Cover not available

In:Discourses of War and Peace: 21st century perspectives
Edited by Cornelia Ilie
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 355] 2026
► pp. 96–123

India’s war on its history of humiliation

A Discourse of Illusion approach

 | The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
In India, since Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) rise to power, socio-political discourse has increasingly been reconfigured through the lens of Hindutva (a conflation of religious and national identity). This includes the revision of history books to diminish India’s Mughal influence and rearticulate its national identity as more muscular against the enemy Other. This chapter explores how India has seen conceptualizations of war move beyond traditional border clashes towards the terrain of ideological thought, and where competing groups use language to redefine the nation’s identity. To do so, the analysis employs Bhatia’s (2015) Discourse of Illusion theoretical framework that demystifies how subjective notions of the imagined nation (Anderson 2010), within which India is reconceptualized as a pure Hindu nation, are legitimized. Data analysis occurs from three aspects: historicity (drawing on the past to make sense of the present or future); linguistic and semiotic action (subjective conceptualizations made apparent through metaphorical rhetoric); and degree of social impact (rise of delineating categorizations).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Analysing discursive reconceptualizations of war
    • 2.1Theoretical framework: Discourse of Illusion (DoI)
    • 2.2Methodology: Analytical framework
    • 2.3Data
  • 3.Analysis of the data
    • 3.1The collusion of educational and political discourses
    • 3.2Correcting history to build a New India
    • 3.3Rewriting history to empower majoritarian politics
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Websites
References (59)
References
Anand, Kusha, and Mari Lall. 2022. The debate between secularism and Hindu nationalism — how India’s textbooks have become the government’s medium for political communication, India Review, 21:1, 77–107. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. 2010. “The Nation and the Origin of National Consciousness.” In The Ethnicity Reader: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Migration, ed. by Guibernau Montserrat and John Rex. UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Banaji, Shakuntala. 2018. “Vigilante Publics: Orientalism, Modernity and Hindutva Fascism in India.” Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture 25 (4): 333–350. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Banerjee, Sikata. 2003. “Gender and Nationalism: The Masculinization of Hinduism and Female Political Participation in India.” Women’s Studies International Forum 26 (2): 167–179. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Banerjee, Sikata. 2012. Muscular Nationalism: Gender, Violence, and Empire in India and Ireland, 1914–2004. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Banerjee, Abhishek. 2023 May 1. “Forget small changes by NCERT, liberals are now preparing a dangerous new radical version of history.” Firstpost. [URL]
Bhatia, Aditi. 2015. Discursive Illusions in Public Discourse: Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bhatia, Aditi. 2020. “Saffronisation of India: A critical discourse analysis of contemporary political ideology.” World Englishes 39(4): 568–580. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bhatia, Aditi. 2021. ‘The Discursive Construction of Legitimacy in the Abrogation of Indian Constitution’s Article 370.’ Journal of Pragmatics 183: 132–14. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bhatia, Aditi, and Ross, Andrew. 2022. ‘“We shall not flag or fail, we shall go on to the end”: Hashtag Activism in Hong Kong Protests.’ Journal of Language and Politics 21(1): 117–142. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bhatia, Aditi. 2023. “Abrogating Article 370 and Kashmir’s exceptionalism: a critical analysis of India’s bodies politic.” Critical Discourse Studies 22(2): 167–182. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bhatty, Kiran, and Sundar, Nandini. 2020. “Sliding from majoritarianism towards fascism: Educating India under the Modi regime.” International Sociology, 1–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bose, Saikat Kumar. 30 April 2025. “Mughals Out, Mahakumbh In: What Has Changed In New NCERT Class 7 Books”. NDTV. [URL]
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bouvier, Gwen, and Way, Lyndon C. S. 2021. “Revealing the politics in “soft”, everyday uses of social media: the challenge for critical discourse studies.” Social Semiotics 31 (3): 345–364. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cialdini, Robert B. 1997. “Interpersonal Influence”. In Persuasion: Psychological Insights and Perspectives, ed. by Sharon Shavitt, and Timothy C. Brock, 195–217. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Graham, Phil. 2018. “Ethics in critical discourse analysis.” Critical Discourse Studies 15 (2): 186–203. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Graham, Phil, and Allan Luke. 2003. “Militarizing the body politic: New mediations as weapons of mass instruction.” Body & Society 9 (4): 149–168. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gruber, Helmut. 2026. “Debating the Ukraine war in the German Public. Three open letters, an op-ed, and their uptake in the German quality press.” In Discourses of War and Peace: 21st Century Perspectives, ed. by Cornelia Ilie. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Herman, Edward, and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. USA: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ilie, Cornelia. 2024. “Crisis manipulation: Discourse- and argumentation-based approaches”. In Manufacturing Dissent: manipulation and counter-manipulation in times of crisis, ed. by Cornelia Ilie, 1–23. John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2017. “Toward a Hindu state?” Journal of Democracy 28 (3): 52–63. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jayyusi, Lena. 1984. Categorization and the Moral Order. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kansteiner, Wulf. 2002. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies.” History and Thought 41: 179–197. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kaul, Nitasha. 2017. “Rise of the political right in India: Hindutva-Development mix, Modi myth, and dualities.” Journal of Labor and Society 20 (4): 523–548. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kesavan, Mukul. 2023 April 16. “Maiming India.” Telegraph India. [URL]
Kinnvall, Catarina. 2019. “Populism, ontological insecurity and Hindutva: Modi and the masculinization of Indian politics.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 32 (3): 283–302. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kowner, Rotem, and Cornelia Ilie. 2026. “The Long, Unsuccessful War: Discourses of Russian Defeat following the Russo-Japanese War, 1905-Present.” In Discourses of War and Peace: 21st Century Perspectives, ed. by Cornelia Ilie. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kumar, Utpal. 2023 April 7. NCERT Mughal Saga Exposes India’s Eminent Historians and their Subterfuge. News18. [URL]
Kumar, Abhijeet. 28 April 2025. “No Delhi Sultanate, Mughals in books: A look at past NCERT syllabus changes”. Business Standard. [URL]
Lazar, Anita, and Michelle M. Lazar. 2004. “The discourse of the New World Order: ‘Out-casting’ the double face of threat.” Discourse & Society 15 (2–3): 223–242. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leudar, Ivan, Marsland, Victoria, and Nekvapil, Jiri. 2004. “On Membership Categorization: ‘Us’, ‘Them’ and ‘Doing Violence’ in Political Discourse.” Discourse & Society 15 (2–3): 243–266. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leudar, Ivan, and Jiri Nekvapil. 2011. “Practical historians and adversaries: 9/11 revisited.” Discourse & Society 22 (1): 66–85. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liu, James. H., and Janos Laszlo. 2007. “A Narrative Theory and Identity: Social Identity, Social Representation, Society, and the Individual.” In Social Representations and Identity: Content, Process, and Power, ed. by Gail Moloney and Iain Walker, 85–107. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mansoor, Sanya. 2023 April 6. “India’s School Textbooks Are the Latest Battleground for Hindu Nationalism.” TIME. [URL]
Mathur, Abhinandita. D. 2023 April 16. “Modi govt erasing more than just Mughals from textbooks. It’s also deleting agency of Indians.” The Print. [URL]
Oktar, Lutfiye. 2001. “The ideological organization of representational processes in the presentation of us and them.” Discourse & Society 12 (3): 313–346. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Perloff, Richard. M. 1993. The Dynamics of Persuasion. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pokharna, Yuvraj. 2023 April 10. “The Mughal History Needs Narration. This Time Matter-of-Factly”. News18. [URL]
Potapenko, Serhiy, and Oleksii Deikun. 2026. “Peace into war transformation in news discourse on Ukraine: A cognitive-rhetorical perspective”. In Discourses of War and Peace: 21st Century Perspectives, ed. by Cornelia Ilie. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ranhotra, Sanbeer S. 2021 January 15. “NCERT has polluted the minds of kids for far too long, now Modi govt is planning a complete overhaul of school textbooks.” TFIPOST. [URL]
Reddy, Deepa. (2011). “Hindutva as Praxis.” Religion Compass 5 (8): 412–426. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sarangi, Srikant, and Christopher N. Candlin. 2003. “Categorization and Explanation of Risk: A Discourse Analytical Perspective.” Health, Risk & Society 5 (2): 115–124. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sen, Sudipta. 2019 May 20. “Tampering with history: how India’s ruling party is erasing the Muslim heritage of the nation’s cities.” The Conversation. [URL].
Shenhav, Shaul. 2004. “Once Upon a Time There Was a Nation: Narrative Conceptualisation Analysis. The Concept of ‘Nation’ in the Discourse of Israeli Likud Party leaders.” Discourse & Society 15 (1): 81–104. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Simon, Roger. 1999. Gramsci’s Political Thought: An Introduction. London: The Electric Book Company.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Swain, Ashok. 2018 March 13. “By Rewriting India’s History, Hindutva Forces Meddling With India’s Present And Future”. Outlook India. [URL]
Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Karin Liebhart. 2009. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Websites
Official government website for Ministry of Home Affairs, Amit Shah1. Official government website for Ministry of Home Affairs, Amit Shah [URL]
Official government website for Prime Minister, Narendra Modi2. Official government website for Prime Minister, Narendra Modi [URL]
FirstPost3. FirstPost [URL]
Outlook India4. Outlook India [URL]
News 185. News 18 [URL]
Telegraph India6. Telegraph India [URL]
TFIPOST7. TFIPOST [URL]
TIME8. TIME [URL]
The Conversation9. The Conversation [URL]
The Print10. The Print [URL]
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue