Nation branding, soft Hindutva, and ecotraditionalism in anti-plastics discourses in India

ABSTRACT

A recent dimension of India’s nation-branding project, by which it aims to attract investment, trade, human resources, and tourists to the country, has been a focus on a ‘green’ India as a global leader in sustainable development. As part of this strategy, messages aimed at a national and external audience are aligned, and a line is drawn between the country’s putative ecologically sensitive past and a green future. Such messages highlight selective, sanitised, and idealised Hindu texts and praxis related to the environment as evidence of India’s innate ecological sensitivity. The environment thus becomes a domain for the permeation of a seemingly apolitical strand of Hindutva rhetoric, which emphasises the civilisational wisdom of Indian (coded as Hindu) thought and presents it for consumption by national and global audiences. In this article, using anti-plastics discourses as a lens, I investigate the cultural politics of this emerging stream of Hindutva-linked ‘ecotraditionalism’.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecotraditionalism
• environment
• nation branding
• Hindutva
• plastics
• consumption

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to all my interlocutors for their gracious participation, to Sonali Soans, Ravinder Kaur, Richard Cole, Mark Nichter, and Manuela Ciotti for discussions that contributed to the ideas presented here, and to the anonymous reviewers for their comments on early versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Although single-use plastics relate to carbon emissions through fossil fuel dependence, the environmental harms of plastics are usually framed in terms of marine litter or plastics and plastic additives in the soil, water, and food chain. Notably, plastics can have a lower carbon footprint and can be less water intensive than alternatives such as paper or cloth (see Pathak and Nichter 2019).

2 These websites or stores often also sell personal care products and toiletries (usually packaged in plastics) that claim to be ‘chemical-free’, ‘organic’, and ‘natural’, both demonstrating and expanding the ecotraditional semantic field (see also Pathak and Nichter 2018).

3 I am grateful to Richard Cole for this point.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was supported by the Homi Bhabha Fellowship (2016–2018) and the Aarhus Universitets Forskningsfond Ekstrapuljen grant.