Roundtable on Hindutva Harassment of Academics in North America: Hindu Supremacists in a White World

HINDU RIGHT assaults on North American academics unfold within, to borrow WEB Du Bois’s phrase, a “white world” (Du Bois 2007, 69). This context is critical for understanding how Hindu supremacists have advanced some of the broad goals of white supremacy through anti-intellectual attacks. Scholars have long recognized that the Hindu Right—a broad group of individuals who sympathize with aspects of the political ideology known as Hindutva or Hindu nationalism—advances a narrow agenda of prejudice within the white-dominated context of North America. In 2000 Vijay Prashad argued “Yankee Hindutva fights a bigoted culture [racist culture in the US] with its own bigoted worldview” (Prashad 2000, 320). In 2000 Biju Mathew and Vijay Prashad drew attention to “Yankee Hindutva’s affinity with US racism” (Mathew and Prashad 2000, 523). In 2007 Prema Kurien warned about the essentialist tendencies of “Hindu American groups,” whose “challenge to Eurocentrism is grounded in an essentialist, unicultural, valorized model of Indianness that is in many respects the mirror image of what they seek to critique” (Kurien 2007, 184). In 2022 the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies (FCHS) Collective analyzed how Hindu supremacist discourse “mimics and reformulates the discursive grievances of white supremacy culture” (Feminist Critical Hindu Studies 2022). I build on these arguments by analyzing one key shift indicated by the South Asia Scholar Activist Collective’s (SASAC) Selective Timeline of Hindu Harassment of Scholars: namely, the Hindu Right predominantly targeted white scholars in the 1990s to early 2000s, whereas in more recent years they have directed their ire primarily against scholars of South Asian descent. In progressing from white targets to scholars of color, I argue that the Hindu Right has relied on the tools of white supremacy readily available in the United States context and, in so doing, has erected roadblocks to progressive attempts to diversify the North American academy.

In the initial wave of attacks on academics documented on the SASAC’s Timeline, beginning in the 1990s, the Hindu Right focused on a handful of white scholars, often attributing alleged misinterpretations of Hinduism or Sanskrit texts to the scholars being non-South Asian. The complaints constitute a depressing laundry list of retrograde stances. For instance, members of the Hindu Right objected to frank, even admiring discussions of sexuality in premodern Indian texts (e.g., Timeline 2002–2003: Religion in South Asia and Representing Hinduism; Timeline 2003: Banning Ganesa Book). They took umbrage at recognition of queerness in South Asian history and persons (Timeline 1997: Kali’s Child Book). Following patriarchal logic, Wendy Doniger was a favorite early target. The predominantly male attackers often referred to Doniger by her first name—eschewing her proper title of Dr. or Professor—in an attempt “simultaneously to patronise and trivialise” (Taylor 2011, 154). They further sought to capitalize on the oppressive tools of misogyny by referring to a group of scholars, pejoratively, as “Wendy’s children” (Doniger 2009). These attacks rarely had intellectual content. Even when there was a veneer of substantive disagreement, it tended to rely on blatant bad-faith misreadings (Nussbaum 2007). It seems most accurate to identify broader traditionalist logics—including patriarchy, heteronormativity, and Victorian prudishness—as among the driving forces behind these early anti-intellectual campaigns.

Many earlier attacks were also characterized by xenophobia. Key aggressors, such as Rajiv Malhotra, devoted significant energy to reifying groups of insiders and outsiders, vociferously condemning the latter (see Gandhi’s article in the current roundtable). In this the Hindu Right eschewed intellectual training and acumen as important qualifiers and instead claimed a basic ethnic or, from their perspective, racial superiority. For instance, Rajiv Malhotra—who is ignorant of Sanskrit—relentlessly attacked the Sanskrit abilities of both Wendy Doniger and Sheldon Pollock. From a scholarly perspective, this is laughable, deserving dismissal as “it’s all Greek to me.” But Malhotra was serious. He attempted to assert ownership of Sanskrit based on a claim of embodied racial knowledge. This line of thinking goes back to VD Savarkar, an early Hindutva articulator, who viewed Hindus as constituting a race characterized by “common blood” that carried historical memories (Jaffrelot 2007, 94–96). Such a view reduces outsiders—no matter their training, learning, or knowledge—to mere videshis or foreigners (Ghosh 2018). This logic also invalidates education, which makes sense given that Malhotra exhibited “contempt for the humanities,” extolling instead the “superiority of the sciences” (Kurien 2007, 193). It is worth underscoring the degree to which Hindu Right attacks seek to undermine the foundational principles of humanities scholarship. This is both alarming and unsurprising given that humanities scholarship positions us to criticize Hindutva ideology and its apologists.

Early on, the Hindu Right showed anxiety about even a minority of their targets being non-white, and they attempted to negotiate this issue by deploying two key tactics of white supremacy: centering white viewpoints and denying agency to people of color. Early on, Malhotra popularized the term “sepoy”—historically a soldier of Indian descent who fought for British colonialists—to refer to South Asian-descent scholars whose views he disliked. The term trades on denying the agency of non-white scholars, depicting them instead as race-traitors who follow the orders of white masters and usually play, as per Malhotra, “marginal roles” in the larger alleged maligning of Hinduism within western academia (Kurien 2007, 206). In Malhotra’s view, to be blunt, white scholars always run the show. Here, we see at work a basic premise of white supremacy, namely the relentless centering of white agency. Without white supremacy, we could imagine a Hindu Right narrative where a scholar of South Asian descent—of their own mind and volition—led the charge to allegedly defame Hinduism. But the Hindu Right playbook in the United States is unimaginable, in its current epistemology, without the scaffolding of white supremacy and its attendant assumptions about white dominance.

In the last decade, the Hindu Right has overwhelmingly targeted scholars of South Asian descent in the North American academy, using a constricting nativism. Nativism is defined, Maritsa Poros argues, by a relentless focus on the “us” in an us-them dichotomy (Poros 2019, 212). Indeed, Hindu Right assaults on the academy have long projected victimhood (FCHS Collective 2022). In a wave of attacks in 2021 and 2022, “Hinduphobia” was the trending term for this grievance against alleged bigots who, again and again, are diverse faculty. In one recent case (Timeline 2022: Decrying Anti-Racism Efforts), a Hindutva ideologue was rather explicit in his use of anti-Black racist rhetoric, attacking a Dalit scholar for allying with Black groups. Looking at the timeline, it is painfully clear that scholars of South Asian descent, including Hindus, have become the poster children—replacing “Wendy’s children”—targeted by the Hindu Right. One scholar recently noted, somewhat wryly, that the modern Hindu Right would be forced, by its own logic and ever-expanding list of enemies, to declare Savarkar himself a “Hinduphobe” (Chaturvedi 2021).

In making sense of how so many Indians, even Hindus, are excluded from the “us” of the Hindu Right, we must pay attention to this group’s delimitations on who possesses authority. As others have pointed out, Hindutva ideology projects wide-scale Hindu unity while upholding a small class of mainly upper-caste men as the tradition’s preservers. This holds true in the US context as well where the attackers have championed a “largely brahmanical understanding of Hinduism” (Warrier 2012, 51). In other words, the Hindu Right advances a narrow definition of who can speak about Hinduism that excludes most members of this vast religious tradition. Some scholars continue to call for engagement with “those who will not engage us on our own terms of tolerance” (Patton 2019, 16). But the Hindu Right’s nativism denies agency and voice to even many practicing Hindus, instead supporting caste and gender hierarchies. The harms of this exclusionary approach play out in specific ways in attacks on the modern academy, including cutting against progressive attempts to diversify university curriculums (Ahmed et al. 2021).

As the Hindu Right continues to constrict the boundaries of “us,” they endanger hard-won attempts to diversify the North American professoriate. South Asians often face racial barriers and discrimination in the United States (Pew Survey 2021). Many academics have engaged, personally and structurally, in attempts to diversify the academy, a project that has been laborious and slow-going given the weight of structural racism. Now some of those advances in fields related to South Asia are directly threatened by Hindu Right assaults that aim to have diverse professors fired, to curtail academic freedom, and to imperil physical safety (Chakravarti et al. 2021). As Kate Manne has pointed out regarding misogyny, we are often in a better position to focus on victims rather than trying to discern the motivations of perpetrators (Manne 2020, 22–23). I do not know if the Hindu Right recognizes their anti-diversity bias as such, but the effects are clear. Scholars of color are the group most at risk at present due to Hindu Right assaults on North American academics. Here we see both “interpersonal and structural dimensions of these harms,” as Vincent Lloyd and Andrew Prevot have described anti-Black racism, the bedrock of American white supremacy (Lloyd and Prevot 2017, 25).

Looking back over nearly thirty years of Hindu Right attacks on the academy, more recent waves help us analyze the earlier attacks with greater clarity and vice versa. The initial assaults were never about “unwhitening” an academic discipline in the sense that Charles Mills used the term (Mills 2014), because the intention was never to introduce a diversity of persons or viewpoints. If it had been, the Hindu Right would be rejoicing at the younger, more diverse generation of scholars who are now taking the study of South Asia—including Hinduism—in new, exciting directions (e.g., FCHS Collective 2021). Instead, the Hindu Right’s goals have always been hegemony and homogeneity, consistent with the structural features of Hindutva as modeled on European ethnonationalist movements. Hindutva has not fundamentally changed in the last century (Anderson and Jaffrelot 2018). But, as it has made a home on American soil, champions of Hindutva have adapted white supremacist tactics, most notably by centering white agency and trying to reduce diversity in the North American academy.