| Summary/Abstract |
A recent dimension of India’s nation-branding project, by which it aims to attract investment, trade, human resources, and tourists to the country, has been a focus on a ‘green’ India as a global leader in sustainable development. As part of this strategy, messages aimed at a national and external audience are aligned, and a line is drawn between the country’s putative ecologically sensitive past and a green future. Such messages highlight selective, sanitised, and idealised Hindu texts and praxis related to the environment as evidence of India’s innate ecological sensitivity. The environment thus becomes a domain for the permeation of a seemingly apolitical strand of Hindutva rhetoric, which emphasises the civilisational wisdom of Indian (coded as Hindu) thought and presents it for consumption by national and global audiences. In this article, using anti-plastics discourses as a lens, I investigate the cultural politics of this emerging stream of Hindutva-linked ‘ecotraditionalism’.
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