Queer life and moral policing in the time of Hindutva

In this dissertation project, I analyze what I consider to be three artifacts constitutive of the Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) mission to make India a “Hindu” state. I suggest that The Transgender Persons (Protections of Rights) Act 2019, moral policing and the assassination of a journalist all (re)create and help extend Hindu nationalism. While the killing of Lankesh was explicitly violent, I suggest that the Transgender Act and moral policing inflict violence in implicit ways upon queer and transgender people in their everyday lives. In Article 1, I use ethnography and discourse analysis to analyze the Trans Act and the ways it conceptualizes gender. I then bring in the experiences of my participants to show how this Act disregards the lived experiences of trans people and instead is a state tool to collect demographic data about its citizens. In Article 2, I present moral policing as a form of informal social control used by non-state actors to enforce and uphold the Hindutva nationalism and gender ideology. Non-state actors such as aunties, shopkeepers and security guards advance the same ideology as state-actors and help formulate and circulate the Hindutva discourses. I foreground the experiences of my participants to show the everyday impacts of such state-sanctioned gender ideology and moral policing. I unpack how power operates in moral policing and how hegemonic ways of policing queer people are reproduced in queer spaces as well. In Article 3, I examine representations of nation and gender in newspaper coverage of the assassination a woman journalist named Gauri Lankesh. I wonder how a vernacular press journalist like Lankesh could become a martyr for English-speaking intellectual liberals and the English-language media. While both media present different narratives of the murder and its aftermath, they both downplay its gendered implications.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Sociology

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Delanthamajalu, Shwetha

Contributors dc:contributor

• Marshall, Anna-Maria
• Dill, Brian
• Atiles, Jose
• Vogler, Stefan

• India
• moral policing
• queer
• Hindutva
• gender

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright Shwetha Delanthamajalu 2025

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132787

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/132787