‘Blackened face’: Emotional Community and the Hindu Nationalist Interpretation of History

Abstract

Abstract When in 1664 the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb appointed a Rajput general, Mirza Raja Jai Singh Kachwaha, as commander-in-chief of a punitive army sent against the Maratha warlord Shivaji, contemporary authors recorded it dispassionately as a trivial occurrence. Emotional perception of the event had changed drastically by the early twentieth century, when the proponents of Hindu nationalism began to view Jai Singh with disgust and anger as a ‘traitor to the Hindu nation’. Analysis of ‘Letter of Maharaja Shivaji to Mirza Raja Jai Singh’ (‘Mahārāj Śivājī kā patr Mirzā Rājā Jai Siṅgh ke nām’), by the Hindi classic poet Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, discloses the communicative means employed by the author to ‘reboot’ the emotional attitudes of his readers and to rope them into the emotional community of Hindu nationalists.