Siddhartha Deb, Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India (Haymarket Books, 2024), 232 pp. $21.95
Journalist and novelist Siddhartha Deb grew up in Shillong in Northeastern India and was educated in Kolkata and at Columbia University. He has published three novels, Point of Return (2003); Outline of the Republic (2005); and The Light at the End of the World (2023). He has also published journalistic pieces in numerous venues such as The Guardian, The Nation, and The Boston Globe. Twilight Prisoners is his second work of non-fiction, and it is a collection of long form pieces published in the last fifteen years on the rise of Hindu nationalism in India.
The book consists of nine essays organized into three sections. Taken together these essays chart the rise of authoritarian Hindu nationalism and the power of the administration of Narendra Modi who was recently elected for a third time (albeit with a narrower margin of votes than he predicted) to be the Prime Minister of India. In Part I, Deb’s three essays examine the emergence of Modi as a national political figure, the Bhopal disaster of 1984 and the erasure of memory, and the fate of Burmese dissidents in the Northeast border towns. In Part II, Deb examines the mythologies of the Hindu right such as the creation of the Muslim foreigner in the Northeast, the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, and the myth of scientific and technological wonders of Vedic India. Part III discusses resistance to the Hindu right and the heavy price paid by dissidents including the assassination of Gauri Lankesh, a journalist; the attacks on Arundhati Roy, the novelist and activist; and the imprisonment of intellectuals and activists such as Anand Teltumbde, Stan Swamy, Vara Vara Rao, and Rona Wilson (referred to here as the BK16) who have been imprisoned under anti-terror laws since 2018. Taken together these essays present the growing power of the Hindu Right led by Modi; the ideological shifts in contemporary India as a postcolonial nation which had pledged itself to secularism and which is now increasingly a Hindu fascist state; and the state’s violent repression of dissidents, Muslims, and Dalits. With a novelist’s eye, Deb often provides sharp portraits of ordinary Indians and their deep commitment to Hindutva in their everyday lives.
Deb’s audience is largely non-Indian as these essays have been published in such venues as The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Columbia Journalism Review, Harper’s Magazine, and The Baffler. The purpose of these essays is to raise awareness about the growing authoritarianism in India and to counter the brand India/shining India narrative put forth by the Indian government. Since 2001, Deb has been publishing essays and non-fiction books to lay bare the nexus of Hindu nationalism, neoliberalism, and “the violence lurking underneath the techno-shine of consumerist Delhi and Bangalore” (5). While the Indian American technocrats in the United States continue to celebrate India as a rising technical and economic power, Deb’s essays examine the violence perpetrated by the Indian state on its minority populations as it pursues global economic and military influence. The establishment of an Indian consulate in Seattle in 2023 with the explicit goal of furthering India–US ties to the technology hub in Seattle speaks to the power of this brand India narrative. Modi’s re-election to a third term in 2024 emphasizes how deeply rooted Hindu nationalism is.
Deb, having been raised in India’s Northeast, brings a distinct lens to challenge the dominant Hindu nationalist narrative. His essays “Nowhere Land: The Lost Dissidents of Manipur” and “Manufacturing Foreigners: India’s war of Disenfranchisement against Muslims” focus on the region that is often overlooked in discussions of India. India’s Northeast borders Bangladesh, China, and Burma/Myanmar, and the border there is quite porous. Additionally, the region is home to many indigenous groups (referred to in India as tribals or Adivasis); there have been numerous uprisings and inter-ethnic conflicts that have shaped the region’s history in the last seven decades. Deb writes of India’s “Look East” policy and its relationship with the Burmese junta as a means of countering growing Chinese power in the region. He writes of the Burmese dissidents who were first given shelter in Manipur, a state in the Northeast, and who have now been neglected by the Hindu Right government. He writes of sneaking across the border into Burma using false papers and of secret meetings with dissidents. He writes of the Modi government’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) which effectively disenfranchises Muslims and strips them of citizen- ship if they cannot demonstrate with papers that they were born in India. The NRC and CAA led to widespread protests in India in 2019, of which the most famous was in Shaheen Bagh led by Muslim women. The protests were forcefully ended when Delhi went into lock- down during the pandemic.
The book also includes a couple of essays that investigate the mythology that sustains the Hindu Right’s beliefs in Hindu supremacy. One of these is the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya. Under Hindu nationalism, the story about a 16th century mosque supposed to have been built by the Mughal emperor Babar on the ruins of a temple commemorating the birthplace of Rama (the hero of the Hindu epic The Ramayana who is worshipped as a God across India), takes on great urgency. In 1992, Hindu nationalists led a rath yatra (chariot procession) across India that culminated in Ayodhya and led to the devotees tearing down the mosque with their bare hands. In 2002 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya after celebrating the tenth anniversary of the mosque’s destruction died in a train carriage fire in Gujarat. The Gujarat government led then by Narendra Modi promoted the idea that the fire was caused by Muslims and what fol- lowed was a state government supported pogrom against Muslims. In 2014, Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India. (A recent book by Zara Chowdhary, The Lucky Ones tells of the author’s harrow- ing experience as a teen of living through the pogrom in Ahmedabad.) The right to build a temple in Ayodhya became mired in the Indian supreme Court and eventually the Court ruled in favor of the Hindu Right based on dubious archaeological evidence. Deb’s essay “Ram’s Kingdom: The Ayodhya Temple and the Ruins of History” outlines this history and speaks of his experience visiting Ayodhya and talking to ordinary people about their belief in this temple and the impact of its construction on the local economy. Modi had made the temple a centerpiece of his election campaigns, and in January 2024, the temple opened to much fanfare, with its consecration ceremony televised both nationally and globally.
In Section III, Deb explores stories of those who have defied the Hindu Right and the Modi government. He writes of Gauri Lankesh, the journalist in Bangalore, who was assassinated by gunmen for her outspoken critiques of Hindu nationalism. He also writes about Arundhati Roy, the novelist and essayist, whose trenchant criticism of Hindu nationalism has made her a target of numerous lawsuits. His essay on the Bhima Koregaon 16, Dalit activists, who were arrested based on manufactured evidence, speaks of the ongoing attacks on intellectuals in India.
Deb’s writing demonstrates deep familiarity with Indian politics and the ability to write for a non-Indian audience. For Americans reading this collection, there will inevitably be a comparison with the emergence of the Christian Right and the MAGA movement in recent years. One of the limitations of this book is that many of the essays are dated. For example, the essay on the Ram temple was pub- lished in 2022 and there is not an update on the completion of the temple that occurred in January 2024. Similarly, the piece on Arundhati Roy precedes the publication of her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happi-ness in which she documented the Indian state’s atrocities in Kashmir, against Dalits and trans people. Since the Indian state’s annexation of Kashmir, Roy has continued her strong critiques of the Modi govern-ment and Hindutva and has faced significant legal harassment and personal threats. With so many developments in Roy’s situation, a discursive footnote providing some updates would have been helpful for a reader in 2024. Overall, this book is an eminently engaging and politically astute collection of essays that critique the growth of Hindu nationalism, the absurd and ahistorical mythology that under- girds it, and the violence experienced by minorities in India.
© 2025 Nalini Iyer
Seattle University,
Seattle, USA
niyer@seattleu.edu
https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2024.2435795
