If the metamorphosis of Mohandas Gandhi's Gujarat into a Hindutva laboratory was baffling to social scientists, Orissa's recent emergence as another communal hotspot has been no less surprising. If the metamorphosis of Mohandas Gandhi's Gujarat into a Hindutva laboratory was baffling to social scientists, Orissa's recent emergence as another communal hotspot has been no less surprising. Over the course of August and September 2008, following the murder by Maoists of Laxmananda Saraswati, a sadhu closely associated with the Hindutva brigade, the state witnessed large-scale communal violence against the Christian community in and around Kandhamal District. This onslaught was actually a continuation of disturbances that took place in Kandhamal in December 2007, when Christians were likewise subjected to indiscriminate violence – churches burned, houses destroyed, women brutalised and innocent people killed – even as the administration turned a blind eye.
The 'transformation' of Orissa into another Hindutva lab is the central focus of Angana Chatterji's book, Violent Gods: Hindu nationalism in India's present. An assistant professor of cultural anthropology in California, Chatterji says her work was prompted by the Gujarat genocide of 2002, with her first visit to Orissa being a sequel to her Gujarat trip. There, she learned how the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had galvanised its forces to replicate the "successful Gujarat experiment". This initial exposure to the unfolding situation led the author to enter into a different kind of engagement in Orissa. She returned numerous times, meeting people from across the ideological spectrum, visiting victims of sectarian and communal violence, interacting with NGOs and social-action groups, and even involving herself in convening the Orissa People's Tribunal on Communalism.
Of particular importance in Chatterji's work is the impressive number of interviews she conducted during the course of her fieldwork, allowing her to get to know a broad spectrum of voices, including revisiting victims of violence. For example, the author made several visits to the village of Kilipal, where in February 2004 seven Dalit Christian women and a male pastor were tonsured (had their hair stripped from their scalps) by upper-caste and Hindu-identified Dalit neighbours. Chatterji's first visit was in August, six months after the incident, and she returned four times over the following three years. By allowing the victims to speak over the course of these recurring visits, Chatterji hopes to break "the silence imposed by social disgrace, and enables action, legal and political".
Violent Gods is thus an outcome of a process of interaction and reflection by a researcher who willingly slips into the role of an activist. Through her research, which is extensively reliant on oral historiography, Chatterji discusses the period between 1999 and October 2008. She begins with the horrific incident of Graham Staines, an Australian missionary working with the leprosy-afflicted in Orissa, who was burned alive with his two children by a mob led by Dara Singh, a Bajrang Dal activist. Plotting the trajectory of the state's Hindutva forces (which are generally seen to have entered Orissa with the launching of a branch of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1940), Chatterji emphasises that the key to Hindu cultural dominance is the ascendance of an aggressive Brahminism, which legitimises certain forms of violence against the Shudras and Ati-Shudras. In this vein, the author describes the two aspects of the Hindu-majoritarian strategy to produce cohesion in Oriya society: ethnic cleansing and Hindutva education.