Hindu Nationalism, History and Identity in India: Narrating a Hindu Past under the BJP

This study analyzes four textbooks published when India was governed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. A key contribution of the study is to show how notions of cultural similarity were produced. Flaten argues that the textbooks paid scarce attention to social, geographical and temporal contexts in their approaches to Indian history. The textbooks operate with the existence of a timeless sense of Hindu unity, that concurs with the BJP’s ideology of Hindu cultural nationalism.