Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh; Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi captioned the mural’s photograph with the words that the resolve was clear, Akhand Bharat, and Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar clarified on 8 June 2023 that the mural depicted the Ashokan empire and responsible governance. The discourse thus operates as civilisational claim in the ruling movement’s vocabulary and as territorial warning in the neighbours’ hearing, and the gap between the two hearings is the discourse’s political life.

Q: How does the 2020 NEP affect language policy?

The National Education Policy approved on 29 July 2020 retained the three-language formula of 1968 and rewrote its operative terms in four ways. The choice of languages passed to states, regions and students, ending any reading of the formula as a central prescription. At least two of the three languages must be native to India, a condition that admits Sanskrit, the classical languages and every scheduled language into the third slot that Hindi had been assumed to fill. The policy states in terms that no language will be imposed on any state, a sentence written into the text after the draft of June 2019, whose clause requiring Hindi in non-Hindi-speaking states had been withdrawn within days of publication under Tamil Nadu’s protest. And the medium of instruction until at least Grade 5, preferably until Grade 8, is to be the child’s home language or mother tongue, strengthening regional languages in the primary years while the formula presses multilingualism in the secondary ones. The policy’s net effect is the Hindi project’s signature: the direction of promotion survives, the instrument of compulsion is surrendered in writing.

Q: What is cultural nationalism in the Modi era?

Cultural nationalism in the Modi era is the doctrine that the Indian nation’s substance is its civilisation, and that the state acts legitimately when it aligns language, education and ceremony with that civilisation’s continuity. The doctrine differs from older cultural nationalisms in its instruments: where Tilak’s generation mobilised festivals against a colonial state, the Modi-era version works through the textbook council, the curriculum framework, the official-language machinery and the Prime Minister’s ceremonial calendar. It differs from classical Hindutva in its legitimation, resting on electoral verdicts and on the claim to speak for a civilisation rather than for a creed. And it differs from the plural-civilisational nationalism of the founding settlement in its central assertion, that India’s many traditions compose one civilisation with a Hindu anchor rather than several civilisations sharing one state. Its documents are the National Education Policy of 2020, the National Curriculum Framework of 2023 and the cultural communications of the Prime Minister’s Office and the culture and home ministries, and its test cases are the language formula, the textbook revisions and the citizenship law.

Q: Where do the words Hindi, Hindutva and Hindostan come from?

All three words descend from Sindhu, the Sanskrit name of the river Indus. Old Persian rendered the trans-Indus land Hindush in the Achaemenid inscriptions, and Persian usage produced Hindu for the people beyond the river and Hind for their land, the forms that Arabic and Persian literature carried across Asia. Greek dropped the aspirate and produced Indos, the ancestor of India. Hindostan joins the stem to the Persian suffix stan, meaning place, and served Mughal and British administration as the name of northern India and then of the subcontinent; Iqbal’s anthem of 1904, Sare Jahan se Achha Hindostan Hamara, used it for the shared homeland. Hindi began as the Persian adjective for the land’s speech and settled, through nineteenth-century standardisation, on the Khari Boli-based language written in Devanagari. Hindutva alone was manufactured at a date: Savarkar’s text of 1923 attached the Sanskrit abstract suffix tva, denoting essence or quality, to Hindu, coining the term for Hindu-ness as a political category. The family resemblance among the three words is therefore real and misleading in equal measure, one river wearing three histories.

Q: How does Hindutva as the Modi government presents it differ from Savarkar’s 1923 definition?

The difference runs along three seams. The first is the exclusion test: Savarkar’s definition admitted to the Hindu nation only those who held India as both fatherland and holy land, a test that placed Muslims and Christians, whose holy lands the text located outside India, outside the nation by construction. Modi-era government presentation omits the test from its vocabulary, speaking instead of civilisational confidence, cultural recovery and equal citizenship, and leaves the 1923 corollary unquoted. The second seam is theology: Savarkar, a self-described rationalist, built Hindutva as a category of culture, indifferent to belief, while the Modi-era state’s practice is saturated with performed devotion, consecrations led by the Prime Minister, temple corridors inaugurated as state projects, a register Savarkar’s text never contemplates. The third seam is legal: the government’s spokesmen rest their usage on the Supreme Court’s 1995 judgments describing Hindutva as a way of life rather than a religious creed, a judicial shelter its author never sought. Critics answer that the omitted test survives in the citizenship law’s sorting of faiths, whatever the vocabulary; defenders answer that a doctrine quoted selectively by its inheritors has been revised by the selection.

Q: What changes did the NCERT textbook revisions after 2017 make to school history and social science teaching?

The revisions ran in three waves. A first round in 2017 and 2018 adjusted references across the political science and history lists, inserting the Union government’s flagship programmes into civics teaching. The second wave, the syllabus rationalisation notified in June 2022 and contested through 2023, deleted the chapter on the Mughal courts from the Class 12 history textbook, references to the Gujarat violence of 2002 from the sociology and political science textbooks, passages on the Emergency of 1975 to 1977, and passages recording that Gandhi’s pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity had provoked Hindu extremists and that the RSS had been banned after his assassination; NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani defended the exercise as load reduction against overlap and irrelevance. The third wave was constructive: textbooks written to the National Curriculum Framework of 2023, the Class 6 volume Exploring Society: India and Beyond of 2024 among the first, reorganised early history around the civilisational geography of the subcontinent. Historians of the Indian History Congress tradition condemned the pattern as communal editing; the ministry defended it as the correction of a syllabus written through invaders and failures.

Q: What place does Sanskrit hold in Modi-era education policy?

Sanskrit holds the place of keystone: the smallest language in the classroom by enrolment and the largest by structural function. The National Education Policy of 2020 offers Sanskrit as an option at every level of school and higher education, counts it among the classical languages whose study the policy commends, and routes the growth of Hindi through it, honouring Article 351’s direction that Hindi draw its vocabulary primarily on Sanskrit. The Central Sanskrit Universities Act 2020 converted the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan in Delhi, the Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha in Delhi and the Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha at Tirupati into central universities with effect from 30 April 2020, giving the classical language a university system of its own. The Census of 2011 counted 24,821 mother-tongue speakers of Sanskrit, a figure the policy’s critics cite to argue that the investment serves symbolism rather than speech, and its defenders cite to argue the opposite, that a civilisational language is infrastructure rather than demography. The classical file widened in October 2024, when the Union Cabinet granted classical status to Marathi, Pali, Prakrit, Assamese and Bengali alongside the six languages recognised earlier.

Q: How has the Union government promoted Hindi in official communication since 2014?

The promotion has run through the Union’s own machinery rather than through any state’s consent. A Ministry of Home Affairs circular of May 2014 directed Union ministries to give Hindi priority on official social-media accounts, narrowed to Hindi-speaking states after Tamil Nadu’s chief minister protested in writing. Narendra Modi addressed the United Nations General Assembly in Hindi on 27 September 2014, establishing the language as the government’s voice on the world’s largest podium. Home Minister Amit Shah used Hindi Diwas on 14 September 2019 to argue that one language could unite the country, a statement southern opposition leaders condemned and Shah later qualified by calling Hindi a friend of every Indian language. Presiding over the Parliamentary Committee on Official Language on 7 April 2022, Shah reported the machinery’s conversion into statistics: seventy percent of the Union Cabinet’s agenda prepared in Hindi, twenty-two thousand Hindi teachers recruited in the eight North Eastern states, nine tribal languages of that region written in Devanagari, and Hindi accepted, in his formulation, as an alternative to English rather than to any local language.

Q: What is the strongest objection to reading Hindi, Hindutva and Hindostan as one integrated project?

The strongest objection is mechanical, and it deserves its full weight. The three commitments run through institutions with different masters, different clocks and different veto points, and the objector asks whether the integration exists anywhere outside the analyst’s diagram. Language policy meets state governments holding a constitutional veto, and Tamil Nadu’s two-language policy has defeated every Union formula since 1968, and it killed the draft education clause of June 2019 within a week of its release. Curriculum meets a professional estate of historians who contest each deletion in public and a textbook market no ministry fully commands. Citizenship and territory meet only Parliament, where a majority suffices, which is why that file moved in months while the language file stalled for a decade. On the objector’s account, three policies that advance at three speeds through three consent structures, one of them repeatedly stopped, share a government and a decade and nothing else; the triad is a coherence imposed on coincidence by hindsight. The reading defended in this study answers at the level of commitment rather than mechanism, pointing to the shared archive and the sequenced execution, but the objection correctly identifies the evidence any defence must produce.

Q: What do Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle argue about the RSS in The RSS: A View to the Inside (2018)?

Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle argue, from interviews reaching the Sangh’s senior leadership and from the organisation’s own records, that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh of the Modi era is an adaptive institution that has travelled from the margins of Indian public life toward its centre by repeatedly subordinating doctrinal display to organisational growth. Their account traces the Sangh’s survival of the bans of 1948, 1975 and 1992, the building of its family of affiliates across labour, students, religion and politics, and the movement’s growing engagement with the state after 2014, when its cadre staffed a governing party in power. Against portraits of the RSS as a frozen ideological machine, Andersen and Damle present an organisation that revises tactics, moderates presentation and absorbs social change, including on caste, while holding its core commitment to a Hindu nation constant. The book’s evidence cuts two ways in the scholarly argument: the strategy reading of Hindutva rests on its documentation of pragmatism, and the continuity reading rests on its documentation of the constant core, a double service that has made the book the most cited inside account of the movement it studies.

Q: How does Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s cultural nationalism differ from the Modi-era Hindi-Hindutva-Hindostan triad?

The difference is positional before it is doctrinal. Tilak built his cultural nationalism against a state he did not control: the public Ganapati festival launched at Poona in 1893 and the Shivaji festival of 1895 created a Hindu idiom of mobilisation under British rule, and the idiom’s purpose was to convert subjects into a public capable of demanding swaraj. Aurobindo Ghose’s editorials in Bande Mataram in 1907 completed the register, casting nationalism as a religion and the nation as a goddess, again as insurgent speech addressed to the ruled. The Modi-era triad speaks from the opposite chair. Its programme is executed by the state itself, through a textbook council, a curriculum framework, an official-language machinery and a legislative majority, and its idiom is not mobilisation against power but the self-description of power. A festival organised to circumvent a colonial ban on political assembly and a syllabus revised by the ruling party’s own ministry are acts of different species that share a vocabulary. The triad also differs in legitimation: Tilak’s festivals needed no verdicts, the triad rests its authority on the general elections of 2014 and 2019 and executes its programme as promises redeemed.

Q: What is a territorial-cultural state, and how does it differ from the territorial-political state?

A territorial-political state defines itself by jurisdiction: a bounded territory, a population holding citizenship by legal rules of birth, descent and registration, and institutions whose authority runs to the border and stops there. The Constitution of 1950 built India in that form, its First Schedule listing the territory and Articles 5 to 11 assigning membership without reference to faith or civilisational belonging. A territorial-cultural state keeps the same borders and adds a second definition: the territory is the homeland of a civilisation, membership carries a cultural meaning beyond legal status, and the state’s acts, its citizenship law, its internal reorganisations, its maps and murals, express the civilisation’s account of itself. The distinction is analytical rather than legal, since no Indian instrument declares the second form, and its usefulness lies in what it separates: the Modi-era state has not moved a boundary, annexed a district or revised the First Schedule’s logic, while repeatedly re-describing what the territory means, at Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, in the citizenship amendment of 2019 and in the Parliament mural dispute of 2023. One state, two descriptions, and the argument between the descriptions is the Hindostan commitment.

Q: What role do Ministry of Culture programmes play in the Hindutva commitment after 2014?

Ministry of Culture programmes supply the commitment’s public-history infrastructure, the stratum where civilisational identity is produced as commemoration rather than as law. The ministry led Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, the seventy-fifth anniversary commemoration that ran from March 2021 to August 2023, framing the freedom struggle as a civilisational festival across thousands of district events. Its agencies carry the material file: the Archaeological Survey of India’s stewardship of temples and monuments, the national academies’ patronage of classical arts, and the diplomacy of antiquities recovery, in which official statements counted artefacts returned from foreign collections in the hundreds across the decade, each return staged as a civilisation reclaiming its custody. The ministry ran the culture track of India’s G20 presidency in 2023 under the campaign claim that culture unites all, extending the frame to an international circuit. None of these programmes compels, prohibits or amends; their work is to normalise a description of the nation as an ancient civilisation with a continuous cultural personality, the description the Hindutva project requires as common sense before its harder instruments, curriculum and citizenship, ask anything of anyone.

Q: What is the difference between an official language and a national language in Indian constitutional law?

The Constitution designates the first and withholds the second. An official language is the language of state business: Article 343 names Hindi in the Devanagari script the official language of the Union, the Official Languages Act 1963 and its amendment of 1967 continue English alongside it indefinitely, Article 345 lets each state adopt its own official languages, and Article 348 fixes English for the Supreme Court and the High Courts until Parliament provides otherwise. A national language, by contrast, would be a symbolic designation of the nation’s own tongue, a status no Indian constitutional provision, statute or notification confers on any language. The Gujarat High Court recorded the position in 2010, observing in the course of a case that no law or notification declares Hindi the national language of India. The distinction explains the peculiar shape of the language argument: Hindi Diwas, observed each 14 September, commemorates the official-language adoption of 1949, and the political demand that Hindi be recognised as the nation’s language asks for a symbolic rank the founding settlement deliberately declined to create, which is why the demand advances by promotion and never reaches a text to amend.

Q: How does the Hindutva commitment work through implicit anchoring rather than formal adoption?

Implicit anchoring is the technique by which a civilisational identity is set as the state’s default without any clause adopting it. The instruments are atmospheric and curricular rather than constitutional: a syllabus rationalisation that deletes the Mughal court and the circumstances of Gandhi’s assassination, a curriculum framework organised around Indian knowledge systems and rootedness, a ceremonial calendar in which the Prime Minister inaugurates temple corridors and leads a consecration, a sceptre installed in Parliament on a monastery’s authority. Each act is defensible in isolation on administrative, pedagogical or ceremonial grounds, and none presents a court with a state-religion clause to strike down, a legislature with an amendment to vote on, or an opposition with a single text to campaign against. The cumulative direction, however, is legible, and legibility is the technique’s product: the citizen learns which civilisation the state takes itself to be from the textbooks issued, the festivals led and the precincts rebuilt, rather than from any proclamation. Critics name the technique majoritarianism by ambience; defenders name it the recovery of a cultural confidence a diffident republic had outsourced; the mechanism is the same under both names.

Q: What evidence would separate the electoral-strategy reading of Hindutva from the integrated-triad reading?

The two readings predict different behaviour at three testable points, and the decade’s record discriminates among them. The first test is cost: a strategy-only programme should be traded away when its price rises, yet the citizenship law was defended through months of street protest in 2019 and 2020, the curriculum deletions were held through a historians’ campaign in 2023, and the language formula was retained rather than dropped after the rout of June 2019. The second test is the archive: strategy explains timing but not content, and the commitments executed after 2014 appear in the movement’s manifestos and texts decades before the elections they supposedly served, the 1923 definition and the 1998 deferral list at their head. The third test is coalition arithmetic, the strategy reading’s home ground: the general election of 2024 returned the Bharatiya Janata Party to office dependent on allies, the condition under which the Vajpayee generation had shelved the programme, and the programme nevertheless advanced within months, the classical-language expansion of October 2024 at its head. Evidence of the programme being shelved under the same arithmetic would vindicate the strategy reading; the record to date runs the other way.