The global rise of the radical right is one of the defining political developments of the twenty-first century. Existing explanations have rightly emphasised political-economic transformations such as deindustrialisation, precarity and downward social mobility. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of ethnographic engagement in eastern India, this lecture argues that these explanations capture only part of the story. Building on Eric Wolf’s historical anthropology, it suggests that political economy remains indispensable but must be brought into conversation with changing moral selves, aspirations for recognition, and the organizational ecology through which radical-right movements patiently cultivate political power. Using the rise of Hindu nationalists as an ethnographic lens, the lecture develops the concepts of moral self-worth and scalar consciousness to explain why upward mobility, as much as downward mobility, can generate support for the radical right. It argues that the success of contemporary radical right movements is best understood through the interaction of political economy, moral subjectivity, organizational power and corporate capital, offering a historically grounded anthropological framework for understanding the radical right beyond the Indian case.
Professor Alpa Shah is the Chair of Social Anthropology at University of Oxford and is Fellow of All Souls College. She is the author of The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India (2024) and Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas (2018) a.o.
