Projecting Futures

Reading RSS comics from the 1980s

- LALIT VACHANI

AT A TIME when the signs and symbols of Hindu nationalism are ubiquitous in India, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is the hegemonic force in cultural and educational spheres, it is useful to analyse the RSS cultural output from an earlier moment when the Bharatiya Janata Party was not in power. RSS comics from the 1980s can throw light on both the continuities in Hindu-nationalist ideology over a forty-year period and the departures of the current dispensation from its traditional core of Hindutva ideology.

How did the RSS view itself in 1980? How did it represent and project itself to a newly literate “imagined community” of youth that it targeted for recruitment to the Hindutva cause? Reading RSS comics from the early 1980s allows us to decode the aspirational efforts of RSS cultural production at a time when its ideology was marginal to the national imagination.