Pir Nawaz Ali Naz possesses a striking demeanor. A middle-aged man of medium height and portly build, his appearance is distinguished by a deep maroon turban, which he wears over his long, oiled hair. Seemingly a permanent fixture of his attire, the turban complements his thin, trimmed beard, and its color signifies his affiliation with the Chishti Nizami Sufi silsila. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, this is an association that is key to pir Nawaz's role as a Sufi guide, community leader, and gaddi nashin of his father pir Ahmed Ali Naz's shrine. Relegated to a corner of the small Kamboh graveyard in Ichra, this modest shrine is a simple structure built on a raised platform with Ahmed's grave, which is open to the sky but enclosed by three low walls on one side and an open area for conducting various activities adjacent to it (Plan 2.1). It is served by a small but active community of murids and neighbors under his son's watchful eye. Pir Nawaz is very much at the center of this neighborhood community and actively organizes and leads most of its congregations and activities.

Ahmed's shrine is usually only populated on Thursdays, when pir Nawaz and other community members gather here for performing prayers, conversing, and cooking and consuming langar. These Thursday gatherings serve as an occasion for the community to come together under the guidance of their pir. Besides Thursdays and festivals, a few members of this Sufi community also sporadically gather in pir Nawaz's aastana. Located a couple of kilometers from his father's tomb, in a very narrow lane of the Chah Jammu neighborhood, this is a small private room attached to pir Nawaz's residence but with its own entrance from the street. Ahmed's shrine and the community around it are intimately tied to this neighborhood. Many of the devotees reside in or around it, and all have personal connections with pir Nawaz. The area itself is densely populated, mostly residential, with a few small shops and other commercial ventures on the wider streets. It appears quite congested and tightly packed, with residences and shops spilling over into the street and sagging cables filling up the space above.

Introduction

The current Russian government is revising the constitutional system and essentially curtailing the work of democratic institutions. In the process, it is increasingly turning to history as a means of self-legitimation. During the 1990s, which were difficult years for the economics of the country, ruling elites showed an indifference to history. Since the early 2000s, however, this indifference has been replaced, in the words of Alexey Miller, with ‘the escalation of historical politics’ (Miller 2012: 255), which has reached its peak in the third and fourth terms of Vladimir Putin's presidency. The authorities impose a correct picture, from their point of view, of the historical past with the help of school textbooks, large-scale multimedia projects, such as ‘Russia: My history’, and memorial laws (Koposov 2017: 207–299; Kurilla 2021), and even recently adopted amendments to the constitution.

In this chapter, I analyse the Russian government's uses of history. The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, I discuss two theoretical questions: First, can the Putin regime be considered populist, and, if so, what are its defining features? Second, what uses of history are characteristic of contemporary populism and its Russian variant? I will claim that Russian uses of history can be characterized as conservative, drawing on a particular kind of presentism. After David Armitage, I would call this ‘teleological presentism’ (Armitage 2020). In the second section, I will show how this essentially conservative regime of historicity works in the Russian context by focusing on the use of the idiom ‘historical Russia’. This phrase is increasingly used today in official rhetoric when explaining domestic and foreign policy agendas. In the third and final section, I present my vision of an alternative historicity, which could become a challenge for the kind of presentism produced by the current Russian government.

Introduction

The Bhagavadgita is an 18-chapter philosophical dialogue between Arjuna, the despondent warrior hero reluctant to raise arms against his kin, and his divine charioteer, Krishna, who exhorts him to wage war with detachment as an instrument of divine will. It is set on the battlefield in the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, moments before the beginning of a war. The Bhagavadgita (henceforth Gita), as Richard H. Davis elucidates in his ‘short biography’ of the text, intrigued scholars with its ‘doubleness’ – ‘its historical specificity and its continuing, even eternal, life’. Its ambiguities and accommodation of multiple theological currents made it possible (and continues to do so) for the text to appeal to diverse groups of readers and commentators in medieval, pre-colonial, and colonial India and beyond. It gained a transnational community of readers in Europe and America, as colonial commentators, Christian missionaries, Romantic philosophers, and Indologists popularized it as a Hindu philosophical text at par with the Quran and the Bible. By the early twentieth century, it came to provide a wide range of Indian political thinkers, from Aurobindo Ghose to Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who were occupied in anti-colonial struggle with an opportunity to ‘rethink politics in a novel language of action without consequence’. Among such engagements, M. K. Gandhi's approach to the Gita as a guide to moral action in the realm of politics has attracted maximum scholarly attention. Such works have accorded due focus to the genealogies of (mostly Western) political and religious thought that informed his readings and the innovative agency of Gandhi himself.

This chapter, however, shifts the optic from Gandhi to the Gandhian(s) to draw attention to the hermeneutics of reading the Gita through the prism of non-violence (ahimsa) that Gandhi introduces in Indian sociopolitical thought and constructs an intellectual history of such hermeneutical exercises. Through this, I wish to move beyond the individual centricity that has characterized the global intellectual history of Gandhian thought.

Introduction

It would be a stretch to claim to write about populist philosophies or theories of history because populism does not possess the kind of reflective systematic coherence that distinguishes philosophical theories. Still, it is possible to identify, I argue, a distinct populist attitude to historiography that can be derived from a political theory of populism. This attitude to historiography is expressed by the rhetoric, speeches, and speech acts such as tweets of populists from different parts of the world and different ends of the political spectrum.*

There is a great, indeed ever-increasing, variety of theories of populism. Even within the confines of this volume, no single theory or meaning of populism is accepted by all. I have advocated a theory of populism as the politics of the passions (Tucker 2020). Accordingly, I argue that populism approaches historiography as a narrative expression of the passions projected on the past. This passionate-emotive attitude to historiography generates corresponding values that judge competing historiographies according to their passionate intensity that expresses ‘authenticity’. Finally, I consider the more recent populist use of perspectivism, constructivism, and dialectics to confuse and silence its potential critics.

Populism

Populism, as I understand it, is the rule of political passions. This fits the classical Greek understanding of demagoguery and the Roman understanding of populism with the exception that populism is not exclusively of lower classes because elites are just as likely to succumb to their passions, while the common people may project their passions on elitist leaders. These passions override political interests and shape political beliefs. Pure passions tend to be self-destructive – for example, when people become very angry and burn their homes, start wars that hurt them more than their enemies, or demand economic policies that gratify immediately but generate inflation or accumulate debts that destroy the economy. As La Bruyere (quoted in Elster 1999: 337) puts it, ‘Nothing is easier for passion than to overcome reason, but the greatest triumph is to conquer a man's own interest.’

Harry Frankfurt (1988: 11–25) distinguished first-order desires from second-order volitions, wills about desires, what a person would like their desires to be and not to be.

Introduction

For admirers and detractors alike, Donald Trump's presidency signified a rupture, whether a revelatory inflection point on the brink of a national calamity or a nightmarish transgression of norms and dereliction of duty. Back in 2015, he was the ‘chaos candidate’. Ever since he amplified and dramatized a sense of crisis with the rhetoric he unleashed to announce threats and denounce enemies, both foreign and domestic, as well as through the venues he chose to engage the public, whether large public rallies or daily cascades of tweets (Moffit 2015). The crisis turned more acute and tangible towards the end of his presidency during the COVID-19 pandemic and the eruption of protests following George Floyd's death. It climaxed with the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, when belligerent language and populist rage turned into political violence.

Conflict, crisis, and the sense that a momentous shift is afoot, that the present in some sense is already historic, prompted an intense, both overt and implicit, engagement with the past in American public life. Allusions to the past proliferated in an effort to justify, condemn, or simply comprehend Trump, his politics, and his demeanour. The past, its memory and pedagogy, the meaning of national symbols, and questions about the mnemonic function of the state fed heated disputes and political skirmishes, especially over race and the legacy of slavery. While history was deployed in a volatile political landscape, invocations of the past – from whatever political camp – also indicated a desire for legibility and predictability, facing perceived threats, endemic insecurities, and a perennial gap between expectations and the reality of American life.

This chapter employs Trump and his tenure in the White House to explore the contours and content of the populist historical imagination in the contemporary United States of America (USA). A populist streak is discernible in American politics dating back to the 1830s. Historically, the term ‘populism’ carried a somewhat different valence in Europe, Latin America, and the USA. However, the current political moment signifies a convergence, exemplified, for instance, by Trump's cult of personality and authoritarianism; both were less pronounced in previous iterations of American populism.

Introduction

Populism rarely travels alone. As cases such as Narendra Modi's ‘Hindutva’, Brexit's ‘Take Back Control’, and Donald Trump's ‘Make America Great Again (MAGA)’ show, populism often travels with nostalgia. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's authoritarian populism takes its fuel from neo-Ottomanism, a nostalgic rewriting of the Ottoman past, exemplified by the Conquest Rallies, massive public manifestations commemorating the conquest of Constantinople; the government-endorsed television series Resurrection: Ertuğrul, depicting the modest beginnings of the Ottoman Empire; and the Panorama Museum of Conquest, a state-led interactive museum, intended to ‘transport’ audiences back to 1453. How does authoritarian, right-wing populism pair so well with nostalgia? What is the ‘lost state’ that the Ottoman nostalgia so yearns to bring back, and what emotions go into its making? This chapter answers these case-specific questions while extrapolating that both nostalgia and populism, specific to and exemplified through this case, rely on binaries such as good versus evil, us versus them, and a glorious past versus a crumbling present. Together, these nostalgic and populist binaries create an ideal type, namely nostalgic populism. Nostalgic populism is a common modality of populist historicities and therefore requires close attention. Drawing from the 2020 reconversion of the Hagia Sophia to a mosque, I argue that the nostalgic populism in Turkey, which operates simultaneously through nationalist and imperialist logics, showcases three discursive characteristics vis-à-vis history:

• 1. Legalization of history: Nostalgic populism uses history as a legal precedent and as a legitimizing mechanism for policy. In the case of the Hagia Sophia, the regime refers to national sovereignty and Mehmed the Conqueror's will regarding the Hagia Sophia to present the reconversion decree as lawful.

• 2. Monopolization of history: The regime asserts its claim as the only legitimate one, declaring continuity between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Because Mehmed the Conqueror saved the Hagia Sophia, a marvel, from the state of decay and ruin – the result of Byzantine neglect – Turkey, as the heir of the Ottoman Empire, reasons it has the main claim on this monument.

• 3. Revivification of stolen history: While other countries and the previous regimes in Turkey neglected Ottoman history, the Justice and Development Party, or the AK Party (hereafter AKP), gives the people the ‘right’ kind of history, a history the people have been deprived of thus far.

Introduction

The renewed and persistent interest in the Mahabharata in the twentieth century has most often been linked to the rise of the Indian national(ist) movement in general and a specific nativist and parochial understanding of nationalism in particular. Seen from this perspective, the interest in the Mahabharata stands for an understanding of modern India that is based on the presumption of an ancient and everlasting homogeneous identity of the Indian people as well as a forced equation of ‘Indian’ with ‘Hindu’. While this standard account of the relationship between the Indian epics and right-wing nationalism has been as influential as it is convincing, it fails to analyse the larger historical and epistemological changes that provided the background for the renewed interest in the epic as form. In order to address this epistemological aspect, I propose to look at the larger history of the epic and the construction of a national identity in a global context in order to ask what prompted the interest in the epics on a functional level. Why were they read and retold so many times apart from the certainly true but hardly sufficient reason of them serving as a reminder of and evidence for the existence of a historical basis for the allegedly homogeneous identity in question?

In order to engage with the global significance as well as the philosophical and political implications of the relationship between the epic and nationalism, I look at three specific actors and at how they drew from, as well as referred and contributed to, the discourse on the epic form through their specific reading and reception of the Mahabharata: Friedrich Schlegel's analysis of the allegedly shared roots of Indo-European philosophical thought in ancient folk literature (specifically in his book Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 1808), Maithilisharan Gupt's attempt to recount the history of India as the history of the Aryan race from the mythico-historical times of the Mahabharata to the future of an independent India in his long narrative poem Bharat Bharati (1912), and Jawaharlal Nehru's seemingly uneasy (as well as rather sporadic) rejection of any form of a potentially political engagement with the Mahabharata as inevitably contributing to a parochial and Hindu supremacist notion of Indian nationalism.

This chapter centers on the counterculture’s attitude toward “greatness,” primarily through the odd coupling of the Beatles and Muhammad Ali. The chapter addresses racism, the Vietnam War, and the rebellion against the idyllic forms of greatness furnished by the so-described establishment of the 1950s. The Beatles and Ali (and their supporters) had to come to terms with new expectations and measures of American greatness.

Introduction

There was a time in political science and in political philosophy when emotionality and rationality were regarded as opposites and when the presence of emotions as such (especially of ‘passions’) in politics was seen as inappropriate, if not as outright suspect. Since the nineteenth century, many even liked to think that emotionality in politics was a preserve of unruly mobs and crowds. In democratic theory, politics was predominantly conceived as an arena in which various actors were basically pursuing their interests in a deliberate and rational way. Therefore, rational choice theory and coalition formation theory came to be seen as the best instruments to explain democratic politics according to most political scientists.

Since the ‘affective turn’ started in politics and in political thinking in the 1980s – spearheaded by philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and Chantal Mouffe – this time is no more: emotions are increasingly appealed upon and taken seriously as objects of analysis (Nussbaum 2013; Mouffe 2005). Since then it is no longer possible in politics to criticize political opponents by simply unmasking that their beliefs and actions are based on emotions – and this obviously also holds for right-wing, exclusionary populism because political feelings are as old as modern politics itself (Frevert et al. 2022). Instead, the task of the critics of populism is to analyse the emotional repertoire used by populists in a comparative-historical perspective and to explain why it is successful in terms of mobilizing electoral support (Tietjen 2022; Demertzis 2019).

In this chapter, I address these issues by asking whether the emotions that populism appeals to form a specific set that distinguishes populism from other ideologies or discourses, especially from ethnic nationalism and nativism. However, in order to answer this first question, I first need to clarify the definitions of populism, ethnic nationalism, and nativism that I adopt. I depart from the well-known definition of populism formulated by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser and indicate the problems connected with this kind of definition in the light of ethnic nationalism. Then I elucidate the concept of ethnic nationalism and its relationship to populism because at least in Western Europe and in the United States of America (USA) they both appear to be very closely related.

This chapter studies the interlocked biographies of three interwar figures: Charlie Chaplin, Charles Lindbergh, and Mickey Mouse. All three achieved renown as changemakers and the title “greatest of all time” in their various social/cultural arenas. More importantly, for this chapter, all three figures undergo a steep decline, forcing the American public to reconsider the contours of greatness. Chaplin is branded a Communist. Lindbergh a Nazi. Mickey Mouse is eventually seen as too unmasculine to support patriotism during World War II and is therefore swapped by Walt Disney for Donald Duck. The chapter highlights the historical contingencies of greatness.