Cut The Noise: How did Jai Shri Ram become a call for violence?

In this video, Suchitra Vijayan examines how the chant Jai Sri Ram became a call for violence in India. She explores the historical context to the term and how it has emerged as a call to not only signify a muscular Hindu Rashtra but to also construct and define a certain kind of Hindu nation on the BJP and Sangh’s terms.

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Suchitra Vijayan is the author of the critically acclaimed book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India (Melville House, New York) and How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (Pluto Press). She is an award-winning photographer and the founder and executive director of the Polis Project, a New York-based magazine of dissent. She teaches at NYU Gallatin and Columbia University, and is the Chairperson of the International Human Rights Committee. Her essays, photographs, and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Nation, The Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Rumpus, Electric Literature, NPR, NBC, Time, and BBC. As an attorney, she worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo for Iraqi refugees.