Gandhi defined India as Hindu via holy-place geography while urging religious assimilation

Evidence

Nevertheless, in Hind Swaraj, Gandhi (like many right-wing Hindu nationalists would do in the future) superimposes Hinduism’s spiritual map—the map of its holy places—on the territorial map of India, and uses that to define the boundaries of the country. By doing so, consciously or unconsciously, Gandhi presents the Homeland as unmistakably Hindu. But he goes on, in the manner of a good host, to say that “a country must have a faculty for assimilation” and that “the Hindus, the Mohammedans, the Parsees and the Christians who have made India their country, are fellow countrymen”. The time Gandhi spent in South Africa—where the majority of his clients, and later his political constituency, were wealthy Muslim businessmen—seems to have made him more attentive to the Muslim question than he might have otherwise been. For the sin of this attentiveness, this obviously unforgivable complexity, he paid with his life. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 249

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how Hindu nationalist self-definition of the homeland operated before and after Ambedkar — echoes of today’s India geography debates. — connects to: Hindutva defines Indian citizenship by religion-of-origin within sacred territory — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1158