Making of the Hindu Nation, Masculinity and the Citizen – Critical Reading of Children’s Magazines in South Asia and the Place of Muslims

Abstract

This study critically analyses popular and children’s science magazines published in Kerala, a southern state of India. It examines how these magazines construct an ideal Hindu nation and citizen through different narratives. Here, I argue that the imagery of popular children’s magazines in Kerala is rooted in the Hindu ideal – wherein dominant masculine characters and a glorified Hindu cultural past are foregrounded. In these magazines, the idealisation of Hindu masculinity takes place through presenting Muslims as less progressive / incapable of acquiring “modern standards”. In this context, the Hindu emerges as a reformer who helps the Muslim to “acquire modernity”. Also, children’s science magazines view science as a means for liberation from religion and irrational beliefs through critiquing “irrational” stories in popular Malayalam children’s magazines. But a close examination of science magazines reveals that it is embedded in the very religious ideologies from which it is seeking liberation.