Introduction

In the Kingdom of Thailand, known as Siam until 1939, the great Sanskrit epic of the Ramayana, or rather the Thai-language Ramakien, composed under King Phra Phutthayotfa Chulalok (King Rama I, 1737–1809, r. 1782–1809), is omnipresent. It is the national epic of the Southeast Asian kingdom, taught not only in schools but encountered also in picture books and manga. The epic is deeply embedded in the kingdom's history and culture of everyday life. King Ramkamhaeng (‘Rama, the Bold’, r. 1279–98) of Sukhothai, named after the epic's hero, is today remembered in official historiography not simply as a great king but also as a founding figure of the Thai nation as a cultural community through his invention of the Thai script. He is depicted on banknotes, and major public works are named after him, such as a university and a major thoroughfare in Bangkok. And according to a late seventeenth-century chronicle, the former capital was founded in 1350 as Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya. Its founder took the title Ramathibodi (‘Rama, the Mighty’, 1315–69, r. 1351–69) upon ascending to his throne and founded the Phra Ram temple in the capital in 1369, the year of his death.

Ayutthaya was destroyed in 1767 by an invading army from Burma. After a short intermezzo under the charismatic King Taksin (1734–82, r. 1767–82) ruling from Thonburi, the current capital and dynasty were founded by Taksin's former general, King Phra Phutthayotfa Chulalok. He added Ayutthaya to the city's full name and included Ramathibodi to his full royal title. In addition to having had a new version of the Ramakien written, he also had murals with scenes from the epic added to the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, where the kingdom's palladium of the same name is enshrined. The national dance drama of Khon is also based on the epic and can be found recounted in children's literature today. The epic is furthermore the source of proverbs and placenames far from royal palaces, such as Huai Sukhrip, or Sukhrip's Brook, a stream located near the city of Chonburi, close to Bangkok.

Introduction

In Figure 9.1, we see a meme made by the Brazilian far-right portraying the president Jair Messias Bolsonaro (2019–2022) as a crusader. How to interpret the engagements with history embodied by images like this one?* Is it a traditional use of the past for a coherent ideological project, or is it something else? We believe that this image and, more broadly, Bolsonarist engagements with history reveal certain dimensions of contemporary historicity – by which we mean the articulation of the past, the present, and the future. In this chapter, we thus analyse how the populist movement embodied by Bolsonaro engages with history in a way that activates its heterogeneous political base. These engagements seem to be different from some aspects of modern chronosophies, such as their abandonment of synchronization and coherent presentation of a national history. Instead, the new Brazilian far-right populist historicity relies more on emotional attachment, a pragmatic and highly fragmented historical performance that, as we claim, is more akin to a historicity that we call ‘updatism’, meaning this historicity in which an empty and self-centred present is loosely and pragmatically related to the past, whereas the future is desired as a reserve for the linear expansion of an updating – and sometimes upgrading – present (see Araujo and Pereira 2019).

To demonstrate the affinity between ‘updatism’ and the specific Bolsonarist version of populism, this chapter is divided into three sections. First, we introduce the concept and the theory of updatism. Next, we characterize the populist dimensions of Bolsonarism – that is, the cultural and political movement represented by Jair Bolsonaro. Then we analyse the new Brazilian populism in its engagements with history, especially the performances of history by the three secretaries of culture of Bolsonaro's government and how the defactualization of reality gains momentum, creating the conditions of possibility for the past to be like a large wardrobe full of prêt-à-porter images and templates. Taken together, we can conclude that the affinities we see between Brazilian populism, or Bolsonarism, and updatist historicity are the following: both flourish in a communicational environment characterized by a shared and simulated reality that defies modern authorities and institutions; both tend to dissolve historical synchronization and thus lead to dispersion and agitation; and both have a more pragmatic engagement with historical content.

Introduction

Ancient epics have played a significant role in the growth of modern nationalism. At the time of their conception, epics possessed no notion of nationalism. However, over the past three centuries, they have been routinely invoked in many parts of the world for fulfilling modern nationalist claims and aspirations. Political and cultural unity, key features of modern nationalism, were found to be described in ancient epics. Therefore, epics were routinely invoked either as repositories of a nation's past frozen in time (as with Homer or Virgil) or as a genealogical exercise meant to reconstruct an unbroken national–cultural lineage (as with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata). Both processes helped in nationalist revival.

The two epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, were used by Indian subcontinental nationalists during the colonial and post-colonial periods to imagine a politically and ethnically (Hindu) unified image of the country. The study of Indian epics was facilitated by modern European Indology and the ‘discovery’ of India's ancient (largely Hindu and Buddhist) heritage during the late eighteenth century. Therefore, unlike the absolute devotional reverence and eschatological infallibility accorded to the epics during pre-modernity, Indians were open to investigating their historical context and using them for didactic–political purposes. History, coming to the aid of religious reverence, produced a strange concoction of nationalist rectitude and a strong antidote to colonial cultural hegemony. The fratricide depicted in the Mahabharata was seen as an act of reclaiming the unjust seizure of territory, rendering the epic's moral lesson ‘analogous to the colonial occupation of India’.

Epic studies developing during the nineteenth century drove European Indologists’ primary interest – namely, determining the remote antiquity of the Mahabharata, deciphering the urtext from latter recensions, and granting it lesser value in comparison to the Greco-Roman classics. European Indological discourses posited India as the opposite of ‘the West’ and hence inferior in character. Indian thought was presented as mythical and symbolic and therefore unworthy of the cold rationality articulated through logical arguments.

Indians attached multifarious significance to its epics. If the Ramayana was the adi-kavya (the original poem), the Mahabharata was varyingly rendered as an itihasa (history) and the ‘fifth Veda’ and even garnered equivalency to a Dharmashastra text. The Mahabharata also carried a powerful moral sermon on righteous violence (the Bhagavadgita), delivered by Krishna, the personification of the Absolute.

On the evening of January 24, 2015, I was in the midst of Baba Shah Jamal's urs festival at his shrine in Lahore. Stationed just outside the main entrance, I observed a succession of devotees approaching their saint in groups of different sizes. All of a sudden, a commotion erupted a few yards away, where some men seemed on the verge of a physical altercation. Along with other onlookers, I also rushed to this scene and soon discovered that a group of devotees had taken offense to a handful of teenage boys who had attempted to join their dhamal. All evening, I had been witnessing similar scenes in which small bands of teenagers would infiltrate circles of devotees and join in their dhamal by unfurling an array of Bollywood-inspired dance moves. So far, such incursions had been tolerated in the festive spirit of the occasion. After all, urs in South Asia, which are enacted annually on the occasion of a Sufi saint's death anniversary, are not just a ritual commemoration of saints but also a popular celebration. However, this particular group reacted differently. Two of the men violently grabbed the teenagers and literally tossed them aside. Given the serious intent and intimidating appearance – large and muscular build emphasized by an exaggerated swagger and aggressive manner – of these men, the rest of the teenagers beat a hasty retreat. Quite quickly, a circular space was cleared for the group to continue their dhamal uninterrupted. The message that these devotees took their dhamal very seriously and were not going to tolerate any interference in it had been delivered loud and clear.

As an audience started building around this circle, the devotee group promptly launched into a dhamal to the insistent beat of the dhol. Within a matter of seconds, their scowls had melted into expressions of joy. Driven on by one of the devotees (let us call him Pehalwan), who appeared to be the group leader, the men's movements began to pick up pace. They extended their arms with palms outstretched toward the tomb of their saint as if asking for supplication and stomped their feet with a thudding noise.

Devotion on the Margins

In my first meeting with Meedan, she handed me an old, fading photograph of herself. Stylishly dressed in a fitted white dress and contrasting green dupatta with a golden border, she was unrecognizable from the worn, gray-haired woman in baggy clothes sitting in front of me. Golden earrings, which she wore two in each ear, a clutch of hair framing the top half of her face, and liberally applied pink lipstick completed her carefully arranged look in the photograph. Her stiff expression and the awkwardness with which she held a long metal tong as a prop in both hands further cemented the impression that much thought and effort had been expended for this pose (see Figure 4.1). Meedan had been reminiscing about her trips to Shahbaz Qalandar's mela in her younger years when she brought out this photograph. Pointing to it, she chuckled, “Now you know how I used to go to sarkar.” “You should have seen her dhamal. She was known for it,” Meedan's younger brother, Azeem, chimed in. Meedan went on to elaborate that she had been hearing stories of Qalandar from her father when she was a child. These tales stirred a growing desire, which quickly turned into an obsession, to visit his shrine herself. She then started putting aside 5 rupees from her daily earnings in a pot that she kept hidden under her charpoy. After doing this for a whole year, she finally had enough money to attend Qalandar's urs in Sehwan. In subsequent years, Meedan made a habit of saving money to attend this annual festival to celebrate her saint.

Meedan's story is not, by any means, unique in her community, as many others express similar sentiments of devotion to Shahbaz Qalandar and other Sufi saints. She identifies as a member of the Muslim Sheikh, a low-caste pakhi waas tribe of Punjab. Literally, camp dwellers, the pakhi waas describe themselves as former nomadic tribes that historically existed outside the social structure of caste-based Punjabi society. As a result of the gradual collapse of the nomadic economy and systematic efforts to curb their mobility and regulate their lives by the British colonial state (Major 1999; Schwarz 2010), these tribes were coerced to join settled society and adopt its ways.

Introduction

Rightly or not, the governments’ engagements with memory policies are often met with a shadow of suspicion. Victims’ associations, intellectuals, and activists from different parts of the world tend to warn their publics of possible abuses of memory and manipulations of the past made by political leaders. Argentina, with a dense history of mobilization around its dictatorial past, is no exception to this rule. During the administrations of Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–2015), the discussion about the role played by the state in public remembrance was subject to much contention.

In this chapter, we focus on the way Kirchnerism engaged with the memory of the repression and forced disappearances that took place during the last military dictatorship (1976–1983). Our goal is to analyse Kirchnerist governments’ involvement in public remembrance by considering the main aspects of their narrative together with the political–institutional approach they unfolded towards memory.

In the Argentinian public debate, the discussion concerning Kirchnerist engagements with the past has so far been dominated by a dichotomous approach that swings from considering Kirchnerist uses of the past as illegitimate ‘appropriations’ to considering their engagement as a sort of automatic ‘enshrinement’ of the human rights movement's claims into the national state. We will argue that, instead, we should understand the dominant Kirchnerist memory frame in Argentina as an outcome of an ‘articulation process’ between the government and the human rights movement, formed by an ensemble of heterogeneous organizations that had historically led the struggle for memory and transitional justice in the country. As suggested by Laclau and Mouffe (1985), by ‘articulation’, we do not merely mean an alliance between two preformed entities, but rather a mutual constitution where both the Kirchnerist movement and the human rights organizations (HROs) were transformed in time. As we will argue, this articulation made it possible for memory and human rights to become an object of public policy in an unprecedented way for Argentinian democracy.

Following Laclau (2005a), we adopt a formal approach to populism. According to this perspective, a movement or government is not ‘populist’ because of its ideological contents but due to a specific logic of articulation of contents, whatever these may be.

Introduction

The Mahabharata and the Ramayana have significantly shaped South Asian norms of gender roles. The ideals transmitted through them are still often considered the proper mode of conduct by many actors and social groups, especially those influenced by Sanskritic varna–jati (the Indian caste system) norms. While the most popular female prototype among many actors is Sita from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata offers a number of exemplary characters as well. Not only Draupadi but also characters such as Damayanti and Savitri play an important role in shaping the myth of the ideal woman. The French philosopher Roland Barthes explains in his book Mythologies (1957) that myth is born out of history but disconnects from it and evolves into nature. As the content of the myth seems like an eternal truth, its motive appears invisible. The Mahabharata shaped an understanding of women and their role in society, which was accepted for centuries as the natural rule. The gendered basis of this discourse was rarely explicitly questioned until recent times.

This chapter begins by first tracing the origin of how mythological women became the ideal prototype in the nationalist discourse, which will be followed by a focus on M. K. Gandhi's politics regarding women. Traits which most of the epic female characters share are that they suffer silently and resist through loyalty and devotion – characteristics that modern reformers like Gandhi foregrounded in an attempt to mobilize women for the Indian nationalist cause. While his discourse elevated the status of women to a higher position, it came at a cost, and by fortifying the image of the ideal Indian woman, he put them in a gilded cage. The rest of the chapter will focus on feminist revision of myths, necessary to deconstruct the female prototype born out of the epics, based on the theoretical framework offered by Adrienne Rich's ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (1972) and Alicia Ostriker's ‘The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking’ (1982). For this, I will take into account several literary texts. Pratibha Ray's (b. 1943) Odia novel Yajnaseni (1984) and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's (b. 1956) novel The Palace of Illusions (2008) are two important landmarks in this paradigm shift.

This chapter uses the histories of baseball (Ty Cobb vs. Babe Ruth) and presidential power rankings, and the reception history of Eleanor Roosevelt to unearth a sea change in greatness conversations. During the 1950s, America swapped Ty Cobb for Babe Ruth and Washington for FDR to signal a change in the value of greatness. Whereas Americans had valued greatness as a shorthand for changemaking, the postwar period witnessed a search for nostalgic heroes meant to confirm already-established ideals of this generation, later to be designated the “Greatest Generation.”

Introduction

In 1909, the Sino-Japanese poet Su Manshu painted an image of Cai Yan (Lady Wenji), a poetess of the late second century who had spent 12 years in captivity abroad before returning to the Han Empire, and sent it to his friend, the art collector Liu Jiping (also known as Liu San). Liu wrote a series of poems to appreciate Su's gift, including the following verses:

Why would a Chinese literatus at the turn of the twentieth century write a poem mentioning the Indian epic Mahabharata to match a seemingly unrelated painting?

Until well into the twentieth century, the name of the Mahabharata had been mostly unknown in East Asia, except for a few isolated references in Buddhist texts. Against the sheer preponderance of Buddhist thought in the intellectual flows between India and China, it might even have seemed futile to look for an East Asian reception of the Mahabharata. Yet, over the centuries, various elements related to the Mahabharata circulated between South Asia and East Asia and played significant roles within East Asian culture itself.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian thought continued to play a major role in East Asia amidst intense contact between China, Japan, Europe, and India itself. In close interdependence with the notion of the ‘West’, the category of ‘Asia’ emerged in the Japanese and Chinese imaginary by the turn of the twentieth century, when intellectuals developed a globalized sense of their position in the world. India became a renewed object of study but, at the same time, also a ‘method’ to deal with the challenges posed by modernity. Interest in India and its role within ‘Asia’ was a significant element not only in understanding the geopolitical realities and ‘catching up’ with the ‘West,’ but also in the quest for a ‘world beyond the material and epistemological constraints’ posed by Western modernity. While Buddhism still played a crucial role as the connecting bond between the two macroregions of East Asia and South Asia, some intellectuals came to understand it in a wider framework that also encompassed other traditions such as that of the Mahabharata.

Introduction

The emotion of nostalgia plays a vital role in the appeal, expression, and consequences of different forms of populism. As a response to the preceding chapters in this book, this chapter considers the issues of affect or emotion1 revealed as history mobilized by populists and populist movements and analyses the work that emotions perform in this process. The aim is to offer some thoughts on how we might constructively think about and analyse emotions in these contexts through considering critical notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘registers of engagement’. As the chapters in this book reveal, one of the defining features of populism is how it draws on the past to create, following Paul Taggart (2002), concepts of ‘heartland’ (Chapter 3), as well as the construction of historically situated undervalued and excluded ‘folk’ or ‘the people’ pitted against ‘elites’ (Mudde 2004; Chapters 1, 5, 7, 8, and 11), the utilization of historical mythologizing to solidify the peoples’ ‘hero’ (Chapters 1, 4, 5, and 9), the legitimation of certain memory holders of ‘the people’ (Chapters 2 and 6), or, indeed, the disassociation of the present with the past to create historical alternatives (Chapter 10). The appeal to right-wing populism of revisionist, mythologized, or overly selective histories that avoid ambiguity and emphasize the positive, heroic, and patriotic or nationalistic pride is based on the emotional valence of these histories and the work they do in managing present-day emotions or affective states.

I focus on right-wing populism because, as Stuart Hall (1979) has observed, the right continues to be far more effective than the left in organizing populist politics. There are lessons to be learnt by the left in analysing how particular emotions, specifically nostalgia, are used, which can facilitate the development of ways to challenge right-wing populism. Indeed, the affective repertoires of populism and how and why emotions are managed and mobilized are significantly different between those who hold conservative or progressive ideological positions (Jost 2019). I do not equate populism with ideology and follow Ernesto Laclau's definition (2004, 2005) that populism is most usefully understood as a particular logic of politics. Nonetheless, understanding the ideological contexts and implications of how certain emotions are expressed and managed is essential for understanding their utility within right-wing populist movements.

Introduction

This chapter suggests that the Mahabharata has played a central role in the forging of concepts and practices of sovereignty in modern India. I argue that while British and Indian elites deployed the Mahabharata to legitimate the construction of centralized regimes of state sovereignty – imperial sovereignty and nation-state sovereignty – more socially marginal actors, such as ‘lower-caste’ and female activists, as well as sections of the middle-class literati, used the epic to express more democratic, polycentric models of sovereignty. These debates reverberated across state legislatures and princely courts, literary gatherings and peasant assemblies, theatres and secret revolutionary meetings. As Indians journeyed abroad, the Mahabharata came alive in political ritual and deliberation, uniting Indians with other anti-colonial Asians who were carving out their own projects of national sovereignty. The Mahabharata thus helped in decolonizing and democratizing sovereignty in South Asia. In every way, it fulfils the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel's (1770–1831) definition of epics as embodying ‘the spirits of peoples’, ‘the proper foundations of a national consciousness’.

The Mahabharata and State Formation in Early Modern India

The Mahabharata was central to state formation in early modern South Asia. In the 1580s, the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542–1605) commissioned a Persian translation of the Mahabharata, called the Razmnamah (Book of War). There were earlier precedents of Indo-Muslim rulers and officials commissioning translations of the epic. The fifteenth-century ruler of Kashmir, Zayn al-Abidin, is said to have commissioned a translation into Persian, though the text has not survived. Later, Laskar Paragal Khan, governor of Chittagong in eastern Bengal, driven by intellectual curiosity (kutuhale puchhilek), asked Kavindra Parameshvar Das to author a Bengali translation in the early sixteenth century. Parameshwar, in turn, eulogized his patron as an incarnation of righteousness (dharma avatar). Translations of the Mahabharata legitimated regional state formation across South Asia.

However, the Mughal project had a wider pan-subcontinental legacy. Akbar aimed to create an Indo-Persian grammar of kingship that would enable mutual intelligibility and dialogue between Hindu and Muslim subjects across the empire. Audrey Truschke has argued that the translation occasionally abbreviated religious–philosophical discussions present in the epic, including criticisms of kingship and war, while emphasizing and expanding the discussions on just monarchy. The Mahabharata combined themes of martial heroism and ethical kingship in a manner that eminently suited the Mughal ruling classes.

Populist Discourse, Historical Narratives, and the Hazards of Essentialism

There is a growing consensus that populism should not be approached as a clearly identifiable or coherent ideology (Morgan 2022). Instead, it might be better to analyse populism as a discourse revolving around the creation of political identity (Ostiguy 2017). Like most collective identities, populism is constructed by denying other identities. Beyond the usual left–right axis, populists pit ‘the people’ against a minority blamed for monopolizing economic and institutional resources – the elite, or those at the top (Laclau 2005).

As a reaction to the destabilization of ‘ontological securities’, populism tends to be seen as either relying on or leading to essentialist conceptions of social and political identities (Steele and Homolar 2019; Bartoszewicz 2021). It is based upon Manichean friend–enemy counter-concepts (Junge 2011), which grant it a strong ontological grounding. On the other hand, it engages in a counter-hegemonic struggle vis-à-vis an oligarchy portrayed as, in essence, deeply corrupt. Its antagonistic rhetoric is prone to the naturalization of otherness, but it typically does not entail the tactic of adopting essentialist self-identification often used by subaltern groups engaged in identity politics (Panizza 2017; Bell 2021).

Still, populism remains an identity discourse that targets the emotions of an allegedly underrepresented ‘we’ (Ferrada Stoehrel 2017). Ideational approaches to populism stress that, beyond exposing the power elite, populist discourse has among its goals the mobilization of a homogeneous community of decent and rightful commoners (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2019). This leads to a number of prevalent narratives in populist discourse, which are increasingly seen as a form of performative storytelling through which leaders provide meaning to extended injustices and offer simple alternatives that are appealing to the majority (Ungureanu and Popartan 2020; Nordensvard and Ketola 2021).

Specifically, populist narratives construct in-group identity by referring to the ‘people’ (Panizza 2017). Providing the people with a narrative inscribes an essentialist tension into populist discourse. Some advocates of populism are aware of this hazard: post-Marxists, in particular, critically tackle the potential hazard of essentialism by conceptualizing the people as an ‘empty signifier’ for populist ideologues to fill with contextual grievances and values (Laclau 2005).