
India at a Crossroads: 100 Years of the Hindu Nationalist RSS Movement
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh turns one hundred, and this DW film traces how a movement founded in 1925 by K. B. Hedgewar grew into a network with millions of followers now entwined with the government of Narendra Modi, who came up through its ranks. Interviews with RSS members, activists, and families who have belonged to the organization across generations show how discipline, drills, and youth training turn Hindutva, the idea of a Hindu nation, into daily practice. The film also follows people on the receiving end of that shift, including interfaith couples and religious minorities describing rising social pressure and legal uncertainty. It revisits early ideologue M. S. Golwalkar's engagement with European nationalist thought of the 1930s, and how organizational models associated with Mussolini and Hitler appear to have shaped the RSS's structure. Historical footage and testimony sit alongside present-day scenes of training camps and street life, building toward a question the film keeps returning to: what happens to Gandhi's secular republic when a single organization sets the terms of national identity.