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

by Vamsee Juluri

Hindus. Below them are the management who may be driven by business motives too, but occasionally take editorial or ideological leads. The base of the pyramid is where much of the narrative “action” is unfolding today: the teachers, professors, journalists, columnists, editors, stringers,...

Hinduphobia and secure representation. The dominant views of individuals at this level too may be mostly unsympathetic to Hindus, but we must remember that at this level most people are in their work because they believe in it, and at least some of...

How do we create a tipp...

If you look at the conversations and ideas on Twitter and informally in Hindu organizations about “changing the narrative,” you will notice that the focus has been alm...

people from Hindu organizations casually and confidently predicting that once Hindus put a hundred million dollars into the “ecosystem” like the Jewish community did, the Arundhati Roys will dance to the new tune (her name was the example mentioned, and

Somehow, the belief seemed to be that since the BJP was in power in India, the entire “presstitute” factory would magically turn around to lap up to power and start being respectful to Hindus

All I will repeat is this: unless you are a billionaire and also have the commitment and the specialized insider knowledge of the Establishment that is needed, the media and academic narratives won’t be transformed overnight by some huge top-down investment.

Everyone seems to know that Indians don’t use their supposed rising wealth and clout for what is really needed for their people as a whole.

They may run charities, and fund foreign scholars of Sanskrit and Hinduism, even. But they are so disconnected from social and national obligation that even President Obama reportedly commented once that Indian Americans in expensive fund-raisers never ask for anything for the community.

Selfies and trophies and Page 3 splashes are adeq...

My bet therefore is not on Indian or Hindu elites to save us. My bet is only on the ordinary men and women and boys and girls of the Hindu Movement who are facing and seeing the whole of the dangerous hatred being manufactured against us, and are ready to fight it with all their courage, skill and commitment. And my hope is that a more intelligent engagement between them and the foot-soldiers of the Establishment who are working as teachers, professors in h...

lead to a toppling of the paradigm that crushes them and us today. I do know that at the moment many of them are programmed to accept anti-Hinduism as the highest kind of idealism because of their education and work culture. At best, they only see our work as seeking “cosmetic” changes in the de...

and political project with life and death stakes for the people of India and the world that it really is. But I believe that not all of them will remain that way if they see a different way out within their own professional institutional spaces. In other words, writers, artists and teachers a...

more often than bullied or bought. Who wants to live a lie forever, right, even...

Demography is Narrative (1). Be Cool. Think of generational experiences

and how they affect the perception of Hindu narratives. Would a young, idealistic person in school or college aching to break free of authority figures like teachers and parents and grandparents tend to like a writer or politician described as a “Liberal” or a “Right Winger” more?

The future of any movement lies in its ability to reproduce itself. Institutions, such as the Hinduphobic Establishment, reproduce themselves without problem. They are well-established businesses. They have millions of paying students in their schools and colleges, customers for t...

advertise and get paid to advertise for. The global e...

The Movement has grown tremendously in the last two years thanks to new technologies such as the internet (but also because that’s how much harsher reality has become and people do wake up ...

without massive cultural and intellectual transformation, the Movement will be stuck on a treadmill, a private, anonymous, Twitter-tick-Stasi mercy-dependent phenomenon. You need traction in the M...

Not losing the young is a key part of this step. On the good side, there are already many college students, even in the legendarily Left JNU, who are proudly questioning the old paradigms and are part of the Movement. On the bad side, where is the career...

The only career ladder that students and young scholars in India in the Movement seem to have is a political, rather than a professional one.

It’s your choice whether you wish to rise in the professional narrative Establishment, or outside it, which is what politics seems to offer as of now at least.

The future of successful intellectual reproduction is to have your younger peers, your brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, friends and neighbors, stay open-minded enough to understand some harsh (and beautiful) realities about being Hindu in India and the world today.

It’s the intolerance against Hinduism brewed in medieval superstitions and carried over into India’s supposedly

secular constitution that’s un-cool, not speaking up for Hindus as we would of any group that has been intolerantly treated in the past.

And one thing that the Establishment with its overwhelming Left sensibilities has done is that it has made revolution, critique, questioning, speaking...

You just have to do what you are doing, defining the narrative more precisely as you go along. You need not try and defend a power-establishment calling yourself conservative or RW. One, you/ w...

cousins and siblings and all will realize you are a rebel and...

Demography is Narrative (2). Don’t buy into polarizing ideas like “Hindu versus Muslim,” or “Hindu versus Christian.” Truth is on your side, but do you know how to speak it freely? My answer: you could, if you know what can be said and not said for the time and place, and you choose your words very precisely.

The challenge, of course, is that most spaces in our present time have already been conquered by powerful political, economic and cultural-military forces that have well-defined policies and practices of what can be said and not said, often with serious legal and alternatively-legal consequences too.

The American TV show Quantico aired an episode depicting a foiled Hindu terrorist plot against America. As Indians expressed their outrage at the smearing of a holy Hindu symbol (the Rudraksh) and the targeting of a whole culture by mainstream media, some members of the crew tried to shrug it away.

Their line was rather smug and self-righteous, “Indian nationalists” can be talked about too, they said. At the same time, alert citizens noted that the show’s creator had once proclaimed that the show would never show Muslims as terrorists, a

policy that was widely hailed as a step against stereotyping and racism. The double-standards were obvious. The show did apologize, somewhat reluctantly. But still, the whole spat was framed in the newspapers as an example of the intoleran...

A few days later, a celebrity Indian chef tweeted that Priyanka Chopra (the lead actor in the show) was wrong to have blamed Hindus when they have suffered from “two thousand years of Muslim terrorism.” He was widely condemned by leading journalists, and his employer was called upon to discipline him. His businesses were immedi...

This is the power of discourse. A discourse is governed by the rules of intelligibility, about wh...

Academia, anti-racism activists, Muslim and Arab (and South Asian) movements and lobbies have ensured that Islamophobia is defined as a serious offence akin to ...

The discourse, at the same time, does not admit to the existence of anything like “Hinduphobia.” In fact, it actively denies that it even exists, and brands those contesting its exclus...

You probably know all these things. But what you probably don’t know is why things are the way they are, and more importantly, what you can do to secure a fai...

I believe it is very important for Hindu writers not to frame their arguments in zero-sum, cl...

Academia functions today on the basis of its perception of certain dichotomies of power. It sees the West, Capitalism, Whiteness, Masculinity, Heteronormativity (and in South Asia, “Brahmanism”) and certain other formations as dominant, oppressive forces. In all of this, it sees Islam as the great Other of the dominant West, and readily sympathizes with it to the extent of even suppressing criticism of its violent interpreters. And when you, as a Hindu, have already been falsely smeared as essentially a White Supremacist with a false religion, and you use language fashioned by the Western critics of Islam for your arguments (such as “Islamofascism”) and so on, you will always be seen as an oppressive voice, rather than a subaltern one.

was asked once in a talk in Texas by an agitated audience member why I criticized the British so much when they built railroads and why I didn’t admonish Muslims when they destroyed so many temples. I said I follow the rules of my profession’s discourse even when I am speaking or writing for non-academicians.

But academia today does not accept Islam as an object of fury. It accepts the criticism of Western colonialism and neo-colonialism, which is indeed the direct source of much of the Establishment’s Hinduphobia too, as a problem. That can be named and fought as such. Beyond that, it is best to be professionally courteous, civil, and precise in writing about others.

Wild anger helps politicians maybe, but it does not help in securing our representation. Islam is not seen as

the “dominant paradigm” and therefore its critique is simply not ...

So what does that mean in terms of h...

I think your focus should be on the complete falseness of Hindus being defined as...

Hinduism being treated in academia as a dominant construct, akin to “Whiteness.” In the pursuit of facts for this task, you will have to sometimes talk about the history of unpleasant things, including the past history of Islamic imperialism, which is not beyond discussion if done rig...

The “Indic” vs. Abrahamic dichotomy.

To a large extent, it has been deployed largely for brand-building so far like a commercial project even if its intent initially may have been philanthropic.