Saarang Narayan

Profile

I completed my BA in History from the University of Delhi (2013-16), and a M.St. in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford (2016-17). I recently completed my PhD in History from the University of Leeds (2018-24). 

Research interests

I am a historian of twentieth-century South Asia, focusing on Swadeshi (national economic self-sufficiency) and how the right-wing cultural nationalist movement adopted this form of economic thinking. I completed my thesis, ‘Swadeshism as Hindu Nationalism: An Intellectual History of Swadeshi and the Shaping of the Hindu Nationalist Movement’, from the University of Leeds. As such, my doctoral project is the first ever historical analysis of Swadeshi beyond the early twentieth century, as well as a unique contribution to the literature on Hindu Nationalism in that it focussed on figures and periods of the Hindu right that have remained at the margins of the vast literature on right-wing movements in India. 

My thesis—which I am developing into a monograph—argues for seeing Swadeshism as Hindu Nationalism by investigating how and why Swadeshi went from an expression of anti-colonial politics to a reactionary model of alternative globalisation within a century. To do so, it looks at the developments, continuities, and changes within Swadeshist thought across the twentieth century through the works of various hitherto under-analysed Swadeshist ideologues. Tracing the continuity of Brahmanical Hindu normativity in their socio-economic thought, my thesis begins to move towards identifying techniques, ideas, and beliefs that laid the socio-economic and ideological groundwork for the violent cultural nationalism of Hindutva organisations from the mid-twentieth century onwards.