The study of the relationship between Hindu nationalism and Hindu activist traditions of seva (selfless service) has been principally organised into three approaches: firstly, the instrumentalist deployment of the practice, secondly, the political appropriation of traditions of seva, and thirdly, that these related associational spaces are internally homogenous and distinct from alternative ‘legitimate’ religious arenas. These frameworks largely reflect approaches to Hindu nationalism which place emphasis on its forms of political statecraft and relationship to spectacular violence. These approaches raise manifold concerns. This thesis retheorizes the relationship between Hindu nationalism and seva with reference to primary and secondary sources, together with field research in the seva projects of the Vanavasi Kalyan Kendra (VKK), a Hindu nationalist association. Through deploying a reworked understanding of Fraser’s (1990) approach to associational space and Butler’s (1993, 2007) theorisation of performative acts and subject formation, this thesis contributes to rethinking Hindu nationalism and seva. I demonstrate firstly that the colonial encounter worked to produce a series of social imaginaries which were drawn upon to transform traditions of seva. Through their articulation in shared religious languages, practices of seva were productive of porously structured Hindu activist spaces in which the tradition was contested with regard to ‘radical’ and ‘orthodox’ orientations to Hinduism’s boundaries. Increasingly, articulations of seva which invoked a sangathanist ‘orthodoxy’ came to gain hegemony in Hindu activist arenas. This influenced the early and irregular Hindu nationalist practices of seva. Fractures in Hindu nationalist articulations developed as a result of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) sangathanist organisational idioms, allowing the association to inscribe its practices with pro-active meanings. In the post-independence period the alternative arenas of Hindu nationalist seva projects expanded greatly, a point evident in the degrees of dialogue between the Sangh and the sarvodaya movement. The importance of porous associational boundaries is further demonstrated through noting how engagement in visibilized arenas of popular Hindu religiosity worked to both broaden the fields of reference and vernacularize Hindu nationalist practices of seva. With reference to field research, I demonstrate that central to the expansion of the VKK’s arenas of service into spaces associated with Ayurvedic care is the incorporation of both refocused and transgressive practices. In the educational projects of the VKK, I note how seva works to inscribe daily practices of hygiene, the singing of bhajans and daily assemblies with Hindu nationalist meanings, and so works to regulate conduct through the formation of an ‘ethical Hindu self’. However, arenas of seva are also a location where we can witness subjects negotiating power. I demonstrate this through examining how participants in the VKK’s rural development projects rearticulate Othering practices of seva, with actors using the discourse to position themselves as active subjects, break gendered restrictions on public space, and advance an ‘ethically Hindu’ grounded claim on development and critique of power. This work illustrates that far from being of inconsequence to the circulation of Hindu nationalist identities, alternative arenas of seva operate as spaces where discourses are performatively enacted, refocused, transgressed and rearticulated. These acts contribute to the consolidation and disturbance of Hindu nationalist subject formations.

This thesis addresses critical conceptions of Scottish literary development in the twentieth-century which inscribe realism as both the authenticating tradition and necessary telos of modern Scottish writing. To this end I identify and explore a Scottish ‘counter-tradition’ of modern uncanny fiction. Drawing critical attention to techniques of modal disruption in the works of a number of post-1970s Scottish writers gives cause to reconsider that realist teleology while positing a range of other continuities and tensions across modern Scottish literary history. The thesis initially defines the critical context for the project, considering how realism has come to be regarded as a medium of national literary representation. I go on to explore techniques of modal disruption and uncanny in texts by five Scottish writers, contesting ways in which habitual recourse to the realist tradition has obscured important aspects of their work. Chapter One investigates Ali Smith’s reimagining of ‘the uncanny guest’. While this trope has been employed by earlier Scottish writers, Smith redesigns it as part of a wider interrogation of the hyperreal twenty-first-century. Chapter Two considers two texts by James Robertson, each of which, I argue, invokes uncanny techniques familiar to readers of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson in a way intended specifically to suggest concepts of national continuity and literary inheritance. Chapter Three argues that James Kelman’s political stance necessitates modal disruption as a means of relating intimate individual experience. Re-envisaging Kelman as a writer of the uncanny makes his central assimilation into the teleology of Scottish realism untenable, complicating the way his work has been positioned in the Scottish canon. Chapter Four analyses A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad, delineating a similarity in the processes of repetition which result in both uncanny effects and the phenomenon of tradition, leading to Kennedy’s identification of an uncanny dimension in the concept of national tradition itself. Chapter Five considers the work of Alan Warner, in which the uncanny appears as an unsettling sense of significance embedded within the banal everyday, reflecting an existentialism which reaches beyond the national. In this way, I argue that habitual recourse to an inscribed realist tradition tends to obscure the range, complexity and instability of the realist techniques employed by the writers at issue, demonstrating how national continuities can be productively accommodated within wider, pluralistic analytical approaches.