Babri retold: rewriting popular memory through Islamophobic humor

ABSTRACT

The strategic mobilization of humor by Hindutva groups online contributes to the mainstreaming of supremacist ideologies that inform extremist behavior. Analyzing the social media recontextualizations of the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition as case studies, this paper examines how online instantiations of Islamophobic humor contribute to the Hindutva revisioning of popular memory. This paper expands the understanding of how Islamophobia is normalized through the shifting affective framing of the Babri Masjid demolition, from shame to schadenfreude, from tragedy to comedy, and from a threat to Indian secularism to a necessary act of paternalistic disciplining. Studying these shifts through specific examples of Islamophobic humor builds upon previous insights into: (1) the affective regimes by which Islamophobic ideas are made palatable to a wider audience, (2) discriminatory speech as an act of pleasure, and (3) how both of these work toward the reworking of popular memory in service of the Hindutva political project.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamophobia
• humor
• affect
• Hindutva
• memes
• memory

Acknowledgements

I am enormously grateful to Bharath Ganesh for this opportunity and for his detailed feedback on the first draft. My sincere thanks to Iselin Frydenlund for her guidance throughout this process. Thank you, Megan Ewing, for your valuable input. I am thankful to the anonymous reviewer whose thoughtful comments and suggestions helped sharpen my arguments.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 While the focus of the paper is on Hindutva’s strategic mobilization of online humor in the service of exclusionary nationalist agendas, the use of humor by as a device to spread hateful ideas via social media, by nationalist groups, has been noted in various studies (Billig 2001; DeCook 2020; Ekdale and Tully 2014; Haynes 2019; Miller-Idriss 2020; Pérez 2022 and more).

2 Perceived loss in social and economic status.

3 Which serves to normalize physical and political violence against Muslims such as the demolition of Babri Masjid and the subsequent riots, the fatal and injurious attacks on Muslims under pretexts of cow vigilantism and ‘love jihad’, the Karnataka High Court’s restriction (2022) on Muslim students wearing the hijab and so on.

4 And versions of this image.

5 The leading English dailies still had a wider distribution across the various parts of the country while the Hindi press was more regionally distributed.

6 The upper-caste Hindu organizations needed a cause to unify upper-caste Hindus against the perceived increase in opportunities for Muslims and people belonging to the lower-castes, by the implementation of the Mandal Commission report. For more, read Gould (1998).

7 Please contact the author for source information. The sources of these images have been obscured on purpose, both to mitigate their spread and protect the original posters from harassment.