In December last year, I was back in the Western Indian city of Ahmedabad to meet members of the far-right Hindu nationalist organization Bajrang Dal. For over a decade now, I have been following the lives of young male members of right-wing Hindu groups to get a sense of the everyday life of Hindu supremacy in India. This time, we met a week before the inauguration of a grand Hindu temple built on the site of the sixteenth-century Babri mosque that Hindu nationalists demolished in 1992. Televisions in the airport, hotel, and restaurants in Ahmedabad showed looping images of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with folded hands and saffron clothes, preparing for his role as the master of ceremonies to inaugurate the megatemple in Ayodhya. The destruction of the mosque was a major victory of the 1990s Ram Janmabhoomi movement, a VHP (World Hindu Council) campaign to build a temple on the mosque site in Ayodhya.

The movement touched hundreds and thousands of villages and cities in North India, a moving feast of rallies, signature campaigns, speeches, and new rituals, all aimed at amassing mass support to build the Ram temple. This movement inspired an entire generation of Hindu-nationalist volunteers to carry special sanctified bricks, inscribed with “Sri Ram” in Hindi and other languages, from across villages across India to Ayodhya. It was a turning point for the electoral success of the right-wing Hindu political party, the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP); the temple movement made Hindu nationalism a mass-participatory project across North India. It attracted young men by offering them an enchanted politics, an opportunity to establish a virile Hindu self by attacking Muslims.

When I reached Ahmedabad, the mood amongst right-wing volunteers was festive. They invited me to join them as they went handed out invitations to the inauguration of the temple. They divided themselves into small teams of three or four volunteers per neighborhood and knocked on doors. As soon as someone opened the door, they handed out the invitation with a simple message: “Light five lamps in your house and watch the consecration of the Ram temple on the twenty-second of January on television.”

The invitation was more than a piece of paper.

Each household received a small white cloth bag containing a color photograph of the temple and a tiny pouch of prasad (offering). The volunteers asked people to place both in front of their home deity. It also contained a pamphlet that described the monumental scale of the temple in bullet points; it was 160 feet tall and covered 28,000 square feet, for instance. On one side of the cloth bag was an outline of the temple and the Hindu god Ram standing boldly in profile with a bow and an arrow in his hand. On the other side, there was an advertisement for Aabaad dairy with a link to their website, where one can order seven different types of flavored milk.

At the bottom of the invitation was an old message in a new package. “We are proud. We are Hindus” (Hame garv hai, Hum Hindu Hain). It took me back to a childhood memory. In the nineties, as a nine-year-old schoolboy in Delhi, I received a keychain from our friendly next-door neighbor. It was a keyring with a plastic disc that included an embossed message: “Say with pride, we are Hindus” (Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain).

The delivery of the invitations was transformed into a ritual on social media. By the next day, the profiles of the volunteers had changed. The mundane act of knocking on doors was transformed in slow-motion music videos, which showed the volunteers being blessed by elders who put a red tika (mark) on their foreheads. The home delivery of invitations signaled the arrival of Lord Ram into the homes of poor and lower-caste Hindus. The Ram temple inauguration kit, like the sacred brick and the keychain, is only the latest example of the material infrastructure that allows Hindu supremacy to become participatory in India. It reaches your phone, your door, and your neighborhood as a new form of public, celebratory Hinduism that combines the new pulsating soundscape of Hindutva pop with the old infrastructure of right-wing volunteers.

But what happens to these volunteers after the inauguration, after the declaration of Hindu supremacy, after the victory is seen on television, cheered on by spectators, and accepted by the wider public? What, in other words, happens to the delivery boys and foot soldiers once the show is over?

Religious violence in the Indian context has often been understood with reference to communalism and communal riots. These categories are haunted by colonial myths of timeless religious violence between Hindus and Muslims. To counter this myth of religious violence, a rich body of literature has laid bare the state-sanctioned machinery of violence and propaganda directed against minorities, especially against Muslims and Christians. But alongside this violence, there is also the slow internal violence of a movement that draws millions of poor and lower-caste Hindus into its fold, only to discard them when they are no longer useful.

The delivery of the invitations and the performance of the street procession illustrates the work of subaltern groups within the project of Hindu supremacy. Their bodies give Hindu nationalism the shape of a social movement, expanding it beyond party politics. The same young male volunteers who delivered these invitations also pushed the cart that announced the temple inauguration. Many of those involved in organizing the procession told me that they freely gave their time and often their money as sewa (service). This form of religiosity is inextricable from the current state of the economy. It reflects an economy that boasts a remarkably high growth rate accompanied by extraordinary levels of unemployment, an economy where there are no stable jobs for unskilled workers and most people are precariously employed in the informal sector. The lucky ones amongst the volunteers are security guards, peons, and gym trainers.

For example, Jagdish, a young priest accompanying the procession, told me that he had dropped out of school and turned to sewa. Why? “Is it not better to be a tenth-grade failure than be yet another unemployed graduate who hangs himself?” His words alerted me to the possibility of Hindu supremacy offering to people like him a life worth living and dying for at a time when there are no good jobs. Jagdish was keen to discuss the intricacies of sanatan dharma with me, other volunteers asked me to take photos of them with the Ram temple inauguration kit, and a few educated ones wanted my help to go abroad and study. My point is that dashed hopes and precarious lives are the background to performances of Hindu supremacy on the streets.

I got a sense of the bitterness that comes at the end of the road for some volunteers when I met sixty-nine-year-old Sonaliben, a feisty erstwhile volunteer for the VHP. We met outside her one-room dwelling, which she shares with her daughter and two grandchildren. Initially, we chatted about her sewa with Hindu nationalist organizations, for which she traveled across North India. Soon, she pulled out a plastic bag full of colored photographs taken at different political rallies and identity cards issued by a host of Hindu nationalist organizations over the last two decades. One of the identity cards, which included a passport size photograph and the name and signature of the prant mantri (regional minister) of the VHP, identified her as a Ram Sevak (helper of Lord Ram). As a VHP volunteer, she participated in Hindu nationalist processions and was affiliated with the local police station as a member of the “peace committee.” In her youth, she was also active in the movement to build a temple in Ayodhya. The multiple identity cards and papers were a sign of the different ways in which Sonaliben had used the Hindu nationalist movement to gain recognition from the local police station, neighborhood level leaders, and within her community. But participation in rallies and protests and pilgrimages had not translated into a better life.

As a resident of a lower-caste Hindu colony in a mixed neighborhood that houses Muslims, Hindus, and Dalits, Sonaliben was finding it hard to feed herself and her daughter and granddaughters. She worked as a cook for weddings. Her husband, also a precarious worker, died many years ago. Out of her collection of a dozen identity cards affiliated to various Hindu nationalist organizations, it is the government issued BPL or below-poverty-line card that is most relevant to her today.

The contrast between the grand, glittering megatemple and her dark, dilapidated tin shed is stark. “I did all this sewa, but today we struggle to feed ourselves,” she says. Membership with Hindu nationalist organizations runs in the family. Her daughter-in-law stands next to her in a photograph taken on the banks of the river Ganga. In that photograph, Sonaliben is wearing a white t-shirt with the VHP logo and slogan “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail Lord Ram) and in the background, men and women are taking a dip in the holy river. By joining the VHP, Sonaliben and her kin travelled and achieved levels of mobility and status (as protectors and activists for Ram), unimaginable and unaffordable otherwise. The absence of any long-term positive effects of that service and politics on her everyday life led her to reflect on Hindu nationalism and the way it opened and closed doors for women like her. “The men put us in the front when the police in Delhi charged at us.” Did she fear for her life and safety? “If I survived, great. If I did not, martyrdom for Ram.” But what else moved her to join the movement? “Oh, I don’t know, my heart just took to it.” She recalls a touching experience: the local head of the VHP tying a rakhi (amulet) on her wrist. Is she still in touch with him? “No, he’s dead, but his son will be in the office.”

Our conversation moved between the past, characterized by excitement and promise, and the present, characterized by bitterness and helplessness. At a time when the streets were covered with billboards of the inauguration of the new megatemple devoted to Ram, the temple that she had helped to create, Sonaliben wanted help to correct an error in her BPL card, a small error that was making it hard for her to procure rations. I was surprised that her decades-old affiliation with the VHP and the Hindu right-wing political party that has ruled Gujarat for over three decades did not give her the standing to correct this error. The Hindu nation she had helped to create was here, but it was indifferent to her service, her struggles, and her wellbeing.

The leaders are only interested in lining their pockets. The only double-storied building that dwarfs the dilapidated one-room huts in the neighborhood belongs to the local leader. This is politics as usual, after all. Sonaliben’s disenchantment with Hindu supremacy is also a story of the use and abuse of women within the movement. What is the reason for her neglect? The reason is she’s a woman. “They [men and leadership] would never let us lead the movement. It would hurt their pride.”

Sonaliben gives us a glimpse into the forms of internal violence that sustain the project of Hindu supremacy. At the same time, the project directs its violence outward: local and national leaders promised Sonaliben protection from her Muslim neighbors. Still, the movement’s triumphs on the street and in the parliament offer no pathways out of the dead end that remains the default for the poor and marginalized in shiny, neoliberal India. Sonaliben and Jagdish, each in their own way, use Hindu supremacy to go elsewhere, where there is something to die for, and where they have a chance to be recognized by the everyday state and the wider public as part of a triumphant and virile majority. Yet neither the temples nor the processions seem to be able to answer the simple question of what happens after. “We are Hindus. We are proud.” And then?