Abstract

In May 2021, leading Indian authors Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy spoke out against Penguin Random House India’s decision to publish and promote a book by Narendra Modi titled Exam Warriors, “a handy guide for students in India and across the worldµ. The writers accused the publisher of participating in the Prime Minister’s propaganda campaign and questioned the alleged validity of “how to booksµ in the cultural industry. In this article I include that episode in a long list of attacks that Indian writers have launched on the cultural policy of the Prime Minister. I discuss the rhetorical and discursive strategies that characterise the “war on wordsµ of both parts, analysing public speeches and articles within the critical framework of political discourse analysis and critical metaphor analysis. I elaborate not only on the kind of political language used by the Prime Minister, but also, following T. van Dijk’s reflections, on how political texts and talks of individuals are related to socially shared political representations and collective interactions of groups and institutions. I investigate on the kind of vocabulary used by writers, artists, and intellectuals to respond to the “wordsµ of the Prime Minister against them, showing the relationship between discourses of culture and questions of ideology, between the political representation of marginalised groups and the linguistic politics of these same groups to resist power.