By Arun Chaudhuri
It was in March of 2008 that a group of Hindus hailing from various parts of the tri-state area took to the streets in front of Christie’s Auction House in mid-town Manhattan. They had gathered there to publicly protest a series of paintings by the contemporary Indian painter M. F. Husain. Husain’s paintings have a long history of controversy, particularly among Hindus taking offence against the partially nude representations of Hindu deities that have occasionally featured in his work. It was Christie’s latest auction of Husain paintings that drew these American Hindus out to the streets of Manhattan on this day. They publicly registered their grievances by shouting through megaphones, parading placards and distributing leaflets to people passing by indicting Husain’s work as an affront to Hindu deities, and ultimately as an explicit attack on Hindus.
This was a scene I encountered while in New York attempting to research the politicisation of Hinduism in the US. While standing on the sidelines observing the crowd of demonstrators and likewise the slightly smaller crowd of onlookers, I struck up a conversation with a journalist from a diaspora-focused newspaper run out of India. He lived and worked in India and had only just come to New York on an assignment. ‘I’m not really comfortable with this fundamentalist stuff’, he said to me as his way of describing the scene unfolding in front of us. But for him, what was happening here on the streets of Manhattan was not an expression of just any fundamentalism. It was also an anxious, though commonplace, observation of amplified expressions of religiosity among diaspora populations. With what seemed to be an air of caution he continued: ‘This stuff happens all the time [in India], but there it’s much more political. These guys here are much more religious’.
This journalist’s anxious remarks are by no means unique. Questions concerning the politicisation and mobilisation of religion are being asked at accelerated rates these days. The expectations handed down by so many theories of modernisation have tended to anticipate secularisation as an inevitability.1 Modern democratic public spheres and their political apparatuses were, and often still are, thought to be defined by the demise of religion, or at least its retreat into the recesses of private life and individual experience. Such secularisation theory has framed the modern politicisation of religion as something of a surprise. Consequently, political religion, the public airing of religiosity and the group identities sought out therewith, is anxiously scrutinised these days. It is an anxiety often cast as a deepening binary between a Christian West and Muslim East, analytically framed as fundamentalism, extremism or religious nationalism, among other things.
Hinduism has figured into this nervous discourse in its own way. The relationship between Hinduism and public sphere politics has a long history. Many have pointed to the context of 19th century British colonial rule in India as the formative crucible of political Hinduism (Bhatt, 2001; Dalmia, 1999; Freitag, 2005; Jaffrelot, 1996). But it is in the 1990s where political Hinduism begins to earn an intensified scrutiny under the term Hindutva. Hindutva is a term, ambiguities notwithstanding, which conventionally references the development of an essentialist discourse of Hindu identity with exclusivist and exceptionalist claims on territory, culture and religion. The term Hindutva is even more particularly associated with the specific state-building mobilisations and campaigns of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its network that expanded and popularised during the course of the 1980s and 1990s in India. This Hindutva has been critically described as a ‘syndicated Hinduism’ (Thapar, 1985), a simplified, homogenous Hinduism that selectively suppresses and manages its highly complex internal difference. Many critical studies have also commonly observed Hindutva’s tense self/other dynamic in which a Hindu national self mobilises itself against a threatening other, variously Muslim, Christian, Congress or communist, among others (Basu et al., 1993; Jaffrelot, 1996). Appadurai (2006) has described Hindutva’s politicisation of Hinduism as a majoritarian ideology defined by its ‘fear of small numbers’, a fear of minorities whose existence challenges aspirations to a pure national totality. However, one consequence of the arguments forwarded by many of these critical studies is a characterisation of Hindutva as taking on an overdetermined ideological and operational coherence. This is Hindutva as a shorthand trope for a top-down, universalising, instrumental ideology that spells out selves and others as absolute certainties, which then animate equally certain political machinations.2 Many of these accounts emerged in the 1990s as anxious post-Ayodhya responses attempting, with no small sense of urgency, to make sense of the militancy and organised violent manifestations associated with Hindutva.
This characterisation seems to have followed political Hinduism’s movements abroad. The circulations of conventional discourses of Hindu nationalism abroad, particularly in the US and the UK, have frequently been described as schematised reifications of identity that thrive in accordance with the demands of multiculturalism (Kurien, 2007; Mazumdar, 2003; Mukta, 2000; Prashad, 2000; Rajagopal, 2001). In these cases, Hindu nationalism is seen to functionally provide precisely the kind of identity immigrants are compelled to express as viable multicultural subjects. Its circulation is explained as a way of navigating the marginalising and racist terrains of their new homes. Multiculturalism has been thus observed as accommodating Hindtuva’s syndicated Hinduism and its implied ideological certainty.
In this way, the so-called return of religion via its diasporas has been encountered with its own characteristic scrutiny and anxiety. As the aforementioned journalist said with a nervous twinge: ‘These guys here are much more religious’, as if political Hinduism in India has an instrumentality that lends itself to ideological and operational coherence. My suggestion in the discussion to follow is that the contemporary politicisation of Hinduism abroad actually poses considerable challenges to easy mappings and explanations, regardless of whether it is categorised as religious or otherwise. The discussion to follow is an attempt to describe some of the contours of the contemporary politicisation of Hinduism in the US and considers the multiplying of its trajectories and the abstraction of its political project(s). The politicisation of Hinduism in the US today involves an emergent public Hindu activism that no longer easily fits the usual appellations of Hindutva and its transnationalism. The spectre of Hindutva in its conventional sense of course still looms with considerable resonance, if not also continuity, with American Hindu activism today. However, contemporary activism also begins to exceed this frame of nationalism and transnationalism, spinning off into trajectories that do not quite add up to the ideological and political coherence that is often connected with public and political religions in general, and the phenomenon of Hindutva in particular. It has a nebulous character that resonates with discussions of modern political religion stressing paradox, incoherence and the tipping of the ideological scale from signal to noise: what Hent de Vries (2006: 13) has described as the paradox of religion’s ‘minimal remainder’ that intensifies as it empties itself out, or what Jacques Derrida (2002) has described as ‘auto-immunity’. Theirs are suggestions that tread on the edge of religion’s conceptual coherence. But while neither refers to Hinduism specifically, they could very well have been describing the complexities of Hinduism’s conceptual coherence in its mobilised forms.3
By its outward appearance, the demonstration at Christie’s on the streets of Manhattan can be easily seen as an expression of Hindu nationalism, or long-distance nationalism, in its most conventional sense. Demonstrators spoke many familiar tropes: a primordial Hinduism with a glorified essence, claims to exclusive cultural and religious jurisdiction over that essence, a concern with its purity, a focus on Husain as a Muslim enemy and a sharpened feeling of Hindu persecution. More significantly, the bigger picture for these demonstrators was largely, though still not entirely, one oriented towards an Indian state-building project. One of the chief organising groups, a Queens-based outfit calling itself the Indian American Intellectuals Forum (IAIF) has demonstrated through a range of activities and mobilisations a clear interest in mobilising American Hindus, and even American non-Hindus, towards a Hindu Indian state-building project. They have routinely organised public panels on the topic of terrorism/anti-terrorism and Indian national security. They have periodically held street demonstrations on a variety of flashpoint issues in Indian politics, calling variously for increased Indian military presence in Kashmir, revoking American foreign aid to Pakistan and an American declaration of Pakistan as a terrorist state—all efforts working towards an Indian state structure that would supposedly secure the interest of Hindus. They have also engaged in anti-Congress Party campaigning, with one infamous incident in October 2007 in which some members of the group were associated with a high-priced, full-page advertisement taken out in the New York Times denouncing Sonia Gandhi, accusing her of forged credentials and of covert support of terrorism. This advertisement landed several IAIF members on the defendant end of a libel lawsuit, which was later withdrawn, by another group claiming to be an overseas Congress Party affiliate. Many of the senior IAIF activists who organised and attended this demonstration have been active in the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA) during their expansion in the 1990s alongside the BJP’s popularisation of its Hindutva platform in India.
The concern with the security of the Indian state reached a more abstract and anxiously speculative level as some demonstrators began to weave together grand speculative accounts linking M. F. Husain to larger threats, particularly that of a spectral terrorism. One demonstrator, for instance, was convinced that M. F. Husain, complicit with Christie’s, sold paintings to raise money to fund ‘jihadi terrorism’ against Hindus in India. This is an anxiety still oriented towards the security of the Indian state, but also unmistakably moulded in the American post-9/11 sense of terrorism as lurking threat that is global but unspecified.
However, this street protest in front of Christie’s Auction House represents only one trajectory of contemporary American Hindu activism. American Hindu activism today also refracts in numerous other directions, including directions that seem to move away from easy identification as either fundamentalism or Hindutva in their conventional senses. The conventional sense of Hindutva itself has its own complications, for instance, in terms of its fractured appeals to ‘split publics’ across caste and class lines (Rajagopal, 2001) or in terms of the BJP’s strategic regionalisation (Hansen and Jaffrelot, 2001). Hindutva nevertheless manages to circulate with a sense of coherence and totality, and as an enforcer of coherence and totality.
In the American context in particular, Hindutva remains a term in ready circulation with its sense of conceptual coherence intact. Consequently, part of the growth of trajectories of political Hinduism in the US that exceed Hindutva stems from a trend of American Hindu activist groups trying to actively dissociate themselves from the term Hindutva and its immediate signifiers. This began most clearly in the mid-1990s with the Hindu Students Council’s (HSC) efforts to distance themselves from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the VHPA. Traces of these distancing efforts surface across a variety of other sites: in organisation websites, press statements and other sources, disclaimers often appear stating the organisation’s non-affiliation.4 This surfaced dramatically in the public controversy over Sonal Shah, an economist appointed to the Obama transition team following the 2008 presidential election, and whether she could or could not be associated with Hindutva. Shah’s links to the VHPA raised familiar, though no less anxious, concerns. Her public defence to this was a disclaimer exculpating her ‘personal politics’ from any VHP affiliation.5
Such disclaimer statements may pre-empt accusations of Hindutva, but seem to do so conspicuously with the odd effect of invoking Hindutva without naming it. Nevertheless, given not only the association of Hindutva with doctrinaire and exclusivist ideological formations but also with its very real association with violence in India, many American Hindu organisations have attempted to forge a Hindu political mobilisation divested from any association with the Indian political context in the interests of projecting themselves as moderate and model minority voices.6 This interestingly inverts Vijay Prashad’s (2000) earlier observation of a ‘Yankee Hindutva’ in the 1990s fixated on politics in India from a distance, but largely indifferent to the political circumstance of its own American backyard.
Such a shift can also be observed beyond the disclaimers offered by many organisations. A subtle, currently emerging, shift may be identified in the very particular emphasis being placed by many American Hindu activists on the American Hindu as the political object of interest, and on America as the situating socio-political terrain. This is a different political orientation from those American Hindu activists whose politics are anchored in India and claims on the Indian state. It may also be different from the transnational financial and operational ties that have been extensively documented and demonstrated between the diaspora Hindu organisations and affiliates back in India (Awaaz, 2004; Campaign to Stop Funding Hate, 2007, 2008; Sabrang, 2002). This is not to say the experiences of, and issues faced by, American Hindus have until now gone unnoticed. In the early phase of American temple-building of the 1970s, many of the post-65 generation of Indian immigrants developed concerns about the fate of American-born Hindu youth and how they may or may not be socialised as Hindu growing up in the US. Out of such concerns, many temples in the 1980s and 1990s came to focus on American-born Hindu youth by hosting language classes, Sunday schools and other sorts of youth-oriented educational activities.7 The VHPA formed around the same time with a similar narrative in mind. The consolidation and unification of second generation Hindu youth has been one of the VHPA’s central aims since its formation, and they have for years run youth camp programmes towards this end. But these responses can be seen as particularly inward and practise-focused. In a sense, this particular moment for American Hinduism might be seen as conforming to secularisation theory’s core premise—which is to say that diasporic Hinduism of the 1970s and 1980s in many ways was oriented towards private life more than public life; inwards rather than outwards.
In more recent years, however, emerging trajectories of American Hindu activism are channelling a focus on American Hindus and their socio-political experience in America outwardly: towards an American public, a broader extra-community audience and in political terms. This movement towards public and political claims on American Hinduism takes an early form in the mid-1990s with the rise of a discourse of Hindu anti-defamation. In 1997, a number of VHPA members formed American Hindus Against Defamation (AHAD), an outfit created to monitor American popular media for profane and offensive representations of Hinduism. Their first official campaign targeted Sony/Columbia music publishers for an album released in April 1997 by American rock band Aerosmith depicting a stylised image of Krishna on the cover. AHAD initiated a letter-writing and phone call campaign directed at Sony demanding an apology and a removal of the offending image (both of which they did eventually receive) that was given coverage in the diaspora and mainstream American newspapers. Across the late 1990s, AHAD initiated a number of other mobilisations with overt public and political orientations: the appearance of deities in the television show Xena: The Warrior Princess, the use of a Gita verse in Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut, a collage of deities displayed in a Chicago nightclub and the appearance of deities on clothing items sold by American Eagle Outfitters and others, have all prompted AHAD anti-defamation mobilisations. These mobilisations were publicly oriented (that is, targeting extra-community actors and addressing a broader public audience) and politically articulated (that is, fashioning jurisdictional claim over the offending images, seeking control, entitlement and authority). However, this flurry of anti-defamation action in the 1990s was concerned not just with representation in general, but the proper representation of deities, symbols or other imagery that are at some level ostensibly ‘sacred’.
Some of the most recent sites of Hindu anti-defamation discourse suggest an added dynamic that might be seen as a kind of pre-emptive anti-defamation mobilisation, in which the protest erupts not over a particular offending image, but over the possibility of offence. One example of this can be seen in the controversy in early 2008 over the movie The Love Guru, a comedy satirising the commercialisation of guru movements in North America. A group of outfits, including the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) and the Spiritual Science Research Foundation (SSRF), targeted the film feeling that it mocked Hindus and ‘the sanctity of the Guru-disciple tradition’.8 They campaigned to demand a public apology from Paramount Pictures, age restrictions on the film that would change its rating from PG-13 to NC-17, actual changes to the film’s content and even a block on the film’s final release. In this case, the height of the controversy occurred weeks and even months before the movie was actually released. The movie was deemed offensive and defaming based only on minimal promotional material, well before anyone had actually seen the film itself. The controversy subsided after a special pre-screening of the film was granted to the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), who was not a major player in the controversy up until this point, who then proclaimed the film as ‘vulgar but not Hinduphobic’.9 Another case in which claims of defamation actually precede the existence of, or at least encounter with, the offending image can be seen with the New Jersey–based Hindu International Council Against Defamation (HICAD). HICAD launched an initiative to offer a US$100 reward incentive to college students for finding and reporting defaming representations of Hindus and of India by their textbooks, classes, professors or in media. This particular mobilisation stems from a different trajectory of American Hindu activism, that stemming from ongoing tensions between American Hindu organisations and American academia, to which I will return below. However, as with the Love Guru controversy, this indicates an American Hindu anti-defamation discourse that is pre-emptive and anticipatory rather than simply reactive. This points towards a politics of anticipation and anxiety that increasingly underwrites contemporary forms of American Hindu activism.10
The emergence of American Hindu anti-defamation mobilisations in the late 1990s signals the rise of a more abstract American Hindu activist concern with representation. This shows American Hindus focusing on a different set of political objectives not simply rooted in a Hindu nationalist state-building project (though these are also not entirely disconnected either). The discourses and operations of each certainly overlap, but they are not quite the same and are not entirely linked up to a coherent transnational mobilisation between the diaspora and India. Representation, for a politicised Hinduism in the US, is evidently more abstract than what literal and instrumental political representation of Hindus might mean in India (for example, intervention in electoral politics and actual seats in parliament).
Such concerns with representation have developed most significantly with the HAF. The HAF, an organisation that has developed an expansive public presence and scope in the US since 2004, has been chiefly concerned with both the political and discursive representation of Hindus; that is, getting Hindus into American political processes and ensuring they have a positive public profile.11 Its efforts to promote Hindu participation and influence in American political processes have resulted in a number of mobilisations, including campaigns against Christian-themed licence plates issued in South Carolina, reforming the American R-1 visa programme to remain accessible to Hindu religious workers and lobbying US Congress for a statement of official recognition for Diwali. In terms of discursive representation, the HAF has been involved in the controversy surrounding the depiction of Hinduism in California’s school textbooks, monitoring media (especially the Internet) for offending misrepresentations of Hindus and publishing information manuals and pamphlets of quick definitional sound bites on Hinduism aimed at both American Hindus and non-Hindus.12
However, what the HAF has staked as its central concern is not just the representation of Hinduism in general, but the particular representation of American Hindus and the development of a public and unified American Hindu voice. An HAF article contributed to the Harvard Hindu Student Association magazine in 2007 describes the HAF’s project as the ‘next generation of a new kind of advocacy’ (Shukla, 2007: 25). It consciously bills itself as a paradigm shifter, ushering in a new second generation-led mobilisation that will make American Hindus players in an American public sphere. Indeed there is a shift with the HAF tied at least in part to the aforementioned move by many American Hindu organisations to decouple from Hindutva and the political context of India. At the same time, the HAF’s concern, more than just with enacting a narrative about the coming of age of second generation American Hindus, is also concerned with a particular affirmation of Hinduism as an identity in the American context. The HAF constructs Hindus as a definable and coherently representable entity such that they can be advocated for. The interest in going public with this advocacy further underscores this understanding of Hindus as a preformed entity with an expected essential unity or necessary commonality: Hindus, as Hindus, are to be one voice among others in a broader public arena, situating Hindus squarely in a familiar grid of identity politics. Hindus are thereby further defined and imagined through the equivalency drawn with other spots on the grid and their supposedly discrete voices and identities. The impact of American discourses of multiculturalism, and its regulation of pluralism through a vocabulary of discrete difference and reified identity, upon the cultural politics of American Hindus has been widely observed (Kurien, 2007; Lal, 2003a, 2003b; Prashad, 2000; Rajagopal, 2001).
The issue here, however, is not a straightforward one: while there is a discourse and narrative that shores up a particular logic of identity, there is a complication in how organisations such as the HAF have engaged the logic of the American style of identity politics. The Hinduism that the HAF seeks to represent is carefully not fundamentalist or nationalist. Instead, they invest in a sense of Hinduism and Hindu identity that insists upon its internal diversity and essential tolerance. The tagline used by the organisation in many of its documents and publications states its interest in ‘Promoting Understanding, Tolerance and Pluralism’. The HAF valorises a rhetoric of difference alongside a call for unity. While this discursively distinguishes the HAF’s trajectory of Hindu activism from any sort of fundamentalism with the sheen of a particular kind of American liberalism, it begs the larger question: why is Hinduism an identity and what makes it coherently representable as a political body with a unified voice? Moreover, what are the implications of mobilising Hinduism within this logic of identity?
One of the most significant trajectories of American Hindu activism, and one increasingly concerned with identity, has developed out of the ongoing conflicts between American Hindu organisations and American academia. The public controversies of the 2000s over works by American non-Hindu scholars of Hinduism such as Wendy Doniger, Jeffrey Kripal and Paul Courtright and their application of Freudian psychoanalysis to various aspects of Hindu mythology, ritual and literary culture are now well known.13 The American Academy of Religion (AAR) has also become a locus of conflict over representations of Hinduism and Hindus, particularly the AAR’s Religion in South Asia (RISA) group. Rajiv Malhotra’s RISA-Lila essays (2002; 2003) have circulated an influential discourse describing American academia as the new frontline of anti-Hindu defamation and threat. By the early 2000s, the sense of academia as a source of grave threat began to generate numerous campaigns, many of which played out in the virtual space of online discussion forums, email lists, e-petitions and news and portal sites. Other mobilisations were directed at more physical social spaces with protests being taken to the space of AAR annual meetings, to university administrations and even to the on-the-ground level of the university classroom itself.14
In 2007, these grievances and their mobilisations culminated in the appearance of the volume titled Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America (Ramaswamy, Nicolas and Aditi Banerjee, 2007a). The book, an edited volume with contributions from a number of individuals, mostly American-based Hindus, presents itself as a summation of Hindu grievances against American academia. Its chapters profile various controversial academic representations of Hinduism, including those of Doniger, Kripal and Courtright, among others. Many of the book’s critiques are largely re-articulated versions of several of Rajiv Malhotra’s earlier online essays. The book decries the lack of ‘insiders’ in academic studies of Hinduism and claims to expose a patterned culture and agenda of what it calls ‘Hinduphobia’ in American academic institutions. Invading the Sacred offers itself as a document of the American Hindu activism mobilised against American academia and as a kind of intervention in itself.
While Invading the Sacred is a lengthy volume covering a large terrain, an identifiable theme emerges in the particular set of grievances against American academia it articulates. Running thematically through the volume is a narrative of Hindu threat and persecution concerned not only with representation and misrepresentation in itself, but with the anticipation of misrepresentation and its projected consequences. The book furthers a narrative of Hindu persecution through a markedly anxious futurism.
This can be seen in looking to one of the book’s rather unconventional features: its cartoons. The book contains a series of short one- to two-page editorial cartoons in between the main chapters. These cartoons depict a variety of scenarios dramatising the anti-Hindu sentiments that the book claims as prevalent in academia and the hypothetical consequences of academia’s representations. While these cartoons might not be considered a proportionately significant component of the book’s total content, they do make for a highly evocative site, indeed deliberately hyperbolic, that condense the book’s broader concerns. One example appearing on pages 15–16 depicts a scenario in which a group of American college students are about to attend an introductory class on Hinduism. All are depicted as enthusiastic, especially one young woman of a Hindu background shown as excited to learn more about Hindu philosophy that she has heard of but knows little about otherwise. They go to the class and are confronted by a professor who proceeds to describe upanayana, the upper caste ‘sacred thread ceremony’, in terms of a stylised Freudian psychosexual symbolism. The class responds with disgust. One student vows to avoid Hindus. Another is now convinced Hindus are ‘sick-o-perverts’. The cartoon reaches a climax with the young Hindu student, now embarrassed to be a Hindu, calling her parents on the phone crying to renounce their ‘weird religion’ and her identity. ‘I hate myself—I am a South Asian, not an Indian!’ she tearfully exclaims in the cartoon’s final panel.
What does this tell us about the emergent concerns of contemporary American Hindu activism? Invading the Sacred first re-articulates a narrative of Hindu persecution with a very particular object of concern: second generation American-born Hindu youth. It also focuses on a distinctly American source of threat and persecution: the American university classroom. The scenario depicted here is one of American Hindus endangered by American threats. The localisation of anti-Hindu threats as particularly American in this cartoon ties into the larger theme of threat and persecution presented in Invading the Sacred. In one chapter, Hindus in America are described as ‘the latest in a long list of “savage” minorities to be pitted against the “civilizing” force of America’s Manifest Destiny [sic]’ (Banerjee, 2007: 261). This simultaneously abstracts and specifies the sense of threat. It abstracts in the way that the threat expands the concerns of American Hindus beyond a particular misrepresentation or misused image to focus on the sense of a larger sociopolitical dynamic seen as driving the misrepresentation. But then it specifies the threat in the way it orients the discourse of American Manifest Destiny as specifically anti-Hindu.
An additional feature of this narrative of persecution is its temporal displacement. The cartoon is concerned not just with threats of the past or the present, but with anticipated threats and consequences. Its concerns are literally anxious, anticipated fears of what has yet to happen. In the cartoon described above, the reaction is not just about the misrepresentation or misinterpretation of upanayana in itself, but also about the projected consequences of such misrepresentations. The social consequences are envisioned on two levels. One level envisions the facilitation of negative racist stereotyping by an impressionable non-Hindu American public. The more profoundly anxious consequence of this scenario is that Hindu identity goes unfulfilled as the young student rejects Hinduism. That the renunciation of Hinduism and of being ‘Indian’ fashions a tacit equation between the two is obvious enough. The cartoon’s concern that the rejection of being Hindu/Indian will culminate in a new claim to being ‘South Asian’ also implies something gravely consequential in this shift in identities.15
But the cartoon moreover carries a disclaimer caption reminding us: ‘Any resemblance herein to actual events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.’ We are reminded here at a literal level that what is being depicted in the cartoon has not actually happened—only that it might. The cartoon does gesture towards a legacy of Orientalist representations of Hinduism and India that still make their way into American classrooms and media. This, and the marginalisation that racialised students (Hindu, Indian, South Asian or otherwise) face in many other ways, should not be denied. The cartoon’s disclaimer however, more than a simple innocuous legal provision, also draws clear attention to the fact that this presentation of grievances and anxieties is necessarily fashioning a narrative rather than, by its own admitting disclaimer, reporting or resembling ‘actual events or persons’. Anxieties here are cast in the form of a constructed narrative that anticipates.
This is not the only moment of Invading the Sacred marked by an anxious futurism. The book elsewhere anticipates that anti-Hindu American academics are gearing up for outright ‘campaigns of hatred’ (Rampersad, 2007: 47). In a more extreme case, it anticipates a looming genocide of Hindus (Rampersad, 2007: 62). Such an anxious futurism seems to underwrite other trajectories of American Hindu activism as well, such as the pre-emptive anti-defamation actions noted above. Such a concern had also preoccupied the street demonstrators protesting against M. F. Husain and Christie’s auction house described above—in this case showing a more conventional Hindutva becoming increasingly preoccupied with the abstracted threat of global terrorism, the ultimate threat anticipated by post-9/11 American war-on-terror discourse (Derrida, 2005; Weber, 2006; Zizek, 2002a, 2002b).16
At the core of Invading the Sacred’s anxious narratives however is the chief object of concern for American Hindu activism generally these days—that of identity. As the book attributes misrepresentation, and the anticipated identity crisis, to the lack of ‘indigenous interpretations of events and symbols’ (Ramaswamy, 2007: 367), it responds with a call for the mobilisation of an ‘insider’ voice (Sharma, 2007: xii–xiii), an emic Hindu voice. An insistence on the emic insider’s voice obviously signals an underlying expectation of a Hindu voice or identity out there somewhere that is capable of getting these representations right. But this begs a lurking question about what this voice or identity actually is. What defines and authorises this ‘insider’ position and to what is it ‘indigenous’?
On these points Invading the Sacred, and its larger narrative of persecution, is less clear. The opening chapter praises accounts that depict Indians, tacitly equated with Hindus, as ‘problem-solvers’ whose economy is ‘a positive engine for the world’ (Ramaswamy, Nicolas and Banerjee, 2007b: 8). The book laments these traits as severely under-recognised by everyone save those in ‘the business world and from top business schools’ (ibid.: 8), implying a definition of Indians as essentially adept capitalists and entrepreneurs. But such a reduction of Hindu/Indian identity to essential attributes, which has long been observed as a key feature of at least a century of Hindu nationalist discourse, also sits in tension here with a discourse of indeterminacy.17
For Sankrant Sanu (2007), one of the contributing authors to Invading the Sacred, Hinduism is ideally defined by an inherent indeterminacy that is akin to the open free-for-all of the virtual realm of the Internet. He suggests that ‘the internet can truly be regarded as a Hindu medium’ (Sanu, 2007), each being defined as radically decentralised forms through which ideas flow freely, in a way that he compares to the modular information routing of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) packets. While Sanu’s take on Hinduism’s virtual, indeterminate expanse might on the surface approximate something like Mark C. Taylor’s (1999; 2004; 2007) understanding of a radically virtualised religious culture in the midst of a wired, globalised and deterritorialised network society, it also points to a curious tension in how an overdetermined indigenous insider voice might claim for itself this abstract undetermined essence. This is a similar tension that we might see more broadly in the HAF’s project to seek out a coherent and representable American Hindu voice, while also claiming American Hindus as pluralistic, diverse and essentially tolerant—a move that is simultaneously essentialising and de-essentialising. In the case of the Invading the Sacred cartoon described above, the hypothetical scenario of the Hindu student renouncing Hinduism when confronted with its defamed representation is premised on a fundamental anxiety over how this young student is not a fully formed Hindu yet; the Hindu-ness she is supposed to assume is projected into the future as a desired possibility that actually may go unfulfilled.18 Significantly implied here, then, is that she has to become Hindu, and it is this becoming that seems to be under threat. Perhaps she is not Hindu essentially. Perhaps she is to become something else entirely, Hindu and/or otherwise. In any case, this narrative of the threatening American university classroom and its projected consequences fashions an anxious futurism whose central object of concern, identity, is in itself revealed as elusive, incomplete in the present and whose envisioned completion can only be deferred to the future. These are the cracks in identity’s surface. The tension in situating a Hindu youth identity in between its unfulfilled expected potential and its anticipated realisation somewhere in the future, has something of the dynamic of what Derrida (2002) has termed ‘auto-immunity’, the paradoxical dynamic in which the assertion of a subject becomes a ‘self-contesting attestation’ actively pointing to its incompletion, its absent essence and thus its ‘open[ing] to something other and more than itself’ (2002: 87). The cartoon’s rendering of potential threat, its rendering of identity and even its odd disclaimer are all strikingly autoimmune.
But Derrida’s autoimmunity is highly ambivalent. It is possibility as much as closure, similar to how he elsewhere describes religion returning both ‘with a menace and with a chance’ (Derrida, 2002: 82). However, the discourses of Invading the Sacred seem to present an identity politics in which possibility is invoked to mobilise closure, like the mutual relationship between intensification and abstraction that Hent de Vries has described as crucial to religion’s contemporary mobilised and politicised identities. According to de Vries, political religion today assumes a virtual configuration in which it is paradoxically emptied of social and practical content as it intensifies. Religion undergoes an abstraction, or a ‘shrinkage and evaporation of the doctrinal substance of historical religion’, that at the same time has the potential to ‘propel the remainder of its believers into rhetorical overdrive’ (de Vries, 2006: 10). Whether or not Invading the Sacred represents a kind of rhetorical overdrive, it is at least mobilising a sense of Hindu identity that is conspicuously abstract while at the same time staking out a project for its definition and security. If there is any overdriven rhetoric here, it is in the amplified rhetoric of identity that anticipates its hardened contours as it struggles with an expected, but elusive, ontological certainty.
This discussion has broadly sought to describe the changing politicisation of Hinduism in the US today and to raise questions about how to think about the politics of Hinduism in the diaspora. One suggestion is that the politicisation of Hinduism in the American context needs to be seen in terms of its refracting trajectories. Emerging trajectories of American Hindu activism are marked by a growing focus on American Hindus as the political object of concern, as opposed to a discursive and operational anchoring in India and a Hindu Indian state-building project.
This is not to discount the significant interconnections that many have demonstrated between organised political projects in India and its associated diasporas (Jaffrelot and Therwath, 2007; McKean, 1996; van der Veer, 1994). At the same time, it might be useful to raise questions about how overdetermined frames of nationalism and transnationalism may be obscuring part of the story of Hinduism’s politicisation abroad. The expansion of Hindu organisations in the 1990s has often been described in terms underwritten by classical theories of nationalism and transnationalism. Classical theories of Anderson (1991), Gellner (1983) and Smith (1995) variously describe nationalism as a combination of cultural and political projects; that is to say, as discourses of essentially unified and homogenous cultural groups defined centrally through claims to territorial and political sovereignty. The notion of transnationalism builds on this in describing a process through which migrating populations cultivate a sense of essential unification through the maintenance of direct cultural, political and economic ties between a home nation state and another (Basch, Glick-Schiller and Blanc, 1994). Such basic theoretical dynamics of nationalism and transnationalism are apparent in the many accounts of diasporic Hindutva that consistently stress its ideological continuity and operational coordination between India and the diaspora. This seems at one level a repetition of a central trope of diaspora studies in which the essence of a diaspora, and the sum of its motivations and operations, is located in a point of origin rooted in a homeland (Axel, 2004). At another level, there is a presumption of certainty and instrumentality that, while certainly not unfounded, may not tell us much about the precarious discourses of identity that animate the contemporary mobilisations of Hinduism abroad, or about new trajectories of Hinduism, political or otherwise, that might unfold in unpredictable directions.
Considerations of Hinduism in the US and elsewhere in terms of nationalism or transnationalism are complicated particularly when identity, a concept that is uncertain to the core, becomes conspicuously central. Nationalism in the conventional sense is, of course, also informed by discourses of identity, usually a fixed, unitary and primordial one (Handler, 1988).19 At the same time, many theories of identity have come to explore how identity might be de-essentialised (Bhabha, 1994; Fuss, 1995; Hall, 1990). It is in this vein that Zygmunt Bauman (1998) has suggested that the mobilising force of modern political religion is in its fundamental promise of identity to its adherents. For Bauman, this is a promise marked by a paradoxical catch when identity becomes mobilised as a means of establishing political, social and cosmological certainty that can never actually be fulfilled by identity’s ‘never complete construction’ (1998: 68). Identity may assume a strange double role as both cause and cure for the anxious contemporary mobilisations of religion, which can be seen in the precarious character of identity that has emerged as the object of political desire for American Hindus. This is identity expressed in ‘self-contesting attestations’ (Derrida, 2002) and that becomes uncertain in tandem with claims to its certainty (and vice versa).
Identity in this sense also becomes a fitting object of concern for the anxious futurisms that seem to propel American Hindu activism and its amplification of a well-worn preoccupation with the fate of second generation American-born Hindus. The larger history of Hinduism’s politicisation in India is, of course, also marked by shifting anxieties and narratives of persecution. The force of anxiety and anticipation in Hindu nationalism more broadly is a larger question that deserves further exploration. In the case of the shifting trajectories of American Hindu activism described here, anxiety runs through re-articulated narratives of persecution in which new sites of threat emerge: media, academia, American policy makers and even a more abstract retuned notion of American Manifest Destiny. The anticipatory dimension of these threats makes this narrative of persecution different from the sorts of anti-defamation campaigns seen in the 1990s, which were more reactive than anticipatory.
This is again not to say that Hindus, as with other South Asians and racialised people generally, are not impacted by racism, whether explicit or implicit, in the American context. Evidently there are cultural and structural forms of racism that continue to formatively impact and shape the experiences and opportunities of many. But this does leave us with a question about how people, individually or collectively, might respond to socio-political contexts that leave them feeling threatened or marginalised. It may well be of significance to consider the implications and impacts of the assertion of identity, Hindu, Indian or otherwise, especially when forged through an odd futurism which tempers essentialisms while simultaneously galvanising them.
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1 Marxist, Durkheimian and Weberian evolutionist models of social change have variously envisioned modernity as a process in which religion recedes as societies rationalise/secularise. Parsonian-influenced sociology of the 1960s and 1970s reinforced a secularisation theory predicting the retreat of religion from the modern democratic public sphere into the recesses of private life (for example, Berger, 1969; Luckmann, 1967; Martin, 1978).
2 The description of Hindtuva as a top-down ideology of coherence has featured in many accounts over the years (for example, Appadurai, 2006; Basu et al., 1993; Nandy et al., 1995; Nussbaum, 2007; Sen, 1993). The analytical usefulness and urgency of these accounts notwithstanding, a particular notion of ideology assuming its discursive and operational coherence, instrumentality and universalising tendencies has featured quite centrally. See Eagleton’s (2007) discussion of ideology.
3 See Burghart (2008), Frykenburg (1989), Inden (1990), King (1999), Lorenzen (1999), Pennington (2005), von Stietencron (1989) for a small segment of an ongoing debate on the conceptual coherence of the term Hinduism.
4 Examples of this can be seen on the websites of the HAF and HSC. The HAF describes itself as ‘not affiliated with any religious organization or political organizations or entities’. The website of the HSC at the University of Michigan similarly describes itself ‘an independent, non-affiliated organization’. The Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (2007; 2008) has described in its reports how the National HSC has long made efforts to dissociate itself operationally from the VHP and VHPA.
5 See Sonal Shah’s statement posted on Asian Americans for Obama ’08, 11 November 2009. [http://www.asianamericansforobama.com/statement-by-sonal-shah-transition-board-member-for-president-elect-barack-obama]. Many have remained unconvinced by her public defence. As Prashad (2008) warned of her association with ‘the U.S. branch of the most virulently fascistic outfit within India’, similarly critical groups have continued to press Shah for a clearer statement of her political affiliations.
6 See Kurien (2007), Mazumdar (1989; 2003), Prashad (2000) and Rajagopal (2001) for discussions on discourses of the ‘model minority’ and their relationship to American discourses of race and racism.
7 See Eck (2001), Leonard (1997) and Narayanan (2006) for more on the transforming and syncretising aspects of Hindu temples abroad.
8 See the SSRF statement, 26 April 2008. Available at http://www.hindujagruti.org/news/4191.html (accessed 8 December 2010).
9 HAF Press Release, 20 June 2008. Available at http://www.hinduamericanfoundation.org/media/pr/20080620_the_love_
guru_preview (accessed 12 February 2012).
10 For another approach to the development of discourses of anti-defamation, see the contribution by Khanduri, this volume, Chapter 25.
11 There is precedence for this type of activity with the Association of Indians in America (AIA) beginning in the 1970s and the US Indian Political Action Committee (USINPAC) in the 1990s. The HAF however represent the most concerted effort to mobilise an American lobby as Hindu, and not just as Indian.
12 See, for example, the HAF’s 2007 report Hyperlink to Hinduphobia: Online Hatred, Extremism and Bigotry against Hindus, and their Survey of Human Rights reports published annually since 2004.
13 For more on these controversies, see Courtright (2004), Hawley (2004) and the volume Invading the Sacred discussed in the later section of this chapter.
14 The central example of protest taken to a university administration comes in the controversy surrounding Paul Courtright’s (1985) book Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings, wherein an ad hoc Hindu group lobbied the administration of Emory University to reprimand Courtright. An example of a mobilisation targeting the classroom comes in the controversy surrounding the undergraduate course at Barnard College titled ‘Hinduism Here’. See http://www.barnard.edu/arx/hinduismhere for the details on this controversy.
15 This invokes larger discussions about the use of the term ‘South Asian’ among diaspora communities. While many have observed the emergence of ‘South Asian’ as a means of identifying parallel experiences and growing affiliations between various diaspora populations from the South Asian subcontinent (for example, Bahri and Vasudeva, 1996; Raj, 2000), commentaries written by Ramesh N. Rao (2003) and Rajiv Malhotra (2004) among others lament the use of the term ‘South Asian’ as something that flattens the national and/or religious particularities of ‘Indian’ and ‘Hindu’ that they feel need to be upheld as exceptional.
16 Discourses of anti-terrorism of course have circulated in their own way in the Indian context, particularly so since the passing of India’s Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) in the 1960s. It has been noted that discourses of anti-terrorism in India were significantly impacted and influenced by the post-9/11 American war-on-terror (see Chakravartty, 2002).
17 See Yon’s (2000) critique of what he terms the ‘attribute theory of culture’ that commonly informs discourses of multiculturalism.
18 See Joshi (2006) for an interesting counterpoint. Her study reports Hindu interview subjects showing a great deal of variation in terms of how they encounter representations of Hinduism in the classroom (Joshi, 2006: 80–83), which does not support the narrative and anticipated consequences of extreme alienation offered throughout Invading the Sacred.
19 There are some notable exceptions in relation to Hinduism and nationalism. See Bhatt (1997; 2001), Hansen (1999) and Rajagopal (2001).