Abstract
The Hindu Nationalist Movement, through its organizations, disputes with professional historians the narratives of India’s past, advocating for a version of the past that contributes to the construction of a sense of national pride, destroyed, according to its followers, by the narrative historic considered contrary to the religious sentiments of the Hindu portion of society. Politicians linked to the movement foment historiographical revisionism, taking their inspiration from the Hindutva – ethno nationalist ideology of supremacy of Hindu Culture. In this article, we seek to elucidate the dynamics of the narrative dispute about the Indian past, as well as the motivations of its actors, mobilizing, for that, Paul Ricoeur’s concept of pragmatic use of memory.
Keywords
India; Hindu Nationalism; memory; revisionism; uses of the past