Introduction. Modelling Exemplarity in South Asia

Gayer, Laurent; Therwath, Ingrid

doi:10.4000/samaj.3011

Cited by 2 publications

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“…[T]he village was given as "gurudakshina" [offering to the guru] to him by his students, the Pandavas.' 23 The guru is thus remediated into a 'state narrative of exemplarity' (Gayer and Therwath 2010) through award statuettes, government-sourced news stories, websites and other publicity, including one state's high-profile renaming of a global city. However, not mentioned in state publicity extolling Dronacharya as the ideal guru is the dark fate of one of his pupils, the tribal subject Ekalavya.…”

Section: Hindutva Brahmanism and The Remediation Of Guruship In India...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Hindu Nationalism, Gurus and Media

Copeman,

Duggal,

Longkumer

2023

Religions

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This commentary offers a reflection on the triangular interactive relationship between Hindutva, gurus and media. It suggests that Hindu nationalists understand gurus to be a specific form of valued Hindu cultural good, which helps to explain mediatised activist attempts to defend gurus from legal and media scrutiny, and historicises the theme of guru domination, caste politics and Hindutva through the optics of matter and media, exploring both the mass remediation of Brahmanical guruship models that attended Hindutva’s rise in the 1990s and the oppositional response it provoked, which we term ‘the subaltern counter-publicity of the guru’. It discloses how Hindutva is itself structurally composed of guru logics at different scales; it embodies a kind of ‘fractal guruship’. However, if Hindutva mediates principles of guruship, we also see how a multitude of public gurus mediates principles of Hindutva. This ‘bi-instrumentalism’ of Hindu nationalism and some gurus is witnessed in the instances we describe of gurus—and the idea of India as a guru—being used as a means of branding in order to convey and normalise the ‘Hindutva idea of India’. We suggest, in light of the frequent mutual mediation of gurus and Hindutva, that continued investment by devotees and commentators in gurus as figures embodying hope and the promise of post-communal amity can aptly be described using Berlant’s evocative phrase ‘cruel optimism’.

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Section: Hindutva Brahmanism and The Remediation Of Guruship In India...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Hindu Nationalism, Gurus and Media

Copeman,

Duggal,

Longkumer

2023

Religions

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“…

Exemplarity is almost always examined from a point of view taken from outside the exemplar itself. There are analyses of the advantages and disadvantages of exemplarity as a methodology (Jeanneret 1998;Goldhill 2017), discussions of the roles and virtues held to be exemplary in a given socio-historical environment (Sheridan 1968;Gayer and Therwath 2010), and studies of the ways in which political regimes advance their purposes by the propagation of exemplars (Bulag 1999;Bilgrami 2003). There are investigations of how people search for, choose, relate to, and deal with exemplary figures present in their life-world (Humphrey 1997;Kristjansson 2017;Robbins 2018).

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confidence: 99%

The Slippages of Exemplary Action: The Case of Ataman Semenov

Humphrey

2022

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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This article investigates exemplarity from the point of view of the subject, the person who leads an exemplary life. Asking how this differs from the case of someone who intends more simply to lead a morally good life, it argues that the former requires sharp prioritizing among the range of possible human virtues. While both kinds of actor should be understood in relational terms, namely relations to the self, direct interlocutors, and wider society, a subject becomes an exemplar by objectifying and conveying to others the chosen specific form of virtue. Taking the case of Ataman Semenov, a White general in the Russian Civil War, the article then examines the pitfalls of having to take a culturally particular exemplary position. Some of these relate to the problems that occur in general when moral exemplarity is demonstrated, the subject being unable to control misreading of the exemplary act, the hesitations of followers, or the leeway with which they attempt to emulate or imitate the act. Other problems concern the historical positioning of the exemplary subject, particularly in a time of war. By making overt certain specific virtues, and by the same token backgrounding or suppressing others, he or she has to “stand out” amid general confusion and uncertainty and therefore is certain to arouse animosity, as much as loyalty.

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Introduction. Modelling Exemplarity in South Asia

Cited by 2 publications

References 18 publications

Hindu Nationalism, Gurus and Media

Hindu Nationalism, Gurus and Media

The Slippages of Exemplary Action: The Case of Ataman Semenov

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