Hindutva, Now in Your Wardrobe: The Rise of Right-Wing T-Shirt Brands

From 'Damakdam' to 'Sanatan Store' and 'Nativeheads,' these t-shirt brands are promoting Hindutva ideas out loud.

Many brands spreading Hindutva politics and ideology have now entered the Indian market.

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

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Brands inspired by Hindutva have had no problems aligning themselves with the goals of the market and expanding its influence into hitherto uncharted territories, both socio-economic and geographical.

An interesting aspect of this has been the banalisation of Hindu nationalist ideas in the everyday sphere of economics, most particularly in consumer-grade goods and their advertisements. 

The masculine, militaristic aesthetics of European fascism and Hindutva share palpable linkages, often embodied in the angry, overprotective young man seen in popular films.

However, Hindutva also promotes the archetype of the spiritually-inclined and Dharmically-rooted ascetic, which makes for the other side of its masculinist coin. Interestingly, both archetypes have also emerged in everyday consumption. 

On the other hand, gone are the days when FMCG goods were sold to consumers by a bespectacled fellow in a lab coat. Patanjali, Dabur, Himalaya, and other similar self-care and health-related brands increasingly use the ascetic archetype in their consumer messaging.

A spew of organic or natural products that had been gaining popularity since the rise of new age and wellness movements worldwide in the late twentieth century, have also become part of this tendency to pander to the naturalistic and ecofascist underpinnings of Hindutva.

Their stylings may be more harmless on the surface—sporting logos with trees or herbs, product names based on their Sanskritic herbal name, etc.—but they surely ought to be seen as part of the larger trend of cultural commodification.

Tshirts by Damakdam brand.

(Accessed by The Quint)

This relationship between “mindful”, organic consumption and conservative politics has also been made by scholars across the world. In the ongoing Amrit Kaal, a supposedly purified version of culture seems to be the new language in which goods are bought and sold. 

Saffronisation of Core Brand Identities

While most of this culturalised consumer messaging has come from relatively established conglomerates, smaller outfits in the start-up space are taking Hindutva consumerism into overdrive.

While the established brands with enough money to run television ads are restricted to the more banal version of saffron fascist aesthetics, many newer brands are pandering to the more radical elements of Hindutva in not just their advertising, but also their core brand identity. 

Bhariavaa is a T-shirt-centric start-up that sells apparel with deities depicted in high-contrast prints. These depictions differ from the more ubiquitous ones found, for instance, on calendars. While the latter are seemingly static portrayals, often picturing deities with serene expressions, the newer version found on clothing forgoes the muted tones in favour of aggressive postures and extreme expressions.

T-shirts by Bhairavaa.

(Accessed by The Quint)

Damakdam is another example of a similar start-up that excels in Hindutva fashion and markets itself as a “brand for all Sanatani” that is “Made in Bharat”. Similarly, Sanatan Store, with its tagline “Style your Sanskriti”, offers a 10% discount to first-time customers who use the code “JAISHREERAM” at checkout!

T-shirts by Damakdam.

(Accessed by The Quint)

'Sea, Sun & Fascism': Hindutva Ideals on T-shirts

But perhaps the epitome of Hindutva market aesthetics is the T-shirt brand Native Heads, which sells similarly flashy fascist designs. One of their T-shirts sports the rather candid slogan: Sea, Sun & Fascism.

The instructions for care on the label, apart from the usual suggestions of washing and ironing techniques, ask the wearer not to place the apparel on the floor or let it touch their feet, both seen as acts of pollution in traditional Brahmanical standards.

Other T-shirt designs include depictions of Hindutva icons like Vinayak Savarkar and Nathuram Godse. Some designs are even more overtly violent, with slogans like “reclaim, rebuild, repeat” plastered under the three domes of the Babri Masjid, which was demolished by a Hindu nationalist mob on 6 December 1992 who believed that the mosque was built on the site at which the Hindu deity Lord Rama was born.

T-shirt praising Savarkar.

(Accessed by The Quint)

Uniting the militaristic-ascetic archetypes, other T-shirt designs depict characters and deities from the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata and other historical figures idolised by the Hindu right.

Said subjects are almost all pictured mid-action, fighting off demons, mythological antagonists, and Muslim historical figures. And as Aditya SK, the founder of Native Head, implies, the choice of such depiction is a conscious one.

T-shirts by Nativeheads.

(Accessed by The Quint)

In an introductory video for the brand (interspersed with clips of young men lifting weights), he narrates the anecdote of how he felt a lack of cultural representation of India and Sanatan Dharma’s heroes in popular culture, a domain he felt was dominated by superheroes and anime characters who are alien to India’s heritage and sensibilities.

The founding of the brand was precisely to correct this lack, as he acknowledges in the video on the brand’s web page. In other words, there was a desire to have “a hero of my own” whose sensibilities align with the particularistic version of the culture that the target audience of these brands grew up in. 

T-shirt by Native Heads.

(Accessed by The Quint)

The Fantasy Driving These Brands

There is more to be gleaned from the founder’s message than may appear on the surface. The connection between cultural and religious nationalism (especially of the extreme variety) and a sense of inferiority, lack, insecurity and anxiety, has been made by various political theorists over the years.

The posturing of oneself and one’s heroes as hyper-masculine and aggressive reveals not simply an underlying fantasy of violence towards the Other (in this case, Muslims, Communists, Liberals, and “Woke” people), but also an admission of a sense of defeat.

T-shirt by The Sanatan Store.

(Accessed by The Quint)

It is a wholly different matter that this sense of defeat is also a fantasy: one chooses to view history through a particularly religious lens in order to carve out a narrative of an ancient Hindu India and its golden past (normalised often in the metaphor “sone ki chidiya” or golden bird) and a subsequent “Muslim conquest” which led to a “defeat” of “Hindus”.

The latter is often explained as being the result of the accommodative and tolerant capacity of “Hindus” (caste and gender-based violence notwithstanding!).

A similar framework is used for explaining away colonialism, which is conflated with Christianity, Westernisation, and eventually Communism. This particular fantasy of the past becomes the foundation for the desire for violence in the present and finds expression in the hyper-masculine prints on the T-shirts of Native Head.

But apart from this, the hyper-masculinity also reveals more about the Hindutva male fantasy: the desire to imitate the Other.

The anxious Hindutva-touting man also desires to be the very thing he is supposed to hate: a muscular, virile, bearded man, whose religious community is united under one banner and who wears his identity on his head.

The phrase “every allegation is a confession” was oft repeated by critics of the Zionist regime’s attacks on the people of Gaza. One ought to extend this remarkable insight to conservatives across the world, including those in India.

Everything that advocates of Hindutva hate about the Other is something they themselves are or wish to become. This is why, even when they celebrate seemingly feudal ideas and principles, they often are pioneers in the field of technology and science, especially when it comes to weapons, mass communication, and computer software.

Example of another t-shirt by Damakdam.

(Accessed by The Quint)

This is also why Hindutva has been so open to embracing the market and capitalism in all its neoliberal glory.

While crony capitalism led by industrialists who wear their vernacular identities on their sleeves seems to be the symbol for big projects, the start-up is the perfect site for Hindu Nationalist economics to play itself out in the small-scale and consumer sectors. Yet, as with most fascist or authoritarian regimes, the economics of Hindutva is hollow at its core.

The glitter and glam on the surface of this economic setup are the perfect smokescreen for the unprecedented economic crises that the country has been facing for the last few years. Unemployment, wealth, and income inequality are at record highs as public funding for welfare and public services is shrinking day by day. 

Cronyism in favour of vernacular industrial houses seems to have superseded the public good that was once the self-proclaimed goal of economic policies. Can such an economy that couches fantasies of violence and widens inequalities ever be a sustainable one?

Responding to The Quint, the brand Bhairavaa said, "No relation to politics. Hindutva is an Ideology, which in its roots is almost atheistic, while through Brazenly Hindu I mean, not sugarcoating truth and presenting it as it is, raw and naked, much like the Digambara Guru of Moksha Lord KalaBhairava."

(Saarang Narayan is a historian of cultural nationalism and economic thought in twentieth-century India).