Assassin’s Ashes

“Dhirendhra Jha is the foremost historian of India’s Hindu nationalist movement. Everything he writes is essential to understanding modern India.” —Basharat Peer, author of A Question of Order: India, Turkey, and the Return of Strongmen

“A brilliant, blistering account of a century-long expansionist project by one of India’s finest journalists.” —Siddhartha Deb, author of The Light at the End of the World

“A sharp and concise history of the Hindu right’s frightening ambition to bring much of south Asia into the borders of a ‘united’ India—a project conceived out of anger, advanced through violence, and now housed at the heart of India’s government.” —Samanth Subramanian, author of The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables that Connect Our World and Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast

“In this very concise but comprehensive book, Dhirendra K. Jha explores facets of Hindu nationalism that have been neglected by historians, including the role of RSS before and after 1947 and the impact of Hindutva on India’s neighbors. A very important addition to the existing literature and most topical book!” —Christophe Jaffrelot, professor of South Asian politics and history at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and author of Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy

“Dhirendra Jha’s Assassin’s Ashes provides a sweeping and yet concise account of the rise and growing normalization of extremist ideas about the political project of ‘Greater India.’ Beginning with the story of Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, and the miscalculated effects of his tragic undertaking to remove the one person he thought obstructed the creation of an undivided Hindu India, Jha narrates with power and insight the changing fortunes not just of Godse’s legacy but of the civilizational language that is used to unite political power, territorial ambition and majoritarian intolerance.” —Nicholas Dirks, author of Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India and The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain

“With great economy and precision, Assassin’s Ashes traces the century long journey of the expansionist concept of a larger and ‘unbroken India’ (Akhand Bharat) from political obscurity to the center of Indian political life in Modi’s India. Jha shows, arrestingly, how this journey is mirrored by the recent veneration of the legacy and ashes of Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, who saw himself as a defender of Akhand Bharat. A great and enlightening book, reminding the reader of Hindutva’s roots in the global authoritarian currents of the early 20th century.” —Thomas Blom Hansen, Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University

Dhirendra K. Jha is a Delhi-based journalist and author who has written extensively on the rise of the Hindu Right. He is a contributing writer at The Caravan and the author of several books, including:

• Gandhi’s Assassin: The Making of Nathuram Godse and His Idea of India (2024)
• Shadow Armies: Fringe Organizations and Foot Soldiers of Hindutva (2017)

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