Celebrating More Than the New Year:
The Hindu Nationalist Greeting Cards

Gallery

Recycled New Year Card, from the Vikrami year 2053 (1995 A.D.), produced at a VHP-run school (vidhyala) in RK Puram, New Delhi, and acquired from the VHP shop in 1999. In conversation, the shopkeeper told me that from the hundreds of New Year cards received by the VHP office at RK Puram, many lie wasted. He collects them and hands them over to the school so that the pupils can use them for their own montages of Indian heroes, and simultaneously, learn (the Hindutva) stories related to the depicted persons, deities and sites depicted. Many of the montages are returned to the shopkeeper who has again collected them in several boxes that make up a storehouse of Hindu nationalist Greeting Card iconography.

This card shows (from top left to right, bottom left to the right): King Rana Pratap from Rajasthan, Subhas Chandra Bose, Marathi king Shivaji, Bhagat Singh, RSS founder KB Hedgewar and Chandrashekar Azad. A sticker of the proposed Ram Temple at Ayodhya, promoting the Ram Janmabhoomi Hindu March for Unity organised by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad is added at the bottom right.

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