boundary 2 50:2 (2023) DOI 10.1215/01903659-10300679 © 2023 by Duke University Press The Making of the Hindu Normative Bishnupriya Ghosh An original and erudite book, Hindutva as Political Monotheism (2020) is a tour de force in critical interpretation: it constructs an intellectual genealogy of Hindu religious philosophy, tracking its steady politicization from the late nineteenth century to the present-day “Ram Rajya” (the moni- ker for the Hindu majoritarian state). Since the destruction of the fifteenth- century Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, there has been a deluge of scholarly writings on Hindu nationalism, which constitutes the intellectual context for Anustup Basu’s new reckoning with “Hindutva” as political ideol- ogy. Such a frame already marks the 1992 moment as something of a seis- mic shock to the Indian democratic polity, bringing into sharper focus Basu’s historical intervention: his meticulous demonstration of the slow, inexorable progress toward a Hindu political monotheism through the twentieth cen- tury and its subsequent affective and mediatic entrenchment as Hindutva b2 Review Essay Book Reviewed: Anustup Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/50/2/211/1910629/211ghosh.pdf by UNIV OF ILLINOIS LIB-E user on 26 May 2023