Writing Across a Cracked World: Hindu Representation and the Logic of Narrative

by Vamsee Juluri

The Hindu narrative won itself a government, but has not the narrative battle.

The Establishment owns a monopoly on discourse across time and space. The Establishment owns your children’s future and will continue to own it regardless of who is Prime Minister

It has, between 2014 and 2019, established the “new normal.” Hindu deities, icons and symbols can now be depicted as innately, inherently, inexorably violent, dangerous and evil. The Movement has certainly not sat quietly and watched this happen.

It has contested these acts of symbolic and epistemic violence passionately and intelligently, and even, for the most part, with restraint and civility. But it has not disturbed the Hinduphobic consensus in the Establishment. It has not toppled the discourse.

that the Movement has constantly demonstrated, in the public sphere, that the Establishment’s Hinduphobia...

And a change in government will hardly change things since the Establishment for the most part is privately

owned and controlled.

The advantages that the Establishment has over the Movement are several.

The Establishment is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The Movement is largely unsubsidized and voluntary.

The Establishment is synonymous with the mainstream economy. The Movement is not. As a result, it reproduces itself materially and ideologically efficiently. The Establi...

most schools, colleges, and workplaces as they are today, they will have the advantage, and their beliefs about...

The Establishment also has an advantage in narrative terms. It speaks to the public, those not already in the H...

efficiency and persuasiveness than a voluntary movement ever could. It owns, or at least it seeks to own, a category of peopl...

The Establishment has not changed because not only is the Movement NOT in the Establishment, but also because the Movement is not even reaching the Establishment in a credible, forceful, persuasive way.

The government cannot change discourses in a free and free-market world. Only those who produce it can choose to change it. And right now the Movement does not have the leverage to reach into the Establishment and topple the discourse.

Most people in the Hindu Movement are not in narrative professions. They are not professors of humanities and social sciences, writers, artists, movie-makers, and so on. They are mostly professionals in other, non-narrative areas...

That, the Movement can do. But first it must know its own limits.

The Establishment consists of people who have been trained in a certain way, in the dominant, Hinduphobic discourse, so to speak.

The Movement consists of people who are mostly from other disciplines. They are smart, and frequently challenge the Establishment discourse on social media with facts and reason (and wit), but that is still not enough. There is a very different form of educational and ...

Hindus are not in the institutions. Hindus are not trained in these professions. A Hindu-friendly government may not do much, or cannot do much either. What will change the narrative then?

The Movement must breach the Establishment to change the narrative. That needs expertise, not “Ecosystems” (which are usually just Echo-systems, or even Ego-systems, and therefore profoundly counterproductive).

In other words, money can’t buy you love or narrative.

The Discourse is like a battle formation. It has ideas, beliefs, memes, hints, slogans, images, associations, feelings, all lined up exactly where it wants in the cultural spaces of the world. Wherever anyone on this

planet looks today, in school textbooks, or in their library, or in the movies or on TV, the same, small set or repertoire of images of India are there.

A pyramid about the caste-system which as you know is an image that is nowhere to be found in any Hindu temple or art, but a transposi...

A map in a history textbook supposedly on ancient India, but one which focuses on West Asia and doesn’t even show India because we are supposed to belie...

Pictures of garbage, images of Indian boys jumping into sewers to get Amitabh Bachchan’s autograph (like ...

Photos of Shiva’s Trishul morphed into sexual organs and violating women’s bodies. These a...

And they have been engineered with great force by vested interests, and are kept in place by the enlisted foot-soldiers of the Establishment, who perhaps see you and me and ...

Maybe not literally though—unless you can change your career, study the liberal arts, pursue your professional growth in the narrative Establishment quietly, and then finally turn whistleblower when you are sure of your understanding and professional capability and personal ability to withstand the backlash.

That is probably not feasible for everybody who wishes to do something but is in very different professions and life-stages.

The Movement lacks representation in the narrative professions. How do ...

One alternative which is being pursued furiously since 2014 by enterprising leaders in the Movement is the creation of “ecosys...

The alternative ecosystem will not breach the Establishment, but merely become a way for the Establishment to contain the Movement in a quarantined zone.

Bodies don’t change narratives, especially when they are not even in the right office building. Ecosystems are good at best for solidarity and

that is premised on expertise. And the expertise that is need to breach the Establishment frankly is not so much about disciplinary expertise, about knowing the facts of ancient Indian history or Sanskrit or texts (that knowledge is amply present in the movement, an...

The expertise that is needed now is only about narratives, and the building blocks of nar...

Words are levelers. Words are the levers you can use to topple the paradigm.

You may already possess all the facts you need in order to boldly refute on social media the dominant academic voices and media megaphones (and megalomaniacs) who systematically lie about Hindus and India. But all the facts in the world, issued forth as tweets, retweets, posts and even scholarly essays, will not breach the mental walls erected by the gatekeepers of the Establishment, and more importantly, the mental walls that Middle Hindus live behind for reasons of practical survival.

Right now, the language of the Movement’s narratives is set up so that Middle Hindus either fear to embrace it, ...

anonymously. Our narrative remains credible only amo...

What I believe is that by refining our understanding of the logic of anti-Hindu discourses and narratives as they exist today, and by perfecting our writing accordingly, we can act...

It has managed to turn very neutral and endearing qualities into slurs and insults; for example, the word “Bhakt.”

The way forward, in my view, is to let our words travel where we might physically and professionally not be able to go: into the very core mind-space of the Establishment itself.

If we discipline our writing so that it can work on the stage of understanding that Middle Hindus and reasonably neutral professionals in the Establishment have at the moment, we will have a better chance at reaching in and toppling the ignorance that dominates today.

The Movement already has many members who are strong on facts. What we require now is compelling fluency with language, with the right use of words that actually connect these facts together into winning narratives that will define the shared common mind-space.

It’s small now, but if we capture it, we get to keep it, and grow it. And, more importantly, we get the easily distracted Middle Hindus back on our side too.

Know your worthy target: Middle Hindus and entry or mid-level Establishment professionals whose idealism is still not fully colonized and converted by their discourses and in-house institutional narratives into outright Hinduphobia. You can’t buy the Establishment. But you can win friends there if you respect the idealism of its workers, and show them how to do it better.

If we think of narrative institutions as a pyramid, we can divide the people in there into three broad categories.

At the top are the owners and business drivers, the media “moguls.” With a few exceptions, they are usually ideologically unsympathetic to