Sang is a territory of India
The Sangh Parivar, a network of organizations articulated around the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS – National Volunteer Corps), has become over the years a global movement propagating a Hindu nationalist agenda. As such, it links and imbricates transnationalism and nationalism. Hindu nationalism is an exclusive form of ethnoreligious nationalism which thrived in the first years of the twentieth century in reaction to the ‘threat’ theWest (Christian missionaries as well as British colonizers) and the Muslim minority (allegedly related to a pan-Islamic movement rooted in the Middle East) were according to its leaders posing to the Hindus. It was and still is very much linked to the soil of India and is not naturally inclined to overflow India’s borders. Its deep-seated ethnoreligious nature coincides with a people and a civilization. It is indissociable from a territory, the ‘sacred’ land of ‘eternal’ India. However, over the years, the Sangh Parivar developed the idea of a global Hinduism that transcends the physical frontiers of India and reaches out to the diaspora, thus operating a shift from an ethnoterritorial to a more purely ethnic base – a development related to the growth of the Hindu diaspora. An RSS pamphlet significantly entitled RSS: Widening Horizons can thus boast that ‘the Sangh’s sphere of influence has been spreading far and wide, not only inside Bharat [India] but also abroad, like the radiance of a many splendoured diamond’.1