Abstract
Strategic syncretism and the construction of the Hindu nationalist identity Hindu nationalist identity appears to have been built and developed as an ideology on the mode of "strategic syncretism " : faced with an Other of superior force or prestige, high-caste Hindus wanted to rehabilitate their culture by reforming it. They sought to import the cultural traits to which the " aggressors " superiority was attributed while claiming to return to the sources of their Tradition so as to legitimize such borrowings. This hypothesis is corroborated, when one examines a long period, by the social-religious reform movements, born in the 19th century from confrontation with the Christian missions, by the first Hindu nationalist party, the Hindu Mahasabha, relaunched in the 1920s in réaction to the panislamic militantism of the Muslim minority, by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which appeared under identical circumstances, and by the Vishva Hindu Parishad, founded in 1964 to fight against Christian and Muslim proselytizing.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: