Deconstruction and reconstruction of political discourse: How does an orientalist narrative exacerbate the exclusion of muslims in contemporary india?

Abstract

This paper explores how Orientalist narratives underpin the exclusion of Muslim communities in contemporary India within the context of BJP’s Hindu nationalist policies. Since Narendra Modi’s ascent to power in 2014, a shift towards cultural homogenisation rooted in Hindu nationalism has been evident, purportedly to foster national unity and independence from colonial legacies. However, such narratives often echo Western Orientalist tropes, positioning Hindu civilisation’s origins in Aryan-centric Vedic traditions as central to India’s rise and identity, while marginalising indigenous Muslim populations through ideological othering. This discourse, characterised by anti-Orientalism and a nascent Indian New Orientalism, informs state political narration, influencing public societal discourse and shaping individual identities. The paper delineates the components of Orientalist discourse, illustrating its role in constructing exclusionary national identities and facilitating organised violence. It critically examines how state-sponsored narratives, propagated by bureaucrats and activists, exploit Orientalist tropes to rationalise and reinforce social hierarchies, particularly targeting Muslim communities. Moreover, the study analyses the societal repercussions of such narratives, emphasising the mutual reinforcement of stereotypes, othering and exclusion. Ultimately, this research highlights the enduring impact of Orientalist frameworks on the societal fabric of India, contributing to ongoing intergroup tensions and violence grounded in identity-based stereotyping and marginalisation.

Keywords

Political narrative and discourse Orientalism Hindu nationalism religious conflicts social identity-based violence

Introduction

After Prime Minister Narendra Modi entered office in May 2014, he proposed a series of policies led by Hindu nationalism (Wilson, 2023). Prime Minister Modi wants to mould India into an independent unity through the cultural homogeneity of Hinduism, resolving the religious-cultural conflict brought about by the colonial past (Sarkar, 2022). However, his claims of anti-colonialisation are in many ways actually recolonising the country based on Western Orientalism (Gelders and Balagangadhara, 2011; Inden, 2023; Smith, 2022). From one perspective, Prime Minister Modi believes that the Vedic civilisation centred on Hinduism, which emerged after the arrival of the Aryans on the Indian subcontinent in the 18th century, brought about the great rise of India (Jaffrelot, 2021: 56) and achieved unity and peace in Indian society (Prakash, 2023). Thus, his radical abandonment of the secularisation of the state and the correlation of Hindu revival with India’s political rise and cultural independence has emphasised the majority identity of the Hindu nation through state propaganda and related policies that seem to have brought a more unified image of the Indian to contemporary India (Smith, 2022). Nonetheless, this image is actually more in line with the ‘core Indianness’ of the Western imagination (Smith, 2022: 25). Meanwhile, he has also embraced the Western Orientalist externalisation of Islam, which excludes local Muslims from the domestic hierarchy of the whole by treating them as the ‘other’ associated with ‘exoticism’ (Devadoss and Culcasi, 2020). The new social system marginalises and excludes the Muslim community, which is also indigenous, leading to the prevalence of identity-based dehumanising violence and conflict (Banerjee, 2021; Mehta, 2022).

Based on the current BJP’s Hindu nationalism national strategies, this paper aims to illustrate ‘how do orientalist narrative exacerbate the exclusion of Muslims in contemporary India’. This paper will first delineate the components of Orientalist discourse and identify two specific manifestations of Orientalism within contemporary Indian state political narration: anti-Orientalism and a nascent Indian New Orientalism. It will then explicate the definitions of, and relationships between, state political narratives, public societal discourse and individual identity formation. Building upon this theoretical framework and the historical agenda thus outlined, the study will trace the development of Hindu nationalism and the persistence of Orientalist elements within it, demonstrating how the state (and associated bureaucrats and activists) has been influenced by Orientalist tropes to curate narratives that facilitate organised, publicly sanctioned exclusionary violence against Muslim communities. Finally, this paper will consider the attendant anxieties arising from such Orientalist narration and intergroup violence at the societal level, specifically the mutual reinforcement between identity-based stereotyping produced by Orientalism and the processes of othering and exclusion among social groups differentiated by identity.

Orientalism and India: a discursive hegemony from the West

Orientalism was previously the study of the languages and literatures of the ‘Orient’ or the Near East and Asia (Teo, 2013: 8). Said (1977: 165) redefined the concept of Orientalism as the domination and exploitation of the Orient by the West. Since then, Orientalism has been perceived as a highly closed field of knowledge, a Western-centred way of thinking and a Western-dominated discourse of power (Chibber, 2020). From one perspective, it rationalised Western imperialism and colonialism by marginalising the Oriental world and treating it as the ‘other’ in opposition to the West (Varisco, 2017). Furthermore, Orientalism, as a Western imagination of the Orient, gradually influenced the self-perception of the Orient through political propaganda, colonial activities and education, thus producing an imagined dualistic ontology in order to eventually achieve control, domination and subjugation of the Orient (Inden, 2023; Mielniczuk, 2021).

In original theory, Said focuses primarily on French and British Orientalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries and limits the Orient mainly to the Arab Muslim regions of the Middle East (Said, 1978). However, in his book, Orientalism, Said had originally made some Orientalist statements about India. Said (1978: 75) argues that India never posed a threat to Europe in the way that Oriental Islam did, and was more easily conquered by Europe, so that Oriental India could be treated with ‘elegance’ by the West. Said also describes Romantic Orientalism, which sought to revive a ‘materialistic and mechanistic Europe through Indian culture, religion, and spirituality’, creating a ‘Western glorification of Hinduism’ based on their imagination (Said, 1978: 105). Meanwhile, with the rise of the anti-colonialisation movement in the 1940s, from 1943 to 2002, a total of 120 former colonies became independent (White, 2014: 18). While newly independent nation-states regained sovereignty from the suzerain state (Nicolaïdis et al., 2014), the Western Orientalist imagination has become a social stereotype that continues to influence the post-colonial Oriental countries (Pun, 2019). Consequently, Said’s theory of Orientalism has been found to be validly applicable to other parts of the non-Western world, and various scholars influenced by him have extended his theories to India (Heehs, 2003; Narayan, 1993; Kopf, 2015). Representatively, Breckenridge and Van der Veer proposed Internal Orientalism in 1993. The argument works to show that Western stereotypes of India construct an imagined ‘core Indianness’, making Indians fall into Orientalist narrative in their self-perception.

This path of becoming entangled in both ethnonationalist narratives and systemic Orientalist discourse is inherently structured. For India, there exists a dual contradiction between modernisation and nationalism. Prime Minister Modi urgently seeks to establish India as an independent great power, aiming to dismantle the colonial legacy, and thus actively employs religious and historical narratives to emphasise the tradition and distinctiveness of the nation. On one hand, in Modi’s efforts to decolonise the reformation of the state, societal phenomena, conflicts and ideological currents are categorised as either ‘colonial elements’ or ‘non-colonial elements’, followed by radical transformation efforts. Such exaggerated measures, however, tend to reaffirm the legacy of Orientalism. A typical example is the emphasis on Hindu nationalism and the violent exclusion of other religious or national groups, which further fractures India’s national identity by reinforcing Western stereotypes of a dichotomy between a ‘traditionally peaceful Hinduism’ and ‘violent other religious groups’. On the other hand, the discourse of Hindu nationalism revisited by Modi continues to contain elements of alienation from colonial religious dogma and the Imaginary of Indian ethnonationalism rooted in colonial stereotypes. This includes issues such as the caste system, sectarianism, gender inequality and religious extremism. These two trajectories jointly reconstruct stereotypical images of Indian ethnicity and nationhood, thereby generating a new form of Orientalist discourse within India, as illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

The double directions on reconstruction of India’s Orientalism.

Orientalist narrative influences one’s political self-identity

To elucidate the pathways through which narratives influence personal identity formation, it is first necessary to define the concept of ‘narrative’. The study of narrative has its origins in the 19th century, when scholars primarily treated narrative as an object of literary criticism, focusing on plot construction, characterisation and storytelling techniques in novels and drama. At that time, narrative was understood as the account of a single, concrete story or event employed to analyse rhetorical and discursive strategies in literary composition. In the early 20th century, formalist and structuralist approaches were systematically introduced to the academy, and researchers moved beyond attention to story content alone to examine narrative form, narrative perspective, temporal organisation and semiotic systems, thereby treating narrative as an abstractable and comparable textual structure. It was not until the 1970s that narrative studies underwent a marked turn towards the social sciences. Scholars began to investigate how narratives operate within social life and how they shape collective memory, social norms and identity politics. Narrative ceased to be merely a property of literary texts and became a component of social practice. The notion that narratives frame our experiences with causality and intention, creating a sense of self, is pivotal in understanding identity formation and transformation within political contexts (Bruner, 1991, 2006). In societal realms such as family, education, media and public discourse, individuals consistently internalise or resist particular narratives to shape, maintain or reconstruct their identities. These narratives influence self-perception and the depiction of others, ultimately shaping the process of identity formation through transmission mechanisms, emotional mobilisation and the politics of memory. Orientalism becomes a distinct avenue for crafting universal societal narratives, processing them into more systematic discourses.

Orientalism serves as an invisible conduit for processing universal discursive patterns within society. The dialectic between knowledge production and cognitive transformation is evident as discourses produced through Orientalism not only disseminate knowledge but also alter individual cognitive logic. To comprehend narratives imbued with Orientalist attributes in the Indian context, it is essential to examine constructs such as religion, caste, gender and spatial-national perceptions (e.g. Bharat versus a more diffuse subcontinent). These narratives are intricately woven into systemic discourses, as illustrated by the evolution from traditional imperial Orientalist narratives to more nuanced contemporary forms such as Anti-Orientalism and India’s Neo-Orientalism. The former is visibly processed by political entities like the BJP, which categorises political elements through an Orientalist and non-Orientalist lens. This binary mode of judgement paradoxically reinforces the colonial history of the empire and Orientalism. A typical example is the BJP’s emphasis on the narrative and identity of an independent nation-state, alongside its critique of the imperial era’s perception of the subcontinent as having a loose sovereignty. The government’s recognition of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, along with excessive emphasis on the nation-state, inadvertently provokes ‘identity wars’, further exacerbating ethnic separatism and religious conflict in contemporary Indian society.

Conversely, India’s Neo-Orientalism does not simply perpetuate former academic stereotypes; rather, it reconstructs the representation of Islam and Muslims within modern media, political security contexts and policy narratives. Distinctive features include associating Islam intrinsically with terrorism, constructing a Hindu nationalist subjectivity and utilising expert discourses to legitimise domestic ethnic and religious policy interventions. These curated and filtered narratives, through specific practical pathways, shape public cognitive logic and modes of thinking, gradually establishing a universal public discourse aimed at reinforcing national identity. These Orientalist-inflected narratives are concealed within India’s decolonisation process and continue to influence the generation of public discourse in society. The narratives emphasised in this article primarily relate to religion and ethnicity, which are the two most significant divisions within identity politics. They also represent inseparable cross-sectoral identities under the governance of the BJP (Kerboua, 2016).

Discourses are comprehensive social and ideological systems that encapsulate multiple narratives, shaping the boundaries and meanings of these narratives. The primitive Orientalist narrative transforms into a systematic discourse through meticulous processing of narratives. Consequently, discourse also functions as a method of political communication, affecting political actors’ self-perception by constructing particular (filtered/processed) narrative frameworks. Examining the contemporary political scene in India, the BJP government significantly influences the discourse dynamics by integrating both anti-Orientalist and neo-Orientalist narratives into its official discourse. This political manipulation of narrative frameworks is perceived differently across various identity-based groups, reflecting the diverse socio-political landscape of India. Individuals within these groups undergo self-conversion processes relating to their identities, heavily influenced by how these narratives are projected and perceived. Consequently, individuals’ self-identities manifest with the nature of collectivisation and otherisation inherent in these narratives. The way the orientalist narrative influences individuals’ self-identities is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2.

The way orientalist narrative influences individuals’ self-identities.

The rise and decline of secularism in India

India, the largest country in the South Asian subcontinent, was colonised by European countries from the late 15th century (Bose and Jalal, 2022: 122). Following independence in August 1947, India remained profoundly influenced by the Western Orientalist narrative and faced serious issues in relation to social identity conflict in the course of the colonialisation movement and social integration, of which the Hindu-Muslim conflict was the most pronounced (Ramnath, 2021). At the domestic level, the exclusion of Islam in the coloniser’s Orientalist narrative and the legacy of the Indo-Pakistani partition in terms of territorial demarcation have left India with intense socio-religious tensions that have led to a continuous movement of religious separatism (Khan, 2021). At the international level, as a rising power, post-independence India sought to shed the international image of the stagnant, conservative countries of the Orient and undertook a series of attempts at cultural renaissance and social integration (Paranjpe, 2020). Examples of these include the Indian Secularist Movement and the Non-Aligned Movement promoted by former Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (Willetts, 2023) and the multilingual revival and religious equality policies of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (Tambiah, 1967).

Before Prime Minister Modi entered office in 2014, the Congress Party had been practising secularism in order to break away from the Orientalist narrative of the West in search of a more modern, democratic political system and national image (Anand and Lall, 2022). However, since the late 1970s, driven by opportunism, the Congress Party under Indira Gandhi began to openly pander to religious groups for political gain (Singh and Saxena, 2023). A case in point is that in the early 1980s, in order to disperse the votes of the Sikhs and to weaken its main rival in Punjab (the Akali Dal), the Congress Party has supported the leaders of the Sikh separatist movement (Sisson & Wolpert, 1988: 28). As a result, Indian scholars have generally reflected on and criticised secularism, stressing that the concept arose in the context of the formation of the European nation-state and its resistance to theocracy, which was imbued with a Western narrative (Beltramini, 2023; Momin, 2023). Each country has its own unique historical, social and economic conditions. Secularism, born in the West, expressing the Western democratic politics, cannot be used to solve the problems faced by India, and to impose secularisation on India is to fall into Western Orientalism (Basu, 2023). Since then, the growing divisions within the Congress party and increasing criticism of its secularist policies have provided an opportunity for a revival of Hindu nationalism (Pandey, 2023). Eventually, the Congress party lost the 2014 general elections, and its secularisation of Indian society came to an end (Singh and Saxena, 2023).

Hindu nationalism: establishment of a new India centred on the revival of Hinduism

The Government of contemporary India, through the promotion of Hindu nationalism, has attempted to develop a fully-fledged concept of a sovereign state in the post-colonial era and to eradicate the international stereotypes about it in order to conclusively resolve the issue of religious conflict within the Indian domain (Raghavan et al., 2022). Despite these efforts, it is still difficult to counteract the influence of Western Orientalism on Indian society, and the country is mired in social conflict and Western stereotypes (Gairola and Jayawickrama, 2021; Hack, 2022). To emphasise the independence of Indian civilisation, the current ruling narrative in India views traditional Hinduism as fundamental to Indians and excludes Muslims from Indian society (Shani, 2021). This prevalence of state-representative, high-caste and chauvinistic Hinduism is a relatively new phenomenon (Banaji, 2018). It was introduced in the 1920s by the far-right ideologue, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, and has been adopted and developed by the BJP and its allies since the 1990s (Banaji, 2018: 345). The BJP originated from the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) under the Hindu paramilitary group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which advocates the construction of an exclusionary Hindu nationalism (Kumar, 2022). With Prime Minister Modi leading the BJP to victory in the 2014 general elections, Hindu nationalism was further defined as a national development strategy (Ayoob, 2020).

The new strategy did unite the Hindu majority of the society in a short period of time, giving them a greater sense of national consciousness and enhancing the BJP’s political mobilisation (Azam and Khan, 2022). However, this Hindu nationalism, which has absorbed the Orientalist narratives of the West (especially the British), is an autonomous post-colonial project whose ambition is to suppress, dispossess, control and even annihilate many of the existing cultures and peoples of India and neighbouring countries (Bennett, 2023; Jouhki, 2020; Smith, 2022). The Muslim community, as the largest religious minority in India, has been more severely marginalised since the implementation of the Hindu nationalist strategy (Shaikh et al., 2023). Muslims and their culture of Islam have been assigned the image of an Orientalist-style horrific and violent other, and as a result, they have been severely sidelined in education and employment and have even been subjected to dehumanising violence at the hands of Hindus (Priyadarsini and Panda, 2023).

As mentioned, from 2014, Prime Minister Modi has radically abandoned India’s secularisation process, instead opting for a revival of Hinduism (Smith, 2022), defining the Hindu majority (approximately 79.8% of India’s population) as the state-nation, emphasising this ‘majority India’ at the exclusion of other social minorities, including Muslims (Evans and Sahgal, 2021). His aim in advancing Hindu nationalism was to form a coherent identity of India centred on ethnicity and religion (Sarkar, 2022). Despite seemingly bringing a more unified image of the Indian to contemporary India, it in fact converged on the image of India as imagined under the Orientalism of the West (Smith, 2022). The concept of Hinduism promoted by the BJP is defined by the West and derived from the Orientalist-type imagery of the West (Inden, 2023: 98). In the Western narrative, Aryans from Europe came to the Indian subcontinent in the 18th century, bringing with them the Vedic period, centred on Hindu civilisation (Zavalii, 2023). Their Hinduism is full of traditional beauty, devoted housewives and ancient temples (Inden, 2023: 100). The Vedic period was India’s golden age and represents the spirit of India, where people adhered to caste-centred Hinduism as a universal philosophy of life that transcended religion and made India a monolithic, static, ancient country (Pinkney, 2014; Rao, 2021). This imagery from the West, which simply defined the highly differentiated Hinduism as a stereotypical whole and regarded it as the key to India’s rise to power, was carried over into the education system of British India and was generally accepted by the indigenous elite as the new local perception (King, 1999; Smith, 2022). This is the phenomenon of indigenous Orientalism as discussed by Said (1978: 255) in his work, Orientalism, whereby the inherent notions of Western Orientalism are somehow identified and absorbed by the Orient, and the imagination is further made real through social behaviour, including politics and education (Turner, 2004). Overall, the Hindu nationalism promoted by the BJP is still essentially subservient to the Western narrative of Orientalism, which portrays the Hindu revival as the only path to make India a unified country (Sarkar, 2022). This has stifled India’s religious and folklore diversity, further torn apart India’s socio-cultural identity, and was inherited from the colonial power hierarchy of British India (Huju, 2023). Among the most affected were the exclusion of the Muslim community from Indian society under the BJP and Hindu-Muslim conflicts and atrocities (Lyngmo, 2021).

Othering, dehumanisation and violence against Muslims

The othering, dehumanisation and violence against the Muslim community in domestic society is an inevitable consequence of the Hindu nationalist determination of Hindu subjectivity (Kanwal, 2024; Lyngmo, 2021; Nayal and Naik, 2023). According to Hindu nationalists, Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism were born in India (Moliner, 2020; Sharma, 2020), and Judaism and Zoroastrianism had been assimilated as part of India (Heckert, 2023; Secunda, 2024). With the departure of the British colonisers, Christianity lost its external support, and there was no conflict with Hindu nationalism as long as the Christians did not seek to proselytise and convert the Hindus (James, 2022). The exception is that Muslims are undoubtedly an important ‘other’ in the Orientalism proposed by Said (2023: 365). There are not many Muslims living in the societies from which the European Orientalists themselves came, so they believe that the ‘other’ lives elsewhere (Bennett, 2023: 88). They never realised that this ‘othering’ would construct a new hierarchy of social power through Western colonial activities (Jouhki, 2006). Yet, Muslims become the ‘other with nowhere to hide’ when they share space, time and life with Hindus in India, which enables the exclusion of Muslims from the social hierarchy (Khan, 2020). Muslims are portrayed in Western Orientalist narratives as ‘evil, ugly, materialistic, dangerous destroyers of society’ (Wahid, 2024: 18). During the colonial period of British India, the colonisers of the Empire sought to promote this Orientalist outlook to Indians (Prakash, 2023). For example, George Eden, 1st Earl of Auckland, the then Viceroy of India during the 1820s, emphasised that both Muslims and ‘them’ (the British colonialists) were outsiders, but that the Muslims were violent and belligerent, whereas they, the British, were moderate and happy to co-operate (Marshall, 1974: 88). Subject to Western Orientalist views of Islam, under Prime Minister Modi’s and the BJP’s governance narrative, Hinduism is enlightened while Islam is ignorant, and Hinduism is peace-loving while Islam is violent (Barua, 2023). This is reflected in many public speeches delivered by BJP officials, including even the incitement to Muslim genocide at a Hindu rally in Haldwar on January 15, 2022 (The New York Times, 2022).

Muslims are violent, stupid and will destroy our country. If we want to reduce (their) population then massacre them. We should kill 2 million Muslims then we will win and protect India and make it a Hindu country . . . (The Observer, 2022)

It is not permissible for the Hindus to be tolerant of Islam, as this would mean political weakness, economic decline and the degradation of India’s greatness (Mehta, 2022: 45). Therefore, their attitude towards Indian Muslims could only be deportation, not assimilation (Shahzad et al., 2021). Prime Minister Modi exaggerates Muslim violence and terror through propaganda and education (Sinha, 2021). It is not difficult to see this narrative in the number of column inches devoted to ‘Islamic terror’ in Indian newspapers and on the Internet, and in Bollywood’s portrayal of Muslim anti-heroes (Jouhki, 2006). The anti-Muslim narrative also seems to be one of the ways in which Prime Minister Modi is accumulating votes (Shivshankar and Talya, 2023). In 2023, an important period in which Prime Minister Modi was engaged in the third general election, India Hate Lab (IHL) (2023) documented 668 hate speech events targeting Muslims. IHL recorded 255 of the events in the first half of 2023, while the number rose to 413 events in the second half of the year, marking a 62% increase (IHL, 2023). This propaganda of othering and dehumanising the Muslim community has left Indian Muslims facing various problems, such as backwardness in education, poor health infrastructure, low incomes, a lack of assets and lack of access to credit (Islam, 2018). According to two surveys conducted by Gaikwad and Nellis in 2017 and 2021, in Mumbai, approximately 70% of Muslims working in the public sector feel discriminated against. More disconcertingly, the BJP’s acceptance of the West’s inherent prejudice against the Muslim community as an enemy of religion and nationhood has led to an explosion of Hindu-Muslim conflict and atrocities since 2014 (Mitra and Ray, 2019). Examples include the ‘Citizenship Amendment Act’ protests of December 2019, which resulted in 25 deaths (Bhushan, 2021: 202), and the Assam riots of July 2021, which claimed 80 lives (Bhushan, 2021: 88). In many conflicts and riots, rape and mutilation have even become common atrocities (Tyagi and Sen, 2020), as the Western imagination, where neighbouring Hindus and Muslims see each other as the ‘other’ engaging in dehumanising violence in an attempt to annihilate each other completely (Ahmad, 2022). Prime Minister Modi’s government, in its attempt to address the threat of Islam under the Western Orientalist narrative, has exacerbated the exclusion of Muslims in contemporary India and made the domestic society more dangerous and tense by keeping the Muslim community at the bottom of the social power hierarchy (Priyadarsini and Panda, 2023).

The stereotypes will not be deconstructed

The identity-based stereotyping engendered by Orientalism, together with the narratives and discourses it produces, sows the seeds of intergroup violence and fragmentation within society. Regrettably, such stereotypes do not dissipate with the modernisation of the nation-state but instead deepen under the prolongation of authoritarian rule. Fragmented social identities, irreconcilable positional antagonisms and socially sanctioned movements of othering and violence in ‘the Orient’ could remain the enduring legacies of Orientalism.

The legacies of Orientalist scholarship in narrative and discourse (here defined as Original Orientalism) carry imperialist and colonial characteristics that continuously fragment identity groups within Oriental societies, especially former colonies, and repeatedly rupture national and collective identities. This undermining of state authority and legitimacy has driven governments to adopt de‑Orientalising strategies aimed at shedding colonial legacies and constructing independent nation‑state imaginaries. Yet, as noted above, in the course of these de‑Orientalising narratives governments frequently reconstruct their own Orientalist accounts. Under the influence of such official narratives, more explicit public discourses are systematically produced, prompting individuals to form specific identity‑based stereotypes. While on the other side, these emergent discourses of violent exclusion, dehumanisation and othering that divide groups according to social identities (such as ethnicity and religion) deepen the boundaries of each group. To be more readily recognised and affirmed, individuals tend to align deliberately with their group’s shared repertoires – language and vocabulary use, dietary practices and dress, even personal tastes, as I have noted in an earlier paper. This alignment, in turn, reinforces collective stereotypes in public discourse, constituting a reactive iteration of Orientalist narratives (see Figure 3). In this process, Orientalism is continually confirmed, intensified and reconstructed. I conceptualise this mutually reinforcing cycle as the resilience of Orientalism.

Figure 3.

The reproduction of stereotypes and reconstruction of Orientalism.

The governance of India under the BJP with its Hindu nationalism and the concept of a Hindu-majority nation constitutes a paradigmatic instance validating this vicious cycle. Take Hindu–Muslim communal conflict: the BJP constructs a Hindu-majority national identity, framed through narratives containing orientalist elements, which, under a Western-derived notion of nationhood, positions Muslims outside the mainstream political order. This classificatory regime, however, reinforces fervent group adherence among religious communities and intensifies the severity of inter-religious violence, inadvertently echoing colonial-era understandings that fragmented the Subcontinent. Under the BJP’s Hindu-centric mode of governance, this dynamic is producing systematic exclusion of Muslim communities from social and civic life. The pathways of exclusion and their embedded orientalist elements should be further explicated in future research. These may encompass the production of knowledge, urban modernisation, social segregation and political marginalisation. At the same time, the universality and durability of orientalist cycles and modes of reproduction warrant further interrogation, not only in studies of post-colonial Global South contexts such as India and Latin America, but also in examinations extending the influence of these European narratives to countries like the United States and China.

Conclusion

Prime Minister Modi’s policy of Hindu nationalism did not enable India to break out of the Western narrative of Orientalism and the lingering influence of its colonial past (Jaffrelot, 2021). More problematically, he was influenced by Western Orientalism, which shaped the narrative of indigenous Orientalism in the governance of contemporary India, making the Western imagination gradually become a reality (Turner, 2004). The Hindu nationalism promoted by Prime Minister Modi with the aim of decolonisation has emphasised the centrality of traditional Hinduism which marginalised Islam (Robinson, 2024). Moreover, it has resulted in the ‘othering’ of the Muslim community and the condoning of dehumanising inter-religious violence (Islam, 2023), which has kept Muslims at the bottom of the power hierarchy in society (Deb, 2023). Collectively, these have undoubtedly exacerbated the exclusion of the Muslim community in contemporary Indian society (Tomalin, 2024).

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jianyun Zhao

Author biographies

Jianyun Zhao graduated from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and is currently a student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. He is also an assistant overseas research fellow at the School of International Studies, Renmin University of China. His research examines marginalised actors, focusing on two areas. In international relations he studies nationalism, post‑colonialism, authoritarian politics and discourse in developing countries, and in sociology he investigates urban segregation, identity politics and gender inequality.

Yuwei An graduated from the Department of Social Statistics at the University of Manchester and the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford and is currently a researcher at Nanjing University in China. Her work employs quantitative methods to study gender, family and subjective well‑being.

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