By Deepa S. Reddy
Hindu transnationalism emerges from the interaction of at least two distinct contexts: those of Indian and diasporic socio-politics. Several scholars have argued that the forms nationalism takes in the one determines its directions in the other (Bhatt and Mukta, 2000; Jaffrelot and Therwath, 2009; Rajagopal, 2000). On the one hand, immigrant groups, particularly those living within the frameworks of state-sponsored multiculturalism,1 seem to find affinities with Hindutva as a consequence of the immigrant experience. Nationalist organisations in India capitalise on this emergent affinity and actively mobilise Indians living abroad—the centre attempts to influence and shape its periphery, so to speak, although not always ‘reproduc[ing] hindutva the way it has been emergent in India’ (Bhatt and Mukta, 2000: 436). But also, on the other hand, diasporic forms of nationalism have a bearing on the ‘ideological and political shape of Hindu nationalism in India’ (Bhatt and Mukta, 2000: 409). The logical coherence and self-referentiality that nationalism acquires in immigrant discourses renews the rationale for Hindutva in India by actually generating funding for it (Mathew and Prashad, 2000). Diasporic flows in relation to homelands are not unidirectional (Jaffrelot and Therwath, 2009: 279; van der Veer, 1998: 117–18), and so, ‘Hindutva’s practices in its [diasporic] sites reflect the aspirations of Hindu nationalism in India and vice versa’ (Rajagopal, 2000: 489; cf. also Eisenlohr, 2006: 35–44).
These established insights draw us towards a few areas of emphasis that I use in this chapter to draw the transnational contours of Hindutva into relief. I explore the impact of multiculturalism as state doctrine on creating spaces in which and vocabularies with which ethnicised identities form, formulate their relationships to ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ outside India and carve out spaces of either benign celebration or, more formatively, outraged argument. The issues at stake are as much external as internal—grievances about racism as well as concerns over what properly constitutes Hindu-ness in diaspora—such that transnational Hindutva takes shape at the joint between two sets of distinct, ongoing conversations: those with the multiculturalist state and those within the Indian community, both in India and elsewhere. Multiple localities are often conjoined: the multiculturalist reading of a UK Royal Mail Christmas stamp is forced into cognizance of possible alternate readings as the stamp travels on letters to India (Zavos, 2008); a British protest against a line of footwear depicting Lord Rama marketed by a French retailer is articulated as a human rights abuse and the peeled-off images of Rama are immersed in the cleansing waters of the Ganges in Rishikesh and Haridwar (Raj, 2009); and development activities in Gujarati villages have as much impact on global humanitarian fundraising as on the ways in critiques of Hindutva come to be cast as ‘hate politics’. There is an emerging literature that documents what Hansen (1996) has dubbed the ‘vernacularisation’ of Hindutva, or the ways in which Hindu nationalist logics seep into local politics, and come to be articulated in local idioms. In this chapter I take the ‘transnational’ to be, for all intents and purposes, a locality in its own right, a space in which (borrowing Soysal’s words) ‘forms of community, participation, and solidarity that are emerging connect the claims of individuals and groups to broader institutionalized agendas and globally dominant discourses’ (1997: 511; cf. also Reddy, 2005). In transnational articulations of Hindutva, as in transnational articulations of opposition to religio-ethnicist politics, I argue that we witness the emergence of a comparably global vernacular: the adoption of a lingua franca that is self-consciously and strategically at once local, national and broadly supranational, allowing thus for the expression of specifically grounded grievances and the easy translations of identitarian political claims and counterclaims across otherwise incommensurable contexts.2 I conclude with some notes on reading transnational Hindutva as a pliable logic of seeking out affinities and as a model of citizenship flexible enough to be theoretically far more elusive than prevalent critical models would have us believe.
There is at this stage a good deal of research pointing to the ways in which multiculturalism mediates expressions of Hinduism and then Hindutva in diasporic settings. Prema Kurien (2007: 2) tells us that the institutionalisation of Hinduism in the US has led somewhat paradoxically to its politicisation: the increasingly self-confident Hindu claim to ‘ethnic American identity’ becomes ‘a means to obtain recognition and validation in multicultural America’. Indeed, the ‘Hindu’ label itself acquires a particular sort of salience and saleability in diasporic contexts. Searle-Chatterjee (2000: 497, 504–05) writes that a ‘self-consciousness induced by racism and minority status encourages the reification [and, I would add, conflation] of religion and culture’, flattening regional, jati and other more nuanced religious identifications into a recognisable ‘Hinduism’ cast in the mould of other ‘world religions’. This sort of state-initiated essentialist incorporation of things ‘Hindu’ into broader multi-faith or multicultural admixtures is perhaps akin to what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002) has termed (in another context) a ‘governmental use of ethnicity’—that clearly then opens the door for communities to then claim ‘Hinduness’ in a range of more-and-less assertive ways. This is not to say that identities under multiculturalist regimes are no longer indeterminate, as they clearly continue to be in daily interactions, but that there develops a specific relationship between the types used in governmental practice, and the character of the identities governed by them. Ian Hacking (1986: 228) has termed the process by which this relationship develops ‘dynamic nominalism’, whereby ‘a kind of person [comes] into being at the same time as the kind itself was being invented … each egging the other on’. In other words, multiculturalism sets a politics of recognition in motion, and that that politics generates ‘types’ around which particular sorts of ethnicised communities coalesce and themselves lay claim to the typographies by which they are placed. As a result, ‘“subterranean” group identities become visible within a range of wider public spheres, possibly as the result of the actions of state agencies […], the dynamic development of identities within particular groups, wider political events, or, most likely, a combination of these three factors’ (Zavos, 2008: 328).
But what sort of visibility is generated in the process? When President Clinton sends Indian Americans Diwali greetings from the White House (as he famously did in 2000, and Obama did not disappoint in 2009), a community comes into relief—one that is recognised for its ‘talents, history and traditions’ and its ‘contribut[ions] to American national life and cultural heritage’.3 Here is ethnicity in a legitimate (dare I say tame) form, appropriately packaged with other ‘festivals and foods of the world’, hinting at Indian Americans’ model-minority status, and thus fully worthy of its ‘placement within the trim precincts of a pluralist society’ (Rajagopal, 2000: 472). But when the UK Royal Mail issues its 2005 multicultural-themed Christmas stamp set, including one with an identifiably Hindu man and woman holding a blond baby Jesus, a different sort of community coalesces around this apparent redefinition of a Hindu ‘type’. If what this detail from a 1620 CE painting says about late 17th century India is unclear (but potentially interesting), what it signifies within a contemporary multiculturalist context is not: it is a mark of cultural ‘insensitivity’, the insertion of Hindu themes into a decidedly British Christian multiculturalist narrative potentially inflammatory.
And so in the Royal Mail stamp controversy (and there are several others like it), ethnicity emerges in a certainly more assertive and visible, and politically potentially more troubling guise. What it troubles, Zavos (2008: 327–28) shows, is at least in part the proper place of religion in secular public life; in its ‘uncertainty over the public/private location of religion and over the place of minority religiosity as a feature of secular society, multiculturalism [paradoxically] seems to open up the space for the forthright expression of religious certainty’. From the point of view of the groups that bind together to protest their inclusion into the multicultural British family on the terms vaguely set by the Royal Mail, perhaps the only certainty is that of misrepresentation. Indeed, it seems that questions of representation demarcate one key area of contestation in which the imbrications of Hindutva and ethnic/multiculturalist rhetorics become evident, and in which the essential Hindu-ness that invariably marks diasporic identity begins to overlap with a more politically ‘voicy’ Hindu-tva, concerned with regulating and disciplining public representations of Hinduism.4
I will have more to say on the imbrications of Hindu-ness with Hindutva later on. But first we must note that the charge of misrepresentation is one levelled not just by Hindu-verging-on-Hindutva groups. In 2005–06, even as Hindu groups protested the California State Educational Board’s inaccurate and sometimes cheeky depictions of Hinduism in its Social Science/History textbooks, scholars and others representing the Indian Left, ‘progressive’ and secular politics charged the Hindu organisations leading the call for revision with the misrepresentation of history along Hindu nationalist ideological lines (quite loudly echoing the tone of debates over the National Council of Educational Research and Training [NCERT] textbook revisions of the late 1990s and early 2000s in India, although the two episodes were otherwise quite distinct; cf. Delhi Historians’ Group, 2001; Hasan, 2002; Sundar, 2005). Just a few years prior, in 2002, a report on the ‘Foreign Exchange of Hate’ authored by the US-based Campaign to Stop Funding Hate and published by Sabrang Communications (based in Mumbai, which also publishes the Communalism Combat magazine) forced the Maryland-based India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF) to the centre of an acrimonious debate on whether ‘development’ functions as a ruse by which to raise funds for violent and sectarian Hindutva organisations in India. The ‘Let India Develop’ counter-campaign further charged the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (CSFH, a group of Indian American professionals and students which emerges in the aftermath of the Gujarat riots) with misrepresenting the ‘facts’ in associating the IDRF so closely with sectarian violence in India.5
Clearly, the space that multiculturalism opens up for the forthright expression of religious certainties is equally a space where ‘representations’ circulate and grievances about ‘misrepresentation’ are routinely aired; we might even say that redressing grievances appears to require the formulation of certainties. We see this in the California textbook revision case, where the edits proposed by Hindu groups formulate certainties as a as a means to set the record straight and as a means to make amends for the discomfort and shame that misrepresentation generates. Kurien (2006: 734) reminds us that Hindu American mobilisation on the representation of Hinduism in school textbooks began during Virginia’s 2004 review of its educational materials. The success of that endeavour emboldened Hindu-American groups to turn their attention to other states’ textbooks. Indeed, 91 of the 117 edits proposed by Hindu groups in California might well have been accepted but for the fact that an
Indian graduate student in California who had been approached by the Vedic Foundation for a signature for their petition notified Professor Michael Witzel, Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard University and his collaborator, Steve Farmer, about the attempts of the groups to rewrite the textbooks. (Kurien, 2006: 735)
It was Witzel’s letter to the California State Board of Education (SBE), written ‘on behalf of a long list of specialists on ancient India’, that explicitly connected the proposed edits to Hindutva: the ‘proposed changes are not of a scholarly but of a religious-political nature and are primarily promoted by Hindutva supporters and non-specialist academics writing about these issues far outside their areas of expertise’.6 The historical certainties claimed by Hindu groups are challenged by scholars who complain themselves about the tendencies of Hindu nationalists to force their views of history into common knowledge and liberal education, and who present us with the further certainty that the supporters of the edits are: (a) non-experts; and (b) unmistakably Hindutva supporters.
Many things are noteworthy about this debate and remain underanalysed—for one, the multiculturalist privileging of ‘cultural expertise’ that Witzel leverages to completely marginalise the proposals of the Hindu groups (although there were those in the blogosphere, including some scholars and ‘experts’ who admitted at the time that the directions of some edits were at least worth considering, even if others were problematic and/or poorly articulated). Next, the question of how the ‘Hindu groups’ involved in proposing changes could be so straightforwardly associated with ‘nationalist Hindus’ not just in the US, but the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) central government organisations sponsoring the NCERT revisions, was one Witzel neither asked nor answered, though the controversy generated a wide effort to ‘meticulously trac[e] and publiciz[e] the links between the Vedic Foundation, Hindu Education Foundation, Hindu American Foundation and Hindutva groups in the US and India’ (Kurien, 2006: 735; cf. Bose, 2008; IPAC, 2006; Maira and Swamy, 2006). Finally, it is interesting to note, too, the way in which the problem of non-Indian (non-Hindu) representations of Hinduism in the diaspora turns from a claim made to a multiculturalist state into a debate within the community or between India ‘experts’, whether academicians or others, with the result that Indian American groups opposed to the edits and some Dalit organisations opposed to Hindutva more generally, and Hindu groups supporting the edits each mobilised their respective constituencies. The multiculturalist influence that ‘sanitiz[es] cultural difference without interrogation and introspection’ (Rajagopal, 2000: 472) on the one hand, quite paved the way for such other expressions of dissent tending towards outrage and provided a context for the mobilisation of outraged communities on the other.
Blom and Jaoul (2008: 8) hold the processes of framing ‘discontent into the vocabulary of moral outrage’ to ‘constitute specific dimensions of South Asia’s political culture [of] public dissent’. Indeed, even a cursory glance at Hindutva debates both in India and abroad demonstrates that Hindutva organisations not only actively participate in ‘instigating, staging, and managing’ the ‘righteous anger’ of Hindu communities (Blom and Jaoul, 2008: 27), but they equally provoke, respond to and frame themselves according to other sorts of righteous responses, claims to injustice, vulnerability, anger and expressions of the right to prescribe public moralities. But although the ‘outraged communities’ that Blom and Jaoul identify do not include scholars and activists, I think it critical to underscore the place and function of outrage in rallying not just the ‘masses’, but equally scholarly, and therefore public, opinion. This is especially true in India, where scholarly views often circulate, via the media, well beyond academic circles, and where scholarly authority has so directly been called into question in the debates over Hindutva revisionism. If Hindu nationalists have, as Jaffrelot (2008) suggests, become experts in the arts of outrage, I would add that they have done so in heated debate with several amongst the Indian Left, within India and increasingly abroad, whose sense of moral indignation at the actions of the Sangh Parivar has been nothing short of a spur to collective opposition. I therefore do not exclude scholars and writers from definitions of ‘public’ or ‘community’, but view them as a loosely-constituted interest group of a sort that has rallied considerably in opposition to ‘Hindutva’.
The ‘precipitating incidents’ that ‘form the rough material of outrage’ (Blom and Jaoul, 2008: 12) for Left scholars are many, ranging from the demolition of the Babri Masjid to the NCERT and then California attempts at revisionism, to the Gujarat riots. In other essays on this topic, I have tried to separate and characterise the outrage that is expressed at each of these junctures as they are quite distinct (Reddy, 2011a–c). The Indian American communities that coalesce in opposition to transnational Hindutva seem to have a particular burden, however—in order to cement and seal their outrage, they must incontrovertibly identify ‘Hindutva’ within a multiculturalist context in which Hindu-ness often veers towards Hindutva but does not always clearly overlap with it or reproduce it exactly. So we see a few significant attempts at establishing Hindutva’s transnational genealogy, to some extent in the California textbook controversy but far more clearly in the reports produced by the CSFH: The Foreign Exchange of Hate (on the India Development Relief Fund and its channelling of NRI dollars to Sangh Parivar organisations under the ‘cover’ of development, see CSFH, 2002) and Unmistakably Sangh (on the Hindu Student Council’s links to the Sangh Parivar, at least at the top levels, see CSFH, 2008).7
But there is another sort of genealogy being evoked in the CSFH’s rhetorical strategy of mobilising outrage: that of hate. A parallel report by the British organisation Awaaz, South Asia Watch (Awaaz, 2004), also concerned with tracking how British ‘humanitarian charity’ is used to raise funds for Hindutva organisations, establishes Hindutva straightforwardly as a ‘politics of hate’, its activities all unquestionably ‘hate-driven’. Such strategies of casting the problem of Hindutva’s foreign funding as a ‘foreign exchange of hate’, draw on distinctly North American/European outrage at, and history of legislating against, hate crimes and hate speech. The point is not just to oppose Hindutva by whatever means available, it is to provide the analogies that make such opposition meaningful within local contexts—and the ‘local’ now extends of course to the US and the UK. And in these new localities the classification of Hindtuva under the rubric of ‘hatred’ lays the ground for opposition not just in moral terms but also legalistically. News of the Babri Masjid’s demolition was met with shocked realisation that Hindutva could prevail. News of the Gujarat riots has been met with a further sense of outrage that the state (under the BJP’s Narendra Modi) was not only complicit in the violence, but also would ‘penaliz[e] or demot[e]’ anyone within its ranks trying to stop it (Nussbaum, 2007: 22; Spodek, 2008: 8–11). In the face of not merely state failure, but state orchestration of religious violence, the need for ‘supranational’ condemnation is all the more urgent, and it calls for analogies that render complex local realities not only internationally recognisable but also operational within an international juridical framework. For the ‘processes of globalization are no longer merely a fact’, as Hardt and Negri (2000: 9, xii) write, but also a ‘source of juridical definitions’ that circumvent the nation state and thus herald the ‘coming of Empire’. Fully convinced of the ‘withering of civil society’, and cognizant of the ‘decline of national boundaries’ brought on by the ascendance of international law, local groups thus take their outrage directly to supranational bodies like the United Nations or the International Criminal Court for more universalist frameworks of adjudication (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 336–37, 9; Reddy, 2005; Tisdall, 2009).8 ‘Hate’, thus, describes a specific manifestation of outrage: a strategy to create globally relevant analogies, place Hindutva within identifiable genealogies and thus enable access to international/universal frameworks of condemnation—if not to actually seek legal redressal, at the very least to severely embarrass the Indian state in the presence of the ‘international community’ (Visvanathan, 2001: 2513).
The building outrage about the cooptation of ‘development’ to provide a ‘cover of respectability for funding organizations engaged in hate campaigns’9 produces a fairly influential (and widely cited) narrative about what transnational Hindutva is—a veritable wolf in sheep’s clothing. But this conception needs to be interrogated for the simple reason that it, too, clearly bounds a phenomenon that cannot be quite so easily contained. For the CSFH report and other similar genealogical reckonings of Hindutva that incontrovertibly determine what is ‘Sangh’ and what is not, leave us no means by which to understand cultural and political boundaries as either shifting or pervious. At the same time, and quite ironically, the Hate report’s painstaking placement of the IDRF under the umbrella of the Sangh Parivar inadvertently suggests that there might be another approach to understanding contemporary Hindutva dynamics. Were we to lift the debate from its outraged mode, that is, it might be possible to consider that the IDRF models of ‘development’ coincide with models of humanitarianism that, in turn, fit well with Hindutva-organised or inspired projects—particular sets of interests may overlap at moments while ideologies still diverge at others. To borrow Shiv Visvanathan’s words from a slightly different context, ‘the goal is not identity but affinity’ (Visvanathan, 2001: 2513, emphasis added)—a question of fit and association more than exact correspondence. Edward Simpson draws attention to the ‘selective affinities’ of Hindutva organisations in the context of the 2001 Kachch earthquake and asks: how we are to understand the ‘the relationship between the Sangh Parivar and the host of religious organisations that carry out work in its shadow’? Or further, how we are to classify those ‘Vaishnava sects whose fundamental religious principles strongly resemble the basis of the Hindutva agenda’, for whom there was a ‘groundswell of support’? (Simpson, 2004: 143). At the same time, there is the irony of diasporic denial: the fact that non-profits and charity groups in the US and Britain cannot legally fund or otherwise promote political activities means that associations with Sangh organisations are to be denied rather than openly claimed—at the same time as a ‘moral affiliation as with every other Hindu organization’, including Sangh organisations, takes centre stage (Jaffrelot and Therwath, 2009: 283).
This brings me to the other problem with genealogical reckonings: in their broad-stroke polemical descriptions, they tend to read the ‘moral affiliations’ of Hindu-ness as somehow always-already Hindutva, not explicating the specific mechanisms by which diasporic identifications may selectively turn (or not) towards political religiosity of the sort espoused by the Sangh Parivar. Kurien has written of the imbrication of Hindu American mobilisation with Hindutva: Hindutva organisations’ ‘Hinduism under siege’ message, she writes, is ‘particularly attractive to Hindus in the US who become a racial, religious and cultural minority upon immigration’, have to contend with the negative, stereotypical, orientalist perceptions of Hinduism and thus coalesce ‘to counter their relative invisibility within American society’ (2006: 725–26; see also Kurien, 2004; Jaffrelot and Therwath, 2009; Lal, 1999; Mathew and Prashad, 2000; Rajagopal, 1997). Transnational sentiments, too, congeal most obviously at this joint, with ‘ethnic’ identifications setting the parameters for nationalist expression (Kurien, 2004, 2007). Sangh Parivar organisations like the Vishva Hindu Parishad America (VHPA) and the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), the American counterpart to the RSS can thus easily step into and make full use of the space that multiculturalism allows for religio-cultural protestations, providing easily translatable arguments and the conceptual infrastructure—a culturally grounded lingua franca—for the assertion of Hindu rights in the diaspora. The Indian State, too, facilitates the ‘tacit negotiation’ of expat nationalism: ‘cultural capital and a genuine sense of mutual belonging’ for ‘financial capital from the NRIs’ (Rajagopal, 1997: 49).
This much seems straightforward enough. What is far more tricky to theoretically pin down are the logics of overlap and imbrication, by which the politically voicy, destabilising Hindutva of the diaspora is overlaid by the more or less explicitly Hindu nationalist—or by which the genteel multiculturalist emphasis on ‘religion and culture’ in the diaspora overlaps and interacts with an identification with a ‘strong Hindu state [that] offers compensatory gratification for the experience of exile and marginality’ (Rajagopal, 1997: 54). Although it is certainly possible that Sangh Parivar organisations ‘engineer’ long-distance nationalisms in contexts ripe for the interpellation of Hindutva, I propose that Hindu transnationalisms need to be treated equally as (quintessentially ethic) vernacular forms that negotiate local legal, social, moral and political environments in ways that variously concentrate or dilute their ideological emphases. In this sense, the Sangh Parivar’s ‘pan-Hinduness’ is a veritable model of flexible citizenship (Ong, 1999): alternatingly hegemonic, just as ecumenical as American Hinduism (Williams, 1992; Jaffrelot and Therwath, 2009: 284–86), a platform for inter-faith dialogue (Zavos, 2009) and a commitment to the ‘total welfare of humanity on the basis of the unique cultural ethos of Bharatvarsha’ (VHP, Aims and Objects). What is unique about such local negotiations, then, is that they are hardly limited to localities. Quite the contrary, they inflect and deploy wider, global and even universalist discourses in the search for affinities, legalities, moralities and even what Jaffrelot and Therwath (2009: 283) dub ‘tactical distance’. Looking at transnational Hindutva as adapted—‘but not denatured’, redefined—but ‘retaining a primary and defining allegiance in India’ (Rajagopal, 2000: 489) is still to take Hindutva as having an essential existence, when what I think we are dealing with is far more a traffic in essences and the emergence of globalised vernacular forms that variously align Indian and diasporic interests so as to traverse the distances between home and homeland.
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1 There is little, if any, research on Hindutva expressions among communities living in religious or autocratic states; the discussion in this chapter is thus limited to diasporic communities living in formally multiculturalist countries—primarily the US and the UK.
2 Elsewhere, Soysal identifies this as a paradox of contemporary citizenship: ‘The same global rules and institutional frameworks that celebrate personhood and human rights at the same time naturalize collective identities around national and ethno-religious particularisms.’ http://www.brandeis.edu/ethics/pdfs/internationaljustice/otheractivities/
JAC_Soysal.pdf (accessed 15 January 2011).
3 ‘Clinton greets Indian Americans on Diwali’, Indian Express, 27 October 2000. Available at http://www.indianexpress.com/Storyold/163895 (accessed 4 February 2012).
4 I am borrowing the descriptor ‘voicy’ from the work of Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa (2002). Voicy consumers are those who claim the right to participate (either to support, or subvert and resist) in the processes of qualification and re-qualification by which a branded product acquires meaning. The result is often consumer ‘overflowings’, which can produce a competitive advantage or be entirely destabilising.
5 http://www.letindiadevelop.org/thereport (accessed 4 February 2012).
6 http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/witzelletter.pdf (accessed 4 February 2012). All further quotes attributed to Witzel are from this source, unless otherwise cited.
7 The CSFH is closely associated with Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL)—a self-described ‘clearinghouse for radical Indian activists in the United States, Canada and England’ (http://www.foil.org/resources/foil/foilpg.html, accessed 4 February 2012)—which, in the aftermath of the Gujarat riots, takes on the explicit task of ‘exposing to public scrutiny the activities of the Sangh Parivar in the U.S.’ (http://www.stopfundinghate.org/about.html, accessed 4 February 2012). There is also the Coalition Against Genocide: ‘a spectrum of [some 30 mostly South Asian] organizations and individuals in the United States and Canada’ that claims to have formed ‘in response to the Gujarat genocide to demand accountability and justice’, but seems to have rallied mainly in opposition to the visit of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, under whose watch the riots occurred in 2005 (http://www.coalitionagainstgenocide.org/about.php, accessed 4 February 2012).
8 It is interesting to note, in this context, Witzel’s rather heavy reliance on the United States Department of State’s International Religious Freedom reports of 2003 and 2004 to mark the Sangh Parivar’s efforts as ‘threats to religious freedom’, both in his initial letter and in a later co-authored essay (Visweswaran et al., 2009: 104)—a move that might otherwise have been critiqued as imperialist.
9 http://stopfundinghate.org/resources/FAQ.htm (accessed 4 February 2012).