The Unmaking and Making of the Social Sciences in Contemporary India

This article engages with the social sciences in contemporary India, with a particular focus on its transformation following the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) victory in the 2014 national elections. Shoddy textbooks revisions, relentless fund cuts, and declining fortunes on academic freedom indices telegraph the deepening precarity of the social sciences in contemporary India. We locate this precarity at the intersection of the neoliberal turn in higher education, the anti-intellectualism of authoritarian populism and, most critically, the Hindutva (or Hindu supremacist) moorings of the ruling dispensation. We suggest that in keeping with the ideological and organizational matrix of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent body of the BJP, Hindutva’s concerted assault on the social sciences involves a double manoeuvre with both destructive and productive dimensions. Negative restrictions such as physical attacks on scholars and students work alongside positive restrictions such as the setting of research agendas to vitiate the social sciences from outside and within.