An academic talk presented by Dr. Neel Ahuja.

A rich and growing historiography of Hindu nationalism connects the contemporary rise of fascist social movements in India to (1) historical links between nationalism and the racial discourses of European fascist movements and (2) a set of caste-inflected practices of animal protection that politicize meat-eating, dairy production, leather exports, and related industrialized exploitation of animal bodies and life. This set of links between race, caste, and animal protection in India may look quite different than the way in which animal protection is conventionally narrated in the US and other settler states as connected to Left political critique. However, rather than taking the ongoing linkage of animal care to fascism as a geographically particular articulation of Hindu cultural politics, this presentation seeks to consider how and why animal care might repeatedly offer a site for articulation of fascist movements across a variety of locations.