IISER MOHALI

Abstract: This paper examines the Hindu Nationalist response to globalisation in late twentieth-century India, highlighting their push for an alternative model centred on economic nationalism (Swadeshi). To do so, this paper focuses on the prominent yet understudied Hindu Nationalist ideologue Dattopant Thengadi. Thengadi’s Swadeshist ideas imagined India as a potential World Teacher (Vishwaguru) rather than a subject to the pressures of international capital. He criticised India’s neoliberal regime and its globalisation policies in the late twentieth century for being overly ‘westernised’ and ignoring the interests of domestic capital and India’s vernacular elites. By analysing Thengadi’s Swadeshist ideas, this paper complicates the view that Swadeshi was simply an expression of the anti-globalisation sentiments of a traditionalist faction within the Hindu Nationalist Movement. Furthermore, this paper excavates the ideological roots of contemporary Hindu Nationalist affinity towards neoliberalism and global capitalism within Thengadi’s Swadeshist ideas in the last two decades of the twentieth century.