American Hindu Activism and the Politics of Anxiety

Arun Chaudhuri

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Program in Anthropology York University Toronto, Ontario

September 2012

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This study of contemporary American Hindu activism is based upon fieldwork undertaken in New York City over twelve months spanning 2008-2009. Focusing on the public manifestations and contestations of American Hindu political concerns, it draws upon interviews, informal and formal conversations, participant observation at public events such as demonstrations and academic conferences, and extensive reviews of documentary and virtual sources. The transnational concerns and anxieties regarding the idea of Hindutva and its associated Indian state-building project of the 1980s and 1990s form part of the backdrop of this study and its consideration of the forms of political Hinduism both emerging and diverging from this context. A primary focus is on the social and political climate of the post-9/11 era and the anxieties that are generated by concerns about national security, questions of belonging, discourses of fundamentalism and, in summary, what Brian Massumi terms the "ambient" quality of threat pervading this context. The dissertation calls attention to the multiple, shifting, and often contradictory ways by which a climate of'threat' becomes re-inscribed in the discourses of multiculturalism that shape the identities and practices that are described in the thesis. Acknowledgements

This note is to offer thanks to all the different people who have, in many different ways, contributed to, and helped shape, this work. I owe thanks to the many individuals and organizations who shared their views, stories, and resources during the course of my research. I owe many thanks to Dr. Daniel Yon, who supervised not only this work, but a significant part of my academic development, for his support and direction. I would also like thank, and acknowledge the support of, Dr. Kenneth Little, Dr. Michael Nijhawan, the staff and faculty of the Department of Anthropology at York University, Dr. Balbinder Singh Bhogal, the Department of Religion at Hofstra University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A very special thanks goes to Preethy Sivakumar, whose support goes beyond what I'm able to name or count. iv

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - The specter of Hindutva: stories and theories of political Hinduism ...... 1 ‘Hindu’ and 'Hinduism': the origin of essence and the essence of origin ...... 5 Hinduism, nation, Hindutva ...... 13 Expanding Hindutva and its responses ...... 19 Religion, ideology, and political formations ...... 27 Researching American Hindu activism ...... 41 Chapter 2 - Hinduism in America: organization & expansion ...... 52 Changing landscapes post-65 ...... 53 Organizing Hinduism ...... 55 Public Hinduism and American Hindutva in the 1990s ...... 62 American Hindus Against Defamation (AHAD) ...... 65 Hindu Students Council (HSC) ...... 68 Transnational Hindutva ...... 73 Disavowing Hindutva: American Hindu activism beyond the 1990s...... 76 Chapter 3 - Claiming Hindu India ...... 87 The Human Empowerment Convention (HEC) ...... 90 Hindu Unity Day ...... 106 Claiming Hindu India ...... 116 Chapter 4 - Persecution in public: street protests and emergent trajectories of American Hindu activism ...... 126 Dis/engaging American publics ...... 129 Free speech, mafia hits, and claiming American-ness ...... 137 Ephemeral organizing & cosmopolitanism swarms ...... 151 Claiming the American Hindu ...... 167 Chapter 5 - Identity, representation, and the politics of anxiety ...... 171 Academia, psychoanalysis, and the new frontier of threat ...... 174 ‘Misrepresentation’ and mobilization ...... 183 Invading the Sacred ...... 195 Threat, persecution, and becoming Hindu ...... 201 American menace and chance ...... 210 Invading beyond the sacred ...... 215 Epilogue: facts of the matter ...... 222 Chapter 6 - Concluding remarks ...... 229 Appendix A: Organizations & Acronyms ...... 240 Notes ...... 241

References ...... 268 1

Chapter 1 - The specter of Hindutva: stories and theories of political Hinduism

In the days following the intense media frenzy and public fervor of the 2008

American presidential elections, a smaller frenzy began brewing among South

Asians and Hindus in the U.S. over the cast of characters ushered in alongside

America’s first black president. The appointment of Sonal Shah, an American economist of Gujarati background, to the transition team responsible for setting up the new Obama administration spurred intense reactions of both praise and consternation. The praise for Shah’s appointment came from an assortment of

American Indian and Hindu organizations claiming pride in having an Indian play such a prominent role in the new American government. The United States Indian

Political Action Committee (USINPAC), one of the largest Indian lobby groups in the

U.S., issued a statement praising her corporate and charity work alongside her appointment to the Obama team.1 The Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA) echoed this praise, with the group's general secretary publicly claiming "a feeling of joy and pride that my country person, from Bharat is in that position [sic].”2

But what merited praise for some was a source of consternation for others.

What concerned some critics were the apparent links between Sonal Shah and the VHPA. The VHPA is of course the namesake of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), an organization formed in India in 1964 seeking to establish a unified and codified

Hinduism across all of India. The VHP has become well known as an integral piece of the sangh parivar, the network of political Hindu organizations often described as promoting an extremist Hindu nationalism. Anxious questions surfaced over the implications of these possible links, and over what this meant for someone assuming such a prominent American political role. One critical response came in an article written by Vijay Prashad, a professor of history at Trinity College in

Connecticut and prominent public intellectual, denouncing Shah’s VHPA connections and calling her out on her stance, or apparent lack of stance, on the violent actions linked to the organization with which she was being associated. The protest multiplied with an open letter to Shah issued by the Coalition Against

Genocide (CAG) in tandem with a host of other South Asian organizations demanding her to clarify and/or repudiate these connections. Anxieties over Shah's possible VHPA connections also drew ire from other sources, including former

Republican senator Rick Santorum, who denounced Shah in a scathing op-ed piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer as linked with "an organization that supports terrorism aimed at Muslims and Christians."3

Sonal Shah herself promptly issued a statement in response, exculpating herself of the connections, or rather, from their accusatory implications. "My personal politics have nothing in common with the views of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or any such organization,” she stated, claiming she had been tarred by a simplistic "guilt by association” allegation.4 But some found her defense unconvincing, such as the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate

(CSFH), an American-based group of scholars and community workers (significantly overlapping with the aforementioned CAG) actively criticizing the circulation of

Hindutva in the U.S. for at least the last ten years. The CSFH released a statement the following week claiming that Shah was not merely associated with the VHPA, but had active leadership roles in the organization. Vijay Prashad responded to Shah's rejoinder with a similar argument. Anxieties then widened as questions started to be raised about the Shah family and their activities and associations. The Shah family was said to be prominently involved in Hindu organizations in the Houston area for the last 20 years, with Sonal Shah's parents and siblings as particularly active in the VHPA and Hindu Students Councils (HSCs - see Chapter 3). These larger family ties to the VHPA furthered anxieties over the vague nature of Shah’s own links, and the nagging questions of what exactly this all meant, if, indeed, it was to mean anything.

It is with these questions that the Sonal Shah controversy signals something significant about the public and political life of Hinduism in America today - something out of which the main questions of this dissertation arise. The preoccupation over Sonal Shah’s apparent links to the VHPA was underwritten by an underlying web of links tying the VHPA to the VHP in India, and ultimately 4 animated by an ideology named Hindutva. The outcry over Shah and her VHPA connections was premised on the implication of a prescriptive ideological continuity, the sign of an American front to a political project tied back to the machinations of Hindutva in India. The Shah controversy, in this way, presents a particular story of the politicization of Hinduism in the American context today, one in which Hindutva’s often violent recent history is anxiously invoked and, as seen in

Shah’s disavowing response, navigated. Hindutva, and its ideological transnationalization, thus appears here as a significant force in the political life of

Hinduism outside of India not in and of itself, but as an idea through and against which claims about religion, identity, community and political belonging emerge. I describe in this dissertation the development, workings, and anxieties of an

American Hindu activism that is not simply a Hindu nationalism/transnationalism, but a contemporary politicization of Hinduism in the American context that branches into multiplying trajectories as it attempts to claim and assert political being and belonging through a constellation of ideas of religion, nation, race, ethnicity, and citizenship.5 An age-old question lurks in the background of the discussions in the chapters to follow about how people fashion themselves as socio­ political beings. This is, of course, a question that has preoccupied the Western philosophical canon in various ways from Plato to Marx to Foucault and beyond.

Religion has figured variously, and sometimes ambiguously, in this long lineage of discussions, with many now maintaining religion has “returned” with increasing 5 significance in how people all over the world make claims to sovereignty and selfhood. The ethnographic exploration of American Hindu activism, discourses, and its social forms, offered in this dissertation illustrates how questions and aspirations of political being and belonging are organized and mobilized.

‘Hindu ’ and ‘Hinduism the origin o f essence and the essence o f origin

This chapter first offers a background and discussion of the development of political Hinduism, particularly that which has come to be named as Hindutva, and to consider how it comes to lurk and haunt a varied set of imaginaries, in India and abroad. I outline in this chapter a genealogy of discourses both o/Hindutva and about it, describing how the latter have conceptualized Hindutva into a hardened, unitary and unifying ideology and political project. Given a particularly intensified decade of political Hindu mobilizing in India, bookended by violent eruptions at

Ayodhya in 1992 and Gujarat in 2002, political Hinduism, particularly under the name of Hindutva, has evidently been met with substantial critique. Some critics have gone as far as associating Hindutva’s mobilizations across the 1990s with fascism (Ahmad 1993; Sarkar 1993]. However it may be characterized (and indeed, many have criticized the association of Hindutva with fascism - see Vanaik [1997]), a certain understanding of Hindutva has remained in circulation to be uneasily, anxiously, and quickly recalled.

Such anxieties about Hindutva parallel the larger conceptual discussions about the modern politicization of religion that have come to preoccupy both academic and popular discourse in recent years. Concerns about 'fundamentalism' abound, in which religion becomes seen as the deepest mobilizing agent of people, prone to communalism, intolerance, and moral absolutes.6 This chapter also situates its discussion of Hindutva within a larger body of theoretical literature on the modern politicization of religion in order to raise questions about the characterization of religion and ideology that commonly emerge academically and popularly. The suggestion made in this chapter is that the preoccupation with

Hindutva, and with fundamentalism more generally, seems to leave little room for consideration of the increasingly complex dynamics of political religious movements; of the difficult and sometimes contradictory ways in which they organize, mobilize, and develop. With this in mind, the relationship of Hindutva, and the larger conceptualization of political religion, to American Hindus is taken up across the chapters to follow. As contemporary American Hindu activists remain steeped in the unresolved questions of what Hinduism is, the terms of politicized

Hinduism, and particularly the notion of Hindutva, thus require some examination.

A consideration of what the notion of Hindutva has come to mean is required here in order to show how the politicization of American Hinduism both interacts with and exceeds it.

The politicization of Hinduism, whether or not it comes to be called

'Hindutva,' has necessarily featured claims on the definition of Hinduism and of 7

Hindus. The term 'Hindu' itself has uncertain origins, despite a long-standing preoccupation in both Orientalism and modern Indian political thought with claiming certainties about the origins of Hinduism and Hindus. An established consensus has the term 'Hindu' first identifiably emerging in ancient Persian usage as a generic reference to the region of the Indus river, derived from the Sanskrit term sindhu, meaning 'river' (Frykenburg 1989:30; von Stietenchron 1989:11-12).

This use, or simple translation, of the term seems to have also carried over into

Greek and Persian texts similarly referencing the subcontinent region with the term

'Indus' (Frykenburg 1989). At the same time, the term 'Hindu' itself is believed to be largely absent from the earliest classical Vedic texts (Oberoi 1994:5). The consensus on these textual indices has thus been that the term 'Hindu' was not an indigenously used term in premodern India, but rather a term developed and used from outside.

The suggestion that the term (and in later arguments, its presumed essential content) could possibly have come from somewhere or someone 'outside' has been particularly contentious for those seeking to define Hinduism as primordially indigenous to India (and to thus use that indigeneity as a basis for political mobilization). These are claims that raise difficult questions about Hinduism’s

'insiders’ and ‘outsiders,’ a discourse that intensifies in particular ways in contemporary American Hindu activism (see Chapter 5).

However, such understandings of the term's earliest uses have not been uniformly popular or gone uncontested. There has been much argument about when the term 'Hindu' came into usage on the subcontinent, and how, or even whether, it was understood conceptually in ancient and medieval India. Lorenzen (1999; 2006) claims that the term 'Hindu' came into use coherently and self-consciously during the medieval period, beginning in the 13th century. The influx of Muslims and subsequent Mughal rule in medieval India formed a context in which ‘Hindu’ as a cultural, religious, and even demographic signifier, made sense as Hindus and

Muslims began developing a vocabulary through which their differences could be named. According to Lorenzen, the term Hindu soon developed into an actual self- conscious identity (1999:646) carrying an "ethno-geographical" meaning

(1999:634), defined by a relatively coherent cluster of religious and philosophical beliefs. More than just a word, Lorenzen suggests that Hinduism has a centuries- long self-conscious conceptual coherence.

The academic literature on this topic is considerably split. A critical opposing view holds that Hinduism as a coherent religion and group identity is a modern construction forged in Hindu revivalist, proto-nationalist, and British colonial discourse and policy of 19th century India. This latter view has been referred to as the "constructionist argument" (Lorenzen 1999:630), which in its strongest form holds that there was never an identifiably unified or coherent religion, identity, or social formation, as it has come to be academically and politically understood today, that fell under a singular of name of'Hindu' or 'Hinduism.' The term Hinduism is quite readily recognized as a neologism whose first appearance is commonly traced back to British travel and missionary texts of the early 1800s (Heehs 2008; Smith

1962). For those termed constructivists, Hinduism's signifying cohesion is described as a product of British colonialism's efforts to classify and categorize a colonized

Hindu population (Dirks 2001; Inden 1990; Pandey 1990; Thapar 2000; but see also

Halbfass 1991), or as constructed through the fixation of colonial missionaries on certain beliefs and practices (e.g., idol worship, varna/caste system, etc.) constructed into a generalized ‘Hinduism’ distinguished from, and antithetical to, their own Christianity (Pennington 2005; von Stietenchron 1989). British and

German Orientalism also impacted these constructions, particularly in emphasizing definitions of Hinduism that centered on Vedic Aryanism (Bhatt 2001:13), as well as a dichotomization of'East' and the ‘West,’ mutually defining each other as deeply spiritual and rationally materialistic, respectively (Chatterjee 1993; Heehs 2008;

Inden 1990; King 1999).7 An overriding premise of these constructivist arguments is that what has fallen under the names 'Hindu' and 'Hinduism' can really only be understood as a highly complex array of local traditions, vernacular practices and beliefs, and cannot be accurately or usefully named under one monolithic tradition, people, or set of essential features.8 The complexity and diversity of its referent has made Hinduism for some a "deceptive term" (von Stietenchron 1989) or even a conceptual falsity: it does not, and cannot, coherently or analytically name what it claims to name. Critics of the constructionist argument, and of postcolonial historiography in general, often charge that constructionists reduce Hinduism, 10 empirically and conceptually, to a simple invention of British colonialism and

European Orientalism.

The debate here is thus not only about the origin of the word/term itself and its semantics. It is rather over the referential content, the presumed substance, of

Hindus and Hinduism; in short, its ontology. The debate over Hinduism’s content is situated within a larger, similar, debate in modern religious studies concerning the very notion of "religion." Just as Hinduism's conceptual and analytical cohesion have come under constructionist questioning, so too has that of religion.

Fundamental questions over the universality and conceptual coherence of religion have been raised (Smith 1998; Smith 1962). A growing number of critical genealogies have examined the social, political, and economic backdrop to the formation of religion as a universal phenomenon and analytical category (Asad

1993, 2003; Hart 2000; King 1999; Masuzawa 2005). In any case, what is to be noted here is the nature of the contestation: even before considering the very fundamental question of what Hinduism or a Hindu is, there is the more profoundly nagging question of if it is. The debated status of the conceptual coherence of

"religion" and of "Hinduism” seems to be both cause and product of their elusive definition and content. Moreover, it has ultimately been suggested that even if there was a self-conscious conceptual understanding of Hinduism as a religion and group identity in ancient or precolonial India, it does not seem to have the form of a hardened identity that was definitely or primarily claimed (Burghart 2008; see also 11 von Stientencron 2009). It was likely not a significant mode of group mobilization in ancient or medieval India, nor necessarily understood as a political identity or constituency.

The question is, then, of how Hinduism and Hindus become mapped onto political constituencies and thus become political projects. Many of the aforementioned constructionist accounts point to 19th century British colonial India as a formative context in which new mobilizing discourses and understandings of

Hinduism and Hindus proliferated at an amplified rate (Bhatt 2001; Dalmia 1999;

Frykenburg 1989). The colonial and missionary context of 19th century British India constructed discourses and policies about Hinduism, which in turn prompt further constructions of Hinduism in reaction. Indians living under British colonial rule reactively mobilized other constructions of Hinduism and Hindu identity in resistance to, but also influenced by, colonialism's ideological and political infrastructure (Freitag 2005; Jaffrelot 1996). The result was the promotion of particularly essentialized understandings of Hinduism and Hindu identity by Hindu reformers, revivalists, and proto-nationalists (i.e., Hindus and Indians themselves). The Arya Samaj, Swami Vivekananda, the many voices of the Bengali renaissance, and many others of this particular moment in India, have all been variously associated with the solidification of an essentialized Hinduism. These

Hindu essentialisms were also commonly articulated through a narrative of loss - of an essentialized Hindu being that once was, but is no longer, thus ascribing to 12

Hinduism’s defining content a crucial temporal inflection. Such a narrative of loss in turn animates mobilization to recover this essence.

But these essentialized understandings of Hinduism were not necessarily mobilized in uniform or consistent ways at this time. Vivekananda leaned towards social and psychological reform in his revivalist project.9 The Arya Samaj centered on organizing Hinduism into an institutionalized ecclesiastical form (Jaffrelot 1996; van der Veer 1994).10 Thus, while these emerging ideas of Hindu essentialisms called for mobilization on the level of the cultural and psychological, the relationship between essentialized Hinduisms and explicitly political ends was not clear-cut or developed. Rather, this context sees essentialized understandings of Hinduism continuing to solidify in oppositional terms - for instance, recalling Chatterjee’s

(1993) account of the creation of'inner' and 'outer' domains in 19th century Indian nationalist thought, of which the inner domain, imagined as that of the personal and spiritual, is what the colonized subject maintains sovereign jurisdiction over. The political context of British colonial rule, and its ideological influences, remained central to the emergence and expansion of these discourses of Hindu revivalism

(Jones 1989), along with both the "patronizing" style of British Orientalism and the

"romantic" style of German Orientalism (Heehs 2003), as well as the newly cultivated public sphere constructed by British colonial rule (Freitag 2005). It is often said that identity fundamentally requires its other, and certainly the essentialist discourses of Hinduism emerged out of a late 19th century context where a Hindu group identity could take shape through and against a public backdrop.

However, political anti-colonial responses of the late 19th century (i.e., those concerned with the establishment of a new political apparatus independent from the British) largely fell under a more broadly developing Indian anti-colonial nationalism, as opposed to an explicit mobilization of Indians as Hindus. This is not to say that early anti-colonial Indian nationalism was not underwritten by a tacit connection between India and Hinduism; it most certainly was (Bhatt 2001; Dalmia

1999; Heehs 2008; Sarkar 1996). The essentialized understandings of Hinduism that emerged out of late 19th century colonial India were not necessarily mobilized explicitly as political entities and constituencies, as they would soon be in the early

20th century.

Hinduism, nation, Hindutva

The essentialist understandings of Hinduism that grew out of the 19th century reform and revivalist movements become more forcefully asserted and sharply defined in the early 20th century. Discourses of Hinduism and Hindu identity crucially develop at this time as they merge with the particular vocabulary of nationalism. The concept of nation, historically and ideologically rooted in 16th century Europe, and its relationship to colonial/postcolonial contexts, has been a subject of ongoing discussion (Anderson 1983; Bhatt 1997; Chakrabarty 2000;

Chatterjee 1993; Fanon 1963). The development of nationalist ideologies in India is 14 a topic beyond the scope of this discussion. Indian nationalism is a much bigger discursive terrain than Hindu nationalism, though, again, the two are not disconnected. Nineteenth century revival and reform discourse through Bankim

(Bhatt 2001:26; Sarkar 2001) and later Aurobindo (Bhatt 2001:38), as well as the

Hindu Sabha movements (Jaffrelot 1996:18), foreshadow nationalist thinking and mobilizing via generic designations of'Indian' or 'Hindu.' It has moreover been noted that in the context of late 19th century Hindu reform and revivalism, the idea of nationalism began to emerge as a way of demarcating a line of difference between

Hindus and Muslims (Bhatt 2001; Jaffrelot 1996).

This emerging influence of the concept of nation signals some of the impacts of European philosophy and the discursive regimes of British colonialism on colonial India.11 The impact of European Orientalism on Hinduism’s emerging conceptual coherence has already been noted. The particular vocabulary of nationalism, via European intellectual and political influences ranging from Mazzini to Spencer, seems to have sharpened the emerging essentialized understandings of

Hinduism in Indian political consciousness, particularly as Hinduism comes to articulate with notions of territory, race, and ethnicity. Its politicization focuses as essentialized understandings of Hinduism are further shaped through an historically specific set of political aims and ends: the formation of viable political parties, the defeat of the British Raj, and the establishment of a Hindu political apparatus, often envisioned as an independent state structure. Chatterjee's (1993) 15 dichotomy of the inner spiritual and outer social domains of subjectivity forged in colonial India gains a new orientation here as the sovereignty once claimed by revivalists over an inner spiritual domain of Hindu essence begins to see more outward political expression; the inner essence asserted through the realization of an outer social and political form.

By the 1920s, the Gandhian and Congress nationalism was emerging as the dominant nationalist and anti-colonial movement. Gandhi's vision for Indian decolonization did invoke religion, especially through a monism and asceticism that he associated with Hinduism as a challenge to the Western civilizing and colonizing mission. Gandhian nationalism, and its invocation of religion, however, was mobilized with multiple effects and in multiple directions.12 But while Gandhi and the Congress would lead what became the mainstream of Indian nationalism by this time, a range of other political Hindu ideologues and organizations also emerged in this period, setting the foundations of a particular discourse of Hindu nationalism that would carry through the rest of the century. This foundation of Hindu nationalism is most often situated in the writings of V.D. Savarkar. His influential

1923 treatise Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? develops the concept of "Hindutva”, giving a name to an essential Hindu-ness with more definition than that of his revivalist predecessors. G.M. Joshi, author of the introduction to the 5th published edition of

Savarkar’s treatise, claims that Savarkar's notion of Hindutva was meant to

"correspond exactly to the definition of a nation in modern political theory" (Joshi, in Savarkar [1969:xi]). Drawing on the vocabulary of nationalism allowed Savarkar to define Hindus and their essence as forming a natural community through a new set of substantiating criteria. His definition of this Hindu essence drew simultaneously on notions of race or "common blood” (defined as "race-jati”; see

1969:84), "common civilization” (1969:92), "common language" in Sanskrit

(1969:92), and common geography (1969:82), which all came together in constitution of an essential collective Hindu being, that was to include even Sikhs,

Buddhists, and Jains (1969:106-107). Savarkar's Hindutva also reiterated a crucial temporal dimension. Hinduism’s essence encapsulated a "history” that linked

Hindus across time to an abstracted point of ancient, even primordial, origin

(Savarkar 1969:3). Savarkar also saw Hindus as essentially unified through a collective history of foreign invasion, most notably through medieval encounters with Islam, and then continuing with the arrival of the British. Paralleling many of the revivalists preceding Savarkar, this history of invasion and persecution was seen as responsible for the degeneration of Hinduism and the distortion of its essential unity. Savarkar’s essentialized definition of Hinduism and Hindus was backed now by blood and history, two of the heaviest ontological anchors implying a reality and factuality that could go virtually unquestioned.

Following Savarkar, Hinduism’s essentialization and politicization further developed with the formation of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925, and through the writings of M.S. Golwalkar, the organization's most celebrated and 17 influential leader, beginning in 1940. Golwalkar and the RSS drew upon the essentials of Savarkar’s definition of Hindus as a natural essential community tied together by common blood, territory, and a history of persecution. Golwalkar’s

"cherished goal of national regeneration" (1947:19) was underwritten by his account of Hindus as a homogenous "organic whole” (Golwalkar 1947:49). He further intensified the naturalized essence of Hinduism by claiming that the very concept of nation was indigenously Vedic, with such ancient Vedic cultures self­ consciously recognizing themselves as a Hindu nation. The RSS was formed in 1925 in Maharashtra as an organized effort to recover and cultivate a Hindu "national consciousness” (Andersen & Damle 1987:34). They sought to do so through establishing a training program to discipline young Hindu boys into a proper realization of Hindutva, of their Hindu essence. The RSS organized daily paramilitary-style training camp programs known as shakhas, typically featuring a program of calisthenics and physical drills, alongside games, lectures, and group prayers (Andersen & Damle 1987). The intention was to provide the participants with both physical and psychological conditioning to proactively recover strength, vigor, and aggression, which the RSS emphasized as the essential characteristics of a

Hindu.13 With this, the RSS’s organized form of Hinduism sought the personal and psychological recovery of Hinduism in Indian youth as its ultimate goal. From its inception the RSS has maintained that it is a cultural organization rather than a political one. Despite this, the RSS was underwritten by a strong influence from 18

Savarkar's militancy, which aimed their youth mobilizing, if not directly at, then in anticipation of, an explicit political project. A psychic and cultural recovery of

Hindutva would fashion a Hindu political entity equipped to physically seize the state.

The RSS would represent a significant organized and mobilized form of

Hinduism in India across the century, pushing the ideological terrain set by Savarkar and Golwalkar further into an organized political project by outlining explicitly political means and ends for the recovery of a Hindu national essence. Hindus, as an essentially unified people, needed to organize themselves into a correspondingly unified political unit, and to govern themselves accordingly as a political constituency. Hindus were entitled to a sovereign territory and political structure.

Savarkar, in particular, advocated for Hindus to form parties to insert themselves into the official political channels to wrest control away from the British and towards an independent political structure: a state for Hindus run by Hindus. For his own part, Savarkar radicalized the Hindu Mahasabha, the political party that split away from the Indian National Congress in order to represent and focus on

India as a specifically Hindu political constituency.14 The RSS under Hedgewar, and later Golwalkar, drew direct inspiration from the paramilitary organizing styles of

Mussolini's youth movement in Italy, with parallel political aspirations (Casolari

2000). Expanding Hindutva and its responses

While the RSS was banned for most of the 1950s for their apparent connections to Gandhi's assassination in 1948, the politicization of Hinduism continued to expand over the course of the 20th century in other ways. One significant development was the founding of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in

1964. The VHP was established as an organized effort to institute Golwalkar's call for Hindu unification. The VHP sought to unite a sectarian and regionally diverse

Hindu population through a codification and standardization of Hindu beliefs and practices that would ultimately establish an ecclesiastically structured Hinduism

(Jaffrelot 1996:351).15 The VHP, as the RSS before it, presented itself as a social and religious organization, similarly claiming no overt political agenda. However, both these projects begin to intersect formally with Indian politics with formation of a political party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), by RSS-associated personnel in the

1950s. This, for the firt time, gave Hindutva proponents an official political party and a presence in the Indian political system. After one electoral success in the late

1970s as part of the Janata Party coalition, the BJS re-established itself in 1980 as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose popularity would increase steadily in the decades to follow.

With the formation and ascent of the BJP in the 1980s, the politicization of

Hinduism in India took on its most structured form to date. The idea of an essential

Hindu self was not only to be recovered, but also to be elected, to govern, and to secure its territory. Discursive tropes that had been in circulation since the late 19th century became the basis of campaign platforms, lobby issues, and attempted policy initiatives and reforms. The BJP, RSS, and VHP coordinated in the 1980s to form a larger network, the sangh parivar, that would actively mobilize opposition to a range of issues including caste reservations, legal allowances for religious minorities in India, and incidents of mass lower caste conversions to Islam (Andersen & Damle

1987:134; Jaffrelot 1996: 338-341). They also promoted aggressive policy stances towards Pakistan, regarded as a constant source of threat to Indian security, especially in relation to the tensions around Indian and Pakistani claims to Kashmir.

These flashpoint issues reinforced old tropes of Hindu persecution, ancient glory, and essential origin.

The BJP’s claims on the Indian state have been described as premised on a strengthened discourse of majoritarianism (Appadurai 2006). Hindu nationalism of the 1970s and 1980s, in a nominally "postcolonial” India, no longer justified its political project through the anti-colonial struggle for independence. Rather, Hindu nationalism came to seek jurisdiction over an Indian state based on securing Hindus as the state’s entitled majority and central political constituency and authority.

However, this appeal to majoritarianism does not dislodge longstanding narratives of Hindu persecution. Narratives of persecution continue to inform the politicization of Hinduism, not through concerns with subjugation by British colonial rule, but rather through a proliferation of external and internal threats, focused variously on Islam, China, various separatist movements (Assam, Nagaland, etc.), Christian missionizing, and communism, among others. This signals a shift in orientation in the late 20th century politicization of Hinduism. The multiplying concerns over internal threats, particularly those posed by minority groups in India, sharpen the majoritarian discourse of contemporary Hindu nationalism. Appadurai (2006) has described this as Hindutva's "fear of small numbers," and as an integral part of the modern politicization of Hinduism and its claims on India’s political structures.

I have so far offered here what should be considered a fairly conventional genealogy of Hindu nationalism in recounting the rise of the RSS and VHP, leading into the BJP's rise to power in the 1990s, all traced back to the ideological contours of Hindutva as established by Savarkar in the 1920s and Golwalkar in the 1940s.

However, as Bhatt (2001) usefully cautions, genealogies of Hindu nationalism are not so easily drawn and realized, pointing in particular to the problems of identifying definite origins and linear genealogies of Hindu nationalism. While I have been describing a constellation of tropes and movements shaping a general politicized Hinduism across the 20th century, the ideological and organizational formations of political Hinduism in India that come under the name Hindutva can easily become seen as linear and, consequently, reified. And indeed the surge of academic literature on Hindutva in the 1990s on the heels of the destruction of

Babri mosque at Ayodhya at the hands of RSS, VHP, and Bajrang Dal activists, seems to have contributed to solidifying particular analytical presumptions about 22

Hindutva’s politicization of Hinduism. Given that many in India and abroad saw

Ayodhya as the height of a startlingly coordinated, and unprecedented, realization of

Hindutva’s political objectives through violence, the spate of critical and anxious accounts of Hindutva that followed were understandably compelled to examine

Hindutva in focused, instrumental, and determined terms.16 The result, however, has been a certain reification of Hindutva when theorized as a hardened ideology.

A larger tendency focusing on contemporary political Hinduism, Hindutva namely, as a rigid ideology has featured widely across a number of accounts. By the mid-1980s, critical commentators began to describe Hindutva as a "syndicated

Hinduism" (Thapar 1985), a simplified, homogenous Hinduism that selectively suppresses and controls its highly complex internal difference, converting it into a monolithic Hinduism with a fixed and singular practice, history, and being. This reduction of Hinduism to a singular fixed form is then seen as key to its instrumental political use. For Thapar, syndicated Hinduism is synthesized "for purposes more political than religious" and in the interests "of the ambitions of a new social class”

(1985:22). The political instrumentality of Hindutva's monolithic construction is thus characterized as a doctrinaire perversion of Hinduism.

One of the key critical studies of Hindutva describes Hindutva as politicizing

Hinduism as "a coherent, continuous ideological tradition" (Basu et al. 1993:28).

This ideological tradition is moreover described as one that draws its appeal based on "the basic simplicity of its ideological message, preached in a style that 23 deliberately avoids complexities and debates, and inculcated simultaneously via a whole battery of rituals and symbols...” (Basu et al. 1993:36). Critical explorations of

Hindutva as an ideology appear in many key studies of Hindu nationalism of the

1990s (e.g. Jaffrelot 1996; Nussbaum 2007; van der Veer 1994), carrying over into its popular and journalistic representations. Liberal economist Amartya Sen, for instance, writing in Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) immediately following the destruction of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya, saw Hindu nationalism as defined by a

"militant obscurantism - the political use of people's credulity in unreasoned and archaic beliefs in order to generate fierce extremism" (1993:17).

Appadurai’s (2006) more recent account of Hindu nationalist majoritarianism echoes such tendencies. He describes modern Hindutva within a larger account of "ideological certainty" mobilized in tandem response to "social uncertainty,” particularly that of globalization (Appadurai 2006:90). Majorities encounter their minorities through a pervading "anxiety of incompleteness”

(2006:8), generating conflict between the two, out of which totalized doctrines of group identity are formed and imposed. Hindutva in India politicizes Hinduism as a totalized group identity in its strongest form against Muslims, India's "small numbers". Appadurai’s suggestion, while mindful of the larger social and political climate of the post-9/11 era and discourse of a global war on terror, maintains the view of Hindutva as an ideology that constructs, and operates through, rigid totalities of majority and minority, self and other. 24

Without collapsing these various studies into one, and certainly without devaluing their academic and political contributions, there is a shared recourse towards a particular understanding of ideology to be noted. Hindutva has often been described as an ideology in a very classical sense of the term. As Terry Eagleton has noted, classical conceptualizations of ideology tend to hold ideology as a set of ideas forged to legitimate and sustain power and domination through a false consciousness whose terms are naturalizing, universalizing, reifying, dehistoricizing, and ultimately lacking in self-reflexiveness (2007:5-6; 59-60).

Ideology in this sense has preoccupied social theorists in varying ways across recent decades. From Daniel Bell (1960) to Francis Fukuyama (1992), predictions about the "end of ideology” have circulated scenarios that theorize the demise of parochial ideologies at the hands of a global, rational, and economic liberalism. By the 1990s, a preoccupation with ideology resurfaces and intensifies, particularly through the lens of religion. Conceptually, religion has long been tied up with social and political order, particularly in early sociological and anthropological approaches that held religion as an archaic mechanism of establishing and maintaining social order.17

These same theories held religion and modernity as antithetical, a presumption carried over into theories of secularization derived from Parsonian-influenced sociology of the 1960s anticipating the demise of religion in modern public and political spheres. Significant challenges to the expectations of secularization theory became apparent across the 1970s and 1980s with the establishment of clerical rule 25 in post-revolutionary Iran, the publicly prominent emergence of Protestant

Fundamentalism in the U.S., and numerous other such movements in which religion and ideology combined into newly emerging political forms.

The response to the emergence of these political religious movements has often featured an anxious redeployment of classical notions of ideology.

Secularization theory normalized the expectation that religion in modernity would either vanish, or retreat into the recesses of private life. The apparent "return” of religion in public and political forms in the late 20th century thus generates anxieties seeking explanations. Ideology in the classical sense tends to serve as this explanation. Benjamin Barber (1995), for instance, has theorized a "returned” political religion as a practical and defensive ideological response to the rapid economic, cultural, and political upheavals of a globalizing world. Such theories of ideological response/defense were likewise emphasized by the Fundamentalism

Project at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, one of the largest and most concerted efforts to theorize and explain religion’s politicized forms of the time. The

Fundamentalism Project theorizes "fundamentalism” broadly as modern ideological religious movements based on sets of ideas intended to protect a group against the perceived threats of modernization and secularization (Almond etal. 1995a:405), and that mobilize reactively against external threats (see Almond et al. 1995b).

Fundamentalisms are said to be restorative political projects operating through ideas of "selectivity" (of how the 'fundamentals' of a given religious tradition are 26 reconstructed), "moral manicheanism" (fashioning moral certainty through absolutes), "absolutism and inerrancy" (in terms of how those absolutes are realized), and finally "millennialism and messianism” (see Almond et al. 1995a:406-

7). Fundamentalisms are, moreover, described as having an "enclave” mentality in which religion maps out sharply defined senses of difference and ideas of who are to be considered insiders versus outsiders (see Sivan 1995).

Ideology in this sense becomes highly anxiety-provoking due to its implied or anticipated consequences. On one end of the political spectrum, conservative commentators such as Bernard Lewis (1990) and Samuel Huntington (1996) approach religious ideologies as indices of a deep, profoundly essential primal being that is unpredictably irrational, intense, and potentially violent. Here, religion, particularly in the highly demonized rendering of Islam of these writers, seals people into a certainty of being, and thereby lurks as a prescriptive force of (violent) social and political action. Critical renderings of religious ideology also appear in the opposite direction of the political spectrum, as seen in the influential work of philosopher Charles Taylor. Taylor (2006:294) describes the late 20th century as

"the age of mobilization" marked by the rise of particularistic, identity-based, mobilizations of religion. He sees these as "neo-Durkheimian" forms in which senses of religious belonging merge with senses of political identity, with religion potentially strengthening reified ideologies of civilization, morality, and group identity, once again becoming prone to conflict.18 27

Religion, ideology, and political formations

I do not intend to deny that theorizing of religion in terms of ideology and absolutist claims on identities, states, morality, and history, can apply to social movements in many contexts across the globe. Classical understandings of ideology have been conceptually useful in identifying the claims and aims of particular social movements. At the same time, there is another side to ideology's conceptual coin.

Returning to Eagleton, he describes the classical rendering of ideology as one concerned with false consciousness, with a manipulative worldview tied up with the maintenance of a dominant political order. Ideologies in this classical sense appear as fixed and over-instrumentalized. Against this, Eagleton raises a question:

How unified ideologies actually are...is a matter of debate. If they strive to homogenize, they are rarely homogeneous. Ideologies are usually internally complex, differentiated formations, with conflicts between their various elements which need to be continually renegotiated and resolved (Eagleton 2007:45).

This presents a different characterization of ideology, one attentive to ideology’s instabilities, where its terms stumble, or do not add up to consistent ideas or claims.

This side of ideology's internal contradictions and ambiguities is resonant with

Zizek's (1989) reflections on ideology where, from a broadly Lacanian perspective, ideology is considered in terms of its absences as much as its stated terms, however narrow or fixed they may appear. Zizek draws upon a core insight of Lacanian psychoanlysis that subject identities are formed in necessary relation to otherness, to things (images, beings, etc.) beyond themselves, and thus split, constituted by absence and incompletion. For Zizek, this insight has implications for identity more broadly, as well as for notions of ideology. Whatever claims or ideas an ideology may prescribe, its prescriptions necessarily require the possibility of the negation of these claims and ideas, of what lies beyond or outside them. For Zizek then, ideologies are not simply internally complex; rather, he raises a more fundamental question about the nature of ideologies that are never fully complete or certain.

Parallel sensibilities are also seen in recent new critical theories of religion and its public and political forms. Asad’s (2003) blurring of the boundaries between the religious and the secular suggests one re-conceptualization of religion. Mark C.

Taylor (1999, 2004, 2007) has theorized the emergence of a modern/postmodern virtualized form of religion in the midst of a radically deterritorialized network society. For Taylor, virtual religion engages reality contingently, in stark opposition to the inerrant truth claims he sees in "fundamentalist” religion.19 Arvind Mandair

(2004) also approaches religion with questions about its presumed universality, and with a particular concern over the hardening of religious group identities he observes among immigrant populations in North American and Europe.

Conventional understandings of religion forged through a Christianized lens have descended from European continental philosophy, through Hegel in particular, 29 becoming default, normalized, and finding their way into how some South Asian immigrant communities construct ideas of religious tradition and religious identity.

Mandair ponders an alternative:

What if British-Asian settlers were to exercise a definite undecidability in the process of translating received traditions according to a mechanism which automatically inserted them into a global circulation as proper representatives of the many particular and therefore ethnic ‘religions’? What if the ideological relay responsible for this automatic translation were to be circumvented? (2004:659)

While religion remains a significant means of social identification and community building, Mandair suggests that religious identities and ideologies open to their uncertainties may promise a chance to open up closed epistemes, altering their political aspirations and effects. Circumventing the "ideological relay” would mean thinking of religion and identity in ways that do not immediately and readily translate into definite representations. Religious identity as a type of ideological formation is then imagined here as incomplete in a way belied by its assertions and public claims.

But what are the effects of this? What are its possibilities? While Mandair sees both theoretical and "geopolitical" (2009:424) possibilities, he also qualifies his optimism in noting the limits of so many trajectories of poststructural theorizing, particularly in the face of a global capitalist paradigm "that exerts power through 30 the very hybridities and fragmentary subjectivities that postmodernists celebrate”

(Mandair 2009:391).20 Mandair raises a question about political, religious, and ideological forms that might claim "undecidability,” a defiance of "automatic translation,” in a way that brings to mind Derrida's suggestion of modern public and political religions returning both "with a menace and with a chance" (2002:82).

Even an ideology of uncertainty, to invert Appadurai's aforementioned formulation of Hindu nationalism, can be politicized, and there are no guarantees to what direction that politicization may point. Recent global intensifications of political religion represent a "double and contradictory phenomenon" according to Derrida

(2002:81). The double and contradictory aspect of these political religions is described by Derrida in terms of the notion of "autoimmunity,” the paradoxical dynamic in which the assertion of a subject, a "self-contesting attestation," actively points to its incompletion, its absent essence, and thus its "open[ing] to something other and more than itself' (2002:87).

Philosopher Hent de Vries (2006a, 2006b) similarly describes a paradoxical dynamic of religion's contemporary mobilized and politicized identities in terms of a mutual relationship between intensification and abstraction. He describes many of the public and political forms of religion today as "minimal theologies," highly virtual configurations in which religion is paradoxically emptied of social and practical content as its assertions, boundaries, and values intensify. De Vries observes a "shrinkage and evaporation of the doctrinal substance of historical 31 religion,” an abstraction with the potential to "propel the remainder of its believers into rhetorical overdrive...” (de Vries 2006a: 10).21 Zygmunt Bauman (1998) describes a similar dynamic in his characterization of religious fundamentalism as a

"postmodern religion.” For Bauman, fundamentalism figures as many other theorists have previously (and subsequently) suggested: as a religious ideology that provides a sense of affirmation, being, purpose, and destiny in the midst of a chaotically globalizing and modernizing world. In this, however, Bauman identifies a central postmodern paradox. What religion offers as an ideology is not just a cosmology, theology, or promise of salvation. It also provides identity, which

Bauman, following many other theorists of identity, describes as a "never complete construction” (1998:68).22 Much like Derrida's dynamic of "autoimmunity,”

Bauman’s suggestion is that the promise of identity is a promise of uncertainty more than certainty, of inherently unstable selves sought as certainties.

These suggestions provide some qualifications for how ideology, and its particular intersection with religion, might be understood. While political religious ideologies may indeed feature claims to essential being, moral absolutes, universalisms, and conflict-prone reifications of difference, Derrida, de Vries, and

Bauman are commonly emphasizing the instabilities and uncertainties of political religion's ideological formations. Such ideological claims of certainty can be missing as much as they are claiming. What ideology lacks, its inability to complete itself, may, moreover, lead to its intensification - hence, de Vries' suggestion of a 32

"rhetorical overdrive" investing all the more heavily in certainties that do not seem to add up. In this way, it becomes generative and animating. Ideology might not

"mean,” as much as it assembles.

A few accounts have extended such considerations to political Hinduism and

Hindutva. Hansen’s (1999] ethnographic study of communalism and Hindu nationalism in India in the 1990s draws upon theories of identity through Lacan and

Zizek, formulating an alternative definition of ideology in relation to Hindutva.

Ideologies here are marked by absences that defy realization, having "repressions as a principle of construction" (1999:62-63). He suggests a myriad range of forces

(global, economic, demographic, religious, among others) in contemporary India have ultimately "fractured social imaginings and notions of order and hierarchy”

(1999:5) of the urban Indian middle class, raising haunting questions that have, in multiple ways, fixated on abstract and shifting constructions of Indian Muslims

(1999:12).23 Rajagopal's (2001) study of Hindu nationalism's use of media technologies in the 1980s and 1990s describes how Hindu nationalist mobilizations in India have engaged "split publics" (2001:16), multiple audiences, in varying ways.

Ideology here has an uneven operation and unpredictable social uptake. The political Hindu ideologies that circulate with speed and force in the 1990s are full of rhetorical gaps and contradictions that actually enable them to become highly opportunistic and adaptable (2001: 215). Political Hinduism of the 1980s and 1990s 33 for Rajagopal, with its uneven social effects and impacts, is not necessarily a unified ideology in operation.

These accounts thus raise alternative considerations about discourses of

Hindutva and how they operate. They diverge from Appadurai's ideology of coherence, and the classical attributes of ideology thereby implied, perhaps also qualifying Eagleton’s (2007:61) claim that "[i]deology...is not always the utterly self­ blinded, self-deluded straw target its theorists occasionally make it out to be." This is also different from many of the earlier accounts of contemporary political

Hinduism described earlier in the chapter, for which Hindutva seems to figure as a

'self-deluded straw target.' In these accounts, Hindutva in the 1990s has often invoked most, if not all, of ideology's classical attributes: as a reifying, universalizing, manipulative ploy for power and false consciousness.

My suggestion is not that these are necessarily mischaracterizations or misplaced analyses, especially given the historical socio-political context out of which they were produced (i.e., post-Ayodhya studies trying to understand the success of BJP and sangh parivar mobilizations). They have, however, contributed to a discourse in which Hindutva becomes a shorthand signifier for encapsulating, and often dismissing, the dynamics of Hinduism’s politicization. Its use has become prescriptive over the years, often as an accusation or allegation, where naming frames and prefigures what it knows. The emergence of Hindutva as a critical accusation and allegation of a homogenizing, universalizing, ideological false 34 consciousness becomes further complicated in light of how political Hinduism has waxed, waned, and changed shape in various ways in the Indian context over the last decade.24

Questions about the relationship between political religion and ideology are also crucially related to contemporary conceptualizations of political subjectivity.

Popular and, according to many, normative models of modern political life have been stretched by new political configurations and shifting forms of sovereignty and citizenship (Fraser 2007). Classical models of state sovereignty descending from

Weber (1965) and Schmitt (1985) emphasized the ordering mechanisms of the modern state and its claims to sovereign power through the suspension of law and the use of violence. Habermas's (1962) highly influential theory of the modern liberal public sphere, on the other hand, viewed modern political subjectivity in terms of the will of a rational public citizenry in determining the operation and interests of a self-contained sovereign state. In response to both of these lines of theory, Michel Foucault has famously attempted to theoretically de-center the state in order to think of other, multiple, loci of power. Foucault’s (1990,1991, 2003) influential concepts of governmentality and biopower theorized political power as dispersed and historically and socially contingent, thus emphasizing how modern liberal subject citizens are governed and shaped relationally between the self, the larger population, the state, and the discourses of its institutions and authorities. 35

Foucault's theory of scattered power has been a point of departure for a growing number of theories of state, citizenship, sovereignty, and political being in recent decades. Larger post-Foucauldian theoretical trends have argued that an erosion of state-centered power is taking place in a globalizing socio-political landscape of newly emerging political structures and imaginaries in the form of

NGOs, multinational corporations, and transnational media (Appadurai 1996;

Hannerz 1992). This point has been the basis of Nancy Fraser's (2007:8) criticism of the bound uniformity of the state and its rational public presumed by Habermas.25

Fraser maintains that the particular types of "transnational public spheres” of today's global socio-political landscape create a scenario in which "current mobilizations of public opinion seldom stop at the borders of territorial states"

(Fraser 2007:14). For Fraser, this raises a more profound question about what it means to think about a public sphere whose "interlocutors do not constitute a demos or political citizenry" (2007:15). A larger question emerges on how to think about reconfigured forms of sovereignty and citizenship; about the different sorts of political subjects fashioned and mobilized in/by today's world.

For Hardt and Negri (2000), old understandings of sovereignty under imperialism have begun to give way to a new politics of Empire. Old models of sovereignty envision bound nation-states, and their equally bound citizenry, as primary political units defined in conflicting opposition to other states and their citizen subjects. The transformation under Empire described by Hardt and Negri 36 involves a sovereignty perpetually in crisis (2000:189, 202), that is “organized not around one central conflict but rather through a flexible network of microconflicts"

(2000:201), whose rule "functions by breaking down” (2000:202), that "often cannot be defined in specific places" (2000:211), and that "[thrives] on the proliferating contradictions corruption gives rise to...” (2000:202). Fraser (2007:16) has summarized their theory of Empire's postmodern sovereignty as hegemony through a "post-Westphalian model of disaggregated sovereignty." Hardt and Negri

(2004) go on to theorize how this global political arrangement reconfigures modes of belonging and citizenship, particularly as Empire's diffuse but enveloping power spawns equally disaggregated forms of resistance by the multitude. Hardt and Negri point to the emergence of scattered, acephalous movements, organizations, and resistances attempting to forge new modes of political belonging.26

While Hardt and Negri describe the scattered, improvised politics of the multitude with optimism (perhaps resonating with the optimism in Mandair’s suggestion about the untranslatability of religion in named ideologies and identities), others have viewed similar political developments with more ambivalence. Hansen and Stepputat (2006) question classical models of sovereignty, of the sovereign state defined by possessing the power to legitimately kill, by suggesting instead

a view of sovereignty as a tentative and always emerging form of authority grounded in violence that is performed and designed to generate loyalty, 37

fear, and legitimacy from the neighborhood to the summit of the state. (Hansen and Stepputat 2006:297)

Hansen and Stepputat describe the emergence of "informal sovereignties"

(2006:295), different power-seeking structures that exist beyond the state or sometimes in its shadow. Informal sovereignties include “vigilante groups, strongmen, insurgents, and illegal networks” and other new modular political formations arising to seek or exercise power and authority in ways that may variously, or simultaneously, oppose the state or work alongside it (Hansen &

Stepputat 2007:297). Scholars have described how the state serves as a vital background that bears down, physically, psychically, and legally upon subjects in and around its borders. Moreover: whether or not the state actually operates politically on its subjects in a classically top-down fashion, the ways in which the state gets imagined, the fetishization, the "fiction," or the magic, of the state

(Aretxaga 2003:400; Das 2007:162-164; Taussig 1997), may also be of great significance. These imaginings seem to be multiplying in the midst of "transnational public spheres.”27

One way in which such shifting political formations have been described is through the notion of the "assemblage.” Theoretical notions of assemblage involve their own complex terrain of discussion, particularly through the notions of assemblage descending from Gilles Deleuze. Collier & Ong's (2005) notion of "global 38 assemblages,” for one, is used to refer to multi-layered convergences and interconnections of global social and political forces, and the production of unpredictable and nonlinear political forms that exceed simple state/subject and sovereign/citizen relationships. Manuel DeLanda (2006:5) more broadly describes assemblages as social formations that do not necessarily have an essential nature so much as "properties emerging] from the interactions between parts." In opposition to "organismic metaphors" (2006:8,11) and "taxonomic essentialism” (2006:26) marking a long lineage of theory from Hegel to Herbert Spencer to Anthony Giddens,

DeLanda suggests that "the parts of an assemblage do not form a seamless whole"

(2006:4). Bruno Latour's (2005) promotion of a "sociology of associations” similarly invokes the notion of society as an assemblage, understood not through the presumption of a social totality, but in terms of the contingent links and associations through which social forms take shape. These are models that suggest social forms cannot be seen as a simple aggregation, as a resolved sum of additive parts. Rather, they suggest a fundamental unpredictability and contingency in how social forms

(an organization, a community, a state, etc.) take shape. Their parts can exceed, reshape, and break off from, and indeed break down, the whole.

Marcus & Saka (2005:102) describe how the proliferation of references to the "assemblage" in the social sciences typically invokes "a certain tension, balancing, and tentativeness where the contradictions between the ephemeral and the structural, and between the structural and the unstably heterogeneous create 39 almost a nervous condition for analytic reason.” The notion of the assemblage in this way suggests both unpredictable and ephemeral social formations as well as the tenuous and partial ways in which these may be "known" - in short, ontological and epistemological questions in tandem. Jasbir Puar (2007:205) similarly invokes the assemblage to refer to "spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and rearrangements" that push conventional questions of representation and the reduction of political subjects to/as "identity." Puar suggests a notion of assemblages intended to challenge conventional idioms of representation, particularly those that privilege the visual/ocular's assumption of self-evidence.

Assemblages are those figures or signs or bodies whose formations are not simply locatable or identifiable - as Puar (2007:174) suggests, the notion of assemblages is intended to shift the question from "what does this body mean?" to "what does this body affect or do?" In this way, Puar crucially roots her notion of assemblages in affect, wherein assemblages form around affects and in turn produce them.

Puar’s concerns moreover focus on the particular political context of the post-9/11 war-on-terror and the "terrorist assemblages" produced thereby. Such a context figures as particularly formative in the intensification and production and recombination of political discourses, responses, and actions.

This is also a context in which Brian Massumi (2010) has described a particular

"political ontology of threat." Massumi suggests that a particular idiom of threat and fear operates as a strongly productive affective force in this context, describing 9/11 40 as an "excess-threat-generating actual event" that generates a "lingering fear"

(2010:60). Without invoking the notion of the assemblage specifically, Massumi does describe an assembling capacity of this "lingering fear" by virtue of its peculiarly contagious and iterative character—notions of threat and fear that are not necessarily tied to an "origin" or an empirical instance, but that impact whether or not the anticipated threat materializes (2010:60). For Massumi, this affective fear is perpetually emergent and abstract, and in this way is highly generative. It can become attached everywhere and anywhere and materialize in different ways, sites, and combinations. 9/11 is one moment that taps into an underlying surplus of threat able to "contaminate new objects" (Massumi 2010:60) and generate a "mode of power” (Massumi 2010:59). In this way, Massumi points towards a particular dimension through which emergent and assembling political forms might be thought, and a particular global context and moment through which these are produced. Ideology, religion, sovereignty, and political belonging might be, perhaps more than ever, seen in terms of a particularly partial, emergent, and disaggregated character in today's political context. Such discussions about new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, and political belonging might raise further questions about what sort of political forms Hindutva generates, and the emergent forms of political

Hinduism that exceed Hindutva's conventional ideological frame. They also raise larger questions about how we might understand the ways in which people construct and mobilize political forms and understandings of political belonging. 41

Researching American Hindu activism

Just as the intersections between religion and ideology have conceptually opened to their instabilities and contradictions, so too do the multiplying and emergent forms of political being and belonging today require consideration. Such forms of ideology and political being may be usefully explored through ethnographic approaches, especially as anthropology and social science of recent decades have sought to distance their interests from reductive holism and to interrogate how, what, and whether they ‘represent’ (e.g., Gupta & Ferguson 1997; Law 2004; Marcus

1998, 2009; Marcus & Fischer 1986; Rabinow & Marcus 2008]. Ethnographic approaches attune to, and bring out the complexities and contradictions of, how people invent, dissolve, and live through their varied social forms, discourses, ideals, structures, and imaginaries. Such ethnographic sensibilities informed the research on American Hindu activism upon which this dissertation is based. The research supporting this dissertation involved examining a network of organizations and individuals involved, in varying ways, in making political and often public claims on

Hindus and Hinduism. I have come to refer to this with the broad designation of

"American Hindu activism" after struggling with the considerable baggage and implications of the term "Hindutva." Interested in studying the public and political forms of Hinduism in the U.S., though not certain if what I was, or was supposed to be, looking at was "Hindutva," I situated my research in New York City, given its 42 demographics and long history of Indian and Hindu organizations in the city and surrounding area. The VHPA and HSS, perhaps the most commonly invoked starting points for any discussion of political Hinduism or Hindutva in the U.S., are two such organizations with histories rooted in New York.

My attention in this research, however, became largely focused on another, more recent, set of groups. Groups such as the Indian American Intellectuals Forum

(IAIF), Hindu Collective Initiative (HCI), and Hindu American Foundation (HAF), or academic-oriented groups (see Chapter 5) such as the Infinity Foundation (IF) and the Dharma Association of North America (DANAM), many of which I encountered in the midst of fieldwork as research progressed, comprise a loose and contingent network of what I am referring to as American Hindu activism. These are groups actively involved in organizing events, conferences, talks, letter-writing, street protests, petitions, press statements, and running mailing lists and blogs, all in various ways making claims on Hindus and Hinduism that are political (i.e., jurisdictional claim over Hindus and Hinduism) and, increasingly, public (i.e., oriented towards a broader outside audience). They, moreover, maintained a public profile and activity that older established groups like the VHPA and HSS no longer did. As my research came to focus on these groups, I grew particularly interested in the public-ness of activities and discourses, and the political interests and claims about Hinduism emerging therefrom.28 At the same time, mapping out this rather different network of groups, identifying the players, and their activities presented a 43 number of difficulties, the first of which stemmed from the diffuse, rather than coordinated, character of this network. This circuit of organization varies considerably in structure and definition: some groups are formally established (e.g., those registered as 501(c)3 tax-exempt non-profits), while a growing number of others are more ephemeral with no address, membership, or official status, and quickly appear and disappear (see Chapter 4). Many are based in New York and New

Jersey, while others have personnel, and sometimes even chapters or offices, scattered across the U.S. Some have no fixed geographical location or center of activity; some operate entirely in the virtual space of the web.

Where possible, 1 met with and interviewed organization personnel to learn directly about these organizations, their work/activities, and their views on Hindus and Hinduism in America. These ranged from in-depth, semi-structured conversations, to discussions/exchanges of varying length and depth depending on setting and circumstance.29 More crucial to the "flow” of the research was something of an improvisational method that followed events, issues, or controversies as they unfolded. I spent time tracking and attending the variety of public events and mobilizations staged by these organizations. This included attending a range of activities such as public lectures/talks, street protests (see Chapter 4), conferences, exhibitions, festival events, and even 'cultural' programming (e.g., dance or music events), depending on the organization. At the same time, many other events, the street demonstrations in particular, were reactive and situational, emerging in response to a given occurrence or controversy. The majority of these events attended were in New York City, where I resided from January 2008 to January

2009, and the immediate surrounding area (particularly in various spots of New

Jersey). However, some larger-scale planned events did take me out of town, as was the case when I attended the annual conference of the Human Empowerment

Foundation in Chicago (see Chapter 3) as well as the 2008 American Academy of

Religion (AAR) and Dharma Association of North America (DANAM) meetings, both held in Chicago in 2008 (see Chapter 5).

This made for a research situation marked by the "saliency of the emergent" that Faubion (2009:154) describes in contemporary ethnography, and by George

Marcus's (1998:106-8) deceptively simple methodological suggestion to "follow the people” or "follow the thing.” Following events and controversies as they emerge and unfold also allowed for the collection of a substantial amount of documentary sources. This dissertation draws on a variety of such sources, including flyers, press statements, letters, pamphlets, legal documents, event programs, among other documents that surface and circulate in and through various events, mobilizations, and controversies. Many of these documentary sources were collected at events, handed out at demonstrations, or otherwise offered to me by organizations, located at local bookshops, sent through formal or informal email lists (see below), or obtained online. Other documentary sources drawn upon include locally-circulating

South Asian-focused magazines and newspapers. These were accessed through extensive searches of the archives of publications such as India-West, Hinduism

Today, News India Times, India Abroad, and The Indian Star, many of which reported regularly on past events, activities and controversies relating to Hinduism and

Hindu organizations in America.30 Such sources are all crucial to tracing the emergent concerns of American Hindu activism, with virtual social spaces often being the central space where things happen.

At the same time, keeping in mind the established discussions about ethnography's practical and representational incompleteness, I have had to think about the ways in which my efforts at examining political Hinduism were tempered and partial.311 was only able to follow these groups and their mobilizations with varying degrees of proximity and distance. A number of challenges surfaced and resurfaced. Personal meetings with organization personnel were not always possible, sometimes due to incidental factors, but many other times not. I found that my attempts to navigate this network of American Hindu activists were often met with resistance or suspicion. Many refused interviews, while others did not respond to calls or emails, even after multiple attempts. Those that responded with initial suspicion requested, as entirely within their right, contact info from my program, department, institution, and supervisor. Some asked for questions or a written interview plan in advance before agreeing to a conversation321 came to understand, and encounter quite directly, a certain culture of suspicion in the larger context of the uneasy, often hostile, relationship between American Hindu organizations and 46

American academia (see Chapter 5).

The challenges and limitations to access also pointed me toward other sites.

I had many people express a disinterest in talking with me by directing me to their websites and literature, insisting that they had little to tell me beyond this. This did, however, lead me to explore the developed web presence and infrastructure that has become vital to American Hindu activism. I spent a good deal of my downtime in the field studying organization websites learning the basics of their structure, personnel, discursive orientations, and piecing together histories and records of activity. Through investigating this web presence, I developed a sense of the range and scope of the virtual fronts in which American Hindu activism operates. I spent time daily reading a variety of online news sites and discussion forums such as

India-Forum, Vigil Public Opinion Forum, and Hindu Unity, many of which are either

American-based or feature American-based contributors (though they are not necessarily region-specific). In addition, the emergence of Hindu activist-oriented blog sites, either run or read by American-based Hindu activists, provided rich and active sites of discussion and news. Blogs such as Shadow Warrior, Satyameva

Jayate, Pseudo-Secularism, Intellibriefs, HinduCurrents, and Varnam were regularly followed during the course of my research, initially as a way of keeping on top of events taking place in the city, as these blogs would often feature the most up-to- date notices and postings for events, demonstrations, campaigns, and calls to action.

I soon began following these more regularly to study their editorial content and 47 discussions. Blog portal sites such as HindToday and Sulekha that post and collect news stories and editorials, many of which were often directly and locally relevant to New York and New Jersey, were also followed. Another significant part of this virtual infrastructure was the use of e-mail lists, including both mass/automated organizational mailing lists as well as personal/informal email lists of messages and discussion circulated among select groups of people. One list of particular significance is the Religion in South Asia List (RISA-L), the large e-mail discussion list of the Religion in South Asia group of the American Academy of Religion, known as a major site of often-heated debate around issues of Hinduism and representation in academia (see Chapter 5).

The chapters to follow thus draw their discussions from a range of ethnographic, documentary, virtual, and observational sources. The historical and contextual story told in Chapter 2 draws from a range of textual sources, websites, academic literature, and conversations, to outline the context out of which some significant forms of public and political Hindu discourses in the U.S. have emerged and, moreover, to consider the ways in which these earlier developments have been explained and analyzed. Chapter 3 features a detailed discussion of two particular

American Hindu activist events, the Human Empowerment Conference (HEC) in

Chicago and Hindu Unity Day in Queens, New York, and the politicization of

Hinduism through narratives of persecution invoked within these sites. Chapter 4 discusses a different type of event: its street demonstrations. A look at these 48 particularly public mobilizations, along with the trail of documentary sources, letters, press statements, legal documents, blog posts, websites and media generated in and through the controversies that accompanies them, reveal the varied ways in which American Hindu activist anxieties, discourses, and social forms assemble, expand, and reshape. Chapter 5 draws on another set of events, texts, and conversations in exploring how American academia has become a key battleground over questions about representation and identity. This chapter focuses on a number of textual and documentary sources through which controversies have played out, in print and online, with particular attention to the volume Invading the Sacred: An

Analysis o f Hinduism Studies in America (2007), a large compilation of many

American Hindu criticisms about academic representational practices released just prior to the start of my fieldwork.

This examination of American Hindu activism, and its range of sites and activities, also considers how Hinduism’s politicizations are at times ambivalently linked up with Hindutva, and at other times exceeding it, and emerging in new and multiplying directions. The Sonal Shah controversy described at the opening of this chapter is a telling case. The controversy involved concern about her as a both a dupe and purveyor of ideology, with the specter of Hindutva looming as a prescriptive allegation. As important is the fact that the accusation emerged to no small amount of debate and disavowal. Shah was quick to distance herself, not just from her actual VHPA connections (despite these being documentable), but from 49 what those connections were believed to mean and anticipate. Shah's move is part of a larger overall disavowal of, or at least distancing from, the lurking ideological weight associated with Hindutva on the part of American Hindu organizations and public voices (see Chapters 3 and 4).

This apparent sidelining of Hindutva then raises the question engaged in the chapters to follow: what sorts of discourses and social forms does political

Hinduism in the U.S. take today? What sorts of political projects do American Hindus imagine and enact? How do they engage the state and public sphere? How do they situate themselves between the American state, the Indian state, and then beyond states altogether? Finally, how does Hindutva haunt, and become exceeded by, the multiplying forms of American Hindu activism today? This dissertation explores the place of this contemporary activism in the context of the larger discussions of ideology, religion, and political belonging outlined above. This network of activism, rather than unified in discourse or practice through a common homogenous and universalizing ideology, actually refracts into multiple trajectories and projects not always in alignment with each other. These trajectories situate themselves differently, and not always consistently, in relation to Hindutva, India, and America.

A larger implication of the suggestions made about religion and ideology in this chapter points towards, once more following Eagleton (2007:194), a consideration of ideology not just in terms of its ideas but also in terms of its effects.

To put it another way, a consideration of ideology's instabilities orients us towards the 'work' of ideology: its social forms, manifestations, social performances, momentary emergences. This is precisely to what the burgeoning field of discussion about new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, and political belonging also points. The account of American Hindu activism presented in the chapters to follow is thus a look at a politicization of Hinduism that is not necessarily about the terms of a given reified discourse or political program (as "Hindutva" has often come to be invoked), but about what and how organizational forms, beliefs, ideas, histories, affiliations, threats, reactions, etc., assemble - what emerges, what takes shape, and perhaps what loses shape. This is an activism shaping itself through a long-standing trope of

Hindu exceptionalism and narratives of Hindu persecution, but also reconfiguring itself in new ways. Anxieties about terrorism under the post-9/11 American war-on- terror have become a key animating force for activist organizing (see Chapters 3 and

4). Such activism shapes itself in, and around, the specter of Hindutva; its varying disavowals of Hindutva navigate the larger negative currency of notions of

"fundamentalism" while also establishing increasingly complicated and contradictory relationships to the Indian state and Indian Hindus, and to the

American state and American Hindus. American Hindu activism shapes itself through larger questions of Hindu-ness itself, at some level the core of their jurisdictional and/or sovereign claims, which becomes increasingly complicated when operating on the abstract terrain of the politics of identity and representation

(see Chapter 5). 51

We thus might again think about how ideologies do not necessarily mean so much as they assemble. Such a consideration is also one amenable to a more ethnographic-oriented approach to the movement of politicized religion today. And indeed many recent ethnographic approaches to religion's 'returned' public and political forms across a range of contexts globally have observed the uneven, unstable, and contradictory terrain in what religion might claim to mobilize, and what is thereby generated socially and discursively.33 Such accounts further suggest how the consequent social forms of unstable ideology are not always predictable and how analyses and representations thereof need to account for this. 52

Chapter 2 - Hinduism in America: organization & expansion

Hinduism and Hindutva in the U.S. develop in ways that intersect with, parallel, and diverge from its forms in India. The aim of this chapter is to discuss these developments, with a particular focus on the ways in which Hinduism, and later Hindutva, assume organized forms in the American context.1 While beginning with the development of Hinduism's organized forms in the U.S. in the 1970s, the more important story outlined here is the emergence of a public and political

Hinduism in the 1990s with the expansion of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), and the Hindu Students Council

(HSC). These organizations are discussed here not simply to consider what they signal about the transnational reach of Hindu nationalism in the 1990s, but for how they become associated with intensifying anxious responses to the idea of Hindutva, and the potential of its American presence. They signal the emergence and expansion of political Hinduism in America, as well as a larger discourse about

Hinduism, Hindutva, politics, and ideology that, in many ways, animates the proliferating forms of American Hindu activism today. 53

Changing landscapes post-65

Hinduism figured ambiguously in the American public imaginary through the early half of the 20th century. The circulation of translated Vedic texts by the mid-

1800s, followed by the scattered migration of labourers, and occasional students, from India to North America, and the anti-Asian and anti-immigrant racism of the early 1900s, all contributed to varied and unsettled public images of Hindus and

Hinduism in America.2 The latter half of the 20th century sees the place of Hinduism in the American imaginary develop even more strongly. Wendy Doniger (2009] suggests that by the 1960s, the dominant public image of Hinduism in America swings from the austere individualist religiosity of the early Vedanta societies to the

American new age fascination with a liberal decadence stereotypically associated with tantric Hinduism and Kali worship. The American guru movements, highlighted by the American tours of prominent figures such as Osho Rajneesh,

Yogananda's Self-Realization movement, and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, were further signs of American counter-culture's growing fascination with Hinduism and

India (Doniger 2009; McKean 1996; Williamson 2010).

But with the changing demographic context in America beginning in the mid-

1960s, Hinduism becomes shaped beyond these earlier American imaginings. In

1965, amendments to the American Immigration Act re-opened the U.S. to Asian immigration for the first time in over forty years. This led to an influx of migration from the Indian subcontinent, with large populations settling in New York, 54

California, and later Texas, among other places. One of the most immediate manifestations of this demographic shift is the rise of new associations and groups through which these new immigrant populations begin to imagine and organize themselves. The New York tristate area, as the center of this post-65 influx of South

Asian immigrants, is where a number of the first community organizations were founded. The Association of Indians in America (AIA) was founded in 1967, and formalized under a constitution by 1970, to represent the interests of Indians in

America.3 Formed from the outset as an "advocacy group” to both help Indians interface with American political structures and to promote Indian-American relations, they currently describe themselves as a "grassroots national organization of Asian immigrants in the United States.”4 The Federation of Indian Associations

(FIA) formed soon after in New York in the 1970s with a similar purpose and character. The FIA emerged as an organization banding together smaller community groups into a larger overarching Indian umbrella organization.

As evidenced by their names, organizations such as the AIA and FIA named and positioned themselves loosely as 'Indian,' an index of the relatively generic way in which the immediate post-65 generation of immigrants seem to have perceived themselves. Scholars have pointed out how diasporas may lead to the formation of broad-based or generic identity categories; the generic sense of'Indian' and ‘South

Asian' attached to many populations immigrating from the subcontinent in the later 55 part of the 20th century often, though unevenly, subsume a range of regional, linguistic, religious, class, and caste identities (Maira 2002; Raj 2000; Rudrappa

2004; Shukla 2003).5 In any case, the emergence of these broad-based organizations is a product of the burgeoning Indian demographic of the time. While they signal emergent articulations of Indian American public/political interests, at the same time, the operation of these groups has largely involved community- oriented social events/gatherings. The AIA, for instance, has become most well known for its annual Diwali street festival that takes over the entirety of lower

Manhattan’s South Seaport, now filled with substantial amounts of corporate advertising and drawing thousands of visitors from the surrounding area. One of the

FIA's main public activities since the late 1970s has been the organization of the annual India Day parade, involving a procession of dozens of floats and displays down Madison Avenue in Manhattan, culminating at a congregation of food stalls and entertainment stages. In a sense, these activities suggest the AIA and FIA as more internally focused than externally - i.e., on providing a social space and service for Indians themselves.

Organizing Hinduism

The organization of the FIA and AIA as generic "Indian” community organizations brought in a mix of Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians (though to my anecdotal knowledge, Muslims have rarely, if ever, held board or executive positions 56 in the AIA and FIA). It is not long after the formation of such Indian umbrella organizations that Hindu-specific organizations emerge. With the construction of the Ganesh temple in Flushing in the borough of Queens, New York in 1970 came the formation of the Hindu Temple Society of North America (HTSNA). The HTSNA sought to build a network of American temples to provide a place of congregation and practice to accommodate a Hindu population that had grown beyond the smaller-scale, private worship of their home altars. Temples that began appearing in the 1970s, such as the Ganesh temple in Flushing, provided an organized space for religious practice and devotion outside the private space of the home.6

As many of the post-65 influx of South Asian immigrants established themselves permanently in the U.S., and particularly as they began forming families, new demands were placed on these temples. The Ganesh Temple began placing emphasis on youth services in response to first generation parents' concerns about how to raise and educate their American-born children as Hindu. The temple soon began organizing education-oriented activities, such as 'Sunday schools' and language classes, geared towards American-born Indian youth.

In more recent years, the temple has expanded into a range of other activities including music classes, adult language classes, and even SAT preparation classes.

Through such activities, many American Hindu temples have expanded significantly beyond their origins as devotional and congregational sites, becoming more 57 community-oriented organizations with a broadening scope. The HTSNA, for one, has in recent years attempted to establish itself as more of a public-outreach organization/network, and as gatekeeper of Hinduism’s public image. They have done so with an increasing amount of success and recognition. Its growing public profile was perhaps most clearly demonstrated when current Temple Society president, Uma Mysorekar, appeared on Comedy Central's popular political satire show, The Colbert Report, to talk about Hinduism in a joke segment about different religious options for then-presidential hopeful Barrack Obama. 1 regularly visited the Ganesh temple in Flushing during the course of my research, often hearing its attendees and volunteers emphasize the social and public role that American temples strive for, and have gradually adopted, over the years. However the HTSNA, and the Ganesh temple in particular, have also been met with criticism, both external and internal, due to the occasional crossing of some of their community outreach activities and involvements into more overtly political terrain (see Chapter

3)-7

Beyond temple construction, there were other organized Hindu forms developing among the first generation of post-65 immigrants. In 1970, the Vishwa

Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA) was incorporated in the state of New York, alongside the establishment of VHPA branches in the U.K., Canada, Singapore, and elsewhere. Aside from the Arya Samaj, the VHP was one of the first Hindu 58 organizations in India to focus specifically on Hindus living abroad as part of their project of Hindu unification. However, the VHPA did not, and given the rather different social context, could not, simply mirror the VHP in practice or in discourse.

While the VHP strove for a unified and codified Hinduism in India through reconversion projects and dharma sansads (religious parliaments], the VHPA’s central concerns paralleled those of early temple organizing.8 From the outset, the

VHPA focused on the question of cultural preservation and transmission, with particular attention paid to the emerging second-generation of American-born

Indian youth. By the VHPA's own official account:

A great motivating factor for launching VHPA and many of its programs was to bring the Hindu immigrant community together and to address many difficult issues facing the community as it started to settle down in a largely unknown land. Bal Vihar programs were offered to provide succor and support to families that were searching for ways to impart Hindu values to their growing children. Towards this end, a Children's Book Store was started in New Hampshire and lecture tour programs were started to share the knowledge of Hindu heritage with the community at large. And, hugely popular Hindu Heritage Youth camps were started in the late seventies, the first being in Rhode Island.9

The VHPA youth camps soon became one of its main activities. In a similar way, the

Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS] was also founded in the U.S. based on practical and organizational concerns that differed from its analog organization, the RSS, in 59

India. While the RSS in India was organized around the practice of the shakha, the paramilitary-style youth camp that promoted physical, spiritual, and ideological training, the HSS in the U.S., through the constraints posed by a very different social context, recreated this practice only in partial form. The HSS version of the shakha was held weekly rather than daily, calisthenics and physical drilling were kept at a minimum, and paramilitary aspects such as weapons training, formation marching, and uniforms were dropped altogether (Rajagopal 2001).

The aims of the VHPA and the HSS in their early days were thus shaped by the immediate concerns of the post-65 migration influx, in a similar ways as the early umbrella organizations and temple building project. They maintained common preoccupation with cultural transmission and the fate of the next generation - indeed, familiar narratives among diasporas of all sorts, Hindu, Indian, or otherwise.

The VHPA and HSS filled in for what the temples were perhaps initially unable to do: while building temples worked for the interests of the first generation migrants, there was no guarantee of youth attending these temples or of what they would take from it. The VHPA and HSS in this way take on a rather different shape and set of goals than their counterparts (the VHP and RSS) in India.10

Many studies in recent decades have, in their own way, centered on the same question of cultural transmission in diaspora, noting religion in general as a strong factor of ongoing significance in the lives of the South Asian diaspora of all 60 generations (Joshi 2006; Stepick 2005). In terms of Hinduism in particular, some accounts have focused on issues of cultural and religious adaptation, often in private spaces such as the home (Leonard 1997; Williams 1988:42-47), but also the temple

(Dempsey 2006; Narayanan 2006; Waghorne 2004), and in organized sampradayas such as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) and the

Swaminarayan movement (Bryant & Ekstrand 2004; Eck 2001:229; Williams 1984).

Hinduism has commonly been described as a particular mode of social identity among diaspora populations. Moreover, accounts of Hinduism's post-WWII movements abroad often describe its diasporic forms as re-negotiated and re­ interpreted into flattened, simplified, or homogenous renderings of Hinduism as a religious identity category (e.g., Leonard 1997:122-123, 2006). Narayanan

(2006:244) has suggested that a "generic" Hinduism develops through temples that are required to cater to the diverse range of regionally distinct Hindu devotional practices brought together in diaspora populations. In this way, temple-building projects such as those described above have had a significant impact in reshaping an

American Hinduism. Some have described a generalizing and formalizing trend as the "protestantization” of Hinduism in America (Bauman & Saunders 2009:122).

Others have suggested that Hinduism's diasporic generalization as a social identity becomes something more akin to "ethnicity”, as it may or may not remain a religious or devotional idiom (Vertovec 2000:106-7; Warrier 2008; Williams 2007).11 Part of 61 this rendering of Hinduism abroad also comes through its organized forms. Vertovec

(2000) has suggested that organized forms of Hinduism in diaspora often become less a "popular Hinduism,” the Hinduism of personal practice, and more of an

"official Hinduism," Hinduism in socially and practically codified forms. Of the latter, he suggests that Hinduism becomes universalizing and "ecumenical", the term

Vertovec gives to the blanket diasporic Hinduism that bundles regionally diverse

Hinduisms into one simplified unity.

Vertovec's "ecumenical Hinduism" seems to describe the early forms of the

VHPA and HSS, as well as the early temple organizing. The concerns of many early temples, the VHPA, HSS, and the AIA and FIA (though these latter two to a slightly lesser degree), commonly contributed to, or at least effectively promoted, Hinduism as a social identity, often in simplified form. However, their common concern was less with outward public representation, and more with a community-focused cultural transmission.12 With the VHPA's youth camps and temple Sunday schools, the articulation of Hinduism as a social identity was not necessarily a political one mobilized to any public end. The character of these different early organized Hindu forms effectively seem to demonstrate one of secularization theory's core premise about religion’s retreat into private life, in this case the private realm of either the household or the inward orientation of the idea of the "community". 62

Public Hinduism and American Hindutva in the 1990s

If American Hinduism's early organized forms generally veered inwards, it is by the late 1980s and early 1990s when some begin to develop more of a public and political orientation. The VHPA and HSS at this time expanded beyond their original founding chapters in New York and New Jersey into multiple chapters across the country, covering almost every state, sometimes with multiple chapters within a state. Both groups also gained official status as registered 501(c)3 non-profit organizations. Their overall growth coincides with sustained migration from the

Indian subcontinent in the 1990s, much of which was related to the boom in software engineering and information technology industries that brought many

"skilled" South Asians workers to the U.S. on increased, and rapidly filling, American

H-1B visa quotas.

The expansion of their public activity and profile also happens alongside the heightened mobilization of the sangh parivar network in India. As noted in the previous chapter, the BJP emerged in the 1980s as the official form (i.e., political party) of a Hindu Indian state-building project. The BJP's campaigns for seats in the

Lok Sabha had a global aspect, calling for support from the diaspora through overseas organizations like the VHPA and HSS. For instance, the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign by the VHP, RSS, and BJP for a Ram temple at Ayodhya reached out to

American Hindus through a transnational shila puja, rites of consecration to bless the bricks and building materials for the temple. Brick consecration became a 63 significant ritual component of the Ram temple campaign in India, as mobile VHP units toured parts of rural India to have bricks consecrated by various village leaders (Hansen 1999:161). The VHP in India sought brick consecration sponsorship from diaspora groups and individuals, garnering a large number of contributions from private donors in the U.S. and the U.K. In the U.S., 31 cities are reported to have contributed consecrated bricks for a Ram temple at Ayodhya

(Rajagopal 2000:474).

Economic links were also part of their expansion. BJP governments of the late

1990s took many efforts to reach out to Non-Resident Indian (NRI) populations, particularly American-based NRIs, targeting them as sources of potential capital to be reinvested into India. In the wake of the BJP-led government's nuclear missile testing in 1998, India was rebuked economically through sanctions imposed by the

U.S., and the cancellation of selected foreign aid contributions from Japan, Canada, and Germany, among others. This prompted the Indian government to appeal directly to its overseas populations through the "Resurgent India Bonds” program in order to compensate for funding lost from international sources (Rajagopal

2000:487-8). The bonds were advertised as a way for NRIs to contribute to Indian self-sufficiency and national autonomy. The BJP-led government sought to demonstrate that if the world backed away, it could maintain strength and independence (Rajagopal 2000:488)—the irony of maintaining independence 64 through capital sent from abroad notwithstanding. VHPA and HSS activity expanded further in tandem with sangh parivar campaigns in India through a number of other financial connections. By the late 1990s, numerous reports by anti-Hindutva activists and academics in the U.S. surfaced documenting how VHPA-linked welfare organizations channeled funds back to particular social and educational programs overseen by the VHP and RSS in India (see below). The coordination between the

BJP’s mobilizations and the diaspora became formalized with the formation of the

Overseas Friends of the BJP (OFBJP) in 1991 in New York. The group, formed by several VHPA and HSS members, sought to generate support for the BJP abroad through demonstrations, conferences and panels on a range of Indian political issues, and hosting American visits by BJP politicians.13 The growth of the VHPA and the HSS, and their emerging public and political activity at this time, is thus significantly related to concurrent political developments in India.

Some key shifts seen in the expansion of HSS, VHPA, and OFBJP activity in the

1990s are then: (a) a shift from the work of umbrella organizations such as the AIA and FIA in the 1970s and 1980s from a generalized 'Indian' orientation to a 'Hindu' orientation; and (b) a move towards American mobilizations explicitly connected to a Hindu Indian state-building project. The politicization of Hinduism in the 1990s can thus be seen as part of an Indian trans/nationalist political project with its sights set abroad, rather than on the American context and Hindus therein (as was 65 the concern of the early VHPA and HSS in the 1970s and early 1980s). However, the structural expansion of the VHPA and HSS in the 1990s also point in some other directions, notably with the formation of new subsidiary organizations and spin-off projects such as American Hindus Against Defamation (AHAD) and the national

Hindu Students Councils (HSCs).

American Hindus Against Defamation (AHAD)

In early 1997, a message of alarm appeared on the VHPA's governing council listserv (VHPA-GC). The mailing list had been in operation for only a short period of time and was one of the first fronts of an expanding electronic/virtual infrastructure used by American Hindu organizations. Similar mailing lists had been set up by the

HSS and other organizations, largely for organizing purposes, allowing personnel across different cities and states to maintain regular contact. More significantly, use of these lists allowed for both an accelerated circulation of information, and its intensified scrutiny.

In this case, the alarmed message concerned the use of images of Ganesh as part of the decor in some of the rides at the Disneyland amusement park in

California. One ride featuring Ganesh went by the name "Jungle Cruise"; another was based upon the theme of the popular Hollywood film character Indiana Jones. In the latter case, while the notorious caricature of Kali devotees as murderous slave- drivers in the film Indiana Jones and the Temple o f Doom (1984) had already become 66 a known source of offense and controversy, the exact nature of the offense around these appearances of Ganesh at Disneyland was not as clear. In part, it involved concerns over the misuse of the deity's image, with its association with entertainment and amusement regarded as compromising. The article from the monthly American magazine Hinduism Today that first alerted the VHPA governing council circles about the issue itself represented the controversy ambivalently, noting mixed reactions from a number of Hindus about the ride’s use of the Ganesh statue. It even reported some who "actually liked seeing Him there [sic]."14 The

VHPA governing council, however, did not feel so ambivalent about the matter. They were clearly offended by this use of the deity’s image, and their offense circulated rapidly across virtual channels. The VHPA mobilized an organized response that included a letter-writing campaign and petition directed at Disney requesting the image be removed. They even expressed interest in pursuing legal action. The letter campaign and petition were carried through to no avail. The legal path was never pursued.

The e-organizing and e-discoufse initiated by the Ganesh Disneyland controversy, and its virtual amplification, launched one of the VHPA's main initiatives of their 1990s expansion: Hindu anti-defamation mobilizations. Within a couple months, a handful of VHPA members formed American Hindus Against

Defamation (AHAD), a body to monitor American popular media for profane and 67 offensive representations of Hinduism. Their first official campaign following the

Disneyland controversy targeted Sony/Columbia music publishers for an album released in April 1997 by American rock band Aerosmith depicting a stylized image of Krishna on the cover. AHAD would again proceed with a letter-writing and phone call campaign directed at Sony, widely covered in local Indian newspapers and mainstream American papers, demanding both an apology and a removal of the offending image. Both the apology and removal were eventually received. Not all were satisfied by the verbal apology however, and some began pushing for a written public apology to appear in Indian and American newspapers. Even more ambitious mobilizing efforts were suggested, including one plan by a VHPA-GC participant calling to mobilize prominent Indian singers such as Lata Mangeshkar to publicly reprimand Sony:

Here is what you do .. get the copy of the picture printed on the cover and original ISKON picture [of Krishna] with color laser copiers. Write a letter addressed to all prominent Hindu singers in India and give them proof how Sony insulted Hindu sentiments and appeal to Indian singer's Hinduness to ask for a boycott by them of Sony. If not we should appeal that atleast they should double their fees when dealing with Columbia/Sony. You approach the singers thru Mangeshkars, you may /just may be will succeed [sic].15

The style of the listerv post gives a sense of the off-the-cuff thinking and articulation of this particular strategy, which ultimately was never followed through. However, 68 across the late 1990s, AHAD would initiate a number of other mobilizations with increasing success and attention: 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 later, the appearance of deities on clothing items sold by American Eagle Outfitters and others, have all been the targets of anti-defamation mobilizations. What is notable in the AHAD campaigns of the 1990s is a clear turn towards mobilizations of Hinduism that were publicly oriented (i.e., targeting extra-community actors and addressing a broader public audience] and politically articulated (i.e., fashioning jurisdictional claim over the offending images and their authorized use).

Hindu Students Council (HSC)

The Hindu Students Council (HSC) also formed as an offshoot of the VHPA, though slightly earlier than AHAD. Extending the concerns with the adjustment and enculturation of American Hindu youth that had long preoccupied the post-65 immigrant community, the HSC formed in 1990 as an organized attempt to reach

American Hindu youth through the establishment of local Hindu student groups across American college and university campuses. These HSCs sought to build social spaces for Hindu students at American universities in which they could practice and cultivate being Hindu. They staged a variety of activities ranging from Gita study groups to Diwali celebrations. At this level, the HSCs positioned themselves as 69 primarily social, rather than overtly political. However, by the late 1990s, the HSC became the target of considerable scrutiny and criticism. Many critics on the left, mainly academics, students, and activists, voiced concerns that the HSC was not as politically divested as it might have seemed. A number of these critics organized the

Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (CSFH), a project aimed at exposing what they saw as growing connections between American Hindu organizations and sangh parivar mobilizations in India. The CSFH focused a great deal of attention on the HSC in particular, with their research producing two reports, Lying Religiously (2007) and

Unmistakably Sangh (2008), detailing numerous ideological and operational links between the HSC and the VHPA. From this, the CSFH concluded that the HSC harbored a hidden political agenda and purpose. The CSFH argued in its reports that the HSC, at one level, attempts to promote a particular discourse of Hindutva involving a selectively Brahmin- ized, upper caste understanding of Hindu identity.

At a more instrumental level, the HSC is said to function as a key component of a larger sangh parivar political machine - for example, in providing support for the

Ayodhya temple campaign in the early 1990s (CSFH 2007:7). The CSFH suggests the

HSC, over time, deepened its involvement through event coordination with the

VHPA and HSS and, more notably, as a hub of the sangh parivar’s rapidly developing virtual online infrastructure (CSFH 2008:8-10). 70

The key question raised concerns the HSC's claim of being a simple cultural organization that operates independently of any other direction or influence. The

HSC acknowledges its foundational ties to the VHPA, but claims full legal and operational autonomy from its parent organization since 1993. The CSFH questions this claim by noting the HSC's numerous ongoing associations with the VHPA and

HSS, both official and unofficial, to suggest the HSC is, in fact, a fully operating part of the larger sangh parivar network.16 The CSFH’s anxieties were thus about something larger of which the HSC was but a symptom: the VHPA, HSS, the VHP and RSS in

India, and ultimately Hindutva, as the ideological basis animating the HSC's work and activities. With the CSFH’s reports came a larger movement of American-based anti-Hindutva activism. Public intellectuals such as Angana Chatterji, an anthropologist at the California Institute for Integral Studies, Biju Mathew, economics instructor at Rider University and noted activist organizer, and Vijay

Prashad, have raised many criticisms focused on Hindutva's transnational links to the U.S. involving both ideological continuities as well as financial connections to some American-based charity organizations that were said to be funding VHP projects in India (see also Sabrang 2002). A network of groups critical of these suggested connections emerged in the U.S., including the Friends of South Asia

(FOSA), Forum of Indian Leftists Coalition Against Genocide, Dalit Solidarity, and the

Indian Muslim Council USA. The greatest impacts seem to have come from the aforementioned reports by the CFSH on the HSC, which have prompted internal dialogue among local HSCs who were unaware of the national HSC's foundational association with the VHPA, becoming wary of its political implications.17 This, in turn, has led to the CSFH refining its critiques in subsequent reports by qualifying the differences between local HSCs and the central national HSC, rather than collapsing them.

At the same time, larger critiques have been leveled at the critics. Many of these groups critical of Hindutva have been met with counter-criticism and backlash from a range of American Hindu organizations. Extended responses to the CSFH reports have been issued by the group Friends of India and by the National HSC, arguing that alleged connections to the VHP/RSS in India are either non-existent or insignificant. The HSC has denied that it has any operational ties to the VHP/VHPA, and maintains that its autonomy is proven by its independent registered status.18

Some responses have also attempted to turn guilt-by-association arguments back onto the CSFH by denouncing it as "communist” and thus necessarily linked to its own history of violence.19 Elsewhere, arguments against American critics of

Hindutva have taken more extreme forms, ranging from blunt accusations of being

"Khmer Rouge," to Christian (or “Xtian" in the derisive abbreviated slang of some hardline Hindu right blogs), to "South Asian bleeding hearts.”20 Many outspoken critics of Hindutva appear on the "blacklist" of the American Hindu youth group 72

Hindu Unity, said by some to be an American wing of the militant Bajrang Dal.

Particular scorn has been placed upon Vijay Prashad, whose entry on the blacklist features his photograph with devil horns digitally superimposed on his forehead.21

That many academics have been involved in such criticisms of Hindutva is, at least in part, related to a growing suspicion, and often antagonism, directed at academics by many American Hindu activists. This suspicion is something I myself encountered as an academic researcher trying to make contact with public and political Hindu groups. 1 think, for example, of my encounter with a middle-aged entrepreneur from Texas, Sanjay, while attending an annual Hindu activist conference in Chicago (described further in Chapter 4). Sanjay immediately rebuffed my attempt to introduce myself as a researcher interested in looking at public and political Hinduism in the U.S. by sarcastically interjecting, "So, what’s your angle?”

As I attempted to explain that 1 did not intend to have a particular "angle," he replied with lament about how academics, naming "anthropologists" in particular, "have become dangerous to India." "They just try to interfere with the lives of American

Hindus," he complained, while telling me of his frustration with the campaign involving both American- and Canadian-based academics lobbying the U.S. to deny a visa to Narendra Modi, the infamous BJP Chief Minister of Gujarat, for a planned visit to New Jersey in 2005 to speak at a meeting of the Asian American Hotel Owners

Association. In his estimation, Modi was simply a "business man coming to talk to 73 his community," thwarted by "anthropologists [who] rabidly hate India.”

"Anthropologists" became the shorthand for academics seeking to expose American

Hindu organizations as nefariously fundamentalist. He objected to what he saw as the academic and political imposition of a particular narrative, or "angle,” onto

American Hindus, which, short of actually naming this narrative as focused on

Hindutva and its suite of negative connotations, was certainly gesturing towards it.

While these concerns indicate a culture of suspicion and a certain feeling of persecution, they also point towards a wall that anti-Hindutva activism seems to be running up against these days. American Hindu activists such as Sanjay have become concerned with being tarred by the brush of guilt-by-association (with

Hindutva] - a tension amplified in the debates over the CSFH reports on the HSC, and continued in the critical responses in the Sonal Shah controversy (see Chapter

1). The defensiveness of Shah and the preemptive defensiveness I heard from

Sanjay, were reactions to the anxious scrutiny over whether a person/group of concern was associated with, and thus whether it was, or was not, identifiable as

"Hindutva."

Transnational Hindutva

The uneasy disavowals of Hindutva by Sanjay, and indeed by Sonal Shah in the previous chapter, notwithstanding, a number of accounts have described a transnational expansion of Hindutva during the 1990s, with success abroad in 74 promoting schematized reifications of identity that thrive in accordance with the demands of multiculturalism (Jaffrelot & Therwath 2007; Kurien 2004, 2007a; Lai

1999, 2003b; Matthew & Prashad 2000; Nussbaum 2007; Rajagopal 1997, 2000,

2001; van der Veer 1994).22 Hindutva has often been seen as functionally providing precisely the kind of simplified renderings of culture, community, and identity that immigrants are said to need to navigate the marginalizing terrain of their new homes and to become viable multicultural subjects.23 Kurien (2004, 2007a) has described the development of a distinctly "American Hinduism" in response to the demands of American multiculturalist discourse. Kurien's "American Hinduism" refers to a stylized, simplified Hinduism that operates both in private and, increasingly, in public to help American Hindus navigate a multicultural terrain in which discrete and easy difference is expected. Hindutva in America is seen here not just as an "ecumenical" Hinduism, in Vertovec’s (2000) terms, but the particular kind of ecumenicalism that is "universalizing" rather than pluralist (see Warrier

2008). However, Kurien's "American Hinduism” is not just any simplified identity, but one whose terms are increasingly shaped from the ideological mold of Hindutva.

While multiculturalism provides the syntax for Hindus to situate themselves,

Hindutva provides the vocabulary. Vijay Prashad (2000) suggests there are political consequences when a highly simplified "Yankee Hindutva" not only constructs a simplistic homogenized rendering of Hindu identity, but also creates a myopic 75 political perspective fixated on the Indian political context at the expense of local

American political concerns (e.g., class, labour, and gender issues).

Scholars have also pointed to experiences of racism as an explanation for

Hindutva’s appeal abroad (Mazumdar 1989, 2003; Prashad 2000; Rajagopal 2000,

2001). Hindutva abroad has been described as an ideological response to racism, wherein its stylized constructions of identity and history serve to counteract the marginalizing experience of South Asians as ethnic and religious minorities in the

U.S. The "Yankee Hindutva" described by Prashad, however, also mimes the constructed totalities and hierarchies of the racism it attempts to counter (Matthew

& Prashad 2000; Mazumdar 1989, 2003; Prashad 2000). Multiculturalism and racism thus significantly impact upon the experiences of South Asian immigrants in the American context, and shape the notions of ethno-religious identity and community generated thereby. However, the ways in which multiculturalism and racism have been used to explain the appeal of Hindutva abroad have also relied on the rendering of Hindutva as an ideological form in the classical sense (see Chapter

1). Much like how Appadurai (2006) has described Hindutva as providing ideological certainty in modern India (see Chapter 1), Hindutva abroad is similarly seen as providing certainty in the midst of uncertainty. It is seen as providing a stylized and simplified Hindu identity for Indian immigrants abroad as a functional response to the demands of their context. Such explanations for Hindutva abroad 76 have also then tended to assume a rather straightforward relationship between the politicization of Hinduism in America and in India, wherein a population in diaspora is seen as being in need of a nationalist discourse exported from its homeland.

Multiculturalism and racism abroad have thus been observed as accommodating

Hindtuva's syndicated Hinduism, its implied ideological certainty, and its mobilization of a Hindu Indian state-building project built thereupon.

Disavowing Hindutva: American Hindu activism beyond the 1990s

What the academic accounts of Hindutva abroad in the 1990s observe is an emergent Hindu transnationalism linking diaspora organizations with Indian ones, as a Hindu Indian state-building project, and its ideological constructs, are mobilized towards minority communities navigating the maze of multiculturalism. And indeed, the expansion of the VHPA and HSS through the OFBjP and HSC in particular shaped a public and political Hinduism of a sort not seen before in the American context.

The OFBJP's role in mobilizing Hindu nationalism among American Hindus is evident enough. The CSFH's research has argued the HSCs as also part of a larger transnational political infrastructure, though in less straightforward ways that have grown increasingly complicated.24 In any case, these are developments that are clearly transnational insofar as they relate quite directly to Hindu nationalist politics in India of the 1990s. 77

AHAD, however, represents a somewhat different politicization of American

Hinduism. AHAD is not as easily connected to an Indian state-building project in the way that the OFBJP is, and the HSC was at one point. While AHAD's anti-defamation interests certainly did have some orientation to the Indian context - recall, for instance, the anecdote of the VHPA-GC list call to mobilize musicians in India against

Sony/BMG - its primary concerns focused more centrally on outward public representations of Hinduism in the American context. A familiar narrative of persecution is recast here with a new locus of threat: Hindus are in danger, but now under the threat of commercial American media and popular culture. However,

AHAD's anti-defamation actions in the 1990s were concerned not just with representation in general, but the "proper" representation of deities and symbols, a concern that I will later suggest undergoes further transformation in the American

Hindu activism of more recent years (see Chapters 4 & 5).

The developments outlined in this chapter offer a discursive and historical context. However, they are not intended to pose as the origin and cause of a contemporary American Hindu activism that is serially caused thereby. The context described in this chapter, of the early rise of generic community organizations, to temple building and Hindu organizations, to the transnational reach of the OFBJP, as well as the representational concerns of the VHPA and HSCs, all suggest a process of shifting social, organizational, and public forms, rather than an immutable American 78

Hindu "community" that exists and organizes necessarily as such. But the context described here also raises some of the generative terms and forces that are tied up with the emergence of different trajectories of American Hindu activism today. A key question emerges as to where and how the idea Hindutva figures into the politicization of Hinduism in the U.S. today. The expansion of the VHPA and HSS during the 1990s put Hindutva on the map in the American context; the anxious responses from academics and critical activists have kept Hindutva at the center of discussions on Hinduism's public and political presence in the U.S. My own observations have noted that concerns with a Hindu Indian state-building project certainly still exist among American Hindus, though perhaps ambivalently, and sometimes emerging unexpectedly. One case that 1 found particularly striking involved a display at the 2008 India Day parade in Manhattan, the flagship event of the FIA, mentioned earlier in the chapter. The India Day parade is now a major event in New York City, drawing crowds in the thousands, and parading displays in the dozens, many of which feature music and entertainers, along with advertising floats, and floats representing social service and regional/linguistic organizations. The

2008 parade, however, featured a display put on by a Massachusetts-based organization focused on Kashmir - i.e., advocating for its full incorporation into the

Indian state, and highlighting the persecution of Kashmiri Hindus at the hands of

Islamic separatists, both common concerns in much contemporary Hindu nationalism. Their parade display featured twenty or so members carrying signs displaying uncontextualized images of violence and injured bodies accompanied by snippets of slogans denouncing terrorism. This display was led by a man dressed in costume as a Kashmiri Hindu pandit, accompanied by a bandana-masked man representing a generic 'terrorist' brandishing a neon green plastic water pistol pointed to the pandit’s head. This distilled representation of the plight of Kashmiri

Hindus was a striking display, given how it stuck out thematically from the rest of the parade displays. And yet it nonetheless got little rise out of the audience, who seemed to reserve their cheers for the loud sound systems blasting popular Hindi film songs from the numerous corporate floats. The FIA's parade in previous years has, moreover, been the source of controversy over what displays it has allowed and not allowed: while the OFBJP has often participated, groups such as the South Asian

Lesbian and Gay Association (SALGA) have, in previous years, been prohibited

(Maira 2000:144). These concerns thus signal how such social spaces can come laced with the sorts of Hindu nationalist political projects that have made CSFH and other critics anxious.

Yet, questions also now emerge about whether Hindutva remains as centrally relevant to the political interests of American Hindus in the way that it appeared to in the 1990s. There are numerous indicators prompting such questions. First of all, there is a backdrop of considerable internal political struggle and instability in the VHP, RSS, and sangh parivar network within India. The mounting tensions between the BJP and RSS by the late 1990s, and the BJP’s sustained political losses in the

2004 and 2008 federal elections, have altered the public and political position that the sangh parivar had established in the previous decade. It remains unclear exactly how and whether these developments in the Indian context specifically bear on the

American context, though there are hints of parallel developments. The OFBJP, for instance, have more or less ceased using the term "Hindutva" publicly in their literature in a way that seems to parallel how the BJP in India have eased off using

Hindutva as an explicit campaign platform. A comparison between the OFBJP’s websites between 2004 and 2008 shows a conspicuous excising of references to

Hindutva from text that otherwise appears simply cut-and-pasted from the old site to the new site.25 This shift comes as the OFBJP maintains active ties with BJP operations in India today, with current OFBJP members traveling back to India to volunteer in on-the-ground BJP campaigning.26

But just as the sangh parivar has changed shape in India since the 1990s, so too have the HSS and VHPA in the U.S. These two organizations, so often seen as the main agents of Hindutva's American expansion, are presently not as publically and politically active as they once were in the 1990s. Both organizations certainly remain large and active, but beyond the 1990s they have mostly returned to community-oriented activities, such as their respective youth camps that began in 81 their earlier days. The VHPA in the last few years have become particularly interested in tying themselves into the lives of American Hindus through American temples. Since 2005 the organization has convened the annual Hindu Mandir

Executive Council (HMEC) meetings, in which American temple administrators are brought together to coordinate their operations and agendas.

The VHPA and HSS both continue to downplay associations with the VHP and

RSS in India by asserting their independent legal status in the U.S. as registered

501(c)3 non-profit organizations. They position themselves as outside the purview of Hindutva and of the Indian state. This separation is, moreover, an emerging concern commonly voiced by a number of American Hindu activists with whom I have spoken. For Rajiv Malhotra, director of the Infinity Foundation and likely the most well-known and outspoken public American Hindu voice, Hindutva has been a default accusation that he continually encounters with frustration. When 1 first met

Rajiv Malhotra early on in the course of my research, he expressed a disdain for academic and journalistic accounts of Hindutva in America that for him presupposed Hinduism as a "problem.” For Malhotra, the continued preoccupation was part of a larger American trajectory that rendered Hindus in America as uncivilized 'others.' As we sat down for an interview at his suburban New Jersey home, he expressed general misgivings about the BJP, both in India and abroad, which contrasts with the extent to which his involvement in numerous public 82 controversies over the last ten years have often landed him and his organization with the label of "Hindutva.” His foundation and personal work have been largely concerned with the politics of representation, and oriented towards public representations of Hinduism with a particular focus on American academia and knowledge production (see Chapter 5).

I heard similar thoughts from Dr. Sachin Thakur, a senior Hindu activist currently involved with a number of political Hindu initiatives, including a couple of rapidly-growing organizations focused on education and anti-defamation since the early 2000s. He had described to me a strong concern with the promotion of

Hinduism and Hindu interests in America, though through a rather different story as to how he came to these concerns. He described to me his initial turn towards politicized community organizing in the late 1980s coming in response to the

"Dotbusters” scare that hit Jersey City in 1987. The Dotbusters was the name assumed by a local youth gang who targeted and carried out a rash of violent assaults on Indian residents, whom they visually shorthanded by the mark of the bindi, or ornamental ‘dot,’ worn on the forehead by many Hindu women. These bouts of racial violence shocked many of the post-65 generation who had made their

U.S. settlement permanent. For this activist, who came to the U.S. for graduate studies in the late 1960s and was working in the private sector by the 1980s, the

Dotbuster violence shocked him out of his belief that Indian immigrants such as 83 himself were regarded as respectable by the white American majority they lived amongst. He soon became involved with a local chapter of the Indian American

Forum for Political Education (IAFPE), an organization formed in Washington to encourage political awareness and involvement among America's Indian immigrant population. The IAFPE, however, was not an ethnic-specific organization; rather, as

Dr. Thakur had stressed to me, it took a broad-based pan-Asian approach that included both South Asian and East Asian immigrants at the time of his involvement.

He saw the Dotbusters attacks as something of concern to all racialized visible minorities, and thus felt his social and political response to it should be inclusive.

Having known of Dr. Thakur prior to this meeting only through his more recent Hindu-specific organizing, I had asked him why, and when, his interests turned towards Hinduism and Hindus more specifically. He pointed to the rise of the controversies over representations of Hinduism in American academia in the late

1990s as a key turning point for him. The works of American academics such as

Wendy Doniger, Paul Courtright, and Jeff Kripal that became embroiled in controversy at this time signaled to him a surge in activity that he saw as of significant detriment to Hindus, and requiring a Hindu-specific response. The rise of controversies and conflicts between American Hindus and American academia has come to form one of the most substantial trajectories of American Hindu activism beyond the 1990s (see Chapter 5), and one in which both Malhotra and Dr. Thakur 84 became involved.

While this trajectory of American Hindu activism will be taken up in more detail in Chapter 5, it is raised here to suggest the possibility of mobilizations that do not so easily fit the mold of Hindutva. In pinpointing controversial academic representations of Hinduism as a key factor shaping his interests in Hindu identity politics, Dr. Thakur vented frustrated complaints about how public and academic opposition to the California textbook controversy of the early 2000s, a case in which a handful of American Hindu organizations took the California State Board of

Education to court in seeking changes to representations of Hinduism found in public school textbooks, ended up steeped in accusations of Hindutva.27 "All they want to talk about is Hindutva!" he complained of these critics. He maintained that

Hindutva should not be associated with the grievances of these American Hindus against offending textbook and academic representations.

Both Malhotra and Thakur expressed particular disavowals of Hindutva as responses to the highly negative public stigma with which Hindutva, both in India and the U.S., has become associated. They, along with many others, have come to see the accumulation of Hindutva's negative associations as a liability to the mobilization of American Hinduism’s public and political interests. This seems more broadly signaled by how the current websites of many local HSCs often carefully make official disclaimers stating their organizational, operational, and sometimes 85 even ideological, autonomy to preemptively disavow any connection to the VHP,

VHPA, or Hindutva in general. For instance, the HSC at the University of Michigan officially describes itself as "an independent, non-affiliated organization." A similar disavowing disclaimer is seen on the website of the Hindu American Foundation

(H AF), one of the largest public Hindu activist organizations in the U.S. today (see

Chapter 4), who state in the "Who We Are” section of their website that they are

"not affiliated with any religious or political organizations or entities."28 It may be the case that such disavowals are not to be taken transparently or at face value. As described earlier, this has been the CSFH's continuing concern with the HSC and their claimed dissociation from the VHPA, not to mention the VHPA’s claims of dissociation from the VHP in India.29 The CSFH suggests these claims are rhetorical window-dressing masking hidden interests and operations. At the same time, they have also noted how numerous local HSCs have come to dissociate themselves from the national HSC out of concern with possible VHPA links that they did not know about or did not wish to be involved with. The fact that there are such disavowals is still of significance, even if only rhetorically so, though I do not believe the disavowals by Malhotra, Thakur, the HSCs, or even Sonal Shah for that matter, can or should be dismissed as simply rhetorical.

Such disavowals thus prompt the question of what other lines of American

Hindu activism exist beyond the VHPA and HSS, VHP and RSS, beyond conventional 86

“Hindutva”. They thus suggest the possibility of politicizations of Hinduism in the

American context that might not necessarily be read simply as the work of Indian sangh parivar networks manipulating the diaspora ideologically and operationally.

The chapters to follow describe how American Hinduism's organized public and political voices produce mobilizations in a multiplying set of trajectories, spinning complex and often contradictory political projects. The relationship of these projects to Hindutva, despite the central place that Hindutva has come to occupy in how

American Hinduism has come to be understood, is not straightforward. 87

Chapter 3 - Claiming Hindu India

In November of 2008, a group of Hindu activists from across the United

States gathered at a hotel in suburban Chicago as part of an annual meeting and conference called the Human Empowerment Convention (HEC). This was the 6th

HEC event since its inaugural meeting in 2002. According to Koenraad Elst (2009), a prolific and controversial Indologist from Belgium, the HEC represents a unique organizing platform for American Hindus, one that "promotes a more thoughtful

Hindu activism than ever practiced by the Sangh Parivar.” Indeed, no overt references to Hindutva, the sangh parivar, or its conventional signifiers, were to be found here in the conference presentations or the program literature; at least not on the surface. The event's naming invoked a generic notion of "human empowerment," without reference to anything particular about Hindus and Hinduism. The program's "vision statement" describes its scope:

Humanity faces difficult challenges in the form of violence, terrorism, poverty, pollution, marginalization and depravity...The process of human empowerment seeks to reverse the equation between dogma and freedom. Through inquiry, and by making the welfare of the human the primary objective of reason, the root cause of violence and suffering may be identified and eliminated...The process of human empowerment stands on the twin 88

towers of humanism and pluralism and seeks to usher in a new Global Renaissance that would find enduring solutions to the challenges faced by humanity today.1

The event presents itself in a generic language of humanism.2 However, during a coffee break between sessions, when engaged in a conversation with one of the participants, a history professor from New Delhi who had come to speak at the conference, a different set of concerns emerged. He had just begun asking me about anthropology as another attendee joined the conversation. Upon learning that the history professor had come from Delhi, he quickly asked about the upcoming Indian federal elections. "How is the BJP looking now?" he asked. The professor from Delhi said the picture was not clear, but speculated that the BJP could be in a position to

"make up some ground" in the elections. The BJP has seen a string of defeats since the 2004 federal elections in which it lost control of the coalition governments it had formed and kept in power since 1998. It had more recently taken sharp losses in a number of state assembly elections in 2007. "This is an important election for the

BJP,” the other attendee reflected, adding that the threat faced by Hindus in India today is unlike ever before. A BJP victory was crucial: only this "will allow the kshatriyas to rise again," he emphasized. Before 1 had a chance to ask what exactly he envisioned as the role of kshatriyas, the warrior varna of the conventional four- 89 part Vedic caste system, the organizers began to usher everyone back into the meeting room for the next session.

While its outward focus was on "human empowerment," the sessions, and participants in general, were unmistakably concerned with Hinduism and a Hindu

Indian state. This moment signaled one of the ways in which a conventional Hindu nationalism continues to figure as an issue of concern for some American Hindus. In this chapter, I want to consider American Hindu activist concerns with Indian national security and the mobilization of a Hindu Indian state-building project through a detailed discussion of the 2008 HEC event, alongside another event, the annual Hindu Sangathan Divas, or Hindu Unity Day, held at the Ganesh temple in

Flushing, New York in the summer of 2008. However, I consider here the ways in which these American Hindu activist concerns with the Indian state do not necessarily appear in the terms of a straightforward, ideologically-bound Hindutva that is simply circulated or promoted. Rather, these sites reveal shifting, emergent, and ambivalent engagements with Hindutva, nationalism, security, and indeed with

"Hindu-ness" itself. Both these events become sites where concerns with a Hindu

Indian state, and the desire for its security, are uneasily and contingently articulated as they run into questions of what this is and how to secure it. 90

The Human Empowerment Convention (HEC)

The HEC was about both more and less than what its name suggested. The sessions themselves were grouped into streams, with each concurrent stream featuring panel sessions on different subtopics. Each day of the meeting also included a plenary address. While the topics of the different sessions varied, the content of the sessions often focused on Hindus, Hinduism, and the Indian state in specific, rather than the generic humanist theme otherwise presented. This was seen most evidently in streams on "strategic studies” and "public policy," and the explicit focus in the plenary talks on Indian national security, terrorism, and separatist movements in India. The HEC’s scope in practice was narrower than

"humans” in general (i.e., on Hindus specifically), as well as wider than simply

"empowerment” (i.e., in promoting a Hindu Indian state-building project).

The HEC’s introductory session, for instance, featured a representative from the Save Temples campaign, a group made up of participants from Texas, Chicago, and New Jersey. The representative, from Chicago and also the main local organizer for this HEC, told the audience of the threat posed by the current Congress government to Hindu temples in India. He described the Congress party as plotting to buy up Hindu temple properties in order to exercise control over them. This represented an unbalanced punishment of India’s Hindu majority, he maintained, claiming that the Congress government allows mosques and churches to run 91 independent of government administration. The temple issue was seen as a sign of a broader Hindu predicament in India under Congress rule. He spoke briefly about the group’s efforts to lobby the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh on temple protection from government administration, though not yet with any known results.

Another session on the second day of the meeting focused on the state of

Kerala in south India. The situation in Kerala was said to be dire. The presenter in this session described it as "India’s most de-Hinduized state," vulnerable to anti-

Hindu forces threatening Kerala itself, and then the Indian state as a whole. He spoke of Kerala's eroding Hinduism as partly due to a strong Christian and communist presence in the state, but also due to the presence of Islam. These are, of course, very familiar sources of threat featured in at least a century of Hindu nationalist discourse in India. What was striking about the invocation of these threats in this particular session was the work that went into their articulation. As the session on Kerala wound down, a discussion period was promptly initiated with a question shouted from the audience: "Who is the biggest threat to Kerala? The

Christians? Or the Muslims?" This question set off a melee of responses from the audience, with proclamations about the various threatening attributes of each. On the one hand, Muslims posed a threat by their rapid demographic expansion in the area, and by an active terrorism intent on simply destroying Hindus. Christians, on the other hand, threatened to wipe out Kerala's Hindus through forcible conversion. 92

As the audience argued back and forth on various versions of these characterizations of Muslim and Christian threats, the speaker mediated to offer a conclusion: "Muslims are the greatest short-term threat, but Christians are a greater long-term threat.” The audience seemed satisfied with this.

Similar discussions of anti-Hindu threat echoed throughout the meetings.

Outside of the scheduled sessions, conversations buzzed about the recent killing of

Swami Laxmanananda, a senior VHP organizer in Orissa who ran reconversion projects targeting Christians and adivasis. The details of the Swami’s death, still a fresh event at the time of the HEC, were steeped in rumour and speculation across both Indian and global media. No one was sure at first exactly what happened or who killed him. Christian missionaries, on the one hand, and Maoist insurgents, on the other, were variously blamed. Other sources suggested the less credible possibility that it was an inside job by the VHP in order to trigger and justify backlash attacks (which did occur). This rumour and speculation circulated among the HEC attendees and quickly transformed into certainty; not certainty over who exactly killed Swami Laxmananda, but certainty that it was a Maoist, a Christian, or some combination of the two. Conversations about the murder thus seemed much less about establishing a definite verdict, and more about reaffirming pre-existing anxieties about Christianity and communism. 93

However the gravest, though perhaps simultaneously least and most certain, threat voiced at these HEC sessions was that of terrorism. Terrorism was a topic surfacing in many of the meeting's sessions, though nowhere as sharply and dramatically as in the HEC's closing keynote address by Dr. Richard Benkin, former college instructor, occasional media correspondent, and self-described "scholar and human rights activist.”3 Benkin addressed the HEC crowd with a cautionary speech about the danger posed by terrorism today, with a particular focus on India, Israel, and the U.S. as those most under threat. The terrorist threat these states mutually face requires, he argued, a united front between the U.S., Israel, and India. He cited

Israel, India, and the U.S. as those democracies with the military strength that could, and for him should, wipe out terrorism. His proposed alliance got a rise out of the audience. Applause erupted as he described a recent Israeli spy satellite launched on an Indian rocket.

While his solution to global terrorism seemed clear, his articulation of the problem was less so. What exactly is the terrorism that so threatens? "Our enemies have a name - and we have to use that name: radical Islam," he began firmly, presenting his object of concern as not just "terrorism." Terrorism was “only a tactic,” he maintained. But as his talk progressed, terrorism expanded as a diffuse, multiply-located threat. He concluded his speech with a call for a broad anti­ terrorist fight against what he called the “red-green alliance," associating terrorism 94 now with communism (red) and Islam (green, the colour of the flag of Pakistan). The threatening Islam he described here expanded across Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh and others, seamlessly. And yet despite the expanded scope, and thus ambiguity, of the threat, his final response was resolute: terrorism was to be fought by an Indian-

Israeli-American military alliance with a "moral certainty" that gives "no quarter," he emphatically told the audience.

A marked sense of threat is invoked to urgently mobilize the control of a

Hindu Indian state. In the sessions described above, multiple sources of threat appear: the Congress Party, communism, Islam, Christianity, and terrorism are all cited as threats to Hindus and the Indian state. Hindu India’s threatening others thus assume multiple forms in a malleable and multi-faceted narrative of persecution.

Some are articulated as internal threats, i.e., threats to India within the state's own borders, echoing at least one part of Appadurai’s (2006) account of Hindutva's "fear of small numbers" (see Chapter 1). Other threats are external ones, with nearby geopolitical entities like Pakistan and Bangladesh cited as directly and indirectly impinging on the borders of the sovereign Indian state. This might qualify

Appadurai’s larger argument about Hindu nationalism: while a sharp binary might be imagined between self and other, what exactly constitutes that threatening

"other" is hardly singular or stable. An overriding sense of Hindu persecution is maintained through the malleability of its threatening "other." 95

The HEC's narratives of persecution thus emerge with an element of uncertainty. The aforementioned session on Kerala for instance featured, at least momentarily, a debate over the degree of threat represented by Christianity and by

Islam. The threats were not given or self-evident, but rather emerged with a twinge of uncertainty with which attendees grappled until finally settled by the mediating proclamation of the speaker. It is a moment where the narrative of persecution, and its ideological terms, is not simply expressed and communicated, but rather is emergent and under construction. Islam and Christianity are consolidated into a narrative of Hindu persecution before the audience’s eyes through uncertainty of how they threaten. Benkin's closing keynote similarly spoke of terrorist threats that were both malleable and uncertain. Terrorism emerged here as an abstract threat that mapped onto different forces (Islam and communism) and different locations both inside and outside the Indian subcontinent (Kashmir, Pakistan, Bangladesh,

Iran, etc.). This was a spectral and modular terrorism, invoking and attaching to different threats, fashioning a larger overarching threat with grandeur in its lack of specificity. Benkin's absolute measures did not, however, chafe with the vagaries of their moving terrorist target.

Amidst these threats, however, a deeper question lurked under the surface - not just questions about what, where, and how threats were endangering the Indian state, but also questions about the very thing presumed to be under threat: 96 questions of Hindu-ness itself. This emerged in a striking way in an afternoon session on the HEC's second day. The focus of this session was Arunachal Pradesh, a northeastern state that has often been a locus of concerns about Indian border security and decades of conflict between India and China. The state's border is shared with Tibet, and has been the subject of an ongoing dispute between China and India.

The presenter was a soft-spoken middle-aged man representing an organization called RlWatch, an affiliate of an independent Pennsylvania-based research group calling itself the International Center for Cultural Studies.4 He spoke in the evening to an audience of about 20 people, thinned out due to cascading scheduling problems that had, by the end of the day, pushed everything nearly two hours off schedule. The presenter began with a stylized description of the sites and sounds of Arunachal Pradesh, not unlike what one might expect from a promotional tourist ad for the place. He spoke glowingly of the state's ecological beauty and cultural riches. But this introduction to Arunachal Pradesh soon led into an account of numerous security threats to Hindus therein, making it a spot of vulnerability for the Indian state. Arunachal Pradesh, and the Hindus of this state, occupy a precarious position, he told the audience, facing a trio of threats. The instability of the India-China border was the result of a Chinese agenda to culturally and politically absorb Arunachal Pradesh, to be used an in-road for an imperialist- 97 communist Chinese expansion into India. Bangladesh was also described as a nearby threat, as the source of an influx of Muslim immigrants believed to be sneaking anti-Hindu terrorism into the state. Finally, he cited threats pressuring

Arunachal Pradesh from Assam and Nagaland to the south, both of which have active militant separatist movements. These separatist movements have historically been Maoist or socialist inspired, which positioned them here within a larger overarching communist threat to the Indian state. However, the presenter was even more preoccupied with the predominance of Christianity in Nagaland; Naga separatists were not only communist threats, but also Christian threats seeking to convert Arunachal Pradesh Hindus. He described a scenario in which Christian Naga separatists sought to annex Arunachal Pradesh as "an offering to Christ.”

A familiar constellation of threats was once again invoked: China,

Christianity, communism, Islam, Bangladesh, alongside the threat of the internal separatist movements of Assam and Nagaland. Yet, while this combination of forces threatened Hindus and the presumed sovereign unity of a Hindu Indian state, as the presentation on Arunachal Pradesh proceeded, just how the state's Hindus and

Hindu-ness were tied up with the Indian state began to unravel. While the RlWatch representative claimed Arunachal Pradesh politically as Indian, and religiously and culturally as Hindu, the region's complicated ethnic, religious, and linguistic constitution began complicating the presenter's claims. Arunachal Pradesh hosts a 98 complex mix of Tibetan and Burmese tribal populations, a range of languages and dialects, and colliding religious systems syncretizing Buddhist, Hindu, and various animistic/shamanistic cosmologies. The lines defining the ethno-religious-linguistic groups that make up the region are hardly clear or unambiguous.5

Part of the hardship for people from Arunachal Pradesh, the presenter told the audience, is that others often mistake them as "Chinese” by appearance. They are met with disbelief from other Indians if they are said to be Hindu because they look different. He claimed this confusion puts Arunachal Pradesh in a marginalized position, its Hindu-ness undermined in not being immediately recognized as Hindu.

The speaker paused and struggled for a term, before finally classifying the people of

Arunachal Pradesh as "Mongoloid.” This caused some confusion amongst the audience. "Is that the right word?" one audience member asked aloud, to which another affirmatively replied, "Yes, yes, they are the Mongoloid race,” which generated reassured and convinced nods from the audience.

Arunachal Pradesh's assumed essential Hindu-ness thus became marked by an ambiguity in which it was not clearly Hindu. The speaker and the audience momentarily stumbled and puzzled over how to name and classify these Hindus.

The state's Hindu-ness became simultaneously a question and a fact, contested at its moment of utterance.6 The invocation of a particularly archaic vocabulary of race did little to clarify the apparent fact of Arunachal Pradesh’s Hindu-ness. The use of 99 race here interestingly qualifies the internalization of race and racism that others have observed among diasporic South Asians (see Mazumdar 2003; Prashad 2000).

In this case, the invocation of race actually undermines the racialized understandings of Hindu identity of the sort featured in Savarkar's Hindutva that links Hindu-ness to the core of one's being, often cited as being in the "blood" (see

Chapter 1). In this instance "blood" is decoupled from Hindu-ness; Arunachal

Pradesh is racially "Mongoloid" here as well as "Hindu." Hindu-ness thus emerges here as something beyond race.7

But even in the midst of these questions, the expectation of an essential

Hindu-ness remains. For all the questions raised, Arunachal Pradesh was to be secured as part of a Hindu state. The ambivalence and uncertainty of the question on

Hindu-ness then comes to reinforce the mobilizations promoted here. Arunachal

Pradesh's ambiguous and marginal Hindu-ness did not prompt questions about

Hinduism's conceptual coherence. Rather, the ambiguity of its Hindu-ness is seen as a marker of marginality, and thus reinforces its place in the larger narratives of

Hindu persecution, and of Hinduism’s precariousness. The question of Hindu-ness thus emerges here with a degree of uncertainty, and it is this very uncertainty that becomes key to the mobilization of its defense and protection. The audience from this session came away both impressed and convinced of the need for securing an essential Hinduism that remains essentially undefined. 100

The narratives of persecution invoked at the meetings, and the uncertain questions of Hindu-ness grappled with therein, surface alongside an acute concern among many HEC participants over actual strategies of mobilization. The HEC program itself stresses that the meetings intended to bridge discourse and practice, and thus arm its attendees with practical tactics and solutions. Many participants clearly came to the meeting seeking such solutions. Following the exchange negotiating the weight of Christian and Muslim threats at the session on Kerala described above, one agitated audience member jumped up shouting, "We all come to these meetings and always talk of the problems. What we need is concrete action! What are the actual steps that we here in the room can do now?" The presenter acquiesced by calmly outlining a plan of action. He pointed out that the questioner, like many others currently in the room, was Gujarati. He instructed the

Gujarati questioner to call his relatives in Gujarat and urge them to move to Kerala.

The presenter's rationale was that many Gujaratis were gold merchants and jewelers; should they move to Kerala they would apparently transport their economic resources to Kerala and restructure the state's economy, presumably through the creation of a new Gujarati Hindu elite class. The speculative tenuousness of this plan notwithstanding, the originally agitated questioner seemed quite satisfied. "Very good," he responded, "My niece’s husband is a jeweler. 1 will 101 make some phone calls this weekend and tell people, 'Look, here's the situation.'"

With this, he sat back amidst the approving nods of those sitting around him.

Noteworthy is also how this audience member’s demand for practical, immediate solutions was satisfied through an appeal to personal, individual action.

In this way, the mobilizing strategy is not a conventionally structured one; it has less to do with structured machinations of electoral and party politics, and perhaps even of collective mobilization in general, than it does with placing a Hindu Indian state- building project within the realm of the individual. This raises a question about the relationship of larger imagined collectivities and individual being. Theorists of nationalism have often pointed out how nationalist discourses grapple with efforts to combine a material political structure and with a necessarily imagined abstracted social form (Anderson 1991; Bhatt 1997; Handler 1988). Handler (1988) has described how nationalist discourses also have the capacity to condense the abstract totality of a national collectivity into a "collective individual," tenuously reconciling individual action with a larger abstract entity. The individual-focused strategy emerging in the exchange described above momentarily resonates with these larger discussions about nationalist attempts to reconcile the abstract and structural, the collective and the individual—putting a Hindu Indian state-building project in the hands of the individual. Such concerns emerged elsewhere at the HEC, such as when Richard Benkin closed his rousing plenary keynote address outlining 102 the grave terrorist threats faced mutually by India, Israel, and the U.S. by appealing directly to the audience, to "you here in this room," to each personally take action and organize against terrorism. A rush of a dozen or so enthusiastic audience members hustled to the front of the room afterwards to exchange business cards with him as the event wound down.

These particular moments at the HEC also bring to mind larger related discussions about notions of the individual and individualism and/in society. Alexis de Tocqueville's writings on America in the 19th century famously outlined what he saw as an emerging culture of individualism out of American ideals of democracy and equality. When Tocqueville described American individualism as a type of self- interested withdrawal from society (over which they have no more or less power than any other subject) and a diffusion of power among those who are supposed to be made equals, however, he could not have accounted for the particular type of predicament of facing 20th century postcolonial, transnational diaspora communities that are spatially and practically withdrawn from the geopolitical entity they might seek to claim and secure. Recourse to individual actions and strategies become one of the options for such communities caught in the tension between individuals and collectivities in this particular way, and thus perhaps not necessarily in the self-interested manner once observed by Tocqueville. More recently, sociologists Elliott and Lemert (2006:13) have described “the new 103 individualism" as a kind of global culture that normalizes a life oriented to an

"internal world." They suggest that "[t]he main legacy of this cultural trend is that individuals are increasingly expected to produce context for themselves. The designing of life, of a self-project, is deeply rooted as both social norm and cultural obligation" (Elliott & Lemert 2006:13). The strategy sought out by the Gujarati questioner at the Kerala session, the felt need to "do something," sits within the difficult tension between the imagination of the individual and the group (and its larger state-building project), in some way suggesting diasporic subjects producing a context for themselves.

Other scholars have observed a culture of individualism underwriting modern notions of religious identity and new age spirituality, wherein these become projects of individual expression (Bauman 1998; C. Taylor 2007), informed by neoliberal ideals of selfhood (Carrette & King 2005) or ideals of self-cultivation

(Farquhar & Zhang 2005; Mahmood 2005; Matza 2009).8 Included among the activist strategies at the HEC was a stream of sessions under the theme of "integral sciences" and "integral healthcare," featuring workshops on meditation, yoga, and spirituality seeking to offer practical solutions for individual lifestyle and health benefits. These meditation and spiritual workshops sat alongside those overtly politicized sessions focusing on national security and terrorism. At the HEC's opening welcome session, one of the HEC organizers and participant in the 104 meditation sessions, a muscular middle-aged white man sporting a blonde ponytail describing himself as a "fanatic who promotes dharma full-time,” addressed the audience on the central role to be played by "new age yoga practitioners.” For the meditation instructor, such practitioners would contribute to a resurgent Hinduism; one that would be not simply popularly accessible, but also strong and militant. He lamented that Hindus do not worship their more militant deities as much: the soft and pot-bellied Ganesh is popular, but his aggressive war-like brother Skanda or

Murugan is not, he complained. In this way, another element of individual practice becomes promoted via the health and spirituality sessions tied together, but here in articulation with a larger state-building project defined by an aggressive Hindu-ness that has commonly marked Hindu nationalist discourses (see Chapter l).9

This larger interest in cultivating a strengthened, and aggressive, Hindu India more generally drove the event's urgent calls for mobilization. The HEC featured a

Hinduism in a sort of state of emergency, partly following Schmitt's classical invocation of the "state of exception” in which the threatened existence of the state summons a force of exception above and beyond itself (see Weber 1992), but also in a different sense of Benjamin's (1968) suggestion of such an emergency "not the exception, but the rule." Hinduism’s crisis of persecution at the HEC appears as unending and all-encompassing. At the same time, the sense of crisis and urgency echoing throughout the HEC’s presentations did not always spill out into the lobby 105 and dining hall during the session breaks. An informal atmosphere often took over amidst this sense of urgency as participants socialized in the motel lobby: old friends seeing each other once a year at these events joked and caught up (in English much more often than not) on family updates, things happening back in India, and other news. The dinners and lunches at the meetings were the busiest sessions of all. The organizers had indeed emphasized "networking" as one of the key aims of the meeting. The informal socializing aspect of the HEC sat alongside the articulation and mobilization of urgent political projects, in a way, contrasting with the urgency, as well as the individualized orientation, of some of the strategies raised in many of the sessions. This more generally points towards the varying degrees of connection and disconnection in the understandings of Hindu-ness and the nation with which

American Hindu activists grapple. The expectations of a Hindu Indian state apparatus, the nationalist self it imagines and the state structures it seeks, regulates expectations and desires of political being here, while also appearing just out of reach and slightly on the edge through the uncertain terms of what defines it, the modular terms of what threatens it, and its ambivalent proximity to those who seek it. 106

Hindu Unity Day

Hindu Sangathan Divas, or Hindu Unity Day, is a one-day event that has been organized annually for a number of years in New York, now run mainly by a Queens- based group named the Indian American Intellectuals Forum (IAIF). This event bills itself as a commemoration of "the grand coronation of Shri Chhatrapati Shivaji

Maharaj in the year 1674" in order to celebrate the "crucial cause of the unity of our bigger Hindu Samaj.”10 Its organizers have described it more broadly as an effort to bring all Hindus together "under one banner," transcending both place and caste.11

The Hindu Unity Day event I attended in the summer of 2008 was held at the auditorium of the Ganesh Temple complex in Flushing, New York, gathering at least

500-600 people, perhaps more.12 The Ganesh temple, as noted in the previous chapter, is one of the most established and prominent temples in North America, with access to a large number of patrons from the surrounding Flushing and north

Queens neighbourhoods where many South Asian immigrants of the post-65 influx have settled. The temple itself has grown over the years beyond its origins as a site of practical congregation and worship, now also serving as a more general public community space, with its own auditorium (see Chapter 2).

Hindu Unity Day drew on the temple's broader audience, bringing in a mix of families, young kids, regular temple patrons, neighbourhood business owners, and others. The event also drew a smaller number of people from out of town, from 107 upstate, New Jersey, D.C., and Pennsylvania. In this way, Hindu Unity Day was more of a broader public community event than the more limited audience of the HEC.

This event had a more unassuming family-friendly community orientation, aimed at drawing in a broader Hindu audience. While the HEC was essentially a meeting by those who identified as Hindu activists (i.e., the IAIF), Hindu Unity Day was, from its outward presentation, more about assembling Hindus into, as the event's name tells us, an actual display of unity, rather than about political mobilizing and strategizing.

However, as I will describe below, such mobilizing does emerge as a main concern at this event.

Many attendees mingled in the auditorium lobby, filled with an assortment of poster displays about Indian and Hindu civilizational accomplishments, before and during the event's main program. The posters in the lobby suggested a temporal unity, an essential tie between a Vedic golden age and those assembled at the event in listing off innovations and technologies developed by ancient Hinduism. Hindus had discovered mathematics, the posters tell us, as they did a slew of holistic medical technologies and agricultural techniques. Many attendees also socialized in the auditorium basement, where food was being served, and where children could be brought to run around and play as adults socialized. These spaces in many ways resembled a typical weekend at the Ganesh temple. 108

The main event here, however, was not so typical. It was centered on a mixed program of speeches, musical and dance performances, award presentations, yoga demonstrations, and finally a pair of keynote addresses staged in the temple auditorium. The temple auditorium itself seated roughly five hundred, much of which was full, at least for the early portions of the program. The program began, and was interspersed, with musical and dance performances of what were described as "patriotic songs." This included a version of Vande Mataram, a song describing India as a motherland, inspired by the nationalist poem written by

Bengali renaissance writer Bankim Chattopadhayay (and re-popularized in the

1990s by film score composer A.R. Rahman), performed by a band assembled from participants in the temple's various music classes: two young children singing, a teenaged boy playing an electric bass guitar and two older men playing electric guitar and a synthesizer, to a mechanical digital backbeat. A group of youth from a local chapter of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) then took to the stage to give a demonstration of a surya namaskar, a ritual physical salutation to the sun. Since

2006, American HSS chapters have annually organized a nation-wide surya namaskar, in which they attempt to organize American HSS chapters across the country into coordinated surya namaskar marathons - a literal display of Hindu unity. 109

The event's main feature, though, was its series of guests and speakers. The program included a range of speakers of different backgrounds and occupations, commonly appearing at the event to praise the exceptional virtues of Hinduism and

Hindus. A guru who works as a spiritual consultant in the corporate sector, receiving an award for "contributions to Hinduism and the Hindu community," told the audience about the need for the "product of development” of Hindu dharma.

"When the chips are down, invest in dharma,” he quipped. He expounded a conventional definition of ‘dharma’ as 'duty'. But in his estimation, the 'duty' of

Hindus was to promote the public recognition of Hinduism. The job of gurus and sadhus was described as the "marketing of dharma.”

While these segments of the Hindu Unity Day program gestured towards a generalized sense of Hindu unity, they again did not necessarily invoke an overt political discourse as later segments of the event would. Following the 'cultural' aspects of the program (the dance performances, music, and community awards and tributes), a number of publicly prominent New York-area Hindu activists took to the stage. Hindu Unity Day was not just about celebration, but about "outreach," its organizers maintained. The event’s shift towards such overt political concerns began with Narain Kataria taking the stage. Kataria has been an outspoken public figure in New York for at least two decades, and involved with numerous local

Hindu organizations in Queens, including the IAIF, an organization he founded in 110

1999 and for which he currently serves as president. He was greeted with scattered applause from the audience, as well as cheers of "Kataria ki jai!" from some. He introduced the two keynote speakers as Hindu Unity Day's headlining attractions.

One speaker was a former member of the Chief Bureau of Investigations (CBI); the other an economist and former Indian cabinet minister in the 1980s and 1990s. The ex-CBI member was a burly but soft-spoken older Sikh man. Kataria introduced him by describing Sikhism as derivative of, and thus integrally tied to, Hinduism.13 He described Sikhs and Hindus as having both commonly "suffered for India and dharma" - this reference to Sikh suffering, in part, alluding to Operation Blue Star in

1984, in which the Congress-led government launched a violent offensive on Sikh separatists gathered at the Golden Temple at Amritsar. The implication here was that the Congress posed a common threat to both Hindus and Sikhs.

For the ex-CBI officer, however, the gravest source of Indian suffering and persecution today was terrorism. His list of terrorist threats included Kashmiri separatists, Naxalites, among others raised in my previous account of the HEC. What concerned him most, however, were new terrorist threats, those unlike anything before. The new terrorism of today threatens in an "invisible war," he claimed, in which the true enemies are disguised, hidden, unbeatable and unpredictable. His concerns with terrorism here resonated with the fuzzy politics of anxiety of the post-9/11 war on terror (Derrida 2005; Weber 2006; Zizek 2002a, 2002b), in which I l l terrorism threatens by its fundamentally diffuse and unbeatable nature. Similar to what I have described at the HEC, terrorism figured here as a modular threat attaching to multiple threats, internal, external, and global. The ambiguity and vagueness of the "invisible war" made it more threatening than ever.

Despite, and yet again also because of, the vague nature of this threat, the CBI speaker offered one response. He demanded a "clear and consistent stand” by the

Indian government. For him, this stand required responding to terrorism with force.

The audience had largely thinned out by this point in the program; those remaining seemed to be fading. One young restless boy two rows ahead of me stood on his seat spinning in circles with the event program rolled up into a cone, used as a makeshift telescope with which he scoured the audience. An elderly couple a few seats to my right had fallen asleep. But as the speaker barked, "No terrorist will listen to reason

- you have to give him the same sort of medicine!," the remaining crowd snapped back into focus and responded with loud applause. The threats were ambiguous, indeed "invisible," but the prospect of an assertive and aggressive response apparently resonated firmly and with appeal.

Another IAIF member took the stage to introduce the next keynote address.

He did so by invoking a slogan familiar to many in New York. "If you see something, say something," he began, referencing the slogan plastered on posters all over New

York City subway stations and inside train cars. This slogan of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was made into a major security campaign by the

Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) to encourage New York's public transit riders to report suspicious packages, behaviour, or individuals to transit authorities. Here again terrorism constituted an "invisible war,” the specter of anonymous attacks by undetected domestic terrorist threats. In New York in particular, reports of potential attacks on the subway system have circulated frequently since 9/11.

"Everyone who sees something and says something is someone who is resisting terror,” the IAIF speaker continued. The DHS and MTA slogan was used to introduce

Dr. Subramaniam Swamy, an economist and politician from Tamil Nadu.

Subramaniam was described as a notable individual who has "seen something, and said something," as someone who in particular both sees terrorism in India, and is now actively concerned with mobilizing against it.

But Subramaniam did not begin with terrorism. Rather, he began his speech by returning to another source of threat: the Congress party. The present Indian government under the Congress party posed a major threat to Hindus today he maintained, referring specifically to the ongoing Ram Sethu controversy, at the time an item of intense debate among Indian politicians. The Ram Sethu controversy pitted the BJP in staunch opposition to a Congress development project that sought to cut a channel through an undersea land formation claimed by the BJP as the remains of the bridge constructed by Hanuman to reach Lanka as told in the 113

Ramayana. For Subramaniam, this project was a calculated Congress effort to destroy a “Hindu landmark," and the latest in a long lineage of Hindu persecution at the hands of the Congress party (see also Chapter 4).

He then moved to the topic of terrorism. Terrorism is the largest threat to

India he maintained, pointing specifically to an Islamic terrorism seeking to make

India, and the world at large, entirely Muslim. But "India is a Hindu country!” he stated emphatically, receiving scattered, but determined, applause. In "seeing” the threat of terrorism to a Hindu Indian state, Subramaniam also sought to "say something." He first encouraged the audience to have a "healthy suspicion of foreigners,” in reference to the Indian context, implicitly suggesting that Muslims in

India be seen as foreigners that merit a degree of extra scrutiny. He then offered an additional plan for combating terrorism, suggesting that Indian ex-servicemen (i.e., former Indian military personnel) needed to be mobilized into a militia, provided with weapons and funds, and then settled in Kashmir. He claimed that this would bolster the demographic of Hindus in Kashmir, and would provide an armed body mobilized on the ground to fight on what he identified as the frontline of anti-Hindu

Islamic terrorism.

At this point in the program, Hindu Unity Day had clearly become a site of a particular kind of American Hindu activism; one, like the HEC, seeking to mobilize a

Hindu Indian state-building project though narratives of Hindu threat and 114 persecution. There are, however, some differences between these two sites.

Subramaniam’s strategies, for instance, differed somewhat from what I had seen at the HEC insofar as it did not seek to appeal so directly at the level of individual, personal action as the HEC. The American Hindu audience at Hindu Unity Day was at times invited into the narratives of persecution presented here, especially when warned to have a "healthy suspicion of foreigners.” However, Subramaniam’s other strategy of arming ex-military personnel and sending them to Kashmir, a strategy as lofty as some of those suggested at the HEC (e.g., the example of the Gujarati jewelers moving to Kerala), was not one that necessarily appealed directly or individually to the audience on hand.

What Subramaniam did emphasize at Hindu Unity Day was a strategic need to be public. One of his interests was to mobilize Hindus in the audience by encouraging them to act publicly (not unlike the "marketing of dharma” proposed by the corporate guru earlier in the program) to raise awareness about Hindu persecution and Hindu unity. In stressing this need to be public, Subramaniam raised larger questions about Hindu-ness itself. In this case, in these precarious times for Hindus, he maintained that public-ness be a vital part of Hindu-ness.

"Ritual is not enough to be a good Hindu,” he instructed the crowd, challenging the equation between mere religious practice and Hindu-ness. Publicity was promoted 115 as a feature of Hindu-ness, whose unity was to be enacted and strengthened through public representation and activism.

The virtue of being public, however, still remained only partly connected to his Hindu Unity Day audience. Subramaniam is based primarily in India, and this is where his interests lie and concerns are aimed, despite frequent visits to the U.S. and regular appearances at events in New Jersey and New York. In his discussion of

Congress and terrorist threats to the Indian state, he did take a moment to laud the role of American Hindus as part of a larger project for Hindu unity by citing Rajiv

Malhotra, a prominent New Jersey-based activist and public figure (see Chapters 2 &

5), and Narain Kataria of the IAIF. He also appealed to Hindus abroad, first- generation immigrants here in particular, to strengthen Hindu unity through teaching their children Sanskrit.14 He gestured towards his American Hindu audience, inviting them into his larger project in describing how "Hindu Sangathan

Divas started off as an expression of anguish, but is now on the verge of a revolution.” But beyond these remarks, a Hindu Indian state was the main imperative, with American Hindus as an ancillary part thereof. The event closed with applause, leading gradually to a standing ovation for Subramaniam as attendees filed out to go home, visit the temple, or drop into the temple’s basement cafeteria for food and socializing. 116

In the days following the event, the IAIF described the 2008 Hindu Unity Day as a success, as reported in numerous online postings. But the event's claims to

Hindu Unity did not go over well with everyone. One critical opinion surfaced in an angry blog post by a public figure in New Jersey denouncing the event and its organizers. The poster, Dave Makkar, a financial consultant from New Jersey and prolific blogger known for his dramatic online posts denouncing the corruption of

American media, the New Jersey State government, and numerous Hindu and Indian organizations, blasted the IAIF head as bombastic and questioned the representational authority assumed by Hindu Unity Day:

Mr. Narain Kataria who talk about Hinduism, when approached for 1 Bhajan or 1 Indian Patriotic Song by 8 & 12 US born children on his just concluded Hindu Sangathan Diwas; his reply was they play instruments (Harmonium & Tabla) of 1950’s and I want big noise in my event with [computerized] music coming full blast from an big Key Board and orchestra. These type of sycophants in public praise them selves that they are protecting & spreading the Hindu culture & dharma in America ! [sic]15

Claiming Hindu India

The HEC meeting and the Hindu Unity Day celebration, each in its own ways, signal a particular trajectory of American Hindu activism. This is a trajectory of activism that in many ways resembles a conventional sort of Hindu nationalism.

Both events, each in its own ways, navigated disavowals of an instrumental 117

Hindutva nationalism - the HEC through its interests through the language of generic humanism, and Hindu Unity Day in positioning itself as a family and community-oriented celebration. Neither event was directly organized or run by the

VHPA and HSS, the main players typically associated with Hindutva abroad.

However, references to the sangh parivar, as noted, did surface in less formal ways at both sites, and it is clear that the HEC and Hindu Unity Day promoted, or at the very least drew upon, the terms of a familiar Hindu nationalism and its fundamental concerns with a Hindu Indian state-building project.

However, what I have emphasized in this chapter’s account of these events are the numerous moments of instability, and even uncertainty, with which these

Hindu Indian state-building projects are articulated. The hardened ideological certainties often associated with Hindutva or Hindu nationalism (see Chapter 1) are not quite what emerge in these particular sites of American Hindu activism. The narratives of persecution at both the HEC and Hindu Unity Day were articulated through varied and multiple sources of threat: Islam, Christianity, communism,

China, separatist movements (Nagaland, Assam, Kashmir), Pakistan, terrorism, and the Congress Party all emerge as threats to the integrity of the Indian state and to

Hindus and Hinduism as a whole.

With terrorism as one of the prominent themes recurring in these two events, another type of anti-Hindu threat, with its own dynamic of uncertainty particular to the context of the post-9/11 war-on-terror, emerges.15 Derrida (2005) has suggested that post-9/11 terrorist anxieties are condensed in the threat of the

"rogue," first with the "rogue state”, which then becomes abstracted as the terrorist, an un-locatable rogue no longer confined to a state or other familiar structure.

Altheide (2009) has described a larger culture of fear lived by Americans post-9/11 conditioned, in part, by a long-standing exposure to daily crime reporting in mainstream print and television media, normalizing a sense of ubiquitous threats that can exist anywhere. Brian Massumi (2010:54) suggests that the post-9/11 era is one marked by not just by multiplying discourses of threat, but by fear and threat as an "affective fact" lying underneath. For Massumi, what is of significance are not the actual sources or instances of threat, but rather its "felt quality, independent of any particular instance of itself' (2010:61). The nature of threat under the war-on- terror, Massumi notes, is that it might have "no actual referent" (2010:59). Actual instances of terror and threat, not the least of which being the 9/11 attacks, certainly do spark feelings of fear. But for Massumi, just as significant is how terrorist threats effectively create a larger "surplus threat" (2010:60) in which threat becomes abstract and potential. The implication is that fear and threat become highly modular, expanding and multiplying, as they attach to a myriad of potential sources beyond their actual instances. The invocations of terrorist threat at both the HEC and Hindu Unity Day are driven by this quality of threat and fear, and its multiply-located attachments: terrorism via Pakistan, communism via China, the Congress Party, Christian missionizing, internal separatist movements, and so on, threaten Hindus and the

Hindu Indian state. My suggestion is not that these are simply "imagined” threats without any actual conflict or violence involved, but as multiple invocations of threat generating the underlying affective force Massumi describes. Threats not only attach to multiple sources in these sites, but also become generic and unbeatable, as seen in the Hindu Unity Day speech on terrorism as an "invisible war." Terrorist threats in this sense exceed their named instances to drive a larger, indeed generic, sense of anti-Hindu persecution that takes on a life of its own.

Key also to Massumi's suggestion, and apparent at both the HEC and Hindu

Unity Day, is how fear and threat, through its abstract uncertainty, generate responses. If, by Massumi’s view, fear is an underlying affective force, the multiplying efforts to locate, name, and list terrorist threats become one of its signs.

Naming the threats to Hindu India became a key part of both these events, even as the particulars of these threats, their actual instances, were elusive, even debated.

Moreover, both the HEC and Hindu Unity Day featured a proliferation of strategies and solutions to deal with the threat. The individual-oriented strategies, the individual felt need to "do something," emerging at the HEC in particular seems 120 relevant to Massumi’s suggestion about this character of terror and threat. In these cases, there is a way in which the generated response appears removed or disconnected from the supposed source of actual threat; particularly so, considering that these are diasporic Hindus looking for a solution to terrorist threats to an

Indian state from which they are practically and spatially distanced. In a different, but related, way, Subramaniam’s dramatic rendering of terrorist threat at Hindu

Unity Day, and his grandiose plan to counter terrorist threats, was introduced through the American security slogan "if you see something, say something.” This need to "say something” also recalls Massumi’s suggestion that the affective force of fear generates responses. But what and how is terrorist threat "seen"?

Subramaniam's strategies in many ways follow the CBI officer's comment on modern terrorism as the "invisible war.” Seeing something and saying something may also be about something that is less seen than felt. The conditional "if’ in this slogan presents unseen threats out there lurking, waiting to be "seen". Through a slogan that begins as a specific part of the American war-on-terror's vocabulary, fear attaches to the signs of Hindu Indian state-building project (e.g., Subramaniam's call for an Indian military claim on Kashmir). At the same time, Subramaniam’s appeal to all Hindus at the event to be public, especially public about a narrative of Hinduism under threat, suggests another aspect of Massumi’s account of fear and threat: how fear is effectively self-generating (2010:63). Responses in themselves generate fear. 121

The call to be rhetorically public about a Hinduism and Hindu state under threat in itself has an illocutionary force: the statement itself calls to seek out, to be watchful and thereby wary of, threat. It sounds the alarm, as does the conditional "if’ of the

DHS slogan.

Threats of terrorism surface in these sites to produce and shape one emergent American Hindu activist response, signaling a fear, both underlying and overarching, exceeding any particular instance or source as it attaches to many.

Massumi points out that terrorist threats that do not actually materialize are just as impactful as any "actual" instance of terrorism.17 Recall how some invocations of threat at the HEC became debates over the uncertainty of whether and how particular sources of terror threaten (e.g., are Christians or Muslims the bigger threat?). That a threat exists is assumed and felt; to what sign it attaches then becomes produced.

Post-9/11 anxieties about terror and threat articulate with larger narratives of persecution that have been a long-standing feature of at least a century of Hindu nationalist discourse. However, the profound uncertainty at the nature of the threat of terrorism generates a narrative of persecution that differs from the Hindutva theorized by Jaffrelot (1996) or Appadurai (2006), in which it is an ideology that constructs itself and its oppositional others as reified certainties. Insofar as Hindu nationalism fashions its "Other" here, it is one that changes shape readily and 122 frequently. In this way, the Hindu Indian state-building project that emerges here has a built-in flexibility. Its narratives of persecution present the shifting and unstably located effect of an "omni-crisis" (Hardt & Negri 2000:189), a set of “minor and indefinite crises,” conflicts whose terms are shifting and diffuse.

At the same time, the Hindu "Self' claimed in the Hindu Indian state-building projects in both these events is marked by its own uncertainties. While Hindu-ness is assumed as a stable and unproblematic entity, and thus the essential basis for an

Indian state, conspicuous moments in both the HEC and Hindu Unity Day show how understandings of Hindu-ness among these activists are very much in formation.

Everyone is quite certain that it is something, though not always clear on just what that is. On the one hand, familiar essentialisms can be seen. The displays in the lobby of the Ganesh Temple auditorium on Hindu Unity Day recalled an ancient Hindu- ness, indeed a Hindu nation, with a continuous history - an essentializing timelessness key to the sense of Hindu entitlement to a sovereign Indian state. As

Hardt and Negri (2000:102) suggest, "...the concept of nation completes the notion of sovereignty by claiming to precede it." On the other hand, Hindu-ness is at once immutably timeless and under construction here. Subramaniam proposed a new sense of Hindu-ness that called for outspokenness and public activity as its defining features, rather than any particular socio-historical practices and/or beliefs.

Moreover, that Hindu-ness at both the HEC and Hindu Unity Day was defined 123 through persecution contributes to its definitional instability insofar as it defines

Hindu-ness through the negative; i.e., through what it is not, what it is against, and also what it is losing/has lost. In this sense, Hindu-ness is articulated and mobilized both despite and because of its ambiguities.

It is worth noting how the Hindu Indian state-building projects that emerge at the HEC and Hindu Unity Day, for all their ambiguities, are also marked by the uneasy specter of violence. In this way, the strategies emerging in these sites involved aspirations to a classical sort of sovereignty (see Chapter 1). A bound sovereign political entity is not only defined by the will of a uniform ethno-religio- national constituency here, but also through the exercise of violence (Schmitt 1985;

Mbembe 2003; Weber 1965). The range of anti-Hindu threats raised at the HEC and

Hindu Unity Day invoked either past violence, or anxiously anticipated violent threats that put Hindus within a classical, but also perpetual, state of exception. In the interests of securing a Hindu Indian state, violence was also articulated as a strategy of defense and security against these threats. The BJP supporters I spoke with in the motel lobby at HEC looked forward to a “rise of the kshatriyas," the warrior varna, envisioning the ascent of sovereigns who seize and maintain order through legitimized force. Later on at the HEC, Richard Benkin proposed a military alliance between India, Israel, and the U.S. to oppose and contain global terrorism by outright force. At Hindu Unity Day, Subramaniam Swamy advocated sending in a 124 militia of retired military personnel to secure Kashmir. A more overt statement is made right on the cover of the Hindu Unity Day program, in which an image of

"Hindu Warrior Queen Rani Durgavati" is depicted, armor-clad and sword in hand leading an army into battle. She is captioned as having "fought ferociously against invading Mughal armies.” Articles inside the event program venerate medieval king

Shivaji for having similarly led armed conflicts against Mughal rulers. These all signal aspirations to a Hindu Indian state as a classically sovereign entity, including claims on the legitimate use of force to define and protect itself.

Such aspirations towards classical state sovereignty sit in tension with the changing and unstable face of nationalist ideologies marked by an "omni-crisis." The affective force of terror and threat prompts, in one way, the varied calls for classical sovereignty's violent exercise. These claims to the legitimate exercise of violence by and for the state, though, are mitigated by the different layers of activist strategies engaged by the American Hindu activists in these spaces. This is a rhetoric of violence, thus distanced from the middle class lives, often as naturalized American citizens, lived by the majority of the participants and attendees at both of these events. Strategies offered at the HEC, for instance those directly appealing to individual action, did not call for the outward state violence that featured in the larger call for military anti-terrorist action (Benkin at the HEC), or heightened armed intervention in Kashmir (Subramaniam at Hindu Unity Day).18 The sovereign 125 claims on Hindu India sit alongside the tensions between the individual and group/nation, and the related tension between ideology and action seen in the activist strategies presented at the HEC and Hindu Unity Day.

The idea of the sovereign Hindu Indian state secured by force maintains appeal, despite the practical and ideological disconnections between this state, the strategies for its security, and its American Hindu activist proponents. The activists described here claim political belonging in a Hindu Indian state, yet at the same time grapple with the possibility that they “do not constitute a demos or political citizenry” (Fraser 2007:15) in a conventional sense. A disconnection from the more militant and violent strategies becomes of particular importance for American

Hindu activists in navigating the pressures for, and ideals of, respectability and legitimacy. Questions about respectability figure centrally in the trajectories of

American Hindu activism discussed in the following chapters (see Chapters 4 and 5), especially when activist strategies becoming increasingly public in scope. As noted in Chapter 1, American Hindu activists uneasily navigate the specter of Hindutva and its publicly unpalatable associations with violence and fundamentalism, and thus ambivalently aspiring, at times, to a classical type of sovereignty. The following chapters will discuss other trajectories of American Hindu activism and how they begin to move away from these aspirations as they shift in political scope and objective. 126

Chapter 4 - Persecution in public: street protests and emergent trajectories of American Hindu activism

On a December morning in 2008, a group of twenty to thirty American Hindu demonstrators gathered in front of the U.N. headquarters in Manhattan to protest the terrorist attacks that had gripped the city of Mumbai the week before. Through chants and placards they denounced terrorism in general and Pakistan in particular.

They performed a call-and-response chant with one of the lead organizers yelling

"Pakistan!” through a megaphone, to which the assembled demonstrators responded "Terrorist!” The specific aim of the demonstration varied depending on who was asked. Some maintained that the protest was an appeal to the U.N. to pressure the U.S. into cutting aid to Pakistan. Others stated they were out to demand that the U.S. and the U.N. declare Pakistan a terrorist state. The focus on Pakistan as the source of their concerns, and as the target of their varied interventions, was however unambiguous - this, despite the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the

Mumbai attacks, few people had a clear sense of what exactly had happened or who was responsible.

However, while some saw the demonstration as a kind of structural intervention against what they perceived to be threatening anti-Hindu forces, others 127 provided different justifications. One enthusiastic demonstrator, a short middle- aged man from Staten Island, when asked what he thought would ultimately come out of this action, shrugged and to my surprise candidly responded, "I don't really think this will do anything.” He suggested their presence would not have any effect on U.N. personnel or any actual impact on policy decisions. I had indeed wondered this myself, especially given the desolate scene to which they protested: it was a cold early December morning in a part of eastern mid-town Manhattan, completely devoid of pedestrian traffic. They had, moreover, set up their demonstration a block and half south of the main gate, which kept them away from both workers entering the U.N. compound and tourists visiting the landmark. The minimal amount of car traffic, collected and dispensed at high-speeds from a nearby ramp to the FDR expressway, zipped by too quickly to notice. The only other observers on the scene, aside from myself, were two NYPD officers patrolling the demonstration. I asked what they thought of the scene at hand, to which one officer shrugged indifferently saying that "everyone's got a right to speak their mind.”

The demonstration thus appeared to have diverse goals. For the demonstrator from Staten Island, the purpose of this demonstration was beyond its overt instrumental political goal. He spoke a familiar tale of India's degeneration over the centuries. Hindus have become brainwashed, he maintained, particularly due to what he termed "McClareyism," a reference to the 19th century colonial 128 education initiative associated with British historian and administrator Thomas

Macauley (hence, "Macauleyism”). Hindus are taught that everything “great" about

India "came from outside,” rather than from Indians themselves.1 The effects of this were dire: it had made Hindus particularly weak. "If someone reached in and took out your spine, could you survive?" he asked me before quickly answering himself:

"No." Hindus have become "spineless” these days, he maintained. I asked what this had to do with the demonstration at hand, to which he explained that this long-term weakening of Hindus is what has made them susceptible to terrorism. This explained what took place in Mumbai. This was what he saw as happening in India generally today. "Many Chaudhuris have now become Muslim, you know,” he warned me gravely, attempting to relate to me personally. "Nationalism is lost; that is the biggest problem,” he offered in summation, echoing a familiar Hindu nationalist narrative whose concerns were larger, civilizational.

Street demonstrations such as this are an increasingly prominent feature of

American Hindu activism today. In contrast to the events described in the previous chapter, such street demonstrations represent one of the key ways in which

American Hindu activism takes its concerns public. It has become increasingly common to find American Hindu organizations taking their concerns and grievances to the streets, seeking to interface with a larger American public audience for support, recognition, and validation of their interests and political goals. This 129 chapter discusses these public Hindu activist orientations, their contours, implications, and effects. The demonstration at the U.N. headquarters says something about the shifting sets of concerns that emerge through such public sites of American Hindu activism. It shows a demonstration whose overt concerns (i.e., a

U.N. intervention in the interests of Indian national security) give way to an abstracted political project, while a disjuncture emerges between the concerns of these activists and their capacity to strategize and publicize these concerns.

Dis/engaging American publics

The main group behind the demonstration at the U.N. described above was the Queens-based Indian American Intellectuals Forum (IAIF). The IAIF featured in the previous chapter as one of the main organizers of the Hindu Unity Day event

(see Chapter 3). The group has emerged over the last decade as one of the more active and outspoken American Hindu activist voices both locally and nationally, a significant part of which comes from the public presence raised by their street demonstrations. Though details concerning the group’s formation remain unclear, they seem to have first appeared as part of the "Indian American Intellectuals

Conference" in 1999, organized by OFBJP and VHPA personnel. The conference featured a series of presentations by, in the words of current IAIF president and active founding member Narain Kataria, a "galaxy of intellectual luminaries" on the 130 topic of religious conversions in India, with a particular emphasis on the threat posed by Christian missionizing in India.2 It is here that the IAIF took shape as a group that "organizes conferences and seminars” and "invites experts to express their opinions on the topics of interest to Hindu community [sic].”3

Kataria has described the IAIF's existence as hinging on an urgent need for

Hindu defense:

We are always busy doing one thing or the other because Hindus are always under attack. They are being attacked every month, every day; every day Hindus are killed in India...And Hindus don’t retaliate. The problem is that Hindus have to learn how to retaliate.4

Since the IAIF’s formation, its main line of defense has focused on promoting this message about the plight and vulnerabilities of Hindus to a broader public audience.

The IAIF has, for instance, organized a number of conference and panel events intended to "educate” the public on issues of concern to India and relations between the U.S. and India.5 In 2006, it staged a pair of symposia on the topic of terrorism, one in Washington, D.C. under the title "Symposium on Roots of Terrorism," and another in Las Vegas titled "Hindu perspective on terror [sic].” Echoing the previous chapter's discussion of the IAIF’s Hindu Unity Day event, an IAIF press release on the Washington D.C. panel describes terrorism as a part of an ongoing, timeless threat against Hindus. "India has been experiencing terrorism for hundreds of years.

Even the so-called Moghul King Akbar-the-Great had killed 30,000 to 40,000 131 innocent Hindus in one day,” Kataria states in the release. Terrorism is claimed not only as a specifically anti-Hindu threat, but also an amplified threat stretched back in time; an ur-threat targeting Hindus before anyone else.6

The IAIF's public demonstrations have often been triggered by particular events or occurrences, as with the demonstration at the U.N. described above, triggered by the attacks in Mumbai in November 2008. Yet many IAIF demonstrations have also become sites of uneasy public engagement in ways similar to the U.N. demonstration described above. In 2002 for instance, the IAIF took to the streets in protest of a visit to the New School of Social Research in Manhattan by

Indian actor Shabana Azmi and writer Shashi Tharoor. Azmi has faced her share of controversy in India prior to this, not the least of which has come from the BJP and its supporters in India.7 These controversies followed her to New York when IAIF personnel organized themselves under the name "Indian Americans for Truth and

Fairness in Media" to protest the Azmi and Tharoor visit. A statement circulated to promote and accompany the protest spoke of both Azmi and Tharoor through strong invectives, describing them as harbouring a "hidden agenda hatched by deadly combine of Marxist-Islamists to denigrate Hindus, discredit India and strain

Indo-American relations [sic]."8 Azmi is described as a "strange blend of a fundamentalist Moslem woman and a diehard Communist out to defame Hindus and 132 tarnish the image of India," and who also "needs urgent counseling." The protest against Azmi centered on a familiar set of grievances: Islam and communism.

While Azmi was certainly viewed as an embodiment of larger anti-Hindu threats, what the demonstration sought to do or say about this, its more practical intent, remained unclear. While she was heavily criticized in various ways, the IAIF did not seek out specific goals such as shutting down her talk or having her blocked from entry to the school or the country. The demonstration was partly about Azmi and partly about a more abstract set of grievances about the security of the Indian state and the Hindus therein. But the larger effect of the demonstration was reportedly minimal and confusing to the public audience it confronted. Shashi

Tharoor later described the demonstrators as "a fringe group of Hindutva agitators,” comprising a meager scene of 20 or so middle-aged men gathered in front of the

New School shouting "Go Back Shabana!"9 Tharoor also reported a confused public reaction, with bystanders and observers unsure of what exactly was being protested, why, and by whom. There were evident practical disconnects between the demonstration, its aims, and the public to which it was directed.

A more recent public protest took place in March 2008, when the IAIF, in tandem with the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS], took to the streets in front of

Christie's Auction House in mid-town Manhattan. They had gathered there in public protest of a series of paintings by M.F. Husain, one of India's most well known 133 contemporary painters. Husain's paintings have a long history of controversy, particularly among Hindus taking offense to the partially nude representations of

Hindu deities that have occasionally featured in his work. The protest against his work has been global for a number of years, spanning different groups in India, the

U.K., and previously in the U.S. 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 offense by shouting through megaphones, parading placards, and distributing leaflets to people passing by, indicting the artist and his work as an affront to Hindu deities, and ultimately as an explicit attack on Hindus.

While standing on the sidelines observing the crowd of demonstrators, and likewise the slightly smaller crowd of observers, I struck up a conversation with a journalist from a diaspora-focused newspaper run out of India. He actually lived and worked in India and had only just come to New York on assignment for a different story before getting a call from his editor to cover the Christie's protest. “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. He continued, "This stuff happens all the time [in India], but there it's much more political. These guys here are much more religious," echoing a commonplace observation of amplified expressions of religiosity among diaspora populations. 134

One of the demonstrators who had just spoken with the journalist complained of the sheer offense he felt in seeing Hindu deities naked, particularly since, in his estimation, no other religion or culture but Hinduism is targeted this deliberately, nor has to suffer such profaning of its sacred beings. As this demonstrator left us to rejoin the crowd, the journalist scoffed at the oversight in the demonstrator’s reasoning, pointing to the controversy over Andres Serrano's

Piss Christ piece as one instance in which a sacred non-Hindu icon was subject to a controversial representation. He then pointed across the street to the naked Roman- styled figures of the art deco frieze above the side entrance of the old NBC building, rhetorically wondering why these demonstrators were not so bothered by those.

Some of the onlookers witnessing the demonstration, moreover, met the scene with a degree of confusion. The journalist described to me how he had been approached by an alarmed onlooker a few moments ago who misheard the demonstrators' chants of "Down with Christie's" as "Down with Christians."

A leaflet circulated by the demonstrators called attention to some of the details of Husain's offending art, the fact of his Muslim background, as well as his unofficial exile from the Indian state. The numerous placards held up by the demonstrators denounced Husain as an "anti-Hindu coward", demanded Christie's to "stop auctioning M.F. Husain's paintings," and even called "shame on Hindu buyers of Husain’s art." Some demonstrators expressed offense at a double 135 standard: why does Husain not paint his 'own' deities naked? Why does he not paint the Prophet Muhammed naked? But such overt concerns with Christie's auction of

Husain’s paintings belied a number of other concerns below the surface. I heard from one senior activist at the demonstration who was convinced that M.F. Husain, complicit with Christie's, sold paintings to raise money to fund "jihadi terrorism" against Hindus in India. He had no specific evidence of this beyond the fact that

Husain has a Muslim background, which left this activist wondering aloud why else a Muslim would take up art if not to fund jihadis.

While observing the protest, I was approached by one of the organizing members of the demonstration who, without any introduction aside from asking if I was with the media, bluntly questioned: "Are you Hindu or Muslim?” As I acknowledged having a family background that is partly Hindu and from India, he immediately interjected, "Then you are a Hindu! Why do you not say? Are you ashamed?” I explained that given the minimal presence of Hinduism in my northwestern Ontario upbringing, I was hesitant as to whether I was entitled to call myself Hindu. "People identify in many different ways,” I offered. This proved unconvincing, as he proceeded to elaborate on the crisis of Hindu identity for youth such as myself, North American-born and of Indian background. While he offered a host of familiar comments pitting the nobility and eternity of Hindu dharma against the threat of Islam, at this moment he seemed far more concerned about 136 establishing my Hindu-ness, and deeply anxious about the apparent lack thereof.

Everyone from India is a Hindu at the core, he insisted, and it is the increasing number of those born abroad who do not proudly claim a Hindu identity that are responsible for weakening Hinduism today.

"Frankly, 1 feel sorry for you,” he finally concluded as I continued to hedge in response to his assertions on the apparent fact of my Hindu-ness. It seemed part antagonism, part pity, and part anxiety; his unfulfilled anticipation of my identity as

Hindu, the elusiveness of its expected substance, clearly troubled him. "You think about what I've said,” he sternly advised, promptly turning his back and walking away. With this, the urgent defense of Hinduism at work in this scene stretched beyond the particulars of the blasphemy of which M.F. Husain was being publicly accused. A larger question was emerging here to do with who is a Hindu, the ability to determine this identity with certainty, thus relating to larger questions of representation and identity crisis in the diaspora (see Chapter 5 for further discussion on this point).

These IAIF street demonstrations illustrate some of the tensions of American

Hindu activism's ideological terms in the face of its public presentations. While such demonstrations might not, for instance, prevent Christie's from auctioning paintings by M.F. Husain (which in the end, it did not - the auction proceeded and the painting sold as planned), or shut down a public talk by Shabana Azmi, they do become sites 137 in which larger and more abstract political concerns emerge. This is particularly notable in the demonstration at Christie’s. In one respect, its concerns were ostensibly similar to those engaged by the VHPA’s American Hindus Against

Defamation (AHAD) project in the 1990s (see Chapter 2): i.e., monitoring and shutting down misused and defaming representations of Hindu deities and symbols.

However, the M.F. Husain demonstration became about much more than this.

Husain came to embody "jihadi terrorism” at once in his images and in his very being, raising a deeper sense of Hindu suffering beyond the demonstration’s overt terms.

Free speech, mafia hits, and claiming American-ness

In October 2007, Sonia Gandhi was invited to New York to give an address at the U.N. inaugurating the International Day of Non-Violence in commemoration of the birthday of another Gandhi, the venerable Mahatma Gandhi. Sonia Gandhi herself has been a figure of controversy among Hindu nationalists in India, for whom she is regarded as anti-Hindu in practice (by claiming her Congress Party selectively appeases the interests of other Indian religious minorities, particularly

Muslims, to the detriment of a Hindu majority) and by nature (insofar as she is regarded as a foreigner having been born in Italy and entering Indian politics via her marriage to Rajiv Gandhi of the Nehru dynasty). 138

Gandhi’s appearance at the U.N. was met by demonstrations, as a number of

American Hindu activists publicly denounced her inclusion at an event honouring

Mahatma Gandhi. The demonstrators went to lengths to portray the two Gandhis as antagonistic counterpoints: Sonia as a dangerous threat versus the nobility of the

Mahatma. This conflict was performed visually by two demonstrators: one, a woman dressed up in a green and white sari, face covered by a portrait photo of Sonia

Gandhi with a pair of eyeholes punched out, pretending to stab the other demonstrator, who was dressed in a white dhoti, stained red with simulated blood, impersonating an injured Mahatma Gandhi.

Within days, the organizers of the demonstration intensified their protest by commissioning a full-page advertisement in the front section of the New York Times attacking Sonia Gandhi and the Congress Party of India. The advertisement was signed by a makeshift coalition of a number of other American Hindu organizations, including the IAIF, under the name the Forum for the Preservation of Gandhi's

Heritage (more on this below).10 Their ad listed a series of stark allegations. It described Sonia Gandhi as leading a political party guilty of "pro-terrorist policies” and "religious intolerance towards 900 million Hindus." It alleged she had connections to Saddam Hussein and the KGB. The ad also drew attention to the many corruption scandals in which the Congress Party and Gandhi family have been 139 implicated, while also making more general character claims about Sonia Gandhi herself, describing her personally as "vindictive and undemocratic.”

The ad drew some negative responses in the weeks after it appeared. But it was a few months after the ad’s initial appearance that a larger controversy began to unfold. In March 2008, a group based in Queens calling itself the Indian National

Overseas Congress (INOC), claiming to be an affiliate of the Congress Party, issued a

$100 million dollar defamation and libel lawsuit against the organizations and individuals behind the ad. The INOC claimed that the ad knowingly made false statements intending to publicly damage its reputation, and thereby its ability to generate Congress support from an American audience. The defendants in the case, named as Narain Kataria, Arish Sahani, (IAIF president and vice-president, respectively), the Indo-Caribbean Council of New York, and "John Does 1-100," officially responded with a motion to dismiss.11 Their defense was that they were offering free opinionated comment on Sonia Gandhi and the Indian National

Congress and that the plaintiff, the American-based INOC, was not the intended target of the advert and thus could not claim libel or defamation. An affidavit accompanying the motion to dismiss also claimed the statements made in the advertisement were simply repeated from popular media sources and thus ones that the "ad’s authors had no substantial reason to doubt.’’12 This was to address the 140 technical sense of defamation claimed by INOC - i.e., that the advert knowingly contained false information.

Surrounding the defendants' response was a defensive outrage. For the activists being sued, this lawsuit represented another instance of persecution by the domineering anti-Hindu force of the Congress Party, essentially confirming a larger grievance with the Congress in general. At one level, the defendants saw the lawsuit as having meaning and implications far beyond the content of this specific newspaper ad. "Let us understand that this lawsuit is not just against a few individuals, but against the entire NRI community," Kataria claimed in a statement he circulated across his virtual networks, emails and blogs, immediately after the lawsuit filing. The sense of persecution amplified in the following month when

Kataria organized a support rally and fundraiser for himself and his co-defendants.

The rally, held at the auditorium of the Ganesh temple in Flushing, featured speeches from Dr. Subramanian Swamy (featured in the previous chapter as one of the Hindu Unity Day speakers) and Narinder Kukar, former president of the AIA (see

Chapter 2). The rally portrayed Kataria and the other defendants as innocent Hindus being unjustly victimized. It was billed as a fundraiser for the legal fees for Kataria and the other defendants, suggesting these Hindu activists faced financial hardship at the hands of this Congress threat. Narinder Kukar, speaking at the fundraiser 141 rally, claimed that the lawsuit was after "all and any one of us, in this country, or for that matter anywhere in the world where they can get after you!”

With the lawsuit exacerbating an underlying sense of threat, the American

Hindu activist political project began to resituate itself. Take for instance this statement in the memorandum submitted in support of the motion to dismiss prepared by Narain Kataria, Arish Sahani, and their attorneys:

This libel case arises from a high-handed, authoritarian effort by supporters of the most powerful political party in India - the Indian National Congress Party ("Congress" or "Congress Party”] once led by Mahatma Gandhi - to muzzle and punish Congress Party critics in America. Gandhi would not approve.13

Congress here becomes a threat not only to Indians, but specifically now to

Americans, or, rather, American Hindus. The sense of authoritarian Congress persecution is amplified as Congress is depicted attacking beyond the borders of

India to target "critics in America.” In an email circulated by Kataria seeking support for his legal defense, he describes the lawsuit as an attempt to "demoralize leaders in this country who are speaking against the Sonia dynasty. By making them financially bankrupt, harassing them, they hope to frighten them into submission [sic, emphasis added].”14 The motion to dismiss stated even more emphatically that "[t]he defendants have wrongly been sued for exercising their 'prized American privilege to speak one's mind, although not always with perfect good taste, on all public 142 institutions.'"15 A blog post by a group formed to support Kataria and the defendants claimed that the lawsuit targeted American Hindus with "the sole objective of forcing them to give up their fundamental right of freedom of speech."16 These remarks position the street protest and the newspaper ad as simple exercises in quintessential American constitutional rights to protest and to freedom of speech - and thus position the defendants and their actions as politically American. Here, the

Congress Party becomes not only anti-Hindu, as long claimed by the BJP and sangh parivar in India, but also anti-free speech and by implication anti-American and anti-freedom.

While this emphasis on American-ness became key to how these activists publicly responded to the lawsuit, it was not only in reaction to the lawsuit. It also figured in both the original street protest and the advertisement, each as actions targeting an American public audience. In an unpublished letter signed by the

Forum for Gandhi's Heritage, the demonstration organizers stated they ran the newspaper ad out of a concern that an unsuspecting American public would associate Sonia Gandhi with Mahatma Gandhi, based on their common name.17

"Sonia Maino Gandhi is NOT related to Mahatma Gandhi [bold in the original]. She is attempting to misappropriate his name for political mileage and international legitimacy,” the ad cautioned. The ad underscored the distinction by featuring contrasting portraits of the Mahatma and Sonia Gandhi, the former hovering over 143 portraits of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and former Polish president,

Lech Walesa, while the latter sat over the words "corruption," "terrorism," "fraud," and "lies," all in stylized fonts. The portraits also framed a dichotomized list of characteristics that apparently distinguished one from the other: the Mahatma was linked with the words "truth," "non-violence," "sacrifice," "honesty," and "tolerance."

In contrast, Sonia Gandhi was associated with the words "falsehood,” "aggression,"

"self aggrandisement," and "intolerance." Gandhi is, moreover, described as "an embodiment of Hinduism" [sic], thus situating Hinduism more broadly (and not just the image of Gandhi specifically) as the demonstrators’ object of concern. Sonia

Gandhi is described here as contrary to the values represented by Mahatma Gandhi and, by implication, to Hindus at large. In this way, the activists behind the ad situate this action as one by Americans making a representational, indeed jurisdictional, claim on the image of Gandhi to an American public audience.

The libel charges filed by the INOC were also fundamentally premised on the claim that the demonstrators were targeting an American public audience. These

American Hindu activists had, after all, taken out an ad in a major American newspaper with a predominantly American readership. The INOC suit thus claimed libel and defamation on the basis that this ad, in targeting an American audience, would have knowingly had impacts on the INOC’s work in the U.S., and not just on the Congress Party in India. The INOC's response to the motion to dismiss argued 144 that these activists could never have expected to reach or impact the Indian political context:

The authors of the advertisement here in question were anonymous. No particular issue was being lobbied, no political campaign was underway to influence (indeed, as far as events in India are concerned, a publication in an American newspaper would hardly be likely to influence such events even if they were occurring). The attack on Plaintiff was sui generis, analogous to a mafia hit.18

In describing these American Hindu activists as anonymous, deliberately selective renegade diaspora activists, they are seen as disconnected spatially and practically from the larger Indian political context. In this way, they are again located politically as American more than as Indian. The INOC elsewhere underscored the disconnect in describing those behind the ad as "anonymous sycophants operating on distant shores.”19 The INOC's side of the argument clearly takes a disparaging view of these activists and their strategy; the added characterization of the newspaper ad as a

"mafia" hit drives the claim of diasporic disconnection further, while also taking a jab at the legitimacy and representational authority of those behind the ad.

Complicating matters, however, is that while the ad itself made no uncertain claims about targeting an American public audience, the defendants' legal response did in fact the opposite, downplaying an American focus by reasserting that the ad was focused solely upon the Congress Party in India. Key to the legal defense was an 145 attempt to distinguish the INOC and the Congress Party in India as two wholly separate and unrelated entities. The INOC would not be able to legally claim libel or defamation if the ad was not actually about the INOC. This presented something of a contradiction. The lawsuit and the defendants' reactions, both on and off the record, clearly viewed the INOC charges as part of an overarching Congress persecution of

Hindus, collapsing the two entities (i.e., the INOC and the Congress Party) into one.

Even in the motion to dismiss, the activists criticized INOC as being in league with

"[f]oreign politicians, political parties and their representatives" and "should not be allowed to pursue American critics in American courts, determined to put them in their place.”20 The INOC is clearly seen here as an arm of the Congress Party in India, despite the legal defense insisting that INOC and Congress are two entirely separate entities (with the ad thus claiming to solely target the Congress Party in India). But the activists then also suggest that the INOC, by virtue of its foreign ties, should not have any jurisdiction over an American political sphere. India and America both figure ambivalently here as the Hindu activists’ political location and jurisdiction.

Further complications emerged not just over to whom these American Hindu activists claimed to speak, but also over for/as whom they claimed to speak. The ad's focus on distinguishing Sonia Gandhi from Mahatma Gandhi, while, on the one hand, intended to speak to an American public audience, also contained discrepant representational claims. Both parties in the lawsuit, the INOC plaintiffs and the 146

American Hindu activist defendants, each made their own claims to Gandhi’s voice and being able to speak for the Mahatma.21 Assuming a group name such as the

Forum for Saving Gandhi's Heritage, one of the main names under which the newspaper ad was signed, clearly in itself made a very direct claim to speak legitimately for/as Gandhi. Elsewhere in the memorandum accompanying their motion to dismiss, the defendants quipped that "Gandhi would not approve" of the

INOC lawsuit. INOC shot back with its own claim on Gandhi's voice in their response to the motion to dismiss, stating that "[Gandhi] is surely turning in his grave upon hearing his name invoked as a justification for the unimpeded circulation of boldfaced [sic] lies by anonymous sycophants operating on distant shores."22

These disputing claims to being the rightful spokespeople for/as Mahatma

Gandhi ultimately mapped onto claims about the larger representational legitimacy of each side of the lawsuit. Narain Kataria held himself and his co-defendants not just as spokespeople for Gandhi, but more generally as "leaders in this country" - claiming to speak for and represent a larger Indian American community. An unpublished letter sent by the Forum for Preserving Gandhi's Heritage to the New

York Times described with pride a large turnout at the original demonstration, and took this as a clear sign of the group's popular appeal, legitimacy, and representational authority:

[INOC president] Mr. Malhotra claims to speak for all Indian Americans when he is mainly speaking for a political organization based on the Congress party 147

of India. The fact that about 500 people came on a weekday to protest in front of UN and people from all across the country have come to participate in the fasting/prayers on Oct 1st and the protest on Oct 2nd shows that his claims are false.23

Neither the INOC nor the Congress is regarded as legitimately speaking for all

Indians or Indian Americans. The INOC, seen as a mouthpiece for the Congress

Party, is perceived, rather, as a vehement anti-Hindu political force. Through an implied majoritarian populism, the activists claimed that INOC did not represent

Indian Americans as a whole, while they (the activists) did.

But the INOC, for its part, claimed the inverse: that it spoke for all Indian

Americans while the American Hindu activists being sued did, and could, not. The

INOC claimed this position by invoking Hindutva and intolerance as a way of discrediting the activists behind the ad. The INOC president described the ad as the work of a "fringe group of extreme Hindu nationalists who have found refuge in this country and whose campaigns work to undermine the democratic and pluralistic framework of India.''24 The INOC thus claimed Indian-ness as tolerant, secular, and not Hindu necessarily, and thus as antithetical to the extremism attributed to the

American Hindu activists. Such activists are cast as an intolerant minority

"undermin[ing] the democratic pluralistic framework of India." Such a remark, it may be noted, belied the group's legal assertion that INOC was directly targeted, and 148 thus libeled. Jurisdiction over the Indian state, then, still remains an issue of contestation in each group's larger representational scope and legitimacy.

Both sides thus claimed a particular representational authority and legitimacy to speak for "all Indian Americans.” But as the INOC summoned the specter of Hindutva to discredit the American Hindu activists, the defendants' disavowals of Hindutva helped navigate the accusation, and even reaffirm their claim to speak for Indian Americans as a whole. The unpublished letter by the

Forum for Preserving Gandhi's Heritage to the New York Times took particular exception to the association with Hindutva:

Mr. Malhotra [INOC president] makes senseless accusations on organizations such as Vishwa Hindu Parishad and RSS and their funding some communal agenda in India without providing any proof. Many of the organizers of the protest were successful entrepreneurs, doctors and engineers from elite Institutions who have settled in USA for 20 to 45 years and some have not even heard or were part of the organizations he claims they belong. Mr. Malhotra cannot even name the organizers to make such statements. He is indulging in McCarthyism in branding as dangerous and extremist, the highly respected Mahatma Gandhi Center in Wayne, New Jersey that is providing great service for more than two decades to the Indian American community [sic].25

This disavowal maintains that none of these American Hindu activist actions were tied to Hindutva's usual suspects (i.e., the RSS, VHP, HSS, and VHPA). And indeed, 149 none of these groups were officially represented at the initial demonstration, nor did they sign onto or publicly endorse the advertisement. Faced with the accusation of being "extreme Hindu nationalists,” the activists presented themselves as individuals, upper class, respectable, economically successful, and as disconnected from Hindutva’s conventional players, and from any larger organizational or ideological affiliation. The activists were described by supporters as "professional such as Physicians, technicians, Engineers who...did not in the past or do not hold any post in any political party [sic].”26 In contrast to the INOC’s varied charges of intolerance, fanaticism, anti-secularism, and defamation, the American Hindu activists claim a respectable American-ness built from the capitalist ideal of upward class mobility and professional "success" that drives model minority aspirations.

These claims to American-ness are put into sharper relief when deployed against the stigmatizing specter of Hindutva.

Through the protracted controversy that developed out of the public demonstrations, first on the street and then in print, against Sonia Gandhi's visit to

New York in 2007, American Hindu activism's projects, locations, and jurisdictions both unravel and are rearticulated. More than simply a shift in Hindu political allegiance from India to America resulting from migration from the former to the latter, the public demonstrations described here are sites in which American Hindu activism’s political claims (to whom, for whom, and as whom) are rendered problematic. What began with a street demonstration anchored by concerns with the Indian state (and the Hindu-ness thereof) becomes a site for claims and counter­ claims about professed attributes of American-ness. As these American Hindu activists cite their modes of civic engagement (e.g., rights to protest and to free speech) and their target audience and political jurisdiction (e.g., an American public audience and sphere), they position themselves as distinctly American political subjects. The public orientation of these demonstrations promotes an image of the peaceful and democratic minority as opposed to the militant nationalist.

The INOC lawsuit carried on over the summer months as the plaintiff and defendants exchanged memoranda arguing back and forth the nature of the grievances, actions, and parties involved. The INOC filed a parallel lawsuit against a different set of defendants in New Jersey over the same advert, which was quickly thrown out on the ruling that the Congress Party in India was indeed the actual target of the advertisement and therefore that the INOC had no basis for claiming libel or defamation. Soon after, the INOC withdrew its complaint from the New York courts as well. But the controversy over the lawsuit had played out publicly, receiving media coverage not only in diaspora newspapers such as India Abroad,

India-West, and Little India, but also mainstream American media and major papers in India as well. Familiar terms lined the controversy (i.e., anti-Hindu threat versus 151 insidious Hindutva organizing), and yet the controversy itself died as quickly as it surfaced.

Ephemeral organizing & cosmopolitanism swarms

As noted above, the legal tenability of the INOC's claim to libel and defamation was central to the lawsuit. In order to assess the basis of the plaintiff s

(i.e., INOC’s) claim of defamation, the two sides needed to establish and define the parties involved, who they represented, to whom they were speaking. One of INOC's arguments against the Forum for Preserving Gandhi's Heritage raised questions about the structural and organizational ambiguity of the group. In points 20 through

24 of the INOC's amended complaint to the court, the plaintiff questioned the legal existence of the group signed onto the ad. Referring to the "Forum for Saving

Gandhi's Heritage,” as signed onto the ad, the complaint noted that "[n]o authors explicitly identified themselves as being responsible for the advertisement's content within the text... Full names were not given, nor any affiliation or position within the organization held by any of these individuals." The statement notes that the organization’s name appears in inconsistent variations across different letters, statements, and other correspondences (e.g., "Forum for Preserving Gandhi's

Heritage,” what appears to "officially” headline their website, as well as "Forum for

Gandhi Heritage” and "Forum for Saving Gandhi Heritage" used to sign other 152 statements and letters). The complaint then concludes that"[i]n fact, however, there is no legal entity known as 'Forum for Gandhi Heritage' [one of the variations of the organization name invoked]" and that "[i]nstead, such names are improperly used by those individuals identified on the website noted above in paragraph sixteen to suggest the existence of a legal entity, where none actually exists.”27 The ad is described as having an ambiguous, even mysterious, authorship, with the nature and the status of the Forum for Preserving Gandhi's Heritage, hidden, or at least unclear.

The INOC's complaint here was that the Forum for Preserving Gandhi

Heritage essentially does not exist as a legal organization; that they are not officially recognized by the state as a registered charity or corporation with the Department of State of New York. New York state law requires, and has a system for, groups to name, structure, and run themselves as officially recognized organizations. Official status requires such organizations to have a constitution and a board of directors or governors, and also allows them to have an operating budget to generate and/or use funds. Many older Hindu organizations that formed in the U.S. following the post-65 migration influx did register to become official state-recognized organizations, most often as 501(c)3 non-profit corporations, to gain tax exemptions on their revenue and expenses (see Chapter 2). 153

For the INOC, the absence of this official recognition and status undermined the Forum for Preserving Gandhi's Heritage legitimacy. Few of the organizations involved in the Sonia Gandhi demonstration and New York Times advertisement were "official” organizations, or legal entities, in this technical sense. The identity of one of the ad's signatories, the "Mahatma Gandhi International Foundation," for one, now seems to exist only through the remnants of its own, now vacated, website last updated in September of 2007.28 Following the lawsuit, two other related groups emerged: "Friends of Freedom of Speech" and the "Hindu Support Fund," both following the support rally for the IAIF personnel named in the suit. The Hindu

Support Fund claimed to be a registered charity legally capable of soliciting and accepting monetary donations to generate support and financial resources to assist the defendants in the lawsuit. Both groups disappeared soon after the lawsuit was withdrawn.

The IAIF itself has its own structural ambiguities. The group formed largely, though unofficially, out of the east coast branches of the Overseas Friends of the BJP following the considerable internal strife they saw around this time (see Chapter 2).

The IAIF shared many of the OFBJP's political interests, though with less overt invocation of the BJP. The generic appeal of the IAIF’s name to ‘Indians’ obviously distances them from overt association with Hindutva, at least more so than a group which is the namesake of the BJP. However, I can only speculate as to whether this 154 was a tactical attempt to dissociate IAIF from the negative stigma of Hindutva in the way I have suggested for other American Hindu groups. While Narain Kataria has claimed on record that the IAIF is an officially registered organization, I have not found evidence of this, as the group does not appear in any of the corporation or non-profit directories of the New York Department of State.29

In general there has been a proliferation of new American Hindu activist groups of this unofficial and unregistered variety. Activists often organize through a practice of rapidly and temporarily naming, creating, or re-naming, and discarding organizations. An early instance of this might be seen in the IAIF’s street protest against Shabana Azmi’s visit to the New School for Social Research in 2002, mentioned above. Here, the group actually renamed itself under the name "Indian

Americans for Truth and Fairness," an organization again with a name but no official structure, and that did not exist anywhere before or after this specific event.

A similar, ephemeral network of organizations developed out of the U.N. demonstration described at the beginning of this chapter. The week after the initial demonstration at the U.N., a follow-up demonstration took place at the same location, involving many of the same people. This time, however, they organized themselves under the previously unused, and unheard of, name "Tristate Indians.”

Like the Forum for Preserving Gandhi’s Heritage, the Tristate Indians group was formed out of an assortment of Hindu and Indian groups of varying size and scope.30 155

This group presented a similar set of grievances as the IAIF and OFBJP demonstration the week prior: global terrorism, Pakistan, and Indian national security.

But this group proved to be short-lived. The following month, they took their concerns about terrorism and the Mumbai attacks on the road. In late January 2009, the group traveled to Washington, D.C. in order to hold a protest in front of the

White House during Obama's presidential inauguration ceremony. While the intent was no different from the previous demonstrations (i.e., denouncing terrorism and calling for an American response to terrorism in, or against, India), the demonstrators once again renamed themselves, this time under the more generic name "Coalition For Peace."

Only months later, the Coalition For Peace outfit was reinvented under the name "Human Rights Coalition Against Radical Islam” (HRCARI). The group once again formed to stage protests denouncing, as their name suggests, Islamic terrorism on a global scale. Their first street demonstration was held in May 2009 in

New York in Times Square, followed by another in September 2009 at Ground Zero.

In HRCARI’s latter demonstration at Ground Zero, the group "demanded American government officials, President Barak Obama and the mainstream media to connect the dots and report the truth about Radical Islam’s worldwide assault on human rights [sic]." It further "demanded the governments to take appropriate action to 156 protect the civilized world and to slow, if not stop, the spread of Islamic

Supremacism [sic].”31

Despite the familiar concerns of this latest incarnation, it differed in terms of its loosened and reconfigured organizational form. IAIF personnel, Narain Kataria and Arish Sahani in particular, featured prominently as organizers and speakers.

But HRCARI was organized as a self-described "apex group” made up of an alliance of over 30 other organizations.32 This included Hindu and Indian organizations such as the IAIF and a number of other unofficial/unregistered groups of the sort described earlier in the chapter (e.g., Hindu Human Rights Watch and the

Foundation of Nepalese Americans). However, unlike the Tristate Indians and

Coalition for Peace groups, HRCARI included a wide range of other groups from varying ethnic, religious, and interest groups. It featured pro-Israel and Zionist groups (Zionist Organization of America, Jewish Action Alliance Arabs for Israel),

Sikh groups (Namdhari Sikh Foundation, Sikh Recognition Trust), a number of national security oriented groups (9/11 Families for a Secure America, Center for

Security Policy, Forcefield, The Intelligence Summit, and others) and a range of others such as the Chinese Community Relations Council, Muslims Against Sharia,

Sudan Freedom Walk, and the American Coptic Union. While associations between

American Hindu nationalist groups and Zionist groups have been observed before 157

(Swamy 2004; Prashad 2003), the association of American Hindu activists with such a broad coalition of groups had not.

The HRCARI shows American Hindu activists aligning with a range of groups and voices claiming to represent varied political interests and locations. This coalition represents a looser American Hindu activist engagement and operation, organizationally and structurally - but also ideologically, as this modular coalition was driven by a common concern with a threat that is in itself modular. The Human

Rights Coalition Against Radical Islam takes terrorism and Islam as its defining points of concern, and the American Hindu participation in this coalition is based upon a particular claim to terrorist victimization. At the HRCARI demonstration in

May 2009, IAIF member Arish Sahani described to the crowd an ongoing history of

Hindu persecution at the hands of a "Radical Islam" that stretches back 1400 years.33 He claimed contemporary persecution of Hindus takes place across India from Bangladesh to Kashmir, the latter in which "300,000 Hindus were driven out by radical islamists from their homes using rape, murder and intimidation [sic]."34

Sahani describes Hindus as exceptionally victimized by such terrorism, claiming that

"[i]n just the last 4 years both in the number of people died due to terrorism and in the number of terror incidents in India it is just next to the war torn country Iraq

[sic]."35 158

Other participants in the coalition made their own claims to terrorist victimization. At the same HRCARI demonstration in May 2009, a speaker from the

Namdhari Sikh Foundation offered an account of a history of conflict between

Sikhism and a timeless Islamic terrorism:

What America is doing now in Afghanistan, we Sikhs had done it 200 years ago and taught a befitting lesson to terrorists from Afghanistan. We Sikhs organized our army under Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Lion of Punjab, and pushed all the Islamic invaders back to Afghanistan. Under our Commander Hari Singh Nalva we attacked Afghanistan and defeated them and broke their

backbone. We built a very powerful human wall on the western front of India and insulated India from foreign attacks for ever [sic].36

In this case, the speaker described not only a abstracted equation between Islam, timeless terrorism, and a history of Sikh and Indian persecution, but also a history of

Sikh anti-terrorism, an ongoing war-on-terror fought by Sikhs that prefigures

America's post-9/11 war-on-terror.

Common to both the Hindu and Sikh participation was an alignment with, and investment in, a project of American national security. The American Hindu participation in this rally, and in the coalition more broadly, featured a resolute endorsement of the American post-9/11 war-on-terror. Referring again to Arish

Sahani’s comments at the HRCARI demonstration in Times Square in May 2009, he offers his account of Hindu victimization by terrorism as a warning to Americans: 159

Can you imagine being forced to live as refugees in your own country? Can you imagine if you have a daughter you never know when she will be kidnapped and converted? Can you imagine witnessing the destruction of your worship places that have thousands of years of history being blown out to pieces? Can you imagine your worship place being converted to a slaughter house? Can you imagine non-Muslims driven away from Michigan, USA and forced to live as refugees in USA? This is what radical islamists are capable of doing. This is violation of human rights and pure genocide by radical Islam [sic].37

Sahani’s audience here is clearly envisioned as American. Moreover, his alignment with a political project focused on American security, also begins to reposition the political location he is claiming for American Hindus. In this way, much like in the lawsuit over the New York Times ad, what emerges here is a set of claims repositioning American Hindus as American political subjects. Sahani's remarks were unambiguous on this. "I stand before you and feel proud of living in USA. This country is like a heaven on earth," he proclaimed when introducing himself the to crowd.

Beyond Sahani's subjective appeal to being a proud American, the American

Hindu activist involvement in the coalition becomes located as American in more instrumental ways. He called on the crowd to "[f]ight Radical Islam" by instructing them to: 160

[r]ead all about radical Islam and educate yourself and your Congressmen and Senators about it. Take media to task and let them not cause the suicide of our culture in the name of political correctness. Make sure that freedom of expression guaranteed under the Constitution is protected.

The strategy here thus appeals to, and seeks to work within, American political structures. HRCARI's previous incarnation, the Coalition for Peace, similarly described themselves as "[exercising] their right of freedom of speech guaranteed by the US Constitution" in order to "spread the awareness among the general

American public about the dangers arising out of radical Islamic terrorism."38 This group also positioned itself jurisdictionally as American, insofar as they appeal directly to American political institutions - no less than the President and the White

House itself. American Hindu activism in these instances once again stakes its jurisdictional terrain as distinctly American.

The American Hindu activist involvement with these coalitions and their alignment with the larger American war-on-terror illustrates, moreover, another front on which such activists grapple with questions of multicultural respectability and the ideal of the "model minority." The ideal of the “model minority," wherein a serial minoritization constructs some minority groups as successful and "model” in contrast to supposedly "failed" minority groups, has been observed among South

Asian immigrant communities, particularly in terms of the prevalence of anti-Black racism sometimes observed among such communities (Mazumdar 1989; Prashad 161

2000). In this case, under the post-9/11 American war-on-terror, terrorism and

Islam become the foils of the model minority. Opposition to terrorism situates these activists as peaceful, respectable, and non-threatening. The HRCARI demonstrations clearly draw upon the war-on-terror’s hardened "us” and "them" binary, fashioning a model minority in opposition to Muslims and/as terrorists. The demonstrations offer spaces in which activists publicly profess (American) national pride, thereby mitigating the "minority" status. Sahani thus defined the HRCARI coalition in this way:

We are Americans. And we came here today to do what Americans do best. [...] Only in America can all the victims of jihad - black, white, and yellow and brown -gather and join in a brotherhood and a sisterhood of freedom...

However, consider also the remarks by Narain Kataria of the IAIF, and a lead

HRCARI organizer, following the HRCARI demonstration at Ground Zero in

September 2009:

Radical Islamic preaches an ideology that is intolerant, exclusive, oppressive, totalitarian, violates human rights of others, and is incompatible with American Constitution. Radical Islam has unleashed a war on humanity [emphasis added]. For the survival and protection of humanity as a whole, it is absolutely essential for the civilized governments and the United Nations to nip in bud this totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion [sic].39 162

This focus on Islam is, of course, very similar to what I have described at Hindu

Unity Day, while the invocation of "humanity" by Kataria recalls the humanism suggested at the Human Empowerment Conference [see Chapter 3). Here, terrorism, while conflated with Islam, is articulated as global - it threatens everyone, everywhere. Islam threatens Hindus, Jews, Christians, and Buddhists alike, as one

IAIF member told the crowd at HRCARI’s demonstration at Ground Zero in

September 2009.40 With this, American Hindus themselves become located as global in opposition to abstract global threats.41

Such public protests reveal both shifting discourses of political belonging, as well as the shifting organizational forms in American Hindu activism today. Many of the groups described in this chapter bring to mind some aspects of Hansen and

Stepputat's (2007) "informal sovereignties" more than a conventional Hindu transnationalism, insofar as they have an informal character, ephemeral structure, and modular political objectives. They have no official status and are not necessarily recognized by the state, though they do still operate largely within its social and legal boundaries and, more significantly, still seek legitimacy and public approval within these boundaries. The informal cluster of organizations created around the

New York Times ad controversy (the Forum for Preserving Gandhi's Heritage, the

Hindu Support Fund, the Mahatma Gandhi International Foundation, etc.) might better resemble the characteristics of Hardt and Negri's (2004) "swarm” organizing: 163 not only are they unofficial, but they are also decentered, difficult to identify, isolate, and track. They form ephemerally, surface, and then recede, without formal membership, constitution, bylaws, or procedures. The IAIF are perhaps the closest thing to an identifiable hub in this otherwise loose, proliferating network of Hindu activist groups.

This sort of social organizing might, in part, be seen as an inevitable result of

American multicultural's demand for the self-organized minority groups from the

"bottom-up,” as opposed to the structured and state-managed multiculturalisms of

Britain and Canada where it stands as policy (Rajan & Sharma 2006:11). This is the same multiculturalist dynamic often associated with the expansion of American

Hindu groups such as the VHPA and HSS in the 1990s (see Chapter 2). In a way, the expansion of the VHPA and HSS into their numerous subsidiary groups (HSCs, IDRF,

AHAD, etc.) has similarities with the organizational shape-shifting described in this chapter. However, the groups of the 1990s maintained a registered, official, and structured makeup that many of the groups described in this chapter do not. The

Campaign to Stop Funding Hate relied on this structure - the paper trail of financial records left by officially registered non-profits and the various official inter- organizational associations - to research the potential transnational reach of a sangh parivar network in the 1990s. The IAIF on the other hand, only solicit contributions in the form of cheques made out to the name of their acting president, 164 not to the name of the organization. A network of unregistered organizations that sometimes exist only in name eludes a trackable, documented organizational structure.

While premised on a conventional identity politics that assumes uniquely isolated groups coming together in coalition, the Coalition for Peace and HRCARI also seem marked by the informality of assemblages and swarms. These types of unstable organized forms would seem a rather particular response to the new politics of security marked by modular discourses of threat and fear. An omnipresent threatening terrorism able to project and attach to anywhere in time

(e.g., the projection of terrorism back to medieval India] and space (e.g., the global present of universal human rights) allows these groups to recombine in a variety of ways: Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and others that, in other times and places, might well come into coalition as their claims to threat articulate. In this way, American Hindus may not be envisioning themselves as a "political citizenry” in the conventional sense, but in terms more abstract and less defined, as their political aims, in turn become abstract (e.g., global security, human rights).

Perhaps this is the nature of civil society engagements in the midst of what

Deleuze (1992) referred to as the "society of control" and its abstract regulatory forces and political forms beyond those of the "discipline societies" described by

Foucault. Michael Hardt (1995; 1998) extends Deleuze's suggestion into the larger 165 question of the withering of civil society. Hardt suggests that the crisis of modern social institutions is effectively a crisis of the very idea of the liberal public sphere, imagined as the core and engine of modern civil society. The idea of civil society itself, as "the institutional infrastructure for political mediation and public exchange" (Hardt 1995:27), or as the rational consensus of a unified society in the models of Jurgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, is under transformation, thrown into a crisis within which "the place of politics has been de-actualized” (Hardt

1998:142). Civil society's promise of a functional, rational arrangement of groups and interests, according to Hardt, following Deleuze, is not as tenable as, or if, it once was. The assemblage theories of society of DeLanda and Latour (see Chapter 1) think about society in similar terms of contingent, emergent social formations.

The crisis of the liberal public sphere observed by Hardt ultimately concerns a shifting and tenuous relationship between civil society and political society, or the state. Insofar as civil society withers, questions emerge about how people organize and mobilize, how they act politically. The public street demonstrations by

American Hindu activists described in this chapter say something about the ideal of civil society and the context of its apparent withering. They show American Hindu activists going public in such a way that aspires to a certain normative ideal of a civil society that imagines a common public amidst which they are situated as a defined component. They also presuppose a political society with which this civil society 166 interfaces. And yet, what is seen are efforts to organize, mobilize, and publicize interests through a multiplication of reconfiguring, and non-durable, modular, groups and political interests. Claims to whom and as whom they speak are thrown into question and constantly reconfigured. Disconnection, contestation, and antagonism operate in these public spheres as much as "rational" consensus. That notions of terror and threat figure so prominently in these public demonstrations point towards an agitated dimension of civil society situated within a larger politics of fear under which groups reconfigure and realign. That this mobilizing is based around the often undefined, lurking fear of spectral terrorist threats so prevalent in the post-9/11 era, has particular bearing on the questions of civil society being raised by these demonstrations. In one sense, the ideal of a civil society negotiating a consensus with its common public evaporates when abstract threats become operating forces. Political society may or may not be able to do anything about the abstract fears being publicly voiced within civil society. In another way, the focus on terrorism in many of these cases not only prompts claims to integration within a civil society (e.g., as respectable model minorities, or as constitution-observing

Americans, or as proud anti-terrorist citizens), but also an imagination well beyond it, as abstract, global, and realigning formations. 167

Claiming the American Hindu

To return to the pressing claim in the Sonia Gandhi ad controversy, and in the series of demonstrations following the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, we can see a significant American Hindu activist concern with claiming Hindus as politically, and by implication morally, American. The claims emerging out of the

New York Times controversy sat at an ambivalent crossroads between a familiar

Hindu Indian state building project, while simultaneously seeking to secure the interests and voice of American Hindus. Coalition forms such as HRCARI similarly suggest alignment with a particular American national security project, while also imagining larger global threats and formations. From my observation, however, these latter developments are perhaps atypical, or at least nascent. For many

American Hindu organizations, mobilizing and locating their political interests as distinctly American has become explicitly central. This is a trajectory of American

Hindu activism represented by the development of one of the most prominent and established American Hindu organizations, the Hindu American Foundation (HAF).

The HAF is a group founded in 2004 out of Washington D.C., but has since grown into a nationwide organization with multiple locations including New York, D.C.,

California, and Texas. It is a counterpoint to the loose and informal organizations described in this chapter insofar as the HAF seeks to establish a highly structured, official, and legitimate American Hindu public presence. The HAF’s chief concern has been with both the political and discursive representation of Hindus; i.e., getting

Hindus into American political processes, and ensuring a positive public profile. Its efforts to promote Hindu participation and influence in American political processes have resulted in a number of mobilizations in recent years that have included campaigning against Christian themed license plates issued in South Carolina, reforming the American R-l visa program to remain accessible to Hindu religious workers, and lobbying U.S. 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 state school textbooks, monitoring media (especially the internet) for offending misrepresentations of Hindus, and publishing information manuals and pamphlets on Hinduism aimed at both American Hindus and non-Hindus.

Part of the HAF's scope is not altogether different from the concerns of the

FIA or AIA two decades earlier (see Chapter 2). However, the HAF is explicitly concerned with the particular representation of American Hindus and the development of a public and unified American Hindu voice rather than simply

Indian Americans. The HAF is also founded and run almost entirely by second- generation American-born Indians. 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). They consciously bill 169 themselves as paradigm shifters, ushering in a new second-generation-led mobilization that will make American Hindus players in an American public sphere.

In this sense of a coming of age of second generation American Hindus, the

HAF seeks to make Hindus a coherently represent-able entity such that they can be advocated for. The interest in going public with this advocacy further underscores an 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. 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 that regulate pluralism through a vocabulary of discrete difference and reified identity upon the cultural politics of American Hindus has been widely observed (Kurien 2007a; Lai

2003a, 2003b; Prashad 2000; Rajagopal 2001).

In seeking to represent and mobilize an American Hindu voice, the HAF has in its own way attempted to claim legitimacy within an American public sphere. Like many American Hindu organizations, the HAF have sought to decouple themselves from Hindutva and the political context of India, though the group has often been associated with Hindutva by its critics.42 The American Hindu voice that the HAF seeks to represent is carefully not fundamentalist or nationalist. Instead it promotes a sense of Hinduism and Hindu identity that emphasizes its internal diversity and 170 essential tolerance. The tagline used by the organization in recent years states its interest in "Promoting Understanding, Tolerance and Pluralism." But its emphasis on plurality (or otherwise with "difference") alongside a call for unity raises the difficult questions of why Hinduism is an identity and what makes it coherently represent-able as a political body with a unified voice. In its own way, the HAF indicates a certain faith in the promise and logic of civil society, in which representing and authorizing a unified American Hindu voice as a legitimate, definable component of the public becomes the central aim. The concern over the fundamentally abstract terrain of identity, however, opens up its own set of questions and uncertainties, as will be discussed in the following chapter. Chapter 5 - Identity, representation, and the politics of anxiety

In November2008,1 attended the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in Chicago. The AAR's annual meeting, typically drawing thousands of scholars from across the globe for several days of panels, keynotes, book launches, and job interviews, is the largest and most high profile conference in the field of religious studies today. The conference featured, as it has for years, a number of sessions devoted to various aspects of the academic study of Hinduism.

One particular session, under the theme of representations of Hinduism in North

America, drew a particularly large crowd of religious studies scholars, alongside a few non-academics, including representatives from the Hindu American Foundation

(HAF). The panel featured four speakers, all from North American universities, presenting on different topics relating to Hinduism in North America. One presenter spoke about Vivekananda and early Hinduism in North America; another about discourses of home and history among contemporary everyday temple-goers in

California. And while these papers received a largely positive response from the packed meeting room, the most notable aspect of the session was perhaps the frustrated critical intervention it drew from one audience member. During the question period following the presentations, a soft but stern voice cut in from the 172 back of the meeting room. A young man describing himself as a freelance writer, and a Hindu, began to question the panel presenters, accusing them of misrepresenting

Hinduism and of denying Hindus a voice in these discussions. He leveled a frustrated tirade complaining that American academics had an unchecked power over how

Hinduism is represented. He claimed they consolidated their power in meetings such as this, with the deliberate exclusion of Hindus, which thus allowed academic misrepresentations of Hinduism turning into popular truths.

The questioner’s visibly frustrated intervention did not point to any specifics, though it hardly needed to; the nonplussed and irritated panelists were quite familiar with the complaints he was raising. His intervention invoked a well- established discourse of conflict between American Hindus and American academia.

His questions were concerned less with the specifics of what this AAR session had discussed and more with what he thought it represented, the larger threat that it posed. His intervention continued as he pulled out copies of a recently published book, Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America, from a rucksack and offered copies to the crowd, claiming that the book presented "the truth" of what American academia was doing to Hindus (see below for further discussion of this book). The panelists and much of the audience were largely unsympathetic to his grievances. One panelist shot back in equal frustration claiming that the questioner was guilty of precisely what he was criticizing the 173 panelists and academia in general for (i.e., insisting on a singular truth), and that contemporary academic religious studies strives not to work in that way. The questioner left the room abruptly after this exchange - he was clearly about to be ushered out of the room in any case - and was not heard from again. I later heard from some of the other panelists that he had been seen around at other sessions, but few knew much else about who he was or what he was doing. I myself had only seen this questioner briefly on one other occasion at this AAR, where he sat quietly in attendance at a special awards address by Wendy Doniger, a professor of religious studies at the University of Chicago. Doniger, as will be described below, has been no stranger to these sorts of interventions and public criticisms - in fact, the moderator of her address at the 2008 AAR, anticipating such an intervention, preemptively warned the audience that any attempted confrontations would not be tolerated and would result in dismissal from the meeting.

The complaints of this freelance writer, and his attempted public confrontation at the 2008 AAR, are part and parcel of what is perhaps the largest growing trajectory of American Hindu activism today. Over the last decade, conflicts have escalated between America Hindus and American academics, with some feeling that, at best, Hindus are misrepresented in the way that academic studies have described and analyzed aspects of Hindu mythology, symbolism, practice, or literary culture. At worst, some feel Hindus are under attack and systematically 174 marginalized by American academia. This chapter documents and analyzes this discourse of conflict between American Hindus and American academia and how it has given rise to an expanding trajectory of American Hindu activism featuring new sites and strategies of mobilization and, more significantly, further shifting sets of political aims and concerns. It is a trajectory of activism situated on a rather particular political terrain: that of the politics of representation and identity. In describing a range of Hindu activist mobilizations against American academia, I focus in particular on the unstable engagements with identity, in America and of

America, that arise. The conflict with academic representations signal larger dilemmas about the nature of identity and of America itself, as both are encountered ambivalently, or, borrowing a phrase from Derrida (2002:82), "both with a menace and with a chance."

Academia, psychoanalysis, and the new frontier o f threat

The conflicts between American Hindus and American academia begin most clearly in the late 1990s with the controversy over the study of the Hindu mystic

Ramakrishna titled Kali's Child: The Mystic and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings o f

Ramakrishna by Jeffrey Kripal (1995; 1998). Kripal, a professor of religious studies at Rice University, applied psychoanalytic insights to Ramakrishna, and the various texts documenting his life and teachings, to suggest that the famed mystic’s teachings were steeped in, and highly motivated by, an ambiguous sexuality and homoeroticism. While Kripal's approach, and his suggestions about the homoerotic elements in the life and teachings of Ramakrishna, were not without precedent -

Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, for instance, had similarly described the ambiguous sexuality of Ramakrishna's mysticism - his study nevertheless generated an outburst of negative reactions. Spearheading the outburst was a scathing review of the book by Narasingha Sil, a professor in the department of history at Western

Oregon University, appearing in the Calcutta English-language newspaper The

Statesman in 1997.1 Sil took Kripal to task for numerous mistranslations in Kripal's reading of the key Bengali source texts on Ramakrishna. Such mistranslations, according to Sil, allowed Kripal to read sexual and homoerotic themes in these texts.

Sil's critical review incited some backlash in India, not the least of which came from the Ramakrishna Mission in Kolkata, which resented any association of

Ramakrishna with homoeroticism.2 The backlash in India prompted a movement to have Kripal's book banned.

The book's reception in the American context was marked by further controversy. The initial reception of Kripal’s book among academic readers in the

U.S. was largely positive, though not uniformly or unequivocally so. The book won the AAR's book prize in 1995 despite the criticisms of several of the initial reviews.3

The controversy in India generated by Sil's critical review circulated also transnationally, soon picked up by American scholars in online and email 176 discussions, and eventually at the AAR annual meetings. This led Kripal to issue a second edition of Kali's Child with a new preface addressing his critics.4 But this second edition drew more controversy than it quelled. A new wave of critiques emerged and intensified, coming now primarily from American Hindus, notably led by that of Swami Tyagananda (2000} of the Vedanta Society of Boston. The Swami's critique, titled "Kali's Child Revisted - or - Didn't Anyone Check the

Documentation?”, returned to the allegation of rampant mistranslation in Kali’s

Child. His lengthy essay placed a number Kripal's translations of the Kathamrita, one of the central Bengali texts on the life and teachings of Ramakrishna, against the canonical English translation of the text by Swami Nikhilananda in 1942. Swami

Tyagananda focused on the many passages in which Kripal observed a homoerotic subtext where Nikhilananda's translations did not. He concluded that Kripal’s

Bengali skills are deficient, and this deficiency allowed him to impose a psychoanalytical frame onto his source texts. The issue of homoeroticism thus remained of central concern to Tyagananda, maintaining that Kripal sought to find this homoerotic subtext, and this is palpably not part of the original text or even "the

Hindu point of view” from which he claimed to speak (Tyagananda 2000:33).

While Tyagananda’s criticisms were not necessarily new, the methods and expanse of their distribution were. He distributed his article at the annual American

Academy of Religion (AAR) meetings in 2000 (Hawley 2004:372), then 177 subsequently extensively online, with perhaps its most significant outlet being the website of the Infinity Foundation, a non-profit research foundation based in

Princeton, New Jersey, run by Rajiv Malhotra. With the exposure of Tyagananda's critique through the virtual realm of the web, the controversy expanded and spread.

It was intensely debated on the R1SA-L, the email list of the AAR's Religion in South

Asia (RISA) subgroup, made up largely of American-based religious studies and social science professors, including Kripal himself, graduate students, and independent researchers/writers. It is both an informational list and a discussion list. Participants post articles, references, job and research postings, and general questions relating to research on religions in South Asia, most often with a particularly heavy emphasis on Hinduism and India. The Kripal controversy became a topic of conversation on the RISA list by early 2001, in which a number of RISA scholars came to Kripal’s defense, both in terms of his actual thesis and in terms of his right to forward such a thesis.

The discussions on R1SA-L prompted Rajiv Malhotra to write his own critical essay, posted to the blog/portal site Sulekha.com, not just on the Kripal case, but on the larger issue of RISA and the representational authority he saw the group assuming. Referring to RISA and the AAR as a "cartel,” Malhotra held them responsible for "why the American mainstream misunderstands India so pathologically” (Malhotra 2002). He claimed that the American religious studies scholars of RISA not only defame Hinduism, with the power to act as gatekeepers controlling representations of Hinduism in America and globally. While he drew specifically on the Kripal controversy as an example of the "cartel" in operation, much of his criticism was reserved for Wendy Doniger, whom he held as the leader of an anti-Hindu movement sweeping through American academia. Doniger’s students, of whom Kripal was one, are described as a syndicate presiding nefariously over the academic study of Hinduism, intent on feeding distorted representations of Hinduism to an unsuspecting American audience.

Malhotra’s critique envisioned a state of affairs far more dire than that of

Tyagananda. For Malhotra, this syndicate of American scholars is stricken with

"Wendy's child syndrome," what he describes as a pathological cultural trait that locks Western scholars into a neurotic preoccupation with sex. Western scholars are stuck in their "lower three chakras," and thus predisposed towards a frame of analysis fixated on sex and the physical body. For Malhotra, as for Tyagananda, such a fixation makes one incapable of recognizing essential and profound truths of

Hinduism that are supposed to be beyond sex and the body. But while Tyagananda criticized Kripal for mistranslation and ethnocentric theorizing, Malhotra pushed the matter further by rooting academic misrepresentation in psychological and civilizational causes. The stakes in the battle over academic representations are raised with Malhotra’s suggestion that misrepresentations are not incidental, but 179 determined by a predisposed will to demonize Hindus as primitive, strange, and irrational.

Malhotra's critique also amplified concerns not only over these causes of academic misrepresentations, but also over their larger effects and consequences.

The first effect of these representations is the disempowering and marginalization of Hindus:

The denial of agency to Indians who are outside the academy's controls and supervision continues to hide questionable practices, including potential academic violations, and violation of social and personal ethics, ironically, by certain scholars who wear masks of human rights activism. There are social- ethical implications of degrading the dignity of American minorities, by shaming them for their culture (Malhotra 2002).

The "social-ethical implications” here suggest that Hindus are disempowered by not being in control of academia's representations of Hinduism. For Malhotra, a Hindu community should control and preside over representations of Hinduism: "the faith community is the real owner of the tradition,” he notes (Malhotra 2002).

While a particular construction of Hindus as a community (that is definable) and a culture (that is to be owned) emerges here, these definitions remain ambiguous. At times, its definition comes through a contrast with Islam. Malhotra suggests that the treatment of Islam in American religious studies is quite different from that of Hinduism. Islam, he claimed, is being "repackaged" in ways that 180 mitigate or preempt negative stereotyping. While the discipline of religious studies maligned Hinduism, Malhotra saw it venerating Islam, an observation through which he fashioned an oppositional split between Islam and Hinduism. He described

Islam as monolithic and doctrinaire, on the one hand, in opposition to Hinduism, which is essentially tolerant and pluralistic, on the other. He saw the doctrinaire tradition attributed to Islam as being positively represented, while the pluralistic one of Hinduism suffers a "denial of agency" and demonization. A parallel contrast is raised in how Malhotra described American scholars as "outsiders” versus Hindu

"insiders." Non-Hindu outsiders, such as Muslims in this case, are mired in "the mentality of the 'one book’ culture" (Malhotra 2002).

American academics thus create accounts of Hinduism that, according to

Malhotra, Hindus themselves would not recognize. Underneath this is an assumption that if the Hindu community envisioned by Malhotra were to control these representations, then psychoanalysis and sex would not figure into them. In this way, Malhotra's criticisms of academic representations of Hinduism differ from the concerns that AHAD held over appropriation and misrepresentation of

Hinduism in American media and popular culture as described in Chapter 3. As

Malhotra's RISA-Lila essay emphasized the feeling that Kripal, Doniger, and others are actually attempting to pathologize Hindus, rather than simply defame and profane Hindu deities or sacred symbols, the issue turns from a concern with 181 threats against Hinduism towards threats against Hindus. Representation itself becomes the object of political concern, with representational jurisdiction less about particular misrepresentations or mistranslations, and more with securing the nature of, and rights to, the group as a whole.

What concerned Malhotra further was the potential for even greater harmful effects. Academia’s misrepresentations not only disempower and shame Hindus, they also negatively impact society at large. Academic representations of Hinduism are seen as the main interface through which a broader American public encounters

Hinduism. "The typical American student uses his/her pre-existing Eurocentric biases as the context for interpretation,” he claimed, fearing the ready consumption of academia's offending representations by American students, believed as equally predisposed to anti-Hindu sentiments (Malhotra 2002). As negative representations in American classrooms become more broadly and publicly consumed, Malhotra envisioned the gravest of results:

So what do we have here? Islamic scholars are busy trying to clean up the image of Islam. On the other hand, Hinduism scholars are trying the opposite -- appearing to demonize it, and thereby causing, intentionally or otherwise, Hindu shame amongst the youth. History shows that genocides have been preceded by the denigration of the victims - showing them as irrational, immoral, lacking a legitimate religion, lacking in compassion towards others and love towards their babies, etc., i.e. not deserving of the same human rights extended to white people (Malhotra 2002). 182

While Malhotra’s critique began with a concern over Hindus threatened by the cultural pathologies of American academics, the matter becomes marked by a sense of persecution in which Hindus are threatened on a larger social and political scale.

While it built upon previous debates and arguments, Malhotra’s critique became highly influential among American Hindus not just in amplifying the discourse of

Hindu persecution by American academia, but also in generalizing it. Malhotra converted what was previously a number of discrete cases of controversial academic representations into a generalized phenomenon, a threatening whole beyond its parts, beyond its particular cases and moments. Malhotra's RISA-Lila essay states that:

Readers who are unfamiliar with RISA and AAR should read this essay as a general account of Western academic engagement and control over India- related studies. While the examples given are RISA-specific, the message applies more broadly (Malhotra 2002).

His concerns situated academia's threatening representations at a level greater and more general than of Swami Tyagananda, for instance, whose response to Kali's

Child was a particularized critique of a particularized offense. Malhotra's RISA-Lila essay however brought together various controversial academic representations into a larger phenomenon. 183

'Misrepresentation ’ and mobilization

Malhotra's account of Hindu marginalization circulated rapidly across virtual spaces, earning a sizeable following, both in terms of proponents and detractors. On the one hand, detractors claimed that Malhotra was attempting to both construct and preside over a stylized homogenous Hinduism, or worse, that he was a front for a larger Hindu nationalist revisionism, both suggestions that he and others have contested over the years. Proponents, on the other hand, shared in his disdain for academia's representational practices, feeling that Hindus had been systematically excluded and marginalized from the production of their own representations. His account of a generalized narrative of persecution had a particular appeal that can perhaps only be described more than explained. Supporters went as far as to herald his intervention as path-breaking; an early statement by the Hindu American

Foundation (HAF) described the RISA-Lila essay as an "epochal work."5

But while Malhotra put academic representations of Hindus at the top of the

American Hindu political agenda, he did not call for a specific mobilized response to the issues he was outlining - at least not initially. In reflecting on his earlier public interventions, he told me in conversation that he actually "discouraged” any larger community mobilization at first. Instead, he claims to have only sought an academic voice for Hindus with equal representational authority, what he defines in the RISA-

Lila essay as his "quest for inter-cultural symmetry” (Malhotra 2002). The response he did promote was an academic and discursive reversal that would "apply similar 184 methods to psychoanalyze and deconstruct the community of Eurocentric scholars themselves” (Malhotra 2002). The AAR, as the heart of the American academic religious studies cartel, and its annual meetings, became key sites in which

Malhotra, and other American Hindu activists, would attempt to provoke and intervene. Malhotra has regularly attended AAR meetings for a number of years and has been known to frequently pose public challenges to academic presentations felt to be offensive or unfair. In one well-known incident at the 2001 AAR annual meeting, Malhotra publicly challenged Wendy Doniger by asking whether she herself had ever undergone psychoanalysis. The anecdote of my experience at the

2008 AAR meeting, described at the opening of this chapter, suggests that this strategy of confrontation and intervention has proved influential and continues today.

Some scholars have attempted to use the AAR to respond to these issues. In both 1998 and 2001, special AAR panels were organized to engage the complaints being voiced by some American Hindu groups. The panel at the 1998 AAR meetings, titled "Who Speaks for Hinduism?", focused on the issues of representational authority in academia, with particular attention to the insider/outsider debates that had been framing much of the American Hindu concern with academia up to this point.6 The panel's participants reflected on the different ways in which American academics often position themselves in the study of Hinduism as "outsider," with many maintaining that critical and reasonable research need not be done from an

"insider" position, and some also suggesting that these designations are "static or fluid" (Caldwell & Smith 2000:708)7 Similar issues were taken up at an AAR panel in 2001 in Denver titled "Defamation/Anti/Defamation: Hindus in Dialogue with the

Western Academy." The debates were replayed here as Rajiv Malhotra, one of the invited participants claiming to offer "A Hindu View," reasserted his concerns that profound "asymmetries" continue to produce a skewed balance of power through which academics marginalize and exploit Hinduism.8 However, the use of the language of "defamation” - a legal term describing an intention to harm through making false public statements - implied concerns, indeed causes and consequences, beyond just the existence of "asymmetries." Despite the AAR’s apparent intention of promoting dialogue and addressing the many criticisms they had come to face, these sessions contributed to, and perhaps even escalated, the antagonism between American Hindus and American academia; or at least, to the sense that these represent mutually-defining oppositional "sides." At these moments, the AAR figures not only as a key object of American Hindu activist interest, but also as a key site in which these discourses develop and are publicly enacted.

Despite what Malhotra may or may not have intended, the crisis articulated in his early essays has contributed to the development of increasingly active and 186 organized responses from American Hindus. One significant controversy erupted in late 2002 over an entry written for Microsoft's electronic encyclopedia Encarta by

Wendy Doniger. An entry on Hinduism that she had edited for the encyclopedia was targeted by a number of American Hindus, whose reaction culminated in a lengthy critical post on Sulekha.com by Sankrant Sanu, a Washington-based software engineer. He criticized Doniger's account of Hinduism as misleading and unsympathetic in comparison to the encyclopedia's entries on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Doniger was accused of portraying Hinduism as an irrational religion steeped in a strange and delusional mythology.9 Sanu’s critique circulated widely, again aided considerably by the growth of e-mail networks. As word reached a number of organizations and students, letter-writing campaigns and petitions were launched, most of which were virtual (i.e., emailed letters and online petitions].

These mobilizations had an impact as Microsoft ended up removing the Doniger- edited article in favor of one by religious studies professor Arvind Sharma.

Another significant controversy erupted over the book Ganesa: Lord of

Obstacles (1985) by Paul Courtright, a professor of religion at Emory University.

Courtright's book had already been in print for nearly 20 years before it became the center of a controversy very similar to that surrounding Kali's Child. As with Kripal's book, complaints surfaced about Courtright’s application of psychoanalysis in reading latent sexual themes in Hindu mythology, in particular with his suggestion 187 of Oedipal themes in stories of the birth of the popular deity Ganesh. Much of the controversy centered on Courtright’s remark that the acquisition of Ganesha's elephant head represented a displaced tension between Ganesh and his father deity

Shiva, as a phallus rendered limp by Shiva’s attempt to injure the son, in the standard terms of psychoanalytical Oedipal conflicts. Familiar complaints once again alleged poor scholarship and mistranslation (see Ramaswamy 2007b).10

The response to Courtright, more than the simple psychoanalytical reversal proposed by Rajiv Malhotra in the other cases, assumed a very active and public tenor. The Hindu Students Council (HSC) at the University of Louisiana issued a petition calling for Courtright to be reprimanded by Emory, as well as calling on

Motilal Banarsidass, the publisher which re-released the book in 2001, to have it withdrawn and banned. The HSC petition was yet another virtual mobilization: an online petition created, signed, and promoted on the internet. The petition again circulated rapidly to quickly accumulate a sizeable number of e-signatures, in the thousands by the time the petition was shut down after a handful of death threats appeared amidst the signatures.

Mobilizations continued offline as a group of Hindu students and others in

Atlanta organized themselves into a group called the "Concerned Community,” arranging a meeting with the Emory administration to voice their complaints against Courtright.11 The Concerned Community group made a presentation to the administration, alongside a panel of other faculty (not including Courtright himself), in which they outlined a case accusing Courtright of offensive and faulty scholarship.

The group did not quite receive the response it sought, as Emory did not formally reprimand Courtright. The online and offline mobilizations did find success in having Motilal Banarsidass pull the book from its catalogues. This prompted critical responses among American religious studies scholars shocked by the publisher’s acquiescence. Letters soon circulated amongst religious studies scholars, many published by Motilal Banarsidass in the past, on the RISA list calling for a boycott of the publisher.

The handful of death threats against Courtright gained the petition and the

HSC a considerable degree of notoriety, likely earning the entire controversy more publicity than it would have ever had otherwise. Courtright issued his own public response through Emory's journal Academic Exchange, in which he defended his work and his methods as scholarly "critical inquiry" that has run afoul of a type of

Hindu orthodoxy.12 The public attention peaked with a critical article appearing in the Washington Post on this controversy, along with those involving Wendy Doniger and Jeff Kripal, linking all these cases back to the sangh parivar and religious fundamentalism in general.13 The concerns about Hindutva and its ideological and operational movement into the U.S. were in ready circulation by the time of the

Courtright controversy, and became a means of explaining these conflicts. As 189 discussed in Chapter 3, it is just a few years prior to this that the Campaign to Stop

Funding Hate had drawn critical attention to the financial connections between some American Hindu organizations and the sangh parivar in India.

The critical scrutiny prompted by the Courtright controversy, and made public by the Washington Post, only further antagonized American Hindu activists.

The HAF responded with a public statement criticizing the Washington Postfs invocation of Hindutva and of India:

...to imply, as the [Washington Post] article does, that the growing outrage of Hindu-Americans over how their religion is demeaned by the likes of Professor Courtright and Doniger in the United States is related to politics in India is to disparage and belittle the genuine sentiments of Hindus in this country. Hindu-Americans, first and foremost as proud Americans, are exercising their constitutional right to protest an injustice that occurred here in the U.S.14

Their statement shows the HAF once again vying for larger community jurisdiction, claiming to speak for both the overall reaction of this community [“the growing outrage of Hindu-Americans") as well as to where its political allegiance lies ("first and foremost as proud Americans”). The HAF foregrounds American Hindus as its main concern, with an interest in public protest given as a marker of their

American-ness (see Chapter 4). At the same time, the HAF's American Hindu is also positioned as particularly vulnerable to, and targeted by, American academia. The 190

Washington Post article in many ways deepened the conflict between two sides of mutually antagonistic constructions: groups of American Hindus suspicious of

American academia on the one hand, and critical academics with deepening suspicions of public and protesting American Hindu groups on the other. The former cast the latter as purveyors of "hate propaganda"15, while the latter often dismissed the former as sangh parivar fundamentalists, a characterization that, with a certain circularity, furthers the sense of persecution animating and mobilizing American

Hindus.

In 2003, Rajiv Malhotra wrote a sequel to his RISA-Lila essay, here highlighting the rise of "community responses," such as the petition and the

Concerned Community meeting in the Courtright controversy. While reasserting many of his previous concerns and arguments, this essay's focus on the "community response" further highlighted the growing activist focus on American Hindus, and jurisdictional concerns with speaking for, and representing them as, a "community."

Such jurisdictional claims to representational authority over an American Hindu community were only amplified as American Hindu activists began watching academia more closely and mobilizing more proactively.

Growing scrutiny of American academia has prompted other interventions, such as that involving an undergraduate/graduate seminar course at Barnard

College, Columbia University in New York City in 2003. The course, titled "Hinduism 191

Here," taught by professor John Hawley, was focused on teaching students about

Hinduism by looking at its locally (i.e., in New York) practiced and organized forms.

Part of the students' work in the course involved conducting a small-scale ethnographic project of a particular Hindu site, sampradaya, or organization. When one of the students had decided write to about Rajiv Malhotra’s Infinity Foundation

(IF), Malhotra and one of his colleagues became aware of the course. They grew concerned about it as they began to press Hawley for further details on the course, worried that a non-practitioner, i.e., a non-Hindu scholar, was in charge of the course and would not be qualified to fairly teach about Hinduism. Concerns grew over the impression that the students were not well versed enough in Hinduism to initiate their mini-fieldwork projects and would thus be prone to re-affirming misleading academic stereotypes of Hinduism.

The IF’s demand was for inclusion and participation in the course. They requested to visit and speak to the class itself, to monitor the work produced by the students for the course, and the right to critique the students if they did not find their work appropriate or accurate. And indeed, some of the research papers were found lacking by the IF. One student, for instance, was criticized for asking an interview subject about their thoughts on caste during a research visit to a local

Vedanta center, to which the IF objected that this student was perpetuating an 192 image of Hindus as inherently mired in a stratified caste system.16 Other student papers were criticized as unscholarly and inaccurate.17

The complaint voiced by the IF was that Hindus had only peripheral involvement as marginalized research subjects in this course. But there was also a concern over deeper implications of this asymmetry: that the course "denies dignity to Hindus" when it "does not engage them as equals.”18 By its very intervention, the

IF makes a claim to the representational authority they feel is denied. Where Hawley and his students were unqualified academic outsiders, the IF indirectly positions itself as qualified community insiders. The IF’s intervention with the "Hinduism

Here" course thus represents another site in which jurisdictional claims over the

"community," and who holds the capacity to properly represent it, emerges as the primary object of concern.

American Hindu activists were to make their largest public intervention in what is now often referred to as the "California textbook" controversy. This controversy began in 2004 as the California State Board of Education (SBE) began to undertake review of public school curricula, including textbook content. Some

Hindu organizations, including the Texas-based Vedic Foundation (VF) and Hindu

Education Foundation (HEF), voiced complaints to the board about the depiction of

Hinduism in textbooks used in state high schools in California. These groups complained that the textbooks ridiculed Hindu deities and over-emphasized 193 structural and historical caste and gender stratification in India, thereby giving the reader a negative impression of Hinduism and of India. In response, they forwarded a lengthy list of edits they demanded be made to the sections of Hinduism featured in these textbooks.

Their intervention proved controversial. A number of academics and community organizations came out in opposition, claiming that the edits proposed by the VF and HEF were revisionist, inaccurate, and politically motivated. A letter by

Harvard University Sanskritist Michael Witzel, and endorsed by a few dozen

American, European, and Indian academics, called on the California State Board of

Education in late 2005 to dismiss the VF and HEF edits. Drawing a comparison to the RSS and BJP campaigns to revise school textbooks in India, the letter dismissed the textbook edits as a parallel Hindutva project.19 The SBE eventually rejected the

VF and HEF edits, prompting a pair of lawsuits by the California Parents for the

Equalization of Educational Materials (CAPEEM) and the HAF.20 As the case was taken to district court in California, the controversy amplified and gained national attention. A larger network of groups, including the Friends of South Asian (FOSA),

Coalition Against Genocide (CAG) and several others, came together in opposition, again criticizing the edits as Hindutva-driven in attempting to sanitize Hinduism by erasing its historical gender and caste inequality. Moreover, a number of these groups signed onto an amicus curiae brief filed to the court arguing that these 194 groups do not represent any larger community, Hindu or South Asian, either in India or the U.S.21 The case remained tied up in court for two years before a settlement was finally reached in which CAPEEM withdrew the lawsuit.

The California textbook controversy has been described in more detail elsewhere.221 raise it here because it represented one of the most organized, structured, and public American Hindu mobilizations at the time. Moreover, it marks the deepening divide and mutually reinforcing antagonisms between academia and American Hindu activists. The continued focus on Hindutva by many critical academics, especially in the escalating conflicts in the Courtright case and the California textbook case, has only served to make academia a more defined target for American Hindu activists claiming misrepresentation and persecution.

More significantly, though, is that such mobilizations consistently show common concern not simply with misrepresentations of Hinduism, but more broadly with securing representational authority over an American Hindu community, identity, and voice. In this way, these controversies, particularly the California textbook case, resemble the controversy in the New York Times advertisement lawsuit, described in

Chapter 4: Hindu activist groups claimed to represent a larger Hindu community offended and affected by the textbooks, while the academic critics argued that these groups were driven by a narrow extremist perspective and thus could not represent any larger community. 195

The California textbook controversy also echoes a concern with the impacts of the offending textbook representations, wit the VF, HEF, CAPEEM, and the HAF placing further emphasis on the effects that the California school textbooks would have on American Hinduyout/?. CAPEEM’s complaint filed to the district court in

California, for instance, claimed that the negative portrayal of Hinduism in these textbooks "will cause stigma, and significant and irreparable harm to the Students, and which will result in the denial of equal educational opportunities for these students.”23 This focus on the apparent vulnerability of Hindu students and on the need for their defense, as will be described below, has become of increasing significance in the ongoing conflicts between American Hindus and American academia.

Invading the Sacred

In the 2007 volume Invading the Sacred: An Analysis o f Hinduism Studies in

America, collection of essays from a number of contributors, mostly American-based

Hindus, profiling the various controversial academic representations of Hinduism over the years, was released. The volume presents itself both as a summation of

Hindu grievances against American academia, and also as an expose of a patterned culture and agenda of what they call "Hinduphobia" in the U.S. originating from

American academic institutions. The editors, and many of its contributors, held the book as a major intervention, as an attempt by Hindus to fight back against 196

American academia and mobilize a Hindu "insider” voice. The book's intervention, moreover, claimed to be the work of such "insiders” fighting American academia on its own turf - i.e., not simply a backlash of community outrage, but as a serious documented effort to criticize academics on rational, scholarly grounds. As one of the contributors to the volume explained to me, the book was being received positively because of its unique and detailed intervention:

1 think the really good thing about the book is that everything was just documented very well with all the footnotes and we have all the facts. [...] I think what people really appreciated was having all the facts in one place. So people responded to that really well, just to having that information.

Elsewhere, the book’s editors have described the book as "...an intellectually aggressive response to an ongoing intellectually aggressive and destructive trend in

Western scholarship.”24 For many other American Hindu activists, Invading the

Sacred, more than just a document of grievances, was the most forceful and significant American Hindu public intervention and mobilization to date. One of the volume’s contributors praised Invading the Sacred as "...a marker of change that has historical dimensions” (Sanu 2007). Another reviewer predicted that the book was

"...likely to become a landmark in the history of India-related studies” (V.V. Raman

2007).

Few RISA scholars with whom I have spoken found the book to be a constructive or convincing intervention. One professor anonymously referred to the 197 book as a "slimy piece of work.” The book prompted an exchange between Paul

Courtright and Krishnan Ramaswamy, one of the volume's co-editors, in the pages of the monthly diasporic news magazine Little India. In this exchange, Ramaswamy reiterated the book’s overarching grievance about the Hinduphobia of "insular academic cartels” (Ramaswamy 2007b). Courtright, in response, criticized the book, refuting its claims as misguided and driven by ulterior motives:

What is Invading the Sacred so angry about? The book articulates a frustration stemming from a few ideologically committed Hindu chauvinists [sic] failure to leverage influence in how Hinduism is taught in American colleges and universities. The book is parallel to the efforts last year in California by some Hindu organizations to re-write social science textbooks in the state school system, or efforts in India to re-write Indian history textbooks to conform to Hindu nationalist constructions of India’s past. (Courtright 2007)

Courtight's criticism alludes to Hindutva once again, with Invading the Sacred as simply the latest manifestation of an ideologically-bound political Hinduism. He describes it as "propaganda masking as scholarship” (Courtright 2007). Many other readers felt it was of uneven quality at best, and simply retreaded the same arguments and ideological ground as Rajiv Malhotra’s RISA-Lila essays from years ago. His two RISA-Lila essays are themselves reprinted in the book, though Malhotra himself was not directly involved with producing the collection and its 500+ pages of critical essays. 198

While Invading the Sacred’s does not necessarily outline new grievances, the book does present a highly charged and condensed articulation of them, bringing into relief some key attributes of such discourses of academic Hinduphobia. This might be seen in looking to one of the book's rather unconventional features: its cartoons. The book contains a series of short editorial cartoons marking the breaks in between the chapters. These cartoons depict dramatized scenarios taking place around different academic misrepresentations of Hinduism. While these only constitute a proportionally small segment of the book's larger content, they do make for a highly evocative site, indeed deliberately hyperbolic, that condenses its broader themes and concerns. As an example, the cartoon 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, clearly supposed to be of Hindu background, and excited to learn more about Hindu philosophy that she has heard of but knows little about. They go to the class and are confronted by a professor who proceeds to describe upanayana, the upper caste "sacred thread" ceremony, in Freudian terms as a sublimated ritual of sexual abuse. The class is disgusted. One student vows to avoid Hindus; another is now convinced Hindus are "sick-o-perverts.” The cartoon reaches a climax with the young Hindu woman, now embarrassed to be a Hindu, calling her mom on the phone crying to renounce her parents' "weird religion" and her identity - "I hate 199 myself!" she tearfully exclaims - as she rejects being "Indian” to become "South

Asian.”

While this cartoon is evidently a proportionally small part of the volume, and perhaps incidental, it does encapsulate a number of key themes running throughout

Invading the Sacred. It articulates an account of a patterned anti-Hindu agenda in academia by narrating a scenario that imagines how this persecution might take place on the ground. In doing so, the cartoon maintains a focus on American Hindus as a particular object of political concern, as well as a focused preoccupation with second generation American-born Hindu youth as exceptionally vulnerable. The cartoon in particular illustrates how the American university is a crucial site in which American Hinduism is to be negotiated.

What Invading the Sacred signals in particular here is the emergence of a sharpened American Hindu activist concern with identity. This is dramatically shown in the climactic shift from "Indian” to "South Asian" in the cartoon described above. The scenario depicted culminates with a shift in identities in which the young student renounces a Hindu identity. This particular moment draws upon a larger discourse circulating among some American Hindus that views the identification

"South Asian” in highly disparaging terms. Ramesh N. Rao, executive director of the

HAF and frequent writer on issues relating to Hinduism in America, for instance, has complained that "South Asian” is an arbitrary identity in a way that "Indian” is not. 200

He finds that "South Asia” commonly groups India together with Sri Lanka, Nepal,

Bangladesh, and especially Pakistan in a way that is problematic and objectionable

(Rao 2003). He sees the term "South Asia" as having little substance, and he labels

"South Asianism” as a vapid but insidious trend being promoted by American academic institutions:

What psychological and emotional afflictions that second generation Indian- American students have seem to be reflected by the hundreds of academics across American college campuses who continue to be part of the South Asia bandwagon, inspiring the young second-generation Indian Americans in their classes on Indian women, polity and society to embrace a pan-regional identity or forsake their connections to India and to Hinduism. And there are the fashionable, unlettered-in-their-Hindu-culture socialites who believe that anything with the label "Hindu” or "Indian” in it must refer to the RSS or the BJP (Rao 2003).

Ultimately Rao regards "South Asian” as a "deracinated" identity (Rao 2003), a false identity that will negatively impact Hindu youth in America by steering them away from an "Indian" identity that is thought of as more essentially grounding. This essential Indian identity is said to have a "brand value dating back to millennia [sic]"

(Rao 2003), invoking a contemporary logic of commodities and brands that seems most sharply defined in opposition to modern national and state entities such as

Bangladesh and Pakistan, but at the time disavows necessary connection to the typical signs of Hindutva (here, the BJP and RSS). Rao's column, appearing several 201 years prior to Invading the Sacred, closely anticipates many of its concerns about a wider crisis of American Hindu identity.25 The Invading the Sacred cartoon invokes this larger discourse of "South Asianism," envisioning it as a pending consequence of academic Hinduphobia. The cartoon dramatizes a scenario that connects the perceived erosion of a Hindu youth identity with academic misrepresentations of

Hinduism. Invading the Sacred' s concerns are thus not just with control over academic representations in themselves, but for control over the expression, realization, and content of how American Hindus are to identify.

Threat, persecution, and becoming Hindu

Invading the Sacred also raises a set of deeper issues and questions about the nature of the identity sought and contested. As with Rajiv Malhotra's RISA-Lila essay, the Invading the Sacred cartoon demonstrates a concern with identity not just in terms of its misrepresentation, but with the anticipation of misrepresentation and its projected consequences. There is a temporal displacement in its narrative of persecution insofar as its threats and outcomes reach into the future, as anticipated fears of what has yet to happen. In this particular scenario, the reaction is not just about the "wrong" interpretation and representation of upanayana, but also with the rejection of a Hindu identity as its anticipated consequence. Significantly, the cartoon's disclaimer caption reminds us: "...any resemblance herein to actual events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental." We are reminded here at a literal 202 level that what is being depicted in the cartoon has not necessarily happened - only that it might. The dynamic of threat in this case recalls another dimension of Brian

Massumi's (2010) understanding of the affective force of fear. Massumi describes not only the pervasive and "ambient” character of a fear that attaches to multiplying sources, but also the way in which it is projected into the future: "[fjear is the anticipatory reality in the present of a threatening future. It is the felt reality of the nonexistent, loomingly present as the affective fact of the matter" (Massumi

2010:54). This sort of anticipatory fear is built upon a "double conditional," an

"affect-driven logic of the would-have/could-have” (Massumi 2010:55). This describes a mode of fear based on an anticipation of what would happen on the condition of something else enabling that it could happen. The double conditional anticipates a threat and its feared potential effects located in the future.

The academic threat depicted in the Invading the Sacred cartoon is marked by these anticipatory conditions in outlining a scenario of what would happen

(alienation of Hindu youth and, by implication, the erosion of Hindu identity in general) if academia’s threatening misrepresentations are left unchecked and allowed to run rampant. The form in which this scenario of threat is narrated, a hypothetical cartoon, raises the question about whether this feared outcome is actually being empirically documented, reported as fact, or whether it is being anticipated through hyperbole. Is this indeed what American academics are doing in 203 university classrooms? If so, is this the scenario to which it will lead? Is this the particular way in which Hindu students would react, or are reacting? Certainly it might be, and perhaps has been, in some cases. But what makes Massumi's insights on fear particularly relevant here is his suggestion that the empirical fact of the matter might not be as significant as the affective and provocative force of anticipating of what would/could happen. Narrating the threat in this particular way positions it beyond instances of its actual effects (recall: "any resemblance herein to actual events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental"). A dramatic scenario of what would/could happen carries as significant an impact as anything.

Concerns with the anticipated consequences of academic threats appear throughout Invading the Sacred. One chapter predicts that contemporary academic misrepresentations of Hinduism are a prelude to larger "campaigns of hatred" that

American academics are believed to be preparing (Rampersad 2007:47). Elsewhere, the book echoes a more pointed anxiety that academic Hinduphobia is prefacing a looming genocide of Hindus (Rampersad 2007:62). This goes back not only to some of Rajiv Malhotra’s earlier writings, but also to a discourse of "Hindu genocide" that has been suggested by nationalists, both in India and abroad, for a number of years.26 More recently, the idea that Hindus have faced, and are facing, genocide appears on the website "Hindu Holocaust," which maintains that a genocide of

Hindus took place in medieval India at the hands of invading Muslims.27 This idea 204 has been publicly circulated in India by the Foundation Against Continuing

Terrorism (FACT), led by French Auroville-based journalist Francois Gauthier, in touring exhibitions depicting Hindus as the victims of modern day genocide.28

Invading the Sacred invokes this larger discourse of Hindu genocide, positioning

American academia’s Hinduphobia as a potential new source thereof.

Key to Massumi’s account of fear's affective force is how a focus on the potential of threats demands a defensive response of preemption. Invading the

Sacred is as much preemptive as it might be responsive. While the book documents a litany of grievances against existing academic works, its concerns with the damaging potential of misrepresentations of Hinduism is very much about preempting their effects on Hindu youth. In this way, Invading the Sacred also sits within an expanding set of preemptive American Hindu activist mobilizations. In contrast to the earlier work of AHAD, in which offense and opposition was taken against a misused Hindu image, symbol, or deity, some recent mobilizations have surfaced less in reaction to offense and more over the possibility of offense. One such case arose out of a controversy in early 2008 over the movie The Love Guru, a comedy satirizing the commercialization of guru movements in North America.

Groups, 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.”29 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, as well as 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 concern was thus with how the film might offend. The controversy subsided after a special pre­ screening of the film was granted to the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), not major players in the controversy up until this point, who then assessed the film as

"vulgar but not Hinduphobic.”30 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 had, at one point, initiated a program offering a $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. HICAD’s academic monitoring and the mobilizations around The Love Guru both represent anti-defamation concerns, and actions, that precede and anticipate its defamation, with the potential for harm as a key driving force for mobilization.

The fear-anticipation dynamic also has broader implications for what understandings of identity emerge out of these discourses. The narrative of the threatening American university classroom grapples with an identity that is elusive, incomplete in the present (this young student is not yet a fully-formed Hindu), and 206 whose envisioned completion can only be deferred to the future. The tension of situating a Hindu youth identity in between its unfulfilled expected potential and its anticipated actualization somewhere in the future, has something of the dynamic of

Derrida's "auto-immunity" (see Chapter 1). The cartoon’s narrative (and indeed, its disclaimer) becomes a "self-contesting attestation” wherein the assertion of a Hindu identity comes alongside its incompletion, its absent essence, its "open[ing] to something other and more than itself’ (Derrida 2002:87). Invading the Sacred’s anxieties both belie and reveal the possibility that the American-born second generation Hindu may be "something other and more than itself.” The double conditional at work under the surface fears the possibility, following Bauman (1998

- see Chapter 1), of identity not offering the certainty and security that many believe it promises; it fears identity that has no essentialized form to be seamlessly translated from context to context, generation to generation. As per Mandair's

(2009) critical account of the politics of translation and the conceptualization of religion, Invading the Sacred seems compelled by the translation of religion-as- identity. The book’s jurisdictional concern seeks religion as an identity to be defined and secured. However, Mandair’s question about the possibility of thinking of religion and religious identity as untranslatable (see Chapter 1) haunts this part of

Invading the Sacred. Where Mandair sees an opportunity in this question, Invading the Sacred sees the uncertainty of identity with an element of fear, as an indication 207 of being under, or vulnerable to, attack. The question of identity here brings to the fore a fear of the loss of the thing yet to come. The focus on students, and thus on youth in particular is, of significance. Students are not only those who would encounter such representations of Hinduism in the university classroom, but as youth, are those that so often embody the tensions of identity, and thus become the locus of fear about identities that may go unrealized. Indeed, youth identity has been an issue of long-standing concern in diasporic contexts in general, and not just in

Hindu, Indian, or South Asian diasporas. Invading the Sacred’s anxieties are similar to the VHPA's founding concerns over the fate of American-born Hindu youth in the

1970s and 1980s (see Chapter 2).

Such concerns would signal an added dimension to Massumi’s account of double conditional fear. Not only is the threat uncertain, or "specifically imprecise"

(Massumi 2010:58), the object for defense (in this case, the identity of American

Hindu youth) is also uncertain, perpetually deferred in the same way that threat perpetually looms. This becomes further complicated when looking closer at some of the ways in which Invading the Sacred grapples with defining Hindu identity.

While academic misrepresentations are attributed to the lack of "indigenous interpretations of events and symbols" (Ramaswamy 2007a:367), Invading the

Sacred 's calls to mobilize the voice of an "insider” (Sharma 2007:xii-xiii), an 'emic'

Hindu voice, with jurisdiction over Hindu identity, are fraught with ambivalence. 208

Amidst the implied expectation of a Hindu voice or identity out there, somewhere, that is capable of getting these representations "right," Invading the Sacred continually begs the question of what this insider/indigenous voice or identity actually is. The opening chapter depicts Indians, implicitly conflated with Hindus, as particularly adept capitalists, entrepreneurs, and "problem-solvers" whose economy is "a positive engine for the world" (Ramaswamy et al. 2007:8). The book laments these traits as going unrecognized everywhere except for in "the business world and from top business schools" (Ramaswamy et al. 2007:8).

But such essentialized attributes of Hindu/Indian identity also sit in tension here with a discourse of indeterminacy. 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 internet's virtual realm. He suggests that "the internet can truly be regarded as a Hindu medium"

(Sanu 2007), each being defined as radically decentralized forms through which ideas flow freely, in a way that he compares to the modular information routing of

TCP/IP packets. While Sanu's take on Hinduism's virtual, indeterminate expanse might on the surface approximate something like Mark C. Taylor's understanding of a radically virtualized religious culture in the midst of a wired, globalized, and deterritorialized network society, there is also a sharp tension in how it is an overdetermined "indigenous" insider voice claiming for itself this abstract 209 undetermined essence. The Hindu American Foundation (HAF), in a similar way, has attempted to regulate a coherent and represent-able American Hindu voice, while also discursively de-essentializing American Hindus as essentially pluralistic and diverse (see Chapter 4).

The notion of American Hindu identity invariably invokes ambivalence underscored by Derrida's autoimmunity, of its possibility as much as its closure, similar to how he elsewhere describes religion returning both "with a menace and with a chance" (Derrida 2002:82). However what Invading the Sacred, and the larger trajectory of activism concerned with securing jurisdiction over an American Hindu identity, signals is an identity politics in which possibility is invoked to mobilize closure. This is akin to the paradoxical dynamic that Hent de Vries describes in the mutual relationship between intensification and abstraction in religion's contemporary mobilized and politicized identities. Whether or not Invading the

Sacred’s drive to secure and protect Hindu identity represents the kind of

"rhetorical overdrive" suggested by de Vries (2006a: 10), it is at least mobilizing a sense of Hindu identity that is conspicuously abstract, while at the same time staking out a project for its security. If there is any overdriven rhetoric here, it is in the amplified logic of identity that anticipates its hardened contours as it struggles with an expected, but elusive, ontological certainty. Invading the Sacred marks

American Hindu activism’s politics of anxiety: its anxieties about incompletion while 210 seeking jurisdiction over an incomplete object (Hindu identity), and its concerns about what may or may not happen to Hindus in America.

American menace and chance

The ambivalence concerning identity found in Invading the Sacred parallels a further ambivalence about America as both "menace” and "chance.” In contrast to

Chapter 3's account of how the mobilizations around the New York Times advertisement lawsuit invoked a valorized American-ness defined by free speech and democracy, Invading the Sacred encounters America as a constraint. Krishnan

Ramaswamy, one of the volume’s editors, has described the book as distinctly rooted in an American social context that "...unlike Europe, is a deeply religious land, and many Americans see the world through a religious lens. What they think of your religion influences at least in part what they think of you” (Ramaswamy

2007b). A generalized character of America is one of constraining expectations, especially when it comes to ideas of religion and identity.

Following Rajiv Malhotra's argument in his RISA-Lila essays that

Hinduphobia stems from deeply ingrained Western neuroses preoccupied with sex and violence, Invading the Sacred likewise maintains there is a specifically American mindset and socio-political history driving academia’s Hinduphobia. There are moments in Invading the Sacred in which America and American-ness are seen as menacing anti-Hindu forces. This is most sharply articulated in the chapter 211 contributed by Aditi Banerjee, where she describes Hindus as "the latest in a long list o f‘savage’ minorities to be pitted against the ‘civilizing’ force of the America's

Manifest Destiny [sic]" (Banerjee 2007:261), marginalized by an overarching

American culture that is essentially Christian and colonial. Rajiv Malhotra's more recent writings have similarly focused on the centrality of notions of Manifest

Destiny and American exceptionalism to a larger American social and cultural consciousness. He has described a generalized American cultural ethos as built upon a "metaphor of the Frontier,” a conquering impulse marked by an exceptionalism that universalizes America in opposition to the demonized natives it seeks to conquer (Malhotra 2009:173). His article focuses on the genocide of indigenous people by American colonization and expansion and suggests, echoing the well- established insights of much postcolonial and critical race theory, how formative binaries of self/other and civilized/savage underwrite his image of an overarching

American national culture. Malhotra defines this ingrained American cultural ethos and colonial history not only as essentially oppressive and marginalizing, but moreover as a particular source of threat to Hindus today. American colonial attitudes that once targeted indigenous people on the frontier are now seen as targeting American Hindus in textbooks, media, and classrooms. Academic representations of Hinduism, driven by a deeply embedded civilizational logic, become an index of a new frontier of American colonial threat. 212

In this activist focus on academia, a different type of threat thus emerges: that of American civilizationalism. Such concerns, in part, appeal to elements of anti­ imperialism and anti-colonialism, while at the same time remaining grounded in a civilizationalist frame in some ways resembling the terms of Huntington's (1996) infamous “clash of civilizations" thesis. These arguments about America's colonial legacy relate to familiar postcolonial theoretical and historical academic discussions of self/other and civilized/savage binaries, and the formation of such binaries out of power-knowledge relationships that have been particularly scrutinized since Said

(1978; 1993). At the same time, the imagination of the binary of American civilization versus its "other” is not in itself challenged, insofar as Hindus become oppositionally defined in contrast to, and as victim of, this civilizational logic.

Malhotra’s article on American exceptionalism describes indigenous people in North

America as losing out in the American clash of civilizations "...because they lacked a grand unifying myth that could help them participate in the discourse that justified their destruction" (Malhotra 2009:200). For Malhotra, it is incumbent upon minorities in America not only to "reverse the gaze," as he maintained in his earlier

RISA-Lila essays, but also to actively develop and mobilize a group identity that speaks back in the very terms imposed on them. The implication then is that it is imperative for American Hindus to mobilize and control a Hindu group identity in order to respond to America’s threats. 213

Malhotra remarked to me in conversation that he feels American Hindus need to re-imagine themselves in terms of identity as a strategically necessary response to American demands for identity claims:

I think Hinduism in India is not an identity. You don’t get baptized, there's no one who gets converted in. It’s a way of life. You sort of believe in certain values and some general, very generic things, and that's what it is. And nobody wants to be called a Hindu. Hindus don't want to stand up and say "I'm a Hindu.” It’s something that America forces on you. The American environment forces that on you. It forces you to take an identity stand.31

Malhotra is describing here something widely observed, not only by social science literature on Hinduism in diaspora (see Chapter 2), but also common in sociology of religion of the latter half of the 20th century: that the equation of religion with personal and group identities is a common fixture of American social experience.32

Yet while such identity demands appear on the one hand as constraining, imposed, forced, even threatening, there also emerges ambivalence about how what "identity” might mean for American Hindus. Malhotra also maintains that the demands of

America's "deep culture” also present an opportunity; the vocabulary of ethno­ religious identity also presents an opportunity for collective self-realization.33 The chance to consolidate a Hindu group identity is something he finds valuable. One contributor to Invading the Sacred expressed a similar view to me in describing to me their larger perspective on the place of Hindus in the American context: 214

I think America’s a very open minded place, but they expect you to stand up for yourself and to participate, and to ask for things [...] And I think the role we take in shaping how the community perceives you - I think there's been a lack of that. And that's just starting. [...] You have to advocate for yourself. You actually mold how the public perceives you. And maybe that's a difference in economic pressure — when our parents came here they had to just struggle to make money and have a family and a build a home. So they never had the luxury of thinking of these other things. But now it's not like you can just go out and make your money and just have a lot of money. You have to participate in the public square. And I think it's a positive thing.

On the other side of America’s demands for identity is a sense that the cultivation and assertion of Hindu identity is an opportunity. Notable in the remarks cited here is a link between notions of American opportunity and aspirations to upward class mobility. The desire to consolidate a public Hindu identity is also a matter of seeking and having privilege, of "having the luxury of thinking of these other things.” An aspect of class privilege indeed underwrites this trajectory of American Hindu activism concerned with academic Hinduphobia insofar as it positions the highly classed space of the university as the site in which American Hindu youth are threatened. A question might be raised as to whether these concerns with academic representation are shared and relevant to others, Indian, Hindu, immigrant, or otherwise, who do not have access to post-secondary institutions. The relationship of the model minority discourse to Indian and Hindu Americans, as widely observed among scholars (Kurien 2007a; Lai 2008; Prashad 2000; see Chapter 2), remains of key importance, despite its aspirations to a level of social privilege and inclusion that might chafe with the more extreme images of America as a threatening anti-

Hindu context. Hanging in the balance of this double construction of America as, again invoking Derrida, both a menace and a chance, or threat and opportunity, is the pressing American Hindu political concern over who has control and jurisdiction over the assertion of identity. Identity as both menace and chance in tandem, at once an opportunity for realization of a Hindu self while also a lurking threat of that identity in process going unfulfilled, drives Hindu activist responses to seek and secure identity.

Invading beyond the sacred

Invading the Sacred appeared at a time when the larger narrative of persecution, focused on American academia, circulates broadly and readily among

Hindus in America, and even, though to a lesser extent, in India. The underlying uneasiness about identity, representation, and security signaled therein travels well beyond its original contexts and takes on a life of its own. The story of American academics promoting anti-Hindu hate is one that 1 have heard repeated across a number of settings. It was a story circulating, for instance, at the Human

Empowerment Convention (HEC), as I noted anecdotally in Chapter 2, in the generic disdainful, complaints 1 heard about how academics, anthropologists in particular, 216

“hate" Hindus. A similar story came up one weekend afternoon when I was paying a casual visit to the Ganesh Temple in Flushing. While in conversation with one of the temple's volunteer and program coordinators, I was asking about the expanding programs and services the temple has developed over the years. When asked in particular about the temple’s youth education initiatives, and how these related to other educational institutions more broadly, the coordinator, a retired chief financial officer who now ran many of the temple's social services programs full­ time, responded with vague, yet scathing, remarks about the state of American university classrooms. He complained about how American classrooms were full of

"misinformation" about Hinduism: "Do you know there's this professor at the

University of Chicago who hates Hindus?” He offered no names or particulars. He went on to explain how temples now have to contribute to counteracting the misinformation about Hinduism disseminated in universities and other institutions.

Wendy Doniger described to me her frustrations with what she describes as an atmosphere of "blind" critique in these controversies. She described an email exchange she had over one of the many angry messages she had received during the

Microsoft Encarta article controversy. When Doniger asked her critic to point directly to specific passages in her work that were offensive or incorrect, she claims they responded, with an unintentional irony: "I would never read anything you've written!” Doniger described to me how in another case, while giving a talk at the University of London, a young woman stood up from the audience and began asking a very familiar sounding question: "Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?" It was several years earlier at the 2001 AAR meeting, that Rajiv Malhotra had stood up to ask Doniger this exact question, as part of his project of turning the tables on

American academics to balance "asymmetries.” As the young woman stood up and asked this exact question, she kept her head down seeming to look at the ground.

Doniger soon realized that the young woman was reading the question off a sheet of paper. Doniger took this as further indication that many of her critics perpetuate repeated, almost automatic, lines of criticism. Her observation may well resonate with de Vries's suggestion of religion's paradoxical mobilizations that intensify at the same time as they become abstract and emptied of particular content (see

Chapter 1).

Many scholars have, more broadly, attempted to counter those criticisms that have become commonplace, or even routine, over the years. Rajiv Malhotra’s characterization of a closed-circle cartel of mutually self-affirming scholars has been contested.34 Some scholars have complained that many grievances dwell on rather minor comments that become decontextualized and blown out of proportion.35

There are also indications of different narratives of how American Hindu students encounter these representations in the space of the classroom. A number of professors who teach about Hinduism in the U.S., including Wendy Doniger, have 218 told me of positive and respectful interactions with their students, both Hindu and non-Hindu. While activists suspicious of American academia might not find these claims convincing, they do suggest the possibility of a rather different story than that of profound alienation and rejection anticipated in Invading the Sacred.36

Narratives of academic Hinduphobia are complicated with the emergence of

American Hindu research organizations in the 1990s. By the middle of the 1990s, groups such as the Infinity Foundation (IF) and the World Association of Vedic

Studies (WAVES) began to form as research/think tank-type initiatives seeking to promote their own academic research on Hinduism. More recently, the Dharma

Association of North America (DANAM) in 2004, and the launch of the “Center for

Indie Studies” at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, under the direction of

Balram Singh, a professor in the school's department of chemistry, have also formed to promote alternative studies of Hinduism and their own network of knowledge production. The IF has maintained a concern with cultivating "insider"-oriented research in "Indie traditions" it felt as lacking in mainstream academic religious studies. WAVES has similarly positioned itself in opposition to mainstream academic studies of Hinduism out of a concern over the "serious repercussions” it sees arising from mainstream academia’s mistreatment of Hinduism.37 DANAM, for its part, seeks "to identify strategies for, and undertake, the recovery, reclamation and reconstitution of Dharma traditions for the contemporary global era, with initial 219 focus on Hindu Dharma and subsequently on other Dharma traditions."38 Both the

IF and WAVES have also been commonly criticized as Hindutva-oriented organizations.39 The move away from names referencing "Hinduism” to the use of cognate terms ( dharma , Vedic, and Indie) by these research groups might be understood in this larger context.

While some research groups share an overall concern with a broader narrative of academic Hinduphobia, and indeed position themselves as a response to it, their roles are not straightforward. DANAM had something of a rocky beginning, with its opening session at the 2004 AAR meetings met by Rajiv

Malhotra’s accusations that the group was being infiltrated by RISA scholars seeking to marginalize Hindu practitioner voices. My observation of the 2008 DANAM meetings, however, did not find any signs of controversy, despite the inclusion of sessions tackling some of the more contentious ongoing issues in the academic study of Hinduism. Panels on the topics of psychoanalytical approaches to

Hinduism, and interrogating the insider/outsider logic, were held without controversy, attended by a range of scholars and other interested individuals from various religious and political affiliations.

Moreover, some of the participating members of DANAM offered perspectives rather different from the claims of the Hinduphobia described above.

One younger Indian academic, who has been an ongoing participant in DANAM 220 events, told me about how he finds many of the recent conflicts between Hindus and academics to be overblown.40 He had initially found himself sympathetic to, and influenced by, Rajiv Malhotra's essays of the time. But, he told me that as he began to follow the controversies and look into them, he concluded that many of the grievances were unfounded. He expressed doubt about whether any of the more vocal critics had read and understood those representations claimed as controversial, believing that if they had, many of the grievances could not have been sustained.

Similar doubts were expressed from another scholar actively involved with

DANAM 41 While he did express concerns with a history of misrepresentations of

Hinduism in American academia, the larger picture he drew was one of an improving relationship between the two. He cited DANAM in particular as contributing to this improvement by providing a space in which Hindu scholars can engage:

My perception is that [DANAM] has made it safer, professionally, to do constructive work in Dharma traditions and to self-identify as a scholar- practitioner within Dharma traditions. My older colleagues tell me that at one time it would have been career suicide to identify oneself openly as a believing or practicing Hindu in the academy, particularly if one were not of South Asian descent. People would simply not take you seriously. My sense is that this is no longer the case, given the warm reception I have received in the academy (at least thus far)...So 1 think the time when one was afraid to 221

identify one's personal affiliation and do constructive work in the service of one's religious tradition has passed, partly due to DAN AM's work.42

This account, of gradual, cordial improvement, contrasts with the sense of threat running through the controversies described in this chapter, questioning, in particular, the idea that American academia shuts out, or marginalizes, Hindu, or

"practitioner," scholars. But this latter idea still remains in circulation. Dr. Ramdas

Lamb, an American-born scholar who self-identifies as Hindu, for instance, remarked in a recent interview with the Texas-based radio program of the Sanatana

Dharma Foundation (SDF), that Hindu academics are perpetually marginalized, even kept out of academic jobs, resulting in escalating alienation and forced to the point of becoming "closet Hindus.”43

Such contrasting accounts differ fundamentally in how the "insider-outsider” debate in the academic study of Hinduism is perceived. As noted earlier, an opposition drawn between Hindu "insiders" and American academic "outsiders" has been a central point of concern for American Hindu activists who fear that outsiders are prone to misrepresent what insiders "know" innately. The DANAM scholar, by contrast, does not see "outsider” involvement as inevitably negative or prone to misrepresentation. Rather, he feels that too many American Hindus have drawn too rigid lines around what is an "insider." By this account, the debates over academic 222 representations of Hinduism have at times involved overzealous claims of community jurisdiction.

Scholars, in different ways, have described identity as fundamentally incomplete, uncertain, and unstable (Bauman 1998; Bhabha 1990; Fuss 1995; Hall

1990; Puar 2007; Yon 2000]. The mobilizations against American academia at times seek control over an identity that activists self-consciously recognize as in a process of becoming: recall the above remarks by Rajiv Malhotra and others describing the need for American Hindus to create an identity for themselves against the backdrop of an American public, or Sankrant Sanu's description of Hinduism as radically de­ centered, modular, and free-flowing (but alongside a need for its protection and proper representation]. Zygmunt Bauman's (1998] observation that the promise of identity is also a predicament that offers uncertainty far more than certainty (see

Chapter 1] might suggest that identity is both the response (multiplying and expanding efforts to seek it out] and the anxiety in itself, persistently lurking. The focus on identity that preoccupies this trajectory of American Hindu activism animates a politics of anxiety, literally a fear of what may, or what may not, come to pass.

Epilogue: facts o f the matter

In the year following my departure from the field, another controversy, one both new and yet familiar, developed. Wendy Doniger once again became the target 223 of activist concern, this time over the release of her book titled The Hindus: An

Alternative History in 2009. She describes the book as an account of Hindu history, mythology, and philosophy that brings out their otherwise marginalized or sanitized aspects. She stated in an interview with Outlook India about her new book:

Books about Hinduism are about spiritualism, about Brahmins, about men...I wanted to write a book about the more worldly aspects of Hinduism, about its concerns with women, lower castes, children, animals. I wanted to show there was a rich source of information for alternative people. I also wanted to show an alternative history to the BJP version—about Babur’s mosque being built over a Ram temple sort of thing or that monkeys built a bridge to Lanka. It was also an alternative to the way British wrote Indian history: all about kings and battles.44

Doniger's intentions were, however, of little interest to her interlocutors. Her reputation preceded her, and the very news of her new book was enough to incite controversy and opposition. The opposition perhaps took on its most visible form in a way that revisits the mobilizing strategies described in Chapter 4: i.e., with a street protest. When Doniger’s book was nominated for a 2009 National Book Critic's

Circle (NBCC) award, activists publicly demonstrated against her. A low-profile organization called the United States Hindu Alliance (USHA) organized a street demonstration in front of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, where the NBCC awards event was to be held. "The protest march is only a beginning,” the

USHA claimed, adding that they are "garnering worldwide support for further actions against the writer [Wendy Doniger] and all those who willingly and deliberately support her Anti-Hindu Agenda."45 This street demonstration brought together the public mobilizing strategies described in Chapter 4 with the larger discourse of academic Hinduphobia discussed in this chapter. The effect of the demonstration, moreover, as in many of the cases noted in Chapter 4, was hard to assess. One report counted roughly thirty demonstrators on the street in front of the

New School.46 This same report, written by one of the NBCC’s board members, further observed that "the protested barely merited a mention” during the meeting to vote on the award.

Upon the book's release in the U.S., it was also met with an online petition directed towards the publisher, Penguin Books, demanding the book be pulled.

While similar to the response to Paul Courtright’s book years earlier, the petition against The Hindus: An Alternative History, along with a large number of critical responses that followed, was marked by a particular style and emphasis. Beyond the familiar complaints alleging misleading overemphasis on sexual themes in Hindu mythology, the petition featured a point-by-point critique of what were claimed to be "factual errors” in her book. The petition listed a series of offending passages/quotes from the book, with page references and comments on each. The list feature a range of offending comments from "factual errors" to "derogatory, defamatory and offensive statements” made by Doniger.47 Much derision is reserved 225 for Doniger’s analysis of Valmiki's Ramayana, particularly for her suggestion of themes of incest and sex addiction in the ancient epic. A similar type of public response appeared online in Outlook India by Aditi Banerjee, one of the editors of

Invading the Sacred. Banerjee also provides a point-by-point response, identifying many of the same passages, arguments, and sense of offense, in accusing Doniger of forcing sexual themes onto the Ramayana through her translations. A fourth response soon appeared online, again listing offending passages and page references, compiled by Vishal Agarwal, contributor to Invading the Sacred and one of academia’s more vocal American Hindu interlocutors. Agarwal is in the midst of building an extensive website that aims to have a chapter-by-chapter and point-by- point critique of the book. He has so far lengthy critical responses to nearly half of the book’s 20+ chapters.

Aseem Shukla, a current board member of the HAF, added to this stream of criticism with a post on the Washington Postfs religion blog "On Faith." Shukla’s criticism reflects on the controversy as a whole and on the overall critical response, describing it as an affirming moment for American Hindus:

"Tell me where I have interpreted something wrong," Doniger challenged her critics and the gauntlet was picked up. Factual inaccuracies in her latest book were detailed in a prominent Indian media outlet, and a lay historian, Vishal Agarwal, posted a detailed, chapter by chapter riposte to Doniger's history that has been widely circulated. Not phrased in the niceties of academic parlance, perhaps, but Agarwal's methodical work opens the door to 226

questions about Doniger's research, attention to detail, methodology, and more disturbingly, intentions behind her latest venture. Another detailed rebuttal to a single chapter spanning over twenty-two pages was posted by another writer this week.48

This image of American Hindus "picking up the gauntlet” in response to Doniger builds upon Invading the Sacred’s emphasis on mobilizing "insider" Hindus to speak back to their American academic opponents. In this case, it is the particular way in which they speak back that Shukla finds so affirming: he cites with pride the

"detailed," "methodical," and lengthy ("spanning over twenty-two pages”) character of the American Hindu responses to convey their substance and legitimacy.

American Hindus were seen as fighting back by engaging in reasonable and rational public debate. The USHA street demonstration directed its participants to

"adhere to the high standards of USHA and Hindu Scriptures" and that "the use of any profane, indecent or uncharitable language is strictly prohibited, and for the record, inconsistent with Hindu Belief and Practice"49 For Shukla, Agarwal, and

Banerjee, the response to the controversy featured American Hindus who focused on facts, evidence, and arguments. Their public interventions were constructed as sophisticated and rational, seeking legitimacy, and public respectability, by trying to beat Doniger at her own game.

This case reflects the quest for legitimacy in the multicultural and multi­ religious American public sphere. Moreover, Aseem Shukla’s blog post reiterates a 227 claim underlying this entire trajectory of American Hindu activism, from Rajiv

Malhotra's RISA-Lila essay to the appearance of Invading the Sacred: that American academics are largely non-Hindu outsiders, and by virtue of their outsider status, as those who do not know a faith by growing up with it, and believing in or practicing it, are limited in what they can understand about Hinduism. They are bound by strictly rational cognitive understandings of Hinduism that are doomed to fall short of the "true" understanding of Hinduism held by the insider, practitioner, believer.

Aseem Shukla’s blog post complained that:

...Hindu studies is too often the last refuge of idiosyncratic and irreligious academics presenting themselves as "experts" on a faith that they study without the insight, recognition or reverence of, in this case, a practicing Hindu or even non-Hindu- striving to study Hinduism from the insider's perspective- would offer.50*

Reverence for the faith, according to Shukla, is what is missing from academia's approaches to Hinduism, thus keeping them stuck on the "outside". At the same time, the American Hindu response to correct this strives to adopt precisely the style of rational academic argumentation that is seen as a key part of the problem.

However, in their attempt to do so, many of the complaints in the petition denouncing Doniger's book become exercises in simple fact-checking, scrutinize the minutiae of points that Doniger is said have gotten wrong: the date of Kabir's death is given as 1498 instead of 1518, Muhammad bin Qasim is said to have raided Sindh in 713 instead of 711, a mountain range on one of the maps printed in the front pages is mislabeled, for example. The activist response here wants "faith" at the same time as it wants "facts” of the rational and objective sort, posing a challenge to the pervasive binary often assumed between notions of "faith” and "rationality." But the jurisdiction over Hindu representation remains ambivalently caught between

"faith” and "facts.” Insider reverence, on the one hand, is required. On the other,

Shukla’s comment that “a practicing Hindu or even a non-Hindu” might "[strive] to study Hinduism from the insider's perspective" reconfigures who is an insider and outsider, and thus who is a Hindu, into a question of who is speaking the right

"facts.” The defining content of the Hindu "insider," as suggested earlier in this chapter, remains nebulous. 229

Chapter 6 - Concluding remarks

Zygmunt Bauman, writing about the "liquid modern mosaics/kaleidoscope of paradoxes" (2006:101), that describe the present, underscores the status of the

American Hindu activism described in this thesis. Most crucially, he observes a predicament:

...as the capacity of our tools and resources for action grows, allowing us to reach ever further in space and time, so our fear grows of their inadequacy to eradicate the evil we see and the evil yet unseen yet bound to be gestating...The most technologically equipped generation in human history is the generation most haunted by feelings of insecurity and helplessness (Bauman 2006:101). While activist mobilizations branch out across different strategies, concerns, and political jurisdictions, something eludes these proliferating responses, left, in a way, haunted by the feeling of insecurity and helplessness noted by Bauman. Such feelings, and the expanding senses of fear that accompany them, intensify alongside growing concern with securing the elusive political object, Hindu identity.

Significant discrepancies arise even in the seemingly simple question of the population numbers. The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) assumes the voice of a

Hindu American community that it claims as "2 million strong."1 However, the

American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) in 2001 claimed that 0.4% of the 230

American adult population is Hindu, giving an estimated number of 766,000 Hindus in the adult population, while more recent estimates put the number at slightly over one million at the most.2 Such discrepancies point to the contingency of the category, and to a tension over the nature and extent of the community that activists seek to claim.

The sharpened class dimension of the activism signals another discrepancy.

The demographic profile of the post-65 waves of immigration from the Indian subcontinent to the U.S., selectively filtered to let through a particularly classed segment of migrants, has set basic parameters for much activism. Many activists benefit from a fair degree of class privilege - a point that many proud American

Hindu activists are often quick to laud. The Hindu American Foundation’s (HAF) desire to a secure a "professional” voice to represent American Hindus implies particular class parameters, selectively calling upon a specific demographic to act as the representatives and advocates (i.e., those with privileged access to post­ secondary and post-graduate legal training). Moreover, the growing interest in a publicly-oriented activism selectively privileges those who might have the resources to assert themselves publicly. In the case of the Sonia Gandhi advertisement in the

New York Times (see Chapter 4), for instance, the publicizing of activist concerns was enabled by the resources available to access such highly-priced ad space. One independent blogger who wrote a post commenting on the initial controversy over the advertisement notes that a full-page ad the New York Times costs upwards of

$65,000 US, which in this case seems to have been drawn from private resources. In the course of my fieldwork it was fairly common to hear of older first-generation men coming to the U.S., settling into lucrative professional, often private sector, occupations, becoming independently wealthy and taking early retirement. Early retirement gives them both the time and spare resources, in a kind of hobbyist approach, to start organizations, write blog posts, organize panels, etc.

These implicit class factors raise a dimension of Bauman's paradox. The feelings of insecurity Bauman observes also seem to haunt those with a degree of socio-economic security and privilege. This insecurity is marked by key questions regarding who speaks for whom, who and what counts as Hindu, and what defines an American Hindu identity and community. The class dimension of the various trajectories of American Hindu activism described in this thesis builds upon Vinay

Lai's (2003b) suggestion of an "anxiety of influence" suffered by Indian, and particularly Hindu, immigrants in North America and Europe. By this, Lai suggests that Indian Hindu immigrants become preoccupied with a disjuncture in which the personal elevated class privilege in their North American and European lives does not match up with a sense that the Indian state has been taken seriously as an elevated global political and economic superpower. This "anxiety of influence,” Lai 232 suggests, is a heightened preoccupation with representing the successes of the

Indian state.

Beginning the thesis with the question of the specter of Hindutva, I have described the proliferation of activist concerns and strategies that mark American

Hindu activism as contingent assemblages that exceed the reductionism implicit in invocations of Hindu nationalism and Hindutva, underwritten by conventional notions of religious ideology and "fundamentalism.'' The forms of public and political Hinduism in America today are not determined by, or reducible, to such a singular ideological project or organizational form. Certainly the political interests of some American Hindus remain tied, albeit ambivalently, to the idea of a Hindu

Indian state (see Chapter 3). Other trajectories dissociate themselves from the stigma of Hindutva's commonplace fundamentalist connotations (Chapters 4 and 5) and from the organizational apparatus familiarly associated with Hindutva in India

(i.e., the sangh parivar).

My discussion has focused on American Hindu activism's shifting claims, concerns, and jurisdictions. Where Hindu activists do not focus on a Hindu Indian state, they come to focus variously on the public image of Hindus/Hinduism in

America, the respectability and legitimacy of American Hindus as political subjects, but also on concerns with securing Hinduism as an identity. Their political jurisdiction shifts between India and America, with a growing concern for the latter. 233

American Hindu activism’s discursive, ideological, and organizational forms are contingent "assemblages," social forms that "do not form a seamless whole”

(DeLanda 2006:4). They are mobilized as fixed, immutable, and pre-given, quickly become shifting and contested.

There is another term that applies here: virtual. This is a term used by Marc

Redfield to describe the post-9/11 war-on-terror, with its defining event as a

"virtual trauma" and a "trembling of an event on the edge of becoming present: one that is not fully or not properly 'actual'" (2009:2). This is partly "virtual" in the typical sense of media (9/11 as heavily mediated through cameras and television screens), but also "virtual” in the more literal sense of a threat and a "war" that are both present and absent, not fully there or realized. This sense of virtuality is another way of referring to the anticipated threats described by Massumi (2010) - threats that are proximal - virtually, but not fully, there. Massumi elsewhere describes another notion of virtuality as "...a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect; where what cannot be experienced cannot but be felt" (2002:30). The notion of the "virtual” here is about the absence built into the actual, where objects, subject positions, and the movement between them, are experienced in terms of a constitutive "vagueness" (Massumi 2002:232).

Such considerations of virtuality are significantly tied up with the understandings of Hinduism and Hindu identity that become of central political 234 concern to American Hindu activism today. Journalist Ashok Malik foregrounds online activity and internet use (conventionally now the "virtual" realm} as a defining feature of contemporary Hindu activism, but with a cynical angle through which he dismisses the politics of what he terms "Internet Hindus." He notes that

as Hindutva as an idea has contracted in real-world politics, it has become shrill and over-the-top in cyberspace. The Left has its universities, journals and institutional support system. It is a commentary on Internet Hindus that they only have multiple email accounts.3

Malik’s comment on the character of "Internet Hindus” is clearly meant disparagingly. His "Internet Hindus” are dismissed as nothing more than virtual activists spouting rhetoric from their desks behind the anonymity of e-mail.

Virtuality, in this way, describes a crucial infrastructural element of American Hindu activism that has developed and expanded through media technologies, particularly the internet and e-mail. The types of American Hindu activist organizing and mobilizing described in this thesis simply could not exist, as they do, without this particular technological, virtual infrastructure. Nearly every site of American Hindu activist activity described in the preceding chapters involves some sort of virtual or online element. The street protests described in Chapter 4 are dependent on blogs and listservs through which they can be organized and advertised. The discourses of academic Hinduphobia, described in Chapter 5, do not circulate without the blog and portal sites upon which American Hindus can air their grievances, and circulate 235 them widely and rapidly. The degree to which my research and fieldwork relied on the internet and email, not just as key ways to locate, track, and communicate with groups, but often as the only ways to do so, underscores American Hindu activism’s virtual infrastructure and virtual nature of the "community” and its social ties.

But Malik's comment on "Internet Hindus" also echoes Hent de Vries’ notion of a "rhetorical overdrive" generated by global political religious movements as they expand and abstract. It similarly recalls Bauman’s sense of the

"technologically equipped” as haunted by "feelings of insecurity and helplessness" - such is the case with Malik’s "Internet Hindus," even with web technologies and email at their disposal. As Bauman indicates, it would seem that this extensive virtual and technological communicative infrastructure does not necessarily guarantee a larger sense of security, no matter the numbers and distances it may connect. Rather it becomes a virtual platform through which a sense of threat is generated and circulated.

Malik’s characterization of "Internet Hindus" raises the question of why their activism might become "over the top" in cyberspace, intensifying as it becomes virtual. This thesis shows a dynamic in which the activist claims and assertions are caught up with the virtual, and therefore elusive, character of Hindu identity as they seek to make whole something that always appears as partial. The predicament of

Hindus in Arunachal Pradesh, as debated at the Human Empowerment Convention 236

(Chapter 3), for instance, shows a focus on ambiguous, marginalized people, who are not self-evidently Hindu, as under grave threat. The concerns expressed in Invading the Sacred (Chapter 5} also signal Hindu identity as virtually proximate, yet out of reach (Chapter 5).

Brian Massumi's (2010) discussion of a particular idiom of fear, one intensified post-9/11, is particularly relevant to what 1 refer to as the "politics of anxiety" underwriting so much Hindu activism today. Many trajectories of American

Hindu activist are haunted by a fear that is "specifically imprecise," everywhere and nowhere, deferred and anticipated, ‘there’ but no real sense of'where.' "Terrorism” threatens a Hindu Indian state from all sides and from within (Chapter 3). At the same time, terrorism threatens American Hindus, prompting their support for the

American war-on-terror, and for broad coalitions for "global security." This sense of threat expands, and recombines, through modular narratives of persecution. Under the specter of an un-locatable global terrorist threat, M.F. Husain becomes a jihadi funding source; the Congress party muzzles American Hindu leaders; university professors plot against Hindus, and so on. The insecurity and helplessness of

Bauman's paradox is strongly felt precisely because the threats are always just out of reach.

The focus on terrorism has continued as a dominant theme following the end of my fieldwork. The group Hindu Human Rights Watch (HHRW) participated in the 237

"9/11 Rally of Remembrance" in September 2010, alongside the founders of the website Jihad Watch, and the American Center for Law & Justice, among others.

Later in 2010, a number of notable Hindu activists, such as Narain Kataria, joined the public opposition to the Park51 complex in lower Manhattan - the so-called

"Ground Zero mosque" that opponents, Hindu and otherwise, have charged as a potential haven for homegrown terrorism. Beyond this, another generation of

American Hindu organizations is in formation. The Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) has generated a group now called the Forum for Hindu Awakening. Officials who previously organized under the Human Empowerment Convention now send me update emails under a new name, the Hindu Mahasabha of America. Other new groups have surfaced: the USHA, mentioned above, the Forum for Religious

Freedom, the Arise Arjuna Foundation, among many others.

At the same time, existing Hindu activist groups also reconfigure their concerns and political objectives. In once recent case, the HAF, having previously relied upon a very familiar and accessible language of community representation in their policy and legal interventions, set off in a rather different direction in 2009-

2010 with their "Take Back Yoga" campaign. The HAF, feeling that the popular consumption of yoga in the West has marginalized yoga’s essentially Hindu components, sought to raise public awareness about how the "cherished 'spiritual practice’ of yoga is firmly rooted in Hindu philosophy."4 However, their grievance, as 238 reflected in the name and nature of the campaign, suggests something more at stake than simply "awareness." It also signaled a jurisdictional claim, with the HAF assuming ownership of yoga such that it can, and needs to be, "taken back.” This adopts the language of appropriation, notions of cultural property, and culture as property, that anthropologists have widely observed in postcolonial culture industries around the world (e.g., Feld 2000; Handler 1988; Root 1996). These anthropological discussions have drawn attention to the political circumstances through which questions of appropriation are raised, but also the ambiguous boundaries of cultural property claims. The "Take Back Yoga" campaign seeks an unspecified control and jurisdiction over a Hinduism whose defining parameters are not, and perhaps cannot be, clearly demarcated. Nor was the campaign necessarily based on a defined offense. While one might well consider larger political histories of Orientalism, colonialism, racism, and capitalism bearing upon such questions of consumption, appropriation, and representation, the HAF's response sidesteps the particularities of these political histories in focusing on property and jurisdiction as their own ends. The question might be raised as to whether this campaign can ever really do what the HAF would like it to; whether it can really "take back” what it wants to take back; represent who, and how, they want to represent and address the feelings of marginalization that concern the HAF, American Hindus, or racialized subjects in this context in general. This is the question that underscores the tensions 239 raised as such claims, and counter-claim, confront the diffuse, contingent, and elusive qualities of Hinduism and Hindu identity in America. 240

Appendix A: Organizations & Acronyms

AAR American Academy of Religion AHAD American Hindus Against Defamation AIA Association of Indians in America BJP Bharatiya Janata Party CAG Coalition Against Genocide CAPEEM California Parents for the Equalization of Educational Materials CSFH Campaign to Stop Funding Hate DANAM Dharma Association of North America FACT Foundation Against Continuing Terrorism FIA Federation of Indian Associations FOI Friends of India FOSA Friends of South Asia HAF Hindu American Foundation HCI Hindu Collective Initiative HEC Human Empowerment Convention HEF Hindu Education Foundation HICAD Hindu International Council Against Defamation HJS Hindu Janajagruti Samiti HMEC Hindu Mandir Executive Conference HRCARI Human Rights Coalition Against Radical Islam HSC Hindu Students Council HSS Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh HTSNA Hindu Temple Society of North America IAIF Indian American Intellectuals Forum IF Infinity Foundation INOC Indian National Overseas Congress OFBJP Overseas Friends of the BJP RISA Religion in South Asia (AAR subgroup & discussion list] RSS Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh SBE California State Board of Education USHA United States Hindu Alliance USINPAC United States Indian Political Action Committee VF Vedic Foundation VHP Vishwa Hindu Parishad VHPA Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America WAVES World Association of Vedic Studies 241

Notes

Notes for Chapter 1 (pp. 1-51)

1 "Usinpac applauds Sonal Shah’s appointment as Obama advisor." Statement release on the website of the US India Political Action Committee, 14-November, 2008. Available online at: . 2 NDTV interview with Gaurang Vaishnav. See "Obama aide part of governing body: VHP-America," 13-November, 2008. Available online at: . 3 See "The Elephant in the Room: a bad choice for the Obama transition team,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 04-Dec, 2008. Available at: . 4 See Sonal Shah’s statement "Baseless And Silly Reports," Outlook India, 11- November, 2008. Available online at: . 5 The notion of "anxiety” has its own complex range of uses and understandings. Freudian psychoanalysis influentially theorized anxiety in relation to subconscious defense mechanisms, but also, in later work, in relation to fear, particularly as a response to signals of danger (Freud 1936). Anxiety has been further explored alongside conceptualizations of "fear" in social sciences and social theory in a range of other works examining the postmodern angst of a destabilized, globalized, late- capitalist society. Notable here are Ulrich Beck's (1992) theorization of the fears that mark the course of modernity's emerging "risk society," and Wilkinson's (2002) elaboration on anxiety in relation to this "risk society.” Other discussions about the relationship between anxiety and society can be seen in Zygmunt Bauman's (2006) account of postmodern "liquid fear” and its intangible, diffuse nature or, similarly, in the politics of the abstracted "culture of fear" explored by Furedi (2002) and Altheide (2006). A related notion of anxiety and society derives from Cohen's (1973) account of "moral panics” to describe moments of perceived societal crises based on anxieties over perceived social threats (whether a social group, a trend, a movement, etc.). Along these lines, while not necessarily invoking the idea of "moral panic” directly, numerous accounts have described the anxieties of the "crisis” of secularism and multiculturalism, especially in relation to immigration in North America and Europe (e.g., Asad 1993, 2006; Gilroy 2005; Kepel 2004; Roy 2007; C. Taylor 2009). My use of anxiety is mindful of these varied lines of discussion, particularly of the senses of abstract fear raised by Bauman, Furedi, and Altheide. I 242 invoke notions of anxiety, fear, and threat in this thesis more directly through the ideas of Brian Massumi [2010), and his emphasis on the dynamic of displaced and anticipated fear and threat. My use of the term is, however, not necessarily intended to be a technical application of a specific conceptualization. 6 For a range of discussions on the conceptualization of "fundamentalism" see Barr (1977), Bruce (2000), Jansen (2011), Lawrence (1998), Mamdani (2004), Marsden (2006). 7 These influences have given rise to what Jones (1989) has termed "acculturative" religious movements in 19th century British India, referring to Hindu, Sikh, and Islamic movements that shape themselves through significant British and Christian ideological influence and organizational imitation. Jaffrelot (1996) similarly describes late 19th century revivalist movements, the Arya Samaj in particular, as defined by their strategies of emulation and imitation. By Jaffrelot’s account, some movements gave definition to Hinduism by emulating the organizational structure that Christians and Muslims were perceived as having, despite both of these being simultaneously perceived as threats. Groups such as the Arya Samaj organized themselves as ecclesiastical-type structures around centralized and authoritatively doctrinal texts to thereby establish and formalize Hinduism into something named, known, and ultimately to be mobilized. 8 Pennington (2005:60), for instance, describes how an over-emphasis on idol worship was key to "the missionary contrivance of a systematic Hinduism." For Dirks (2001), an inflated focus on caste came to be a defining feature of Hinduism through the work of British census data collectors. 9 Vivekananda is known for promoting a universalist Hinduism rooted in the monism of Vedanta philosophy, and echoing the sentiment lamenting the perceived degeneration of contemporary Hinduism from its golden age in antiquity. Out of this he built his famous civilizational dualism envisioning Hindu India as essentially 'spiritual' in nature versus Europe and North America as essentially 'materialist' (Jones 1989:44). Like many of his contemporaries, Vivekananda asserted a Hindu essentialism through negative definition wherein the West becomes integral as the defining opposite of Hinduism’s essence. But also novel and influential in Vivekananda was his program of action: Hinduism was to be restored and revitalized through seva, a notion of service and public work. Vivekananda, perhaps moreso than his revivalist contemporaries, envisioned a political project through which Hinduism’s defining content was not just to be asserted, but also to be made. 10 The formation of the Arya Samaj ("society of Aryans") in 1875 under by Dayananda Saraswati, a sanyasi from Gujarat, defined Hinduism as rooted in the Vedic religion of the ancient Aryans (Thapar 2006:17-18), claiming also that contemporary Hinduism had degenerated from its ideal Vedic Aryan unity and virtue. The Arya Samaj sought to redefine Hinduism under a unified scriptural 243 authority [i.e. through rejecting the authority of later puranic, tantric, and other texts, with only the oldest most essential Vedas as directly divinely revealed to the Aryans), by dissolving all sectarian lines (including the dominant sectioning of Shaivites from Vaishnavites, as well as a nominal opposition to caste lines and Brahminical authority), and by eliminating numerous popular beliefs and practices (Jones 1989:96). 11 See Chakrabarty (2000) for a wider discussion of the impacts of European concepts of history, nation, citizenship, and modernity on colonial and postcolonial India. 12 Aside from the ambivalent politics of tradition and reform invoked by Gandhi, the mobilizing successes of Gandhian and Congress nationalism have been described as having highly varied impacts and reception, for instance among different adivasi communities and extremely varied sets of local beliefs (Amin 1984; Chatterjee 1984). 13 Two particular elements stressed by the RSS were that of “character-building” and of seva, or "service” (Andersen & Damle 1987:37; Hansen 1999:82-83;94-95). The RSS sought cultivation of a strong disciplined Hindu subject, physically and mentally well conditioned, and dedicated to a principle of'service' to the Hindu nation. 'Service' to the nation was intended to reconfigure a relationship of devotion between the individual and the organic national community (Jaffrelot 1996:62). 14 The RSS on the other hand always maintained a more ambivalent and ambiguous position on political involvement, nominally claiming to be 'cultural' and non­ political. The RSS's political intentions however begin to emerge more particularly with Golwalkar’s "theocratic” vision of a Hindu Indian state defined and bound by dharma (Bhatt 1997:205). For Golwalkar, dharma was to show full devotion to and ultimate faith in a Hindu nation before anything else; this would itself be the process of mental sharpening (and organic societal organization, though Golwalkar is less clear on this point) leading up to moksha, a final realization of god (as nation) and nation (as god) all at once. 15 VHP operations in India from this time on were also focused on India's rural "tribal" or adivasi populations, taking up construction of missionary schools in adivasi areas in attempt to bring them in line with the VHP's codified Hinduism. The VHP also focused on reconverting Muslims, those converted to Islam out of Hinduism, as an attempt to bring lost Hindus back into a unified and mobilized fold (Jaffrelot 1996:358). 16 It is worth noting that the specter of violence is not necessarily unique to this growth of literature on Hindutva, as a number of critical accounts have examined the role/place of violence in different realms of political life in India (e.g., Brass 2003; Das 2007; Eckert 2003; Hansen 2001; Kaur 2005). See Chapter 3 for 244 discussion on invocations of violence in some trajectories of American Hindu activism. 17 The foundational sociology of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, which did much to contextualize religion by theorizing its functional social significance, operated broadly within this schema. Durkheimian and Weberian sociology, each in its own way, figured religion as an essential mechanism of social cohesion in pre-modern societies giving way to mechanical solidarity or bureaucratic rationalism, or other modes of social cohesion presumed as rational. 18 Charles Taylor here describes a post-1960s phenomenon shaped by the rise of a "new individualism" (2002:79-81], an "expressive individualism”, and a "culture of authenticity" (2002:88). Such a culture of "expressivism” is one in which the individuated pursuit of happiness, notions of taste, and personal identity, emerge as key imperatives. It is within these larger logics of identity that, according to Taylor, new political religious movements mobilize. See also C. Taylor (2007). 19 Fundamentalist religion for Mark C. Taylor represents, in many ways conventionally, an ideological form of religion that asserts absolute inerrant truths "to promote partisan political agendas” and "that remain stuck in the oppositions and contradictions of the past” (2004:312-13). Against this, he theorizes "complex religion” as a new formulation resulting from a radical virtualization of culture, society, and religion. 20 Mandair also includes the rise of "postsecular theory" in his critique, suggesting that the proliferation of work examining, and often opposing, secular political and intellectual ideals remains caught in its own conventional assumptions. Mandair (2010: 387) suggests that "even the most radical versions of postsecular theory...need to undergo a further decolonization due largely to the centrality of Hegel and the reconstitution of a new kind of Eurocentrism.” McLennan (2010) similarly suggests that postsecular theoretical trends do not shake off an uneven political and epistemological treatment of religion, despite their best attempts to do so. 21 De Vries (2006a) invokes the notion of a "post-secular world,” qualified not as a world (or a period of world history) that has moved beyond secularization (say in a type of religious pluralism and accommodation), but rather in what, quoting Hans Joas, he describes as a "changed attitude by the secular state or in the public domain with respect to the continued existence of religious communities and the impulses that emerge from them” (Joas, cited in de Vries 2006a:3). The post-secular condition, for de Vries, seems to be one in which religion’s emergent public and political forms does not fit the contained or predictive molds of secularization theory and related idioms of multiculturalism and pluralism. The role of religion here becomes "increasingly difficult to grasp conceptually and to situate empirically” (de Vries 2006a:3). 245

22 Bauman’s suggestion resonates with many contemporary theories of identity (e.g., Bhabha 1994; Fuss 1995; Hall 1990]. For Bauman here, identity's incompleteness is acutely exacerbated by the market logic of "choice,” and the compulsion to choose a "self.” Bauman describes a key underlying anxiety in the fear of "choosing” incorrectly in the midst of multiplying lifestyle "choices.” Identity in this way becomes a profound point of insecurity in the fear that it may go unrealized or unfulfilled. 23 However, it is worth noting Das’s [2007:180-181] critique of some of Hansen’s (2001] other accounts of the modern Indian state, in which she suggests Hansen places too much emphasis on political performances, violence, and the maintenance of abstract power at the cost of understanding the ambivalent encounters and negotiations with state power in the everyday, and at a more local levels. 24 The BJP, VHP, and RSS have all faced internal conflict and directional and leadership struggles over the years. The BJP in particular has seen a number of internal conflicts over the last decade, partly out of the patchwork regionalized and coalition nature of the governments it formed (Gillan 2007; Hansen & Jaffrelot 2001]. The conflicts over the party's leadership succession following the resignation of BJP icon L.K. Advani after the 2004 election marked a particularly tumultuous period of internal conflict for Hindutva politics in India. 25 Foucault was one of Habermas's greatest contemporary critics, and vice versa, with each holding what many have claimed are quite opposing views on the nature of power, critique, and political responsibility (see Ashenden 1999; Flyvbjerg 1998; Tully 1999). Other common criticisms of Habermas raised suggest that he misses the ways in which so many are excluded from or unable to participate in this rational public sphere (Fraser 2007:8), and that his emphasis on the rationality of modern public political life opens his theory to the same criticism as secularization theory noted earlier in this chapter. 26 The significant insights of Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2005,2009) should also be noted here, qualifying how transforming idioms of sovereignty are not about the disappearance of the state as a major locus of power, but about its reconfiguring forms. The common theme in Agamben's thinking about sovereignty in his explorations of the notions of homo sacer and states of exceptions are effectively about the ways in which sovereign powers can reassemble and reconstitute themselves, the different types of power that can be exercised, and political subjects that can be created, erased, or otherwise acted upon. 27 As Aretxaga notes,"[gjlobalization is not only compatible with statehood; it has actually fueled the desire for it" (2003:395). It is also worth noting here, in addition, Aihwa Ong’s (2000) notion of "graduated sovereignty," describing how states now very often encompass complex assemblages of governing practices, both formal and informal, that shape and regulate political subjects. Elsewhere she has referred to 246 the byproduct of this as a kind of "flexible citizenship” in which subjects fashion multiplying types of cultural citizenship, varying ways of belonging, legally and socially, both through and against the state (Ong 1999). 28 The events chosen and grouped together in this dissertation are partly selected from what actual events I had access to. But a range of other events, debates, occurrences, and incidents are discussed as well, many for their public significance concerning American Hinduism, but also those that are noteworthy as moments of controversy, debate, and contestation. Events such as the California textbook case (Chapter 5) or the Indian National Overseas Congress lawsuit (Chapter 4), for instance, have prompted active discussion and writing (and continue to do so), leaving traces of their debates to be examined and analyzed in larger contexts. Moments of debate and contestation are also of key interest in this dissertation as these become public sites in and through which claims on Hinduism, Hindu identity, religion, and nation emerge and take shape. The events and cases discussed here are not intended to be selected in a way that implies singular thematic consistency between them or, moreover, as "typical" of any totalized or generalized form of American Hindu activism or political discourse - and indeed I would question the presumptions and implications of striving to find and represent the "typical." 29 As per ethnographic convention, many correspondents/informants have been made anonymous here, either through the use of pseudonyms or in simply not being identified by name in the text. However, I do refer to individuals by actual names in several places, especially when in relation to public statements, events, or discussions. 30 These were searched out both online and in the extensive media archives of the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) Humanities Research Library. The archive databases accessed included the NYPL's ProQuest Historical New York Newspapers & Magazines, ProQuest Historical Database, New York State Newspapers collection, America's Historical Newspapers database, American Periodical Series, and the Ethnic NewsWatch database. 31 A considerable amount of conceptual literature on ethnographic fieldwork has reflected on the limits of ethnographic authority and representation. See Bourgois (2003), Clifford (1986), Crapanzano (1980), Marcus (1995,1999, 2009), Marcus & Fischer (1986), Rosaldo (1989). 321 also encountered scrutiny due to my name and background, ironically through a presumption of familiarity. Often, my introduction to many American Hindu activists came with immediate questions about my family, my background, and place of birth (i.e., whether 1 was born in India or abroad). Some of these encounters are alluded to in the following chapters. The obstacle often encountered here came from the expectation, or assumption, that I was necessarily Hindu. While my name, appearance, and family background often set up the expectation that I simply must 247 be Hindu essentially and innately, I inevitably failed to live up to expectations in explaining my own tenuous personal and familial identification with Hinduism. This, at times, led to the kinds of encounters and concerns (described in Chapters 4 and 5 in particular) about a Hindu-ness that could/should have been, Hindu youth losing themselves, with myself as an index of those particularly susceptible. I note this dynamic here to foreground my impression of how these efforts to read me as Hindu shaped, and often limited, my encounters with many American Hindu activists. In many situations, the sheer difficulty, if not impossibility, of explaining myself as a researcher primarily, was taxing. 1 am inclined to speculate that I might not have faced challenges in this particular way were 1 not visibly Indian and with an ostensibly Hindu-sounding name. At times, an ambivalent Hindu seemed as threatening as anything. 33 See for example the works of Harding (2000), Hirschkind (2006), Mahmood (2005), Meyer (2006), Robbins (2004), and Varzi (2006).

Notes for Chapter 2 fpp. 52-861

1 For some discussion of the demographic history of South Asian or Hindu immigration to the U.S. and/or the resultant practical cultural changes or continuities in American Hinduism see Bald (2007), Dempsey (2006), Eck (2001), Leonard (1997), Mann et al. (2001), Prashad (2000), Vertovec (2000), Williams (1988,2007). 2 Hinduism occupied an ambivalent place in the American public imaginary, especially from the 19th century onwards. Hinduism, particularly Vedanta, fit positively into a context of the expanding ideals of liberalism and individualism and the related emergence of America's first new age religions of 19th-century America. Henry Thoreau and transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson were famous for their romanticized fascination with Hinduism as a countercultural force. The growing circulation of translated Vedic texts fuelled this fascination, which was soon followed up by the formation of the Theosophical Society in 1875. Vivekananda’s landmark address at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, and the appeal of his subsequent Vedanta Societies among white, upper class, urban American devotees, similarly established a place for Hinduism in this climate of American religious and spiritual individualism. At the same time, this romantic fascination with Hinduism was also tempered by a majority cultural climate that feared Hinduism. The classical colonial, missionary, and Orientalist discourse of the 'Hindoo' also circulated in American popular and print culture. Missionary journals and newsletters reported the lives and practices of the ‘Hindoos,’ a spatial and temporal world away, as bizarre, grotesque, and dangerous. In the tension between 248 fascination and anxiety, the latter ultimately seems to have won out by the first decades of the 20th century as suspicion, racism, and hostility towards the Asian Indian immigrants in America began to grow. Sometimes referred to as the Asian exclusion period, public perceptions in the early 20th of Asians, Indians, and ‘Hindoos' were harshly negative, to the point where American immigration policy was tailored accordingly with a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1923 effectively outlawing immigration from Asia to the U.S. (Hollinger 1995; Takaki 1989). 3 The New York chapter formed in 1968, and now has 17 chapters nationally across the U.S., many of which are concentrated in the eastern U.S. (multiple New York State chapters, two New Jersey chapters, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania). See: . 4 See the AIA website at: . 5 This is not to say that such identities vanish or become irrelevant. The maintenance of regional identities corresponds at least in part to the regionalized patterns of migrating South Asians to the U.S. - i.e., the predominance of South Asian immigrants in the U.S. hailing from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and Punjab. Many neighbourhoods settled by post-65 immigrants have histories of regional predominance (the e.g. NW corridor of New Jersey is largely Gujarati, while much of the earlier Indian immigrants to Queens have been Tamil). Regional and linguistic community organizations also exist among many South Asian populations across the U.S. 6 For further accounts of Hindu temple development in the U.S., see Bauman & Saunders (2009), Dempsey (2006), Eck (2001), Narayanan (2006), Waghorne (2004), Williams (1984,1988). 7 The Ganesh Temple, for instance, was embroiled in controversy and protest back in 2002 when prominent Hindutva supporter Sadhvi Rithambara was scheduled to come speak at an event booked at the temple's auditorium. As anti-Hindutva demonstrators protested Rithambara’s visit, the temple claimed both to have no knowledge of the visit, as well as no knowledge of Rithambara's public profile in India. Temple association president Uma Mysorekar remarked at the time, "If we had known she was an extreme radical at one time, we would have never allowed this event to happen." See Chhabra, Assem. "Protestors confront Sadhvi Rithambara in New York," Rediff.com, 27-July 2002. Available online at: . 8 See Chapter 1 on VHP in India, and Chapter 1, note 15 on reconversion. 9 "History of VHPA," VHPA website. Available online at: . 10 The early concerns of the VHPA and HSS reflect what many scholars would also focus on throughout the 1980s and 1990s. A preoccupation with identity and 249 cultural transmission/change has directed the conceptual and analytical focus of the academic literature on diasporic South Asians in general, and Indians and Hindus in particular. Literature on the South Asian diaspora, in general, has often focused centrally on issues of social identity among diasporic youth. Different accounts have described different responses, ranging from the oscillation between authenticity and assimilation, and then those synthesizing overarching pan-Asian identity categories such as "South Asian” to mediate the inbetween-ness of their presumably polarized experience of East/West, home/away (Joshi 2006; Khandelwal 2003; Leonard 1997; Maira 2002; Rangaswamy 2000; Rudrappa 2004; Shukla 2003). Popular themes of hybridity, fusion, and situational identity have been variously invoked therewith. 11 For some discussion on the conceptualization of Hinduism in terms of ethnicity within India, see Reddy (2006). 12 However, it is worth noting one of the major public faces of Hinduism in America at this time: the monthly magazine Hinduism Today. A publication with unlikely origins, founded by Subramuniyaswami, born as Robert Hansen from Oakland, and his Himalayan Academy think tank and monastery in Hawaii in 1979-1980, it offered a general readership of first-generation Hindus an assortment of articles and columns and has become a major media source on and for American Hindus. 13 The nature of the OFBJP’s support has, however, been ambivalently perceived. While the reports of the CSFH have opened up suspicions, and perhaps a popular perception, about transnational financial ties, the OBFJP maintains publicly that they do not offer financial support to the BJP in India. For instance, a 2004 article appearing on Rediff.com quotes former OFBJP president Dinesh Agarwal stating that it "is not our agenda" to raise funds for BJP campaigns. See lype, George. "Meet the BJP’s American friends." Rediff.com, 12-April 2004. Available online at: . 14 Dongre, Archana. "Ganesha Graces Disneyland: Is the Elephant God getting due respect?" Hinduism Today, December 1996. 15 This message was retrieved from an archived record of the VHPA-GC list circulated publicly online. 16 The CSFH's larger point on the HSCs is that its claims of autonomy are a key signal of their involvement with a larger sangh parivar project. The report suggests that it is characteristic of the sangh parivar network of organizations in India to not maintain legal or formal operational ties between each other. The HSC claim of autonomy, according to the CSFH report, is thus what marks "the moment when it becomes a full part of the Sangh, recognized as a mature component by Sangh leaders" (2007:25). 17 For instance, the CSFH’s 2007 report got the attention of a local HSC chapter at Stanford University, that then held meetings and public discussions examining 250 possible political associations that this local chapter was not otherwise aware of. The discussions involving the Stanford HSC resulted in a statement issued vowing to "[r]ecognize that organizations like CSFH can be valuable partners in helping us stay clear of fundamentalism, and thus, their activism is of great benefit and will act as our conscience” (CSFH 2008:23). 18 An extensive response to the CSFH’s earlier report in 2002 on the Indian Development and Relief Fund (IDRF) by Dr. Ramesh Rao and Dr. Narayanan Komerath appeared on the website Let India Develop . The National HSC also issued a press statement denouncing and refuting the 2007 CSFH report, available online at: . 19 The press release issued by the HSC in response to the 2007 CSFH report, for instance, criticizes a number of the authors of the CSFH report as having "avowed political agendas that are on the very fringe," urging people to "keep away from dangerous ideologies of violence and hatred that they associate with and propagate." 20 See for example websites such as that of the South Asian Bleeding Hearts Association or SABHA , a sarcastically named group targeting liberal and left academics deemed as too soft on issues of Indian national security. Another active site of this particular vocabulary has been on blogs such as "Shadow Warrior" , run by California-based IT professional and writer Rajeev Srinavasan. 21 See the Hindu Unity blacklist at . 22 Not only for the U.S.: Mukta (2000), Raj (2000), and Zavos,(2008, 2009, 2010) have all described very similar dynamics among Hindus in the British context. 23 Multiculturalism's understandings of culture, identity, and community have been widely explored in social science literature of the last two decades with reference to the U.S. (Turner 1993; Zizek 1997), U.K. (Hall 2000; Hesse 2000; Hutnyk & Kalra 1998; Modood 2007), and Canada (Bannerji 2000; Mackey 2002; Yon 2000). Multiculturalism, both as policy and as discourse, has been critically described as a mechanism through which diversity is regulated and cast into a reified mosaic of reified cultural difference both imposed on, and performed by, its subjects (Bhabha 1990). 24 Prema Kurien’s (2007a) study of a local HSC at a California university describes them as semi-public, somewhere in between a private and public focus, noting how the political positions of different HSCs can vary considerably between chapters and within them. See also note 17, above. 25 Most notable is the removal of an introductory statement to the BJP's statement of objecti ves stating the central importance of a philosophy of Hindutva to the BJP's socio-political project in India and to the mobilizing mission of the OFBJP abroad. 251

The statement described “Hindutva as the national and cultural life of India” and that "[a] positive support and widespread recognition of the philosophy of Hindutva is a direct product of this national awakening and approval of the policies of the national forces represented by BJP in the political arena” (sic). 26 Despite this there is a more complicated history of the BJP-OFBJP relationship. In the early 2000s, the OFBJP was marred by internal power struggles and conflicts over leadership that were reported publicly. See Rangajaran, Raj S. "Overseas BJP Body Waits for Delhi Decision on Next Pres." IndiaWest, Issue 13, A27,01-Feb 2002. At one point, it was reported that the BJP in India attempted to dissolve the American group. See: "OFBJP celebrates parent body's 25th anniversary." India Abroad Vol XXXVI, 26, C6. 31-March 2006. 27 See Chapter 5 for further discussion of the California textbook case. 28 See "Who We Are," HAF website. Available online at: . 29 The VHPA, for its part, has offered an ambivalent disclaimer dissociating itself from the Indian VHP on its website. It claims that: "VHP of America is distinct, legally separate and operationally independent Non-Profit organization in its own right within the USA. The programs, projects, policies of VHPA are determined by its Governing Council and operationalized by its Executive board. All communications between VHP Bharat and VHP of America are handled via the National office or through the International coordinator nominated by the GC [sic].” See "Relationship with VHP Bharat" on VHPa website online at .

Notes for Chapter 3 fpp. 87-1251

1 Human Empowerment Convention 2008 Program, p. 31. 2 Notably, without any reference to Upadhyay’s philosophy of "Integral Humanism”, a philosophy once espoused by the early BJP. 3 Human Empowerment Convention 2008 Program, p. 24. 4 RlWatch (Research Institute of World’s Ancient Traditions, Culture, and Heritage) is a part of the ICCS, an American-based independent research institute focused on researching "ancient traditions” around the world, in the style of what many have referred to as "salvage anthropology." While the institute does not specify any regional focus, many of the publications listed on its website show a virtually exclusive focus on South Asia and Hinduism. RlWatch is the part of the group focusing specifically on the northeast of India and Arunachal Pradesh. 5 By all, however uneven, sociological and ethnographic accounts, Arunachal Pradesh and the Indian north-east is scarcely described as having a singular 252 religious, cultural, or ethnic makeup (e.g., Modi 2003; Showren 2006) and only a staggered presence of Hindu architecture beginning in the medieval period (Dash 2003; Malik 2003). Even the rather dated anthropological terms of Christoph von Fiirer-Haimendorf (1982), who otherwise maintained an interest in capturing "authentic" tribal societies, describes the communities he had studied in the mid- 20th century in the region as highly ethnically and religiously diverse. While his representations might also be read in terms of familiar anthropological tropes ascribing chaos and disorder to the tribal, his focus on a myriad of highly local animistic traditions as well as on the prevalence of Mahayana Buddhism in the region still contrasts with the suggestion that these communities are singularly and essentially Hindu. 6 See the discussion of Derrida’s notion of the "self-contesting attestation" in Chapter 5. The notion of utterance here also recalls Bhabha’s (1994) ideas about the split meaning built into enunciation, the utterance that ambivalently refers to both what is and is not. 7 Though this is by no means "against" race in the critical sense of Paul Gilroy (2000). Rather, race figures here ambivalently, more akin to the paradoxes of racial formations described by Goldberg (1990) and Young (1995). 8 Carrette & King (2005), in discussing how many spiritual/philosophical traditions, especially non-Western ones, become re-worked by the contemporary industry of new age spirituality, note a strong logic of individualism and neoliberalism underwriting the marketing and consumption of such traditions. This happens despite a logical irony in how philosophical/spiritual systems based on principles of transcendence and non-accumulation become appropriated as individualist projects of self-making, or even within the corporate realm to promote principles of competition and capital accumulation. 9 The figure of the militant, masculine and modern Hindu fashioned through modern (i.e., 1980s and 1990s) discourses of Hindutva, particularly in the re-worked nationalist iconographies that promote hyper-masculinized, aggressive, and war­ like images of Ram, have been described elsewhere. See Bacchetta (2009), Pinney (2004), Sarkar (2001), and van der Veer (1994). 10 Hindu Unity Day 2008 Program, p. 1. This particular remark comes from the "Welcome Message From the Organisers” signed by Hindu Temple Society of North America president Uma Mysorekar and IAIF president Narain Kataria. 11 Kataria, Narain. Interview with Sanatana Dharma Foundation, 104.9FM, Dallas TX, 08-July 2008. 12 Actual attendance numbers for Hindu Unity Day were not possible to determine. It was not a ticketed event and the doors to the various aspects of the event (the main show in the auditorium, the food service downstairs, the lobby exhibits, etc) remained open allowing people to come and go. Thus, there were not fixed numbers 253 at the event as a whole, nor at given parts of the event. However, the auditorium's seating capacity of 700 looked close to full at the start of the program, giving a preliminary sense of the audience numbers on hand. 13 This is a claim in circulation at least since Savarkar in the early 20th century. Savarkar's Hindutva claims Sikhism and Buddhism as inherently Hindu in origin and essence, and traditions that have deviated from this essence. It is in this sense that Savarkar's notion of Hindutva has a significant genetic and racializing aspect to it. See discussion in Chapter 1. 14 This remark draws from a long-standing view of Sanskrit as the primordial language of Hinduism and India (Bryant 2001), one that has developed both through British Orientalism’s connection of Sanskrit to an essential definition of India (Trautmann 2009), as well as a range of indigenist Hindu nationalist claims from Savarkar (1969) to contemporary writers (e.g., Frawley 1998). 15 Makkar, Dave. "Sonia Gandhi's massive defeat in Lawsuit or Public Money Squandered by 2 Morons/Donkeys.” Blog post on HindToday, 20-August 2008. Available online at: . 16 India has its own history of anti-terrorism discourse, first systematized with the passing of the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) in the 1980s. Following 9/11, the Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act (POTA) in early 2002, the legislative cornerstone to India's reinvigorated war-on-terror and a parallel to the American PATRIOT Act, Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act and Bill C-36, gave increased state provisions for arresting and detaining suspected terrorists as a preemptive measure. India subsequently increased military co-operation with the U.S. in the form of co-ordinated military training and civil nuclear development. Other telling moments of articulation surfaced, such as when then-defense minister George Fernandes suggested that India follow the American lead established with their occupation of Iraq in launching a "preemptive strike" against Pakistan to combat terrorism. 17 Massumi gives the example of post-9/11 anthrax scares as illustrative. The fear of terrorist attacks in the form of anthrax-laced letter mail led to numerous false alarms around suspicious packages or letters. Massumi's point is that it is these false alarms that elicit and amplify such "ambient” senses of threat. The fact that the threat was never realized (i.e., that a suspicious letter did not actually have anthrax in it) does nothing to quell the sense of fear and threat; in fact they perpetuate the sense of threat because it is in the moment of suspicion about possible threat that an affective response is generated. 18 The mobilizing strategies that placed the project of Hindu Indian sovereignty within the hands of individual actions also seem to reflect the larger political 254 changes charted by Hardt and Negri (2000:188-9], who describe a political culture of Empire in which politics becomes interiorized, shrunk down to the realm of the private, as public spaces evaporate or themselves become privatized.

Notes for Chapter 4 (pp. 126-170)

1 His reference here was to the Aryan Invasion Theory, a theory of longstanding controversy about the settlement of ancient India, especially in 19th century Indology. It typically is taken to suggest that the ancient Indian subcontinent was settled and culturally dominated by waves of invading Aryan migrant settlers. It remains a point of intense contention in contemporary Indian archaeology and linguistics, not the least of which has to with the political implications of claims of Aryan indigeneity to India. Many scholars of Indian history today do not accept a simplistic notion of "invasion,” though maintain a significant cultural syncretism of some sort taking shape in ancient India (Bryant 2001; Thapar 2006; Witzel 2005). See Bryant & Patton (2005) for more on the ongoing terms of the controversy. 2 Kataria, Narain. "NR1 Intellectuals conference denounces religious conversion in India." Unpublished report, 11-March 1999. Available online at: . 3 Kataria, Narain. "NRI Intellectuals conference denounces religious conversion in India." Unpublished report, 11-March 1999. Available online at: . 4 Kataria, Narain. Interview with Sanatana Dharma Foundation, 104.9FM, Dallas TX, 08-July 2008. 5 Kataria, Narain. Interview with Sanatana Dharma Foundation, 104.9FM, Dallas TX, 08-July 2008. 6 Katar ia, Narain. "Symposium on Roots of Terrorism in Washington D.C.: A Report.” Press Release issued on website of the Indian American Intellectuals Forum, 04-May 2006. Available online at: . 7 Actor Shabana Azmi's public profile has for years been marked by controversy: her endorsement and involvement in a range of public health and environmental campaigns in India, her public opposition to communal conflict, and particularly her portrayal of a queer woman in the film Fire (1999), have all been regarded as controversial, raising the particular ire of many conservative nationalists in India. 8 Quoted from the text of an email circulated by Narain Kataria, under the name "Indian Americans for Truth and Fairness in Media," advertising for the demonstration against Azmi on 21-May 2002 at 65 5th Ave. The ad circulated 255 contained a section titled "Shabana's bio-data,” profiling her supposed "anti-Indian activities.” 9 Tharoor, Shashi. "Drama in New York.” The Hindu, 09-June 2002. Available online at: . 10 The other groups signed onto the ad included the Mahatma Gandhi International Foundation, the Mahatma Gandhi Center & Hindu Temple, the Indo-Caribbean Council, Kashmir Taskforce, and the Foundation of Nepalis in America. 11 "John Doe” is standard legal designation for an anonymous party. In this case, the designation of "John Does 1-100” left the lawsuit open to amendment to include other possible defendants to be named later, given the questions surrounding the ad’s authorship. 12 Indian National Overseas Congress, Inc. vs. Mr. Narendra Kataria, Mr. Arish Sahani, Mr. Srinivasa K. Murthy, Indo Caribbean Council NY Inc., and John Does 1- 100. Affidavit, Supreme Court of the State of New York, Index No. 103664/08, p. 12. 30-May 2008. 13 Indian National Overseas Congress, Inc. vs. Mr. Narendra Kataria, Mr. Arish Sahani, Mr. Srinivasa K. Murthy, Indo Caribbean Council NY Inc., and John Does 1- 100. Memorandum of Law by Defendants Kataria and Sahani in Support of Motion to Dismiss, Supreme Court of the State of New York, Index No. 103664/08, p. 1. 30-May 2008. 14 Kataria’s email correspondence on this was circulated widely and even quoted publically. See Ashfaque, Swapan. "Anti-Sonia Gandhi Ad Triggers $100M Libel Lawsuit.” India-West, Vol. 33(21):A29,25-April, 2008. 15 Memorandum in Support of Motion to Dismiss, p. 3. Note here that the line cited is itself partly quoting from Bridges v. California, 314 US 252, 270 (1941) as precedence for freedom of antagonistic political speech. 16 Hindu Support Fund. "$100 Million Lawsuit Against Narain Kataria and Arish Sahani: A Dangerous Trend to Curb the Freedom of Speech.” Blog post on HindToday, 12-May 2008. Available online at: . 17 See "Rebuttal to Surinder Malhotra’s letter to NYTimes.” Forum for Preservation of Gandhi's Heritage website. Available online at: . 18 Indian National Overseas Congress, Inc. vs. Mr. Narendra Kataria, Mr. Arish Sahani, Mr. Srinivasa K. Murthy, Indo Caribbean Council NY Inc., and John Does 1- 100. Memorandum of Law of Plaintiff Indian National Overseas Congress Inc. in Opposition to Motion to Dismiss the Amended Complaint by Defendant Narain 256

Kataria and Arish Sahani, Supreme Court of the State of New York, Index No. 103664/08, p. 21. 30-June 2008 19 Memorandum in Opposition, p.2. 20 Memorandum in Support of Motion to Dismiss, p. 29. 21 The demonstrators' effort to mobilize via the figure of Gandhi is in itself notable given the Mahatma's ambivalent standing with the sangh parivar in India, notably the RSS and those who condemn Gandhi's association with the legacy of Congress politics. However, in the space of the demonstration and print ad denouncing Sonia Gandhi, the claims on a Hindu Indian state by these American Hindus are being made by strategically splitting Gandhi from his historical association with Nehru’s Congress dynasty and reclaiming him. Gandhi’s iconicity in the West is not insignificant here. 22 Memorandum in Opposition, p.2. 23 "Rebuttal to Surinder Malhotra's letter to NYTimes.” Forum for Preservation of Gandhi's Heritage website. Available online at: . It does not appear that this rebuttal letter was ever published in the New York Times. 24 See "Indian National Overseas Congress slams anti-Sonia advt," Rediff India Abroad, 12-October 2007. Available online at: . 25 "Rebuttal to Surinder Malhotra’s letter to NYTimes.” Forum for Preservation of Gandhi's Heritage website. Available online at: . 26 See "MGF’s response to Mr. Malhotra’s letter to NYTimes: Who is the real religious fanatic?”. Available online at: . This is a letter of support signed by a Dr. Naresh Sharma representing the Mahatma Gandhi International Foundation. 27 Indian National Overseas Congress, Inc. vs. Mr. Narendra Kataria, Mr. Arish Sahani,, Mr. Srinivasa K. Murthy, Indo Caribbean Council NY Inc., and John Does 1- 100. First Amended Verified Complaint, Supreme Court of the State of New York, Index No. 103664/08, pp. 4-5. 27-May 2008. The full points of this part of the complaint read as follows: 20. No authors explicitly identified themselves as being responsible for the advertisement's content within the text. The advertisement stated that it was "endorsed by Forum for Saving Gandhi's Heritage and gave contact information as "http://gandhiheritage.org” and "[email protected]." The latter website is entitled "Forum for Preserving Gandhi's Heritage" and gives no legal status for any specific 257

organization, no address for its operations, and only the following "contact" information: "You may cal us: [names and numbers listed].” Full names were not given, nor any affiliation or position within the organization held by any of these individuals. 21. To the extent therefore that a so-called corporate veil exists regarding such "entities" as Forum for Gandhi Heritage, Forum for Saving Gandhi Heritage or Forum for Preserving Gandhi Heritage, it can and should be pierced in order to reach the responsible malefactors. 22. In correspondence sent to the New York Times on October 22,2007, the so-called "Forum for Gandhi Heritage" stated that it placed the October 6th advertisement in the newspaper. 23. In fact, however, there is no legal entity known as "Forum for Gandhi Heritage." 24. Instead, such names are improperly used by those individuals identified on the website noted above in paragraph sixteen to suggest the existence of a legal entity, where none actually exists. 28 Further ambiguities around this particular group arise in the fact that its name has been used in reference to at least two other, apparently completely unrelated, North American organizations. The "Mahatma Gandhi International Foundation" is sometimes used to refer to a non-profit formed by a Montreal-based artist who properly refers to his organization as the "International Foundation of Mahatma Gandhi.” The "Mahatma Gandhi International Foundation" has also been used in reference to the controversial "Gandhi Memorial International Foundation," a group formed by a man claiming to be a relative of Mahatma Gandhi and accused of making illegal financial contributions to the U.S. Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the 1990s. See the Senate Committee Report “1997 Special Investigation in Connection with 1996 Federal Election Campaigns." Available online at: . 29 Refer to Kataria, Narain. Interview with Sanatana Dharma Foundation, 104.9FM, Dallas TX, 08-July 2008. Here, Kataria publicly states that the IAIF is registered as a non-profit group in the state of New York. The IAIF’s website however does not quite confirm this. The website, while appearing quite out of date, with the majority of the content being at least a few years old (at the time of this writing, the website has apparently expired, though portions of it have been cached by Google), makes no mention of the organization as having any official 501(c)3 non-profit status. It does, however, provide some insight on the how the group supports itself. Aside from relying on its own private funds, the IAIF also seeks support from donations. The website was at one point set up to process credit card donations/contributions that vary across a range of membership categories. These include "student" and "senior citizen" memberships that come with no fee, "primary" memberships with a 258 contribution of $25 per year, "life” memberships at $150, making one "eligible to take Executive Positions" and open to "all the membership benefits and participate in all the activities of IAIF.” They also have a "grand patron” membership category listed at $1000, described only as open to "all the previliges and participate in all the activities of IAIF [sic]" (see , currently cached by Google). Evidently their events and actions require resources; however, there remain questions about the nature of the organization and the types of donations it is allowed to collect. The IAIF website, at one point, specified that donations are not tax-deductible, indicating that they may not have official charity status. Moreover, while the group does claim to have a conventional organizational structure (with a president, treasurer, and board) as well as a mission statement, the IAIF has no formal constitution or bylaws. 30 The full list of groups signed onto the Tristate Indians flyer included: Afghan Hindu Association, Arsha Bodha Center, Art of Living Foundation, Baba Balak Nath Temple, Bangladeshi Hindus of America, Bangladesh Minority Forum, Bunt Association of North America, Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of USA, Federation of Indian Associations, Friends of India Society, Hindi Samiti of USA, Hindu Center, Hindu Collective Initiative of North America (HCINA), Hindu Human Rights Watch, Hindu International Council Against Defamation (HICAD), Hindu Right Action Force (HINDRAF), Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, Indian American Intellectual Forum, Kanchi Kamkoti Foundation USA, Kannada Koota, Malyali Hindu Mandalam of North America, Marathi Vishwa Nataraja Mandir (WSFC), Namdhari Sikh Foundation, Om Temple of Garden State, Overseas Friends of BJP, Overseas Sindhu Sabha, Panchvati Ashram, Phagwah Parade & Festival Committee, Punjabi Darbar Religious & Cultural Society, Sadhanalaya Dance, Samskrita Bharati, Satya Narayan Mandir, Save Temples in India, Shree Trimurthi Bhavan, Sindhi Circle, The Caribbean Voice, and Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America. 31 Kataria, Narain. "Peaceful Vigil in front of Ground Zero in New York on 9/11 - Report from Narain Kataria." Blog post on HindToday, 16-September 2009. Available online at: . 32 One list of HRCARI's includes the following as member organizations: 9/11 Families for a Secure America, ACT for America, Long Island & Manhattan, AISH Center, Alliance of Interfaith Resistance, AMCHA, American Coptic Union, American Center for Democracy, Americans for Peace & Tolerance, Arabs for Israel, Artists4Israel, Center for Security Policy, Chinese Community Relations Council(CCRC), Clarion Fund, Damanga (Darfur Muslims), David Project, Forcefield, Foundation of Nepalese, Global Movement Against Radical Islam, Hasbara Fellowships, Hindu Human Rights Watch, Indian American Intellectuals Forum, 259

Institut e for Religion & Democracy, International Foundation of Bangladeshi Hindus, Jewish Action Alliance, Mothers Against Terrorism, Muslims Against Sharia, Namdhari Sikh Foundation, R.E.A.L Courage, Security & Law Society, Fordham University School of Law, Sikh Recognition Trust, Stand With Us, Sudan Freedom Walk, The Intelligence Summit, The United Nationalist Nepalese (UNN), Women United: Code Red, and the Zionist Organization of America. Note the rather different composition of this coalition as compared to the list of members under the Tristate Indians name, as listed in note 30. 33 Sahani, Arish. "Speeches given at May 03 rally at Times Square.” Available online at . 34 Sahani, Arish. "Speeches given at May 03 rally at Times Square.” Available online at . 35 Sahani, Arish. "Speeches given at May 03 rally at Times Square.” Available online at . 36 Kataria, Narain. "Peaceful Vigil in front of Ground Zero in New York on 9/11 - Report from Narain Kataria.” Blog post on HindToday, 16-September 2009. Available online at: . 37 Sahani, Arish. "Speeches given at May 03 rally at Times Square." Available online at . 38 "Coalition for Peace: Awareness Campaign with Regard to Terrorism in Front of White House During President Barack Obama Parade on January 20, 2009.” Blog post on HindToday, 23-January 2009. Available online at: . 39 Kataria, Narain. "Peaceful Vigil in front of Ground Zero in New York on 9/11 - Report from Narain Kataria." Blog post on HindToday, 16-September 2009. Available online at: . 40 Kataria, Narain. "Peaceful Vigil in front of Ground Zero in New York on 9/11 - Report from Narain Kataria." Blog post on HindToday, 16-September 2009. Available online at: . 41 In a way, this sense of political belonging appears more cosmopolitan than nationalist. Cosmopolitanism has become an increasingly popular way in which social scientists have conceptualized senses of global citizenship or global political belonging (e.g., Appiah 2006; Gilroy 2000, 2005; Glick-Schiller et al. 2011Hollinger 260

2006; Pollock et al. 2002). However, HRCARI’s globality involves a selectively aligned world and humanity, brought together in reaction to a common global threat that galvanizes transferrable narratives of persecution. Political worldliness can work in tandem with particularist sovereignty, as critics of cosmopolitanism have pointed out (Pagden 2000; Pensky 2000). 42 The 2007 CSFH report "Lying Religiously" for instance links the HAF with Hindutva through the associations of HAF founder and president Mihir Meghani with the HSC, VHPA, HSS, and a group called Democracies Against Terrorism.

Notes for Chapter 5 (pp. 171-228)

1 See Narasingha Sil, "The Question of Ramakrishna’s Homosexuality," The Statesman, 31-January, 1997. 2 Moreover, by Hatcher's (1999) account, the Ramakrishna Mission's reaction is framed by a larger overall push for an institutionalized version of Ramakrishna that tacitly downplays Ramakrishna’s devotional ties to Kali and to the Tantras in favor of a portrayal as an austere Vedanta mystic. 3 One key criticism that initially surfaced about the book was that Kripal’s reliance on psychoanalysis was reductionist, i.e., that Kripal tended to see homoeroticism as causal to Ramakrishna's mystic insights (Larson 1997). 4 The new preface conceded translation issues in the book. However Kripal maintained his overall thesis, claiming that the mistranslated passages under dispute did not undermine his larger contention about the centrality of homoeroticism in the life and teachings of Ramakrishna. 5 See the HAF's action alert statement issued in 2004 on the Courtright controversy. Available online at: . 6 The papers of this session were ultimately collected and published as a special issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 2000. My references here draw from the published versions of these papers in this issue (see issue 68, volume 4). 7 These particular concerns in some ways reach back earlier, having been explored by Belgium-based Indologist Balagangadhara. Balagangadhara’s lengthy volume The Heathen in his Blindness (1994) in many ways amplified this discussion and has proven particularly influential among some Hindus in the U.S. 8 The proceedings of this AAR session are published and remain available at: . 261

9 See Sankrat Sanu's critique of Doniger, initially posted on his blog at Sulekha.com. Available online at: . 10 See also the lengthy review by Vishal Agarwal and Kalavai Venat, "When the cigar becomes a phallus.” Available online at: . 11 See "Draft minutes of the first dialogue on February 18, 2004 between Emory officials and the Concerned Community.” Previously available at: . And alternately at: . Both links are now inactive; document is cited from a personally archived copy. 12 See Paul Courtright's response in Emory’s Academic Exchange. Available at: . 13 See Shankar Vedantam, "Wrath Over a Hindu God,” Washington Post, 10-April, 2004, page A01. Available online at: . 14 See the HAF's letter, "HAF Counters Biased Coverage of Emory-Courtright Issue in Washington Post." Available online at: . 15 For instance, see the online commentary by Narayanan Komerath, "Protestant Pedagogues Peeved at Protest Against Porn-Peddling," Ol-June, 2004. Available at: . 16 See the IF's response by Krishnan Ramaswamy to Michele Moritis' paper on the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam. Available online at: . 17 See the IF’s critique of Sneha Mehta’s paper on the Infinity Foundation. Available online at: . 18 Hawley, quoting his IF critics, from the section of the Hinduism Here course website detailed the "Challenges to the Course.” Available online at: . 19 The parallel case in India was that of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF), devised by the first BJP government to rework the National Council for Education and Research Training (NCERT) and review school curriculum content in India. See Visweswaran et al. (2009). 262

20 HAF filed an additional lawsuit against the California State Board of Education claiming procedural violations in their previous rejection of the edits proposed by the VF and HEF. 21 See Declaration of University Faculty & Scholars in Support of Brief of Amici Curiae Ambedkar Center for Justice & Peace, Campaign to Stop Funding Hate, Coalition Against Communalism, Ekta, Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America, Friends of South Asia, and Guru Ravidass Gurdwaras of California in Support of Defendant California State Board of Education's Opposition to Petitioner’s Motion for Preliminary Injunction. Hindu American Foundation, Arjun Bhagat, Yashwant Vaishnav, and Rita Patel v. California State Board of Education, and Does 1-10, Superior Court of the State of California, Case No. 06 CS 00386, 21- April 2006. 22 See Bose (2008), Kurien (2007b:775-777), Maira & Swamy (2006), Nussbaum (2007). As yet another sign of the centrality of the virtual space of the web, the case has been extensively documented online. Organizations on both sides of the debate regularly circulate legal documents, commentary and correspondence relating to the case online. See the website of CAPEEM in particular for extensive discussion and collection of documents on the case. 23 See the Second Amended Complaint in California Parents for the Equalizaiton of Educational Materials v. Kenneth Noonan, Ruth Bloom, Alan Bersin, Yvonne Chan, Donald G. Fisher, Ruth E. Green, Joe Nunez, Johnathan Williams, and David Lopez, all in their official capacities as Members of the California State Board of Education; and Tom Adams, in his official capacity as Director of the Curriculum Frameworks and Instruc tional Resources Division and Executive Director of the Curriculum Commission (of the California StateDepartment of Education, United States District Court, Eastern District of California, Case No.: 2:06-CV-00532-FCD-KJM, p. 2-3. 25- August 2006. 24 Quoted from a message by the "Editor - ITS Web Team” posted in the Invading the Sacred Google Groups discussion thread (discuss-invadingthesacred), 04-December, 2007. Archived online at: . 25 An even earlier column by Rajeev Srinivasan, a California-based management consultant, prominent blogger, and occasional columnist for online Indian magazines such as Outlook and The Pioneer, describes the situation in more stark terms. He complains that the term "South Asian" lumps India together with other regions and states that he feels are not equal or compatible: What exactly does the average Indian have in common with a Pakistani or a Bangladeshi or a Nepali or a Maldivian? Very little. [...] Especially Pakistan and Bangladesh — they split off from India in 1947. Let them eat cake now. [...] There is an inclusivist streak among Indians - - 1 call this a wool-gathering 263

lack of clarity. That's what is on display here. However, when Pakistan's entire raison d'etre is implacable hatred for India, it becomes inappropriate to 'include' them. "South Asia" is an illusion, other than as a trading forum. If at some point in the future, Pakistanis can get over their congenital hatred of "vegetarian Hindus" then maybe we can talk about South Asia. As of now, it makes much more sense to push the "Indian" brand forward. We lose by pushing "South Asia". For Srinivasan, these are all distinct and self-enclosed state, national, and indeed civilizational, entities. He sees the term "South Asian" as diluting the particular civilizational accomplishments he feels are associated with being "Indian." He expresses particular disdain for the association of India with Pakistan, and speculates that the entire discourse around the idea of "South Asia" is constructed simply "to appease Pakistanis." See Srinivasan, Rajeev. "Why I am not a South Asian." Rediff.com, 20-March 2000. Available online at: . 26 Discourses of Hindu genocide are part of an older and longer lineage of demographic anxieties envisioning Hindus as a dying population. This idea was most famously captured in Swami Shraddhananda's "Hindu Sangathan: Saviour of the Dying Race" (1926), arguing that Hinduism in India was under threat of dying out, suggesting stringent reforms based on shuddhi (reconversion) to reclaim what were perceived to be lost Hindus. 27 See for instance the Hindu Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the major websites promoting the memorialization of what is claimed as a centuries-long genocide of Hindus: . 28 See the FACT website for information on its touring exhibits and projects focusing on medieval threats (e.g., "Aurangzeb, as he was according to Mughal Records”) to contemporary threats (e.g., "Bangladesh, A Portrait of Covert Genocide," "Naxalism, a threat to the Unified Nation of India”). 29 "SSRF's Protest Against 'The Love Guru'." Statement issued 26-April 2008. Available online at: . 30 "’The Love Guru' is Vulgar but not Hinduphobic, Say Hindus Attending Special Preview." Press statement issued 20-Jun, 2008. Available online at: . 31 Interview with Rajiv Malhotra, Princeton, NJ, 02-July, 2008. 32 Sociologists who maintained a secularization theory of religion in modernity often had a particular interest in religious trends in America, particularly around the apparent individualization of religion happening alongside steady, even prolife rating, church attendance in America in comparison to the weakening of the Catholic churches in Europe. Common to those key accounts of secularization theory 264 from Martin (1978), Berger (1969), and Luckmann (1967) is the suggestion that religious practice becomes a matter of choice in a secularizing world. The broad character of Protestantism in the U.S. figured as a curious case in which the Church seemed to lose public and political authority while maintaining participation and attendance numbers through individuated choice to practice. While these do not necessarily link American religion to notions of identity per se (as, say, Charles Taylor would later), they do indicate a grappling with a shift in religion that seems particular to the America context. 33 Interview with Rajiv Malhotra, Princeton, NJ, 02-July, 2008. 34 Kripal’s response to Rajiv Malhotra’s initial RISA-Lila essay, for instance, refutes the allegation that Kripal refused any dialogue or public engagement. See "The Tantric Truth of the Matter: A Forthright Response to Rajiv Malhotra," available online at: . Paul Courtright (2007) similarly refutes this common allegation, noting that "[i]t is simply false to claim that Hindus are excluded from the academic study of religion in American universities," in his dialogue with Krishnan Ramaswamy in the pages of Little India. See also Note 18, above, on Jack Hawley's response to similar criticisms leveled at his "Hinduism Here" course. 35 Again, Kripal's many replies to critics have often raised the counter-argument that their criticisms often stem from taking his points out of context (see, again, his reply to Malhotra, cite in Note 36, above). Courtright (2007) defends himself similarly. On this, a larger related argument raised against Kripal's critics suggests that what is really being elevated here is less an anxiety about mistranslation or weak or ethnocentric academic standards, and more a pronounced homophobia entrenched in the moral sensibilities of a conservative Hindu elite (see Hawley 2004). 36 A more complex picture of the engagement between second generation South Asians and American academia has been supported by a recent study by Khyati Joshi (2006). Joshi's study examines the reflections of a selected range of second generation South Asian American youth (Muslim, Hindu, and Christian) on questions of religion and religious identity. Her interview subjects commonly talk about religion as a central point of identification in their lives, but with rather variable responses on how their educational and academic experiences shape and impact this. While some report encountering problematic representations and stereotypes in their school and university classrooms, others report a range of different reactions from indifference, to actual offense, but also inspiration. While Joshi’s study does describe her interview subjects as shaped in relation to Christian undercurrents in American society, her account of these encounters appears to tell a rather different story than Invading the Sacred ’s singular narrative. 265

37 WAVES's current statement of their "Nature and Purpose" describes the group and its project as follows: Vedic traditions have continued without interruption for many millennium of years and remain a living and formative source of Hindu culture and tradition...For most of the world [their] contributions are often unknown, unrecognized, and sometimes rather distorted. There is a need, particularly among scholars to work for the proper understanding and appreciation of such religious, cultural and other contributions. In fact there are various notions and views current about Vedic traditions, Vedic people and their contributions. Moreover, the debates about these various notions are not confined to the academic sphere, but also have other serious repercussions. 38 Dharma Association of North America mission statement. Available online at: . 39 Visweswaran et al. (2009:106), for one, has alleged that WAVES is "an organization known for its Hindutva ties," though is not specific on the claim. However, many of the steering committee members for WAVES have been met with similar critical charges. Dr. David Frawley, an author, teacher at the International Vedic Hindu University, and Vedic astrologer, for instance, has been associated with, and indeed often written approvingly of, Hindutva. Frawley is a key contributor to the volume of works for the Voice of India, an Indian publishing house dedicated to publishing what some have described as key pieces of modern Hindutva literature (Pirbhai 2004). 40 This informant, by request, remains anonymous. 41 Given the contentiousness of these debates, 1 have deliberately withheld specific names of most academics on various sides of the debate with whom I spoke out in an effort to not re-insert them into a larger debate that may not want to be part of. 42 E-mail interview, 18-November, 2008. Correspondent kept anonymous. 43 Lamb, Ramdas. Interview with Sanatana Dharma Foundation Radio, 104.9FM, Dallas TX, 31-March 2007. 44 Wendy Doniger, interview with Sheela Reddy, Outlook India, 26-October 2009. Available at: . 45 "New York: Protest Rally against Anti-Hindu book written by Wendy Doniger." USHA flyer, 07-March 2010. Available online at: . 46 McLemee, Scott, "Views: Scholarship or Sacrilege?" Inside Higher Education, 17- March, 2010. Available online at: . 266

47 See the original petition text, "Demand for withdrawal of a flawed book on Hindu History published by PENGUIN." Available at: . 48 Shukla, Aseem. "Whose history is it anyway?" On Faith, blog column of the Washington Post, March 2010. Available online at: . 49 "New York: Protest Rally against Anti-Hindu book written by Wendy Doniger." USHA flyer, 07-March 2010. Available online at: . 50 Shukla, Aseem. "Whose history is it anyway?" On Faith, blog column of the Washington Post, March 2010. Available online at: .

Notes for Chapter 6 fpp. 229-2391

1 The popular North American magazine Hinduism Today made a similar "definitive estimate" of 2,290,000 Hindus in the U.S. as of 2008. See "So, How Many Hindus Are There in the US?" Hinduism Today, Jan/Feb/Mar 2008. Available online at: . 2 The 2008 ARIS survey data gives no specific data on Hinduism, though does estimate "Eastern Religions," their category that includes Hinduism alongside a range of other traditions, as 0.9% of the 2008 population, or 1,961,000 (Kosmin & Keysar 2009). The Association of Religion Data Archives estimated 0.5% of the 2010 American population as Hindu, a percentage that would work out to over one million Hindus, but far less than two million. See the ARDA data sheet at: . Another figure in this range is given by the Harvard Pluralism Project, which estimates there to be 1,300,000 Hindus living in the U.S., and even cited on the website of the U.S. Census Bureau. But these estimates are not necessarily a count of Indian Hindus exclusively. They also include Hindus of various non-Indian backgrounds, for instance white Americans who self-identify as Hindu. U.S. Census data give little clarification to these figures. The census does not, and cannot, collect information on religious affiliation or identification. The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2005-2007 American Community Survey estimates a total population of 2,449,173 under the "race" category of "Asian Indian." As a generic category, it says little about national, regional, linguistic, ethnic, or indeed religious, 267 particularities within. The U.S. Census has, moreover, redefined such "race” categories in various ways over the years. Those counted as "Asian Indian" beginning in the 2000 census were previously grouped under the broader category of "Asian or Pacific Islander” in the 1990 census. The 2000 census split this category into the two new categories of "Asian” and "Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.” The changing census categories broadly signal one dimension of the changing public profile of the U.S.’s Indian population; i.e., there is a degree of public recognition and validity implied in being counted by a [slightly] more particularized census category. The 2000 U.S. Census count of two million "Asian Indians" could very well be the source of the popular claim that American’s Hindu population also numbers two million. However, this is only so if all such "Asian Indians" are defined as Hindus - which could be what the HAF, Hinduism Today, and many others, are in fact implying. 3 See Malik, Ashok, "When the fringe benefits.” Hindustan Times, 07-March 2010. Available online at: . 4 HAF E-news e-mail alert, 05-May, 2010. 268

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