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In this episode, hosts Amey and Dr. Omar Ali in conversation with Vishal Ganesan, a lawyer and thinker, about his essay “Frontier Dharma” and the meaning of being Hindu in the diaspora. Vishal discusses how his observations of mainstream media and academic discourse led him to research the historical representation of Hindus, which he found to be distorted by a lens stemming from 18th and 19th-century missionary narratives.
Vishal’s essay– The Hindu Case Against “Hinduism”: A Reflection on Dharma in the Diaspora can be found here.
(https://frontierdharma.substack.com/p/the-hindu-case-against-hinduism-a)
Auto-generated transcipt provided by our friends at scribebuddy.com
The Brown Pundits Browncast.
Dr. Omar Ali: Hi, good afternoon everyone and welcome to another episode of the Brown Pundits Browncast. We have a very special edition of the broadcast today. Vishal Ganesan, 1 of our regular Brown Pundits contributors and lurkers, who is also a lawyer and a thinker, wrote a very interesting essay on his sub stack called Frontier Dharma, and about what does it mean to be Hindu in the diaspora. And from that, I think it evolved that we will have a discussion about this topic. And we have Vishal with us today and we have Amey.
Dr. Omar Ali: Amey is our resident Indian expert. Vishal will represent the diaspora and I will represent the non-Hindu outsiders asking questions. So Vishal, why don’t we start with you and just tell us a little bit about how you came to write this essay and what is in this essay.
Vishal: Yeah, thank you for having me, Umar and Amey. Yeah, I guess this is actually the first podcast I’ve done with you guys, even though I’ve been following Brown Pundits for I don’t even know how many years it’s been, I guess, even the seapoint mutiny days. So it’s kind of crazy. This is the first time, but I’m glad to be here and talk to you guys. Yeah, so to start out, I guess just to give a general background.
Vishal: Yeah, so I was born in America, so I’m like, I always forget whether it’s second generation or first generation, but that’s kind of my vantage point. And I think that’s important to kind of understand my perspective on these issues generally. And so I think everything started for me like, you know, a few years ago when I got on Twitter, and I think like a lot of people, you’re exposed to kind of mainstream media accounts, you’re exposed to like different intellectual currents all over the world. And I started kind of getting drops of this sort of Indian intellectual discourse, which has in recent years, especially, I would say, like after post BJP has really started to become like a global discourse in that liberal Americans and the liberal Anglophone discourse globally has started picking up on some of these trends. So I would start kind of looking at mainstream media articles, whether New York Times, Washington Post, and just see how they talk about kind of Hindu related issues or even India related issues.
Vishal: And, you know, I was never really a close observer of Indian politics, but I kind of had a somewhat passing familiarity with what was going on. And obviously I have family there, so they’re always telling me their perspectives on things. And so I think at the start of it, it was a sort of gnawing sense that there was a distortion going on, that there’s some sort of lens that people were looking through that was giving them a jaundiced view of what was going on and, you know, what Hindu identity was, what Hinduism is. And so, you know, I, I would say for the first couple of years on Twitter, my engagement was mostly just kind of pointing this distortion out in kind of an ad hoc way and saying like, you know, you know, the South Asian is for my favorite target, you know, the kind of academic class or activist class that really propagates a lot of these views. And I think, you know, eventually, that kind of got a little bit tiresome, even though it was somewhat satisfying.
Vishal: And that’s what led me to Hindu history, which was kind of the initial stage of this project. And Hindu history, for people who are not aware, is a sort of historical research project that I’ve been engaged in for the past couple of years. And what that entails is going into the newspaper archives, American newspaper archives, and looking at these early representations of the Hindu. And I put it in quotes because it was spelled during that time as H-I-N-D-O-O. And that’s been a very enlightening project.
Vishal: It’s very kind of just historically oriented, you know, not a lot of editorializing. And I don’t think you need a lot of editorializing because you really see the sort of inception. A lot of the kind of modern distortions that we see had their origin in these early narratives that were kind of established in the American public culture, American media in the early 19th century, late 18th century and onwards. So, you know, I kind of was going deep into that. And frontier dharma is, I think, an attempt to try and sink my historical research with my contemporary concerns.
Vishal: But I think that, like, if you look at Hindu history, in some ways, it does vindicate the view that, like, you know, a lot of the contemporary views we see, whether they’re in the media or academia, represent a kind of continuity with what I would broadly call like the missionary discourse of the 19th, late 18th centuries. And what I mean by missionary discourse is that, you know, the kind of early American view of the Hindu was really shaped in a pretty overwhelming way by missionary literature. You know, like there was obviously, you know, again, pre-internet, pre kind of global flow of ideas. So the exposure Americans had to material from India, material about the Hindu religion, was all mediated by a sort of missionary class. These are people who were engaged in some sort of conversion activities in India, and they wanted to raise money for those conversion activities in America and what they would do.
Vishal: And this is quite explicit if you look at the history. Claudius Buchanan is a figure I talk about a lot in Hindu history, and he was this Anglican missionary who was based in Bengal. And this was during the days when the East India Company was still quite reticent about allowing conversion activity in India. And Claudius Buchanan was very clear. He basically formulated this plan and he said, like, if we want to break the reticence of the East India Company, we have to launch a public relations campaign, basically.
Vishal: And so he ended up releasing this book called The Christian Reaches in Asia. I might be forgetting the title. Christian Light in Asia, The Reaches of Christian Light in Asia, something to that effect. And it was this book that was released in like 1811 that was really instrumental in kind of opening up the floodgates. This is the book that included his early accounts of the juggernaut, which kind of became famous in the American public imagination as being kind of representative of like the pagan bloodletting of the Hindu, you know, this like story of this giant monstrous ritual.
Vishal: Yeah, exactly. People would like throwing themselves under it to sacrifice themselves to this like God. And, you know, the account itself was written in like very kind of explicitly old testament vocabulary you know it was like described as moloch you know and so this was done in a way to specifically rile up american churchgoers who would have been familiar with those references. And then in 1812 you have the American Board of Foreign Missionaries that’s officially founded and then they start kind of sending these missionary groups to India. And yeah, and you know as these missionaries go to India they send back these reports that are through missionary journals and then subsequently published in newspapers all over the country.
Vishal: So, you know, 1 of the things that’s interesting about the kind of Hindu history story is you see, especially post Vivekananda, that’s 1893, when you see Vivekananda and then kind of his successors travel through America, you know, like there’s a great quote by The guy who succeeded Vivekananda in New York as the head of the Vedanta chapter there He like has there’s a great newspaper clip where he basically says, you know I didn’t know that Hindus fed their infants to crocodiles until I came to America or something to that effect, you know this is kind of a recurring motif where you find these itinerant spiritual travelers who come to America looking to like propagate whatever their particular brand of Hindu thought or whatever. And they come against this kind of popular conception that they found quite jaundiced and prejudicial and not really in line with their experience. And, you know, coming back to the current day, I think 1 of the things I really started thinking about was how similar the present discourse is to what we see in the early 20th century. You know, in the same way that those early itinerant Swamis were engaged in this battle of representation, like we see the same thing today.
Vishal: You know, now we have this discourse of Hindu phobia, which is essentially similar, you know, structurally, where we have groups of Indians, groups of Hindus, who take a look at, they look at the kind of mainstream media representation or whatever it is in textbooks. And they say like, you know, that’s the false representation of Hinduism. And this is, you know, and you know, sometimes they’ll offer their own representation. Like 1 of the examples I talk about in the Frontier Dharma essays is 2005 California textbook controversy. And that was when, you know, these kind of local groups in California, there was a public comment, you know, this is like a regular thing that these school boards do where they revise their textbooks and they allow public comment.
Vishal: During this public comment period, you had some Hindu groups that, I haven’t looked at the original textbook material, but I imagine it was like the standard caste pyramid. This is kind of a mainstay of the American social studies textbook. Hindus are polytheists, whatever. There’s 3 main gods. They wanted to correct what they saw as a prejudicial representation and they ended up offering their own version of how Hinduism should be described and in that description they kind of emphasize that Hinduism is really more monotheistic.
Vishal: Cast is really a cultural practice, not a religious practice, whatever. And that being this big fight, you know, the Harvard Sanskritist, Michael Witzel ended up catching wind of this and he ended up rallying a bunch of scholars and activist groups. And they, you know, attended these hearings and basically said that the Hindu groups were Hindu nationalists trying to whitewash history and that their proposed edits should be rejected. And
Amey: Vishal, just to add, this is Amey everyone by the way, just to add, I was actually in India when this controversy flared up. This actually was a big deal in India as well. Back in the day, it was a Manmohan Singh government in India. It was also a lot of Indians from India were also involved in pushing forth the narrative that these groups are Hindu nationalists. So they were on the side of Wendy Doniger and Witzel.
Amey: Just to add an interesting dimension to how cross national that thing became.
Vishal: No, I mean, that’s for sure.
Amey: Which was over and I hadn’t appreciated, right? Like, because I hadn’t actually been to America yet. I didn’t even know I was going to spend all of my adult life here. After understanding the actual what the controversy was about, it’s it’s in America, every school board gets picked textbooks and it has very pedestrian definitions of what are what is Islam, what is Judaism, what is Christianity. And I think the main concern of the Indian American community was the descriptions of Hinduism exotified it quite a bit from the American mainstream and focused purely just in the cost and the oppression narrative which is what the narrative you hear in India itself, but in India, it’s in a different context than what an American Hindu growing up here would have.
Amey: Because in India, you have obviously the reservation system and lots of groups who have genuine historical reasons to feel aggrieved. But yeah.
Vishal: No, I think that’s, yeah, exactly right. And I think that’s 1 of the kind of other motivating factors of this essay and why I focused on the diaspora because it’s exactly this strange kind of entanglement with Indian politics that makes this, I think, a difficult topic because a lot of the people, you know, this is 1 of these strange, also narratives that has kind of emerged and taken hold about how the Indian diaspora is this hotbed of Hindu nationalism and Hindu supremacy or whatever. But the truth is that a lot of the people who were opposed to these edits were just normal parents who didn’t want their kids to go to school and feel like marginalized or feel like they were being demonized in the classroom. And yet their concerns are kind of totally subverted by this narrative that like, oh, they’re Hindu nationalists trying to whitewash history. So it’s 1 of these interesting questions about the extent to which the representation of Hinduism is almost inextricably entangled with Indian domestic politics.
Vishal: And that puts the diaspora in a particularly challenging position.
Amey: Interestingly, just yesterday, UK published a report. I don’t follow UK politics as much anymore, but Prevent, which is a program in the UK to prevent, you know, whatever terrorism amongst teenagers has decided to add Hindu nationalism as another area of concern.
Vishal: Oh, yeah. You know,
Amey: as if as if UK Hindu teenagers are in any danger of picking up a trishul and taking a flight to India and joining the Bajrang Dal in tearing down a mosque somewhere in the UP. It’s a ludicrous notion, but they have to be seen as non-Islamophobic. So they have to add a whole
Dr. Omar Ali: host of things. From these sort of thoughts or events that happened you started to think about What is going on? What is the what should be Hindu representation in the US and what it is? And is there a gap that you wanted to fill?
Vishal: Exactly. So this is really what it came down to, is that when I started looking at the kind of contemporary advocacy around how to represent Hinduism, I kind of started to realize that in so many ways, the focus on the public representation distracts from a more fundamental issue, which is that there’s not really a coherent articulation of what Hinduism is as a quote-unquote religion. And this is where I kind of got sent down the intellectual rabbit hole and historical rabbit hole of trying to understand, you know, how this kind of emerged as a global religion and what we actually mean when we refer to Hinduism. And I think that this is a somewhat fraught topic and I’m sensitive to the fact that a lot of the arguments I make are actually arguments that have been made by the so-called secular left, but in a very different context. You have people who are opposed to the BJP in India, who argue like, oh, Hinduism is a construct, therefore Hindu political agency should be rejected out of hand.
Vishal: And in some ways, they are taking the intellectual and historical, factual record and distorting it for a very kind of reductive ideological reason. But I think if you take like an actual objective view of the history, what really happened was, you know, Hinduism as we know it, that term, it emerged in the late 18th century. The first time we see the word Hinduism used is in the writings of this British evangelical named Charles Grant in like 1782. And then Ron Moho and Roy probably picked it up from like Baptist missionaries, and he starts using it in his writings in the late 18th century, early 19th century. So the question is, like, okay, when Hinduism emerges as a term that was being used by missionaries and Indian intellectuals alike, you know, what were they really referring to?
Vishal: And I think that my understanding is that, you know, the British use of it was like a projection of their sort of worldview in the sense that they had, when they came to India, they had a particular understanding of what a religion was. And, you know, you can go into the historical antecedents of why they understood religion in that way. I think that the 2 events in particular that shaped it were the Protestant Reformation and global exploration. So the British came to India and, you know, this was amidst a sort of intellectual construction of this idea of world religions, you know, and world religions, the idea was that, you know, religion was this kind of natural category, everybody has it, or some kind of, you know, type of religion. And it kind of follows this evolutionary process, you know, in Protestant Christianity is sort of like the rational zenith of religion.
Vishal: And, you know, they had this whole kind of characterization of this whole ranking of civilization based on what kind of religion you had. So like the most civilized countries were Protestants, then you had like half civilized, or it was like enlightened, I think is a top category. Then you had civilized, which was like Catholic countries. And then you had, you know, half civilized and then savage countries, you know, there’s like a fourfold classification that they had. And so when they came to India, they were kind of trying to understand how that category of religion would apply to the Indic spiritual traditions.
Vishal: And so when they came to India, you know, they saw what looked like that to them, like spiritual or religious activity. They kind of placed this label of Hinduism onto it, and they assumed that there was a sort of integral structural coherence that’s analogous to what you might find in Christianity or Islam, in the sense that you have this sort of singular text, you have like a kind of a closed system of religious authority and religious hermeneutics to interpret the sacred text, whatever, you have a clerical class. And so they impose this kind of understanding on the Indic spiritual traditions that didn’t reflect the lived reality of Indians themselves. And this is not to say that there wasn’t, I think this is where a lot of people in the Hindu right, they recoil at this argument. Because when you say this, they think that you’re denying any sort of civilizational or cultural unity.
Vishal: But you can have both of these things can be true at once. India clearly had the sort of spiritual, civilizational continuity. I mean, Diana Eck, the Harvard theology scholar, has written about India’s sacred geography, this idea that India had these sort of extensive pilgrimage networks that were instrumental in creating a kind of shared high culture, a shared kind of idiom of religious and ritual practice that connected these far-flung areas of the subcontinent. I think that’s true, but it’s a very different thing to say that they had a religious unity because this whole idea of religious unity or religion was, it emerged from a very specific intellectual and cultural matrix that India was only introduced to by the British. You know, and you can look at, I mean, there’s a lot of scholarship on this about how like, to what extent did Indians themselves use Hindu as a sort of self-descriptor.
Vishal: And the consensus is basically that they really only started after the Islamic incursions. Because when the Afghan and Arab incursions came into the subcontinent, they kind of clearly understood that the Hindus were different than they were, and that they had kind of a distinct religious identity. And then you start seeing, yeah.
Dr. Omar Ali: We have to get the audience to read your essay also, because some of the discussion has to come from there. So we’ll definitely post some excerpts and links and make people read it. The essay is basically after you’re saying Hinduism was not a secondary religion like Islam or Christianity, right? Using that kind of classification. But it’s not the only example in the world, actually.
Dr. Omar Ali: The Japanese people have a Japanese religion, which is even less defined.
Vishal: Yeah.
Dr. Omar Ali: But they seem to do okay. So it shouldn’t be the case that if you have a different software that it’s like not workable anymore just because it’s different.
Vishal: I think I will.
Dr. Omar Ali: I think this need to Why should you have to fit it into the dominant sort of Christian Islamic version in any case?
Vishal: I don’t think you necessarily have to fit it into the dominant paradigm, but I think the problem is that Indians want it both ways. I think this is the kind of intellectual tension at the center of it. So the point I make is that, you know, the British imposed this idea of Hinduism on the Indic spiritual landscape, and then native Hindus appropriate it for their own ends, because the idea of there being a Hindu, unified Hindu religious identity is useful for the assertion of political goals within the kind of colonial context. But even in that context, you have kind of differing strategies. So I split it up into the reformists and then the Orthodox kind of factions of this response.
Vishal: And the reformists I think are typified by Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, groups like that. And Ram Mohan Roy, Dibendranath Tagore, these guys, they basically took this category of religion and they really did try to fit the Indic spiritual essence, whatever they defined that as, into an explicitly kind of quote unquote religious structure. This is why it was so Christianized in its form. And I think that’s a legitimate criticism that a lot of people make, is that they were too over-Christian in their outlook. Even I quote Aurobindo.
Vishal: Aurobindo in the Renaissance in India, I think has a really astute kind of analysis of this whole evolution. He says that these initial waves of reformists, they were enlightened in their own way because they really opened up the Indian world to this whole new set of paradigms and ideas and a way to confront modernity, but they were also like very anglophilic, you know And they really saw they really bought into the kind of colonial view that Protestant Christianity was the highest form You know and there’s this whole backstory here about how even the Orientalists saw Hinduism as a sort of like, there’s this, it’s called the declension theory, right? They basically came to India, they saw, you know, and they interpreted the kind of prevailing religious practice as a sort of degenerate form of religion. But then they started translating the Sanskrit text and they saw, oh, but actually they, the Indians do have this kind of idea of primordial monotheism that’s quite sophisticated. And so a lot of the early reformists really bought into that.
Vishal: I mean, both Dayananda Saraswati and Ram Mohan Roy both kind of saw that, you know, the Vedantic monotheism was really kind of the essence of Hinduism and they accepted the kind of colonial critique of polytheism, temple worship, all of that. So I think that there’s a middle ground, so you have the reformists who really were trying to fit into this category of religion. And then on the other hand, you had this Orthodox faction that basically emerged as a reaction to the reformists. And their argument was like, instead of buying into this kind of colonial view of our religion, we should accept that we’re really just kind of a organic whole is really the kind of theory they had is that Hinduism was an organic whole of all these different traditions, all these different customs, all these different ritual practices, and really we need to kind of maintain this harmonious organic unity. And my argument is that like, you know, the synthesis, Aurobindo in the Renaissance in India talks about how there needs to be a synthesis between these 2 ideas, you know, and that synthesis never really happened.
Vishal: I mean, historically, if you look at, you know, the 1920s in particular is when this kind of falls apart. And this is when the, you know, in the aftermath of the Khilafat movement, you have this sort of mobilization of the Hindu Mahasabha, all these different kind of Hindu groups, and what they kind of argue is that we need to maintain unity at all costs, and this, and they, all of the kind of reformist energy is subsumed into this idea of organization and unity. And I think the problem with that is what, we’ve inherited the issues, the problems with that, with what the events of the 1920s. And then coming back to the present day, like if you look at the kind of diasporic understanding of Hinduism to the extent that it exists, the way I describe it is that we have this uneasy juxtaposition between 2 kind of streams, right? On the 1 hand, you have this idea of like inclusivism, which is I think a very widespread value held by Hindus in America, which is idea, it’s like a kind of downstream for the Vedantic idea that all paths lead to the same truth.
Vishal: There’s really just 1 divine and everything is a kind of a manifestation of it. And therefore, like you can’t really delineate what is Hindu and what is not because people are just following their own path to the same destination. So you have that idea that I think is fairly widespread. And, you know, I quote, even the Hindu American Foundation, if you look at their website, I’m not like blaming them for this. I think it reflects a real…
Dr. Omar Ali: You don’t think it’s a good idea?
Vishal: I don’t think it’s a good idea. I think it’s philosophically, I think, you know, I’ve seen, you know, just from, again, from my vantage point as a second generation Hindu American, I’ve seen how it just leads to a sort of nihilism, you know, it’s kind of it’s it’s it leads to a sort of incoherence Because if you really take this idea of inclusivism and you and you take it seriously, then it’s like well What what what argument you have for preserving any of this stuff? You know, like what argument you have for preserving a particularly Hindu view of looking at reality or looking at, you know, the divine, because you can just argue that like, oh, well, if you’re following some other religion, then you know, that’s just as good because, you know, Vivekananda made the same argument in the world parlour in his speech in 1893, right? He says, I belong to the mother of religion.
Dr. Omar Ali: What would you replace this idea with? What’s the opposing idea that would take its place?
Vishal: So, I don’t, that’s an idea I think for future installments. At least in this essay, I’m just trying to point out the kind of incoherence of this structure, you know, the have have the
Amey: so I would I would interject.
Vishal: Yeah,
Amey: so I would interject here Omer, you know, I think I come at it from an from a, It’s not an opposing point of view. It’s not something particularly front and center of my thoughts, especially right now. But this idea is inherently tied to the idea of Indian nationhood. Yes. And for me as an Indian citizen, it’s a very important idea to preserve.
Amey: And what I would say is the ideas you mentioned, these colonial tropes, they have never died out. They’re still operational in day-to-day reality of India and people talking about India and Indians. For instance, even someone like Tom Holland, who is not an expert on any of this stuff, well, feels confident enough in Dominion to be like Hinduism or something just invented by the British, which as an idea gets expanded to India as a concept created by the British. And while we can trace the modern day definition of Hindus and Hinduism back to Charles Grant’s writings, but there is a wealth of literature about India, especially the Persian historians from 11th century onwards. So in a sense, the colonial conversation is just a continuation of that, right?
Amey: Because the difference, for instance, I come from Maharashtra, which was very influenced by the Bhakti tradition. That is where Bhakti comes from. But even then you have the, especially even in the early Maratha writings a sense of you’re fighting for a Hindavi Swaraj or the fact that Brahmins in all of these temples in northern India, even the Ayodhya temple, the family that kept the, you know, before it was destroyed, the family, rather not Ayodhya, Kashi, the 1 that was actually destroyed the Gyanvapi Masjid, the family that cared for it and the and the shrine was a Maharashtrian Brahmin family right like so they the the you can I think the the thing is for both arguments you can actually follow specific strands of Indian history that don’t necessarily negate each other, but they both have grounds to stand upon?
Vishal: Absolutely. Also,
Dr. Omar Ali: I think that that’s an important point that you should, first of all, India as a civilization and as a geographical entity has a certain unity. It has a physical unity and it has a cultural unity. And that cultural unity includes having a common sort of religious tradition. And this religious tradition is very variegated, sort of heterogeneous or whatever. But that doesn’t mean it’s not 1 tradition in some sense also.
Dr. Omar Ali: And there is also then the matter of Brahmins, you know, Brahmins are, there is a certain role that they played. That’s how they are what makes India India, actually. Yeah, because they are the common feature that everywhere Indian culture went, it was taken by Brahmins, right? Or it generated Brahmins when it got there.
Amey: You’re gonna get a lot of Tamil nationalists arguing that it was like the Chola Empire in Southeast Asia and the Hinduism there, you know, was more varied in its spread.
Dr. Omar Ali: But that’s not- It’s more varied within India too. It’s not, that’s not the argument though. That the thing is you can put up a sort of a straw man and say, oh, it doesn’t fit this particular version of Brahmin domination, so this must be false. But it’s not that. It’s, And in any case, I think that another feature of Hindu thought is just the fact that it is not just open source.
Dr. Omar Ali: It’s sort of open-ended. There isn’t 1 common goal to which everyone is working. Even if you say moksha is a goal, it’s an individual goal. It’s not a common goal for society and culture and everybody. History is not moving towards kayamat or something.
Dr. Omar Ali: So this is that also creates its own issues because it means that there isn’t, it will evolve. We don’t know where it will evolve.
Vishal: It
Dr. Omar Ali: will go wherever it will go. But this is supposed to be, that’s why it’s the land of Babas, right? Everybody has their individual understanding of what reality is. And sometimes it’s very different from other people.
Vishal: Yeah, so let me just make a couple, a few points here. So in terms of like the Tom Holland argument, so that’s a very kind of well established strain of thought within the literature, this idea that Hinduism was invented and I don’t endorse that at all. I think that’s a totally false reading. You know, the kind of my interpretation of it is different and this is, I cite Balagan Gathara, he’s the guy who wrote Heathen in His Blindness and All Roads Lead to Jerusalem. I think it is a subtle difference but I think it’s a really critical 1, right, because Hinduism was not invented as a religion.
Vishal: What Hinduism represents in my mind is a certain conceptual architecture that we use to understand and communicate Hindu tradition, right? And so you can see how that’s reflected in the early reformist efforts. This idea that, you know, Hinduism as a world religion, as we understand it, reflects a certain normative View about how religions ought to be structured and I think that you know, it’s 1 thing to say like yeah You know Hindu tradition exists. There’s a Hindu religious thought we can say like there’s no need to fit it into this structure of religion, but I’m kind of more of a pragmatist about it, you know, like, and again, like this I think comes to the difference between India and the diaspora, like I totally agree, I mean there’s a lot of scholars who have written on this, you know, the nationalization of Hindu tradition and the role that played during the colonial period. But the diaspora is necessarily divorced from that process, right?
Vishal: I mean, I think if you look at kind of the evolution of Hinduism in India, it’s going to be fundamentally different because Hinduism as a religion and Hindu identity in India is mediated by forces that we’re totally immune from in the sense that like Hinduism is, I would say, in Kuwait as a religion in the way we understand it today, but it’s increasingly approaching a structure that’s more akin to that of Christianity or Islam. And it’s doing that through like a variety of historical and political processes, whether that’s like internal migration in India, whether it’s like the popularization of certain deities or mythological stories, you know, like again, you know Indian leftists hate this right they say like You know the Romanian and Mahabharata TV serials were kind of where the proximate And I think it’s a very it’s a very it’s a very it’s a very naive understanding because it’s like, no, these are just natural outgrowths of nationalization, right, of India’s formation as a nation state. And these are kind of natural evolutionary processes that will continue to take place in India. And if I had to predict, I think that in the coming decades, like Hinduism as we know it will be increasingly centralized.
Vishal: And part of this is just a natural byproduct of this sort of internal migration and homogenization that are byproducts of the kind of globalization and capitalism, You know, like you’re going to have certain festivals, you know, a lot of these kind of
Dr. Omar Ali: reality as a whole, right? I mean, there’s nothing special about Hinduism in that way. Everything is like that.
Vishal: No, no, for sure. But it’s what’s unique about Hinduism is how, you know, like the how dramatic of a paradigm shift it’s been. You know, if you think about just the process that, you know, began during the colonial period and has really taken off post 1947 and post liberalization. I mean, you’re seeing a wholesale transformation of this massively variegated spiritual tradition that’s deeply localized, deeply tied in with local deities, even like, you know, family cults or whatever you want to call it, and kind of turning into something that’s a much more national in its character. But I think that in the diaspora,
Dr. Omar Ali: why do you think that it will just become just that? I mean, why would the other things die out? There’s many other things going on at the same time. I think I think the side of it,
Vishal: but I mean, my thought on this is that it’s just the political necessity. You know, I think that basically,
Dr. Omar Ali: I am agreeing it will happen, but this is not the only thing that will happen, right?
Amey: And I’d also point out it’s not necessarily Mostly political in my mind either. I think I don’t know like bollywood is probably a bigger vector of homogenization Like it’s a if
Vishal: you if
Amey: you go to a average Indian wedding, you would think it’s a total Punjabi victory. I think Omri might be tickled to know that many Indian Hindu weddings are basically Punjabi style weddings. Now, you know, which isn’t necessarily the case, wasn’t the case at least in my parents’ generation.
Vishal: But yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah.
Dr. Omar Ali: I was going to ask Vishal a different question. This is all like we’re having this conversation. It’s almost like any educated Western people could have the same conversation, or modern people would have the same conversation, or could have the same conversation. None of us sort of took it as the possibility that there really are gods. Yes.
Dr. Omar Ali: And they are going to, and there are really things you can do by getting up in the morning and sitting in front Of the Sun that will actually change how things happen in your life
Vishal: Absolutely.
Dr. Omar Ali: You have any any comments on that side of religion?
Vishal: I think this is a topic that I want to explore more in future installments, but I think you’re absolutely right. And I think that 1 of the things that maybe the Hindu right hasn’t really sufficiently come to terms with is, you know, like if you look at, if you read like Max Weber, right, or if you read even Heidegger, you know, for them, 1 of the sort of key aspects of modernity, for Max Weber, it was this idea of disenchantment, right, that the kind of spirit of modernity, this idea of like the rationalization of every sphere of human life, it necessarily removes the sort of element of magic from the world. This idea that gods can actually inhabit reality around us and they exist in nature and they exist in the world. For Max Weber, disenchantment almost precludes that. This is a natural process that any country that’s going through this process of modernization has to come to terms with.
Vishal: And Heidegger talks about the flight of the gods, kind of a similar idea, this idea that the rationalization, and he was obviously was a critic of modernity, a critic of enlightenment thought, was coming in from the perspective of like, we need to re-enchant the world and we have to kind of allow space for gods to re-inhabit, you know, reality, re-inhabit existence. I think that’s like a very deep philosophical issue that I think that Hindus and Indians need to come to terms with or I think about in a more critical way, I think that there’s often like a tendency and again, I you know, maybe this will be offensive to some people, but there’s a sort of a tendency I’ve noticed about like, you know, this I mean, I think it even exists in something like the Ram temple you know like there’s no doubt that the for millions of devotees like when they go to Ayodhya you know they see the Ram there like it’s a living god for them you know like that’s a living tradition it exists for them in the real world But I think there’s also like a more modernist take on that, which is like, no, this, the importance for them is like, this is a symbol of Indian nationhood or Hindu nationhood.
Vishal: And it’s more and the valence is more political in its
Dr. Omar Ali: nature. Because
Amey: Hindu nationalism is a very atheistic movement to be to be to be fair Yeah, I’ll point out it was kind
Dr. Omar Ali: of funny.
Amey: There was it There’s a Pakistani commentator Zakaria something Zakaria who lives in New York and she was marveling about like how? Hindu nationalists, you know, like how Pakistani Islamists are not on the internet, but somehow Hindu nationalists seem educated. And I just was like, wait, does she not realize that a Hindu nationalist is more atheistic than an average Westernized Pakistani Muslim on by any rubric. But yeah, anyway, just a point aside.
Vishal: What about nationalism as an atheistic? I mean, it’s absolutely true, right? Because I think that the development of nationalism historically, right? Let’s say maybe India will be an exception to the rule, but historically the idea of nationalism and secularism have always gone hand in hand, right? And the idea is that you have the elevation of the political over the religious, right?
Vishal: Religion, rather than becoming like, and this is, again, I think goes back to the John Osman distinction between primary and secondary religions. So for a primary religion, which we can consider kind of Hinduism or Hindu traditions in the category of primary religion, the idea is that the religion is so inextricably linked with the broader culture And even the geography of the land itself, it evolves organically within that particular context. And where secondary religions can be transported across national or ethnic boundaries because they’re kind of these self-contained systems. And if you think about like-
Dr. Omar Ali: There are also more explicitly political movements almost.
Vishal: Yes, they are. And I think that it’s, you know, again, like, if you think about it in terms of the process of secularization, right, this idea of religion is implicit in the idea of religion that we’ve inherited from the British, it’s this idea that religion is just 1 sphere of human life that exists in a compartmentalized way within a broader kind of societal secular structure. And, you know, and so even in this kind of development of Hinduism as a proper religion, quote unquote, proper religion, you know, the idea of it becoming kind of just another religion alongside Christianity or Islam within a broader secular framework. And so I think that’s a real kind of philosophical conundrum And yeah, I mean, Omar, you’re right, maybe India will be the exception to this rule. But this is kind of the historical process that is played out in Europe that is now playing out in India.
Vishal: But I think to get back to my original point, I the reason why I kind of advocate doing take undertaking this analysis in the diaspora separate from India is because the diaspora, we’re just subject to very different pressures, right? I mean, I think that it’s easy. I think Indians are in a better position to critically examine this category of religion, this category of secularism. But in America, we live in a thoroughly modernized, westernized framework. And these conceptual categories that we’re talking about, like, you know, intellectually, we can scrutinize them.
Vishal: But, you know, in terms of the average diasporic Hindu American, we take these categories for granted. I mean, it’s like the conceptual categories that Indians had to deal with in the colonial period are hegemonic for us. And so, Omar, when you talk about why do we need to fit into this category of religion, I think that my answer is ultimately pragmatic. If you’re trying to exist in a ultra-modern secularized American society and you want to have some semblance of political power, if you have some kind of perspective that you want to share with the world and some sort of interest that you need to protect at the level of culture or level of politics, you kind of have to play by those rules because those are the rules that are operational, I think, in the area that we’re talking about. So even though I agree with everything you guys said about how this is how Hindu tradition is and we shouldn’t discount the coherence of Hindu tradition and Hindu civilization historically.
Vishal: I just think that that analysis has limited utility in the diaspora because we live in a thoroughly modernized, westernized framework. And so for me, you know, I think the question is, and this is really the discussion that I want to start with Frontier Dharma. And it’s something that we need to ask, which is like, okay, you know, if we dispense with this term Hinduism completely, and just kind of take the traditions that we’ve inherited, we have to, in some way, understand how we want to universalize those traditions or try to understand what is what is the essence there and you know try to reformulate it in a way that’s better suited for our political social and cultural conditions and I think that does require some adaptation to this idea of religion. I’m not, I don’t really, I don’t like, again, this is maybe a future piece, but I’m pretty opposed to this kind of like decolonial deconstruction. So all these questions.
Amey: And speaking of this, it’s kind of funny because I’m also part of Indian diaspora in America, but I have a very different lens because I’m also from India. Wouldn’t a cultural coherence be, quote unquote, better operationalized in diasporic context, you know, sort of like Jewish Americans. I have not, you know, I know rabbis who I suspect are atheists, you know, for instance, right? Like I understand that it takes it away from the spiritual meaning of the daily practice as it’s introduced to a Hindu growing up in the diaspora, but wouldn’t, isn’t the cultural coherence more important to perhaps pursue these structures of powers in the West?
Vishal: I mean, I think a lot of people make this argument. I think it’s funny, both the left and the right. I think the left looks at Hindus in the diaspora as like Zionists in the making or something. And I think a lot of people on the Hindu right are like we should be more like the Jews, you know, and I just think that it’s not a realistic option. Like I think that America, like the Hindu diaspora, and I’m part of this, you know, like we’re just very assimilated and I think that in so many ways, like the Hindu diaspora, like India, it’s just not comparable.
Vishal: I think like the Jewish diaspora has a much stronger.
Amey: Oh, I was not making the argument that India should be like, I was not making an argument for a diasporic Zionism.
Dr. Omar Ali: No, no,
Vishal: I know. I know. You know,
Amey: but I’m like making an argument comparable to like secularized American Jews who have a cultural Jewish identity.
Vishal: Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s basically South Asianism, right? I mean, this is this is this is the kind of flip side of it. And like, this is the
Dr. Omar Ali: sort of… Not necessarily. I think I actually, when we were going to do this podcast last week and it got postponed I was talking to a friend of mine who is married to an Indian girl and I just asked him okay you know the whole extended family of Hindus that he knows What do you find in young people these days? And he had an interesting take. He said that he has seen a change in the last 10-15 years, that the young people have become more consciously conscious of India, and also prouder of India than they used to be.
Dr. Omar Ali: And that he was of the opinion that it doesn’t take too much. You actually don’t need, it’s not like you need to have some 500 page, you know, textbook that everybody has to memorize that this is our religion. Very, very simple, basic things are enough, actually. Those people know that they are Hindu, and they are very successful in America. And they continue to identify as Hindu.
Dr. Omar Ali: And now as they see India sort of becoming a relatively, you know, somewhat more prominent, better advanced, whatever place, they also start to feel more comfortable identifying with it. And that’s about all it takes. He said they’re all sort of proud Hindu nationalists, but that’s all Hinduism is to them.
Vishal: I think that there’s something to that in the sense that like, I’m very aware of the fact that like, the character, the political character of India has so changed on the fundamentally, right? In the past few decades, like my dad came here in 1987 and this pre-liberalization, you know, and like, there, you know, my parents, I think this is probably true of a lot of second generation Hindu Americans that were kind of in my situation, like, that generation, like, they were fairly traditional and rooted. I mean, they didn’t have any hangups about their kind of tradition and the religion or whatever, but they weren’t political. There wasn’t that sort of like, more like, I guess, outward confidence maybe in the way that I think more recent generations of immigrants have, because their arrival has coincided with this sort of political awakening in India and I think that’s true but you know I’m I still I’m kind of fairly skeptical that their children the ones that are born in America I think that like yeah you might I think that’s true now right Like people have this sort of identity and they say like, yeah, I’m Hindu, but they take it for granted.
Vishal: And then when you ask her to ask them, like, what does that actually mean? You know? And this is what I mean when I say that this is basically South Asianism, because I think that what happens.
Dr. Omar Ali: Won’t you expect sort of organically that that too will develop, that these people will develop their own catechism of what it means to be Hindu just because people keep asking them that question?
Vishal: I don’t know. I mean, I think that for a lot of people, it just they kind of maintain, I mean, in my experience, what the more common outcome is in the diaspora is that people preserve some sort of attachment to like the festivals, certain cultural traditions, but they kind of become empty of vital meaning in the sense that they’re, because there’s not a sort of language or a framework for them to incorporate the underlying spiritual ideas. They maintain the sort of external forms of these holidays, whether they’re Diwali or Holi. And they kind of they like the kind of the pomp and circumstance of the festival. But then the Underlying spiritual meaning is kind of lost.
Amey: This isn’t necessarily too removed from like an average Many
Vishal: other right
Amey: up in India, you know, absolutely
Dr. Omar Ali: Yeah, that removed from other I can tell you as an outsider I mean, what do Muslim children in America know about the spiritual significance of either whatever it’s a festival you go and eat something and you meet other people and you know, You go for morning prayers There are certain rituals associated with it. It’s not Absolutely most people in a modern
Amey: actually actually it’s when the diaspora Kids find the find the true scripture omer in certain muslim communities. That’s when that’s that’s when the alarm bells sometimes
Dr. Omar Ali: But then then you should say that you’re you already have a religion which is better adapted to actually Doing this job of being you know simultaneously Many things
Vishal: no, but so this is I think you’re right about this I think that is true of most people. But I think the difference is that in the case of Christianity or Islam, right, They have like strong institutional centers and like very committed groups of true believers and scholars who are actually capable of…
Dr. Omar Ali: You don’t think the Indians or Hindus have strong groups of dedicated whatever?
Vishal: I think… No, we don’t.
Amey: We don’t. I would agree we don’t.
Vishal: I think there are groups of Hindus who are strong believers in the sense that like, you know, like even I’ve seen this, you know, in, in, in Arizona and other States, like there are like these, you know, recent immigrants who force their children to do like Vedic recitation every weekend, right? Or like, like Gita recitations or whatever. And you know, there’s like whatever, something appealing about that. But it’s like, that’s not, you know, if you’re actually engaged in like American civic culture, American political culture, like, how is that going to help you actually engage in this kind of field of representation. I think 1 of the challenges that like, yeah, you have.
Dr. Omar Ali: Why, what are other people doing? I mean, you have many things going on in life simultaneously, right? Those Indians are successful people. They go to top colleges. They have top jobs.
Dr. Omar Ali: They make money. They also happen to learn, you know, whatever Sanskrit on the weekends. That’s just, why do you think that’s a hurdle in some way?
Vishal: I don’t think it’s a hurdle. I just think that there’s a fundamental disconnect between the way in which people assert Hindu identity, like, or connection to Hindu culture in America, and what’s actually required to create a sustainable, transgenerational religious identity, right? I mean, I think 1 of the challenges that we see now is that sort of because our like, because we lack the institutional mechanism to affect knowledge, like knowledge production, right? I mean, ultimately that’s really what this comes down to is like, if you look at the past, whatever, decade of discourse around Hinduism in America, what you basically have is, you know, these highly placed academics, activist groups, media people who have a particular representation of Hinduism, right? That is negative, it’s like an oppressive religion, it’s problematic, whatever.
Vishal: And I think what this does is for people in the diaspora, coming up in the diaspora, they’re kind of immersed in this sort of world of liberal progressive discourse. And they see these representations of what Hinduism is. And that essentially leads them to detach themselves from their religious tradition, because they see it as problematic in some way, they see it as like politically inconvenient.
Dr. Omar Ali: This may have been almost standard in sort of left liberal Indian migrants here 20 years ago, but are they still the majority?
Vishal: I don’t think it’s about left liberal Indians. I think it’s just about, again, I mean, this is, I think, 1 of the lessons of Hindu history, right? Is that like the contemporary representation of Hinduism does represent this continuity with the fairly prejudicial view that was, you know, propagated by missionaries in the past 2 centuries. And ultimately, like, if you want to create the social, cultural, and political conditions for people wanting to kind of preserve those traditions, you need to control, you need to have some impact on that level of discourse. And I think that like in the absence of a sort of institutional mechanism, You know, like I think it’s, you know, we can kind of take this romanticized view and say like, oh, you know, it’s great.
Dr. Omar Ali: Like these groups that you mentioned initially, you know, like something like the Hindu American Foundation and you were a little bit critical of the fact that they have this very almost fake ecumenical thing going about. I don’t
Vishal: think it’s fake. I think it’s a real perspective that’s shared by a lot of Hindus. I mean, I’ve heard my own parents.
Dr. Omar Ali: No, but I was just going to say that these people, Aren’t they already doing what you are suggesting that they have a common program which is really about the political and institutional things that matter to people in their life like schools and how people are treated in the media and things like that or how America treats India for that matter. And don’t care about the spiritual aspect at all because that’s not, it’s an open source religion. There’s like a hundred different ways of doing that and people will keep doing their own thing.
Vishal: No, I think they do a great job, but I think that a couple of observations I’ve made is that like you know I’ve been like somewhat peripheral to the sort of whole Hindu advocacy space and 1 of the things that you notice is that it’s almost exclusively first generation immigrants you know like there’s very few American born Hindus who are involved in these organizations. I mean, I will say that HAF leadership is actually a lot of them were born here. But if you look at the kind of rank and file activists, the people who actually care about this stuff, it’s almost all recent immigrants. And I think that reflects a kind of fundamental limitation, which is that first generation immigrants who come here who have like a strong sense of Hindu identity, of Indian identity, are very highly motivated to fight against these misrepresentations. But when it comes to their children, they just don’t care.
Vishal: And I think that that speaks to a sort of communication gap or a failure to kind of articulate, you know, why these traditions or why these misrepresentations need to be corrected.
Amey: So, yeah, I actually really empathize with the point you make about misrepresentations. And I’m, it’s funny, you were talking about generations, I’m not a second generation Indian Hindu American, but I came here relatively early. So I have some insight into what you presumably face growing up here. But these knowledge production things don’t exist within India either. You know, any pushback is inherently wrapped up in a particular style of Indian political discourse, which sort of lends like the style of discourse kind of makes sense perhaps in an Indian setting, but it tunes out every even possible neutral observer from the outside.
Amey: It’s just…
Vishal: No, that’s how it is. Yeah.
Amey: But the question I have is without these knowledge production sources even existing in India, would a diasporic alternative even sustain and stand on its own or there needs to be a United in an extent that there needs to be a, you know, a partnership with perhaps people pursuing such efforts in India or Indian academia and build on that as opposed to have a completely separate power center because it would lead to the same issues of, you know, how do you have a pipeline, you know, into, into, into, and cross-pollinate from 1 another and, and, and perhaps elevate the discourse on, on either side.
Vishal: I think that, I mean, I I’m kind of of the view that the diaspora needs to kind of tackle this issue on its own terms in the diaspora, in the sense that like, you have to start, if you’re trying to solve this problem, it has to start with the recognition of like the material conditions that we face, right? Like the society that we grow up in and the pressures that were, the constraints that we are under. And that’s not to say that, you know, there’s a Priyank, I’m sure you follow him on Twitter. He’s a really thoughtful guy, young guy, I think based out of Delhi. And 1 of the, and he actually had this same criticism about the essay, which was that like, he didn’t understand why I was focusing on the diaspora and not like Hinduism writ large.
Vishal: And my point was that, you know, ultimately I do think that there will be, so like, you know, I think 1 of you made the comment earlier that a lot of the issues that I’m talking about are not dissimilar to what urban Indians might face. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that. And I think that there’s definitely opportunities for cross-pollination between those 2 groups. But I think that you have to acknowledge that we’re operating from a fundamentally different social and cultural base in the sense that I think a lot of 1 of the 1 of the favorite kind of arguments of the Hindu right is, you know, the diaspora is is de-Raston aided, right? And this explains why they’re anti Indian anti Hindu.
Vishal: I think that’s like a very lazy kind of it’s a cop out, right? Because de-Raston nation is sort of a key feature of globalization and modernization. Like the diaspora is de-Rastanated by definition. And I don’t think that’s anything that we should be like trying to fix. I think that’s just a fact of life.
Vishal: And so I think really the mission is to try and understand like, you know, we’ve inherited the spiritual tradition. We live in a sort of, in an American, you know, American context. We think about these things in English, and we operate with this idea of the structure of religion in the background. Now how can you take the essence of these traditions that we’ve inherited. And we have to think seriously about what is it actually that we’re trying to preserve?
Vishal: I mean, what does success look like? I mean, is success just like, they keep celebrating Diwali at the White House, or that kids get together every year and celebrate Holi, like, is that really the kind of the target that we’re going for? Or is it something more like ambitious, you know? And I would hope that we can kind of set a target maybe higher, you know? And 1 of the things I was really inspired by is like, again, like I really love reading the, the, you know, Bengali Renaissance thinkers, there’s like the whole kind of crop of thinkers who emerged in the late 18th century, early 19th century, because I think that they had a very clear eye view of like, you know, Tagore writes really beautifully about this or a Bindo writes really beautiful about this.
Vishal: But I think they really, understood, understood that, the index spiritual traditions and dharma writ large has something to offer the world, right, in a positive way that like, you know, Tagore writes really beautifully about how like dharma is almost like a corrective for like the excesses of modernity, you know, and how this sort of Hindu spiritual values can really kind of help curtail some of those excesses. And I think that that’s really the kind of frame of mind that I’m in when I think about this. I think you have to articulate a positive vision about what we’re actually trying to build as distinguished just from preserving some sort of cultural continuity. I think that this idea of cultural continuity, I don’t think it’s fruitful. And I think that it’s just, it seems futile to me to try and create an identity in the diaspora where kind of cultural continuity with India is a central value.
Vishal: Because I just don’t see that as realistic. I just think that the reality of the matter is that most diasporic Hindu Americans are pretty assimilated. And I think that, you know, like we’re not, you know, in ethnic enclaves for the most part, like we are kind of immersed in the sort of urban cosmopolitan life. And I think you need to kind of articulate a case for Dharmic or Hindu identity that is true to that, those circumstances.
Amey: So, and perhaps this is the last point I wanted to touch on. I actually, this was a clarifying sort of exchange. Have you considered other Hindu diasporas? You know, there’s the ones in the Caribbean and South America, but even Bali, which is an island of certain Hindu tradition that is very localized to itself. They contrast in different ways, but have they…
Amey: I like never actually followed this thread like how have they preserved? You know, what is their version of the Caribbean?
Vishal: I mean, those were basically ethnic enclaves, right? Like there was very little mixing between the African populations and the Indian populations in the Caribbean. And this kind of allowed for this sort of self-contained continuity with this Hindu culture. You know, it’s just so different. I mean, these were, you know, the Indian…
Dr. Omar Ali: But then what you are doing, Vijal, to an outsider, this looks like, yeah, this is exactly what you’re demanding is what is all actually happening, because that’s what you are doing. You’re trying to create, you know, or look for messages and meanings that you feel were not adequately transmitted to you, but that are maybe there in the tradition and you will work out something based on that. But you also know that this is not how every Hindu is sitting in America is going to look at it. Some of them will find a completely different answer.
Vishal: Absolutely. Wouldn’t
Dr. Omar Ali: that be okay? So you
Vishal: would have
Dr. Omar Ali: to have a weekend with very little common, you know, like the common features may not be that many.
Vishal: Absolutely. I think that, you know, I’m not like saying that everyone is wrong and I’m right. I’m just saying that like, we have to kind of think about, you know, if you want to exercise any level of political or cultural power, maybe not cultural power, because I think that actually 1 of the interesting paradoxes is that I would say that Hindus or Hinduism, Hindu values, whatever you want to call it, are culturally more influential than they’ve ever been, you know, and you see this arise in different contexts, whether it’s like yoga or mindfulness or whatever. So you in the cultural sphere, I think that or like even look at like Sadhguru, right, look at how popular he is with all these.
Dr. Omar Ali: You look at, you know, there are these kind of Christian nationalist people and so on. If you look at their complaint about the world, they are going, they’re complaining that the world is too pagan. Yeah. This country and this modern society is like too Hindu already.
Vishal: But yeah, I just think that like you have to, you know, ultimately, like, if you want to have an impact politically, or if you want to even like, you know, have some sort of presence politically, you have to kind of understand what the requirements for that is, right. And like, ultimately, if you want to…
Dr. Omar Ali: Things change, right? What you are describing, in fact, maybe this is a general phenomenon of some sort that by the time, you know, someone like me starts to talk about something, half the thing has already happened because we are sort of late. We are talking about things that are already in process.
Vishal: I think there is a natural sort of process that is taking place but I think that again like I think that in the diaspora we’re not subject to the same natural evolutionary process that’s taking place in India. And in that sense, I think that in the diaspora, you have to be a little bit more like aggressive maybe about what exactly, like, I think that, you know, 1 of the points I make in the essay is that, you know, I think that whatever, you know, I kind of look at this reformist orthodox dialectic and I kind of come down on the side of reformists. And I think that’s really a byproduct of kind of my own context. Right. In the sense that, like, maybe the kind of orthodox view has certainly had its value in the colonial period.
Vishal: And even today in India, where you still have kind of extended kinship ties, or even caste ties are still so strong. People are still so attached to the sort of like local and familial cultures and traditions. Like, you know, maybe that makes more sense, but I think in the diaspora, that’s just not the case. Like, I think that we are ultimately in the diaspora living in a far more individualistic society. And I think that we’re kind of detached from, we don’t, you know, a lot of those extended kinship ties, they act as like a bulwark for certain traditions, right?
Vishal: And we just are divorced from that. I mean, you know, people who are here, who came here as immigrants, like we are alienated from those, that system. And so I think that the requirements for preserving any sort of like spiritual identity, the solutions are gonna be very different here than they would be in India. And I think we just have to be sensitive to that difference would be the point I’d make.
Dr. Omar Ali: And 1 other factor which is sort of unique to the Indian situation is just the presence of such a strong and motivated group of Indians who are very unhappy with Hinduism.
Vishal: Yeah.
Dr. Omar Ali: And who from outside do define it. And they are maybe half the religion probably exists because of them.
Vishal: I mean, in a lot of ways,
Dr. Omar Ali: it does. And And their presence creates a situation that is sort of unique to India. I can’t think of any other country that has this exact situation going on.
Amey: Well, I mean, Omer, if-
Dr. Omar Ali: Like every time, this is almost like a 100% score rate, that I look at a tweet where you look at the tweet and you think, oh, this news item or this tweet or this journalistic piece is an Orientalist sort of trash about India. And 100% of the time these days, it will be written by an Indian. So what do you do about that?
Vishal: Well, yeah, this is exactly the point, right? I mean, this is the sort of, I guess, goes back to the initial point I made about this battle of representation, right? Like I do think that that exists and it’s important to kind of be aware and raise awareness about it. But ultimately, you know, like if we get stuck into this sort of battle of like, oh, that’s a wrong view of Hinduism, this is the right view of Hinduism, without creating the conditions, whether that’s through some sort of institutional mechanism or through a consensus. I mean, again, like to go back to this California textbook, right?
Vishal: So this was exactly what happened there, is that you had some activist groups, you had groups of scholars, and you also had other Hindu groups who kind of took the side of Witzel and the Sanskritists, arguing that, you know, the other groups were Hindu nationalists or whatever. And to me, it’s like, you can keep engaging in that fight over and over again, or you can realize that if you want to have your perspective be the accepted 1, you have to create the conditions for that consensus on the ground. You have to create an institutional mechanism that can legitimately say, like, we are representatives of this community and we have an official doctrinal view on what the truth is. And until you actually do that, then you’re going to be constantly fighting the same battles over and over again.
Dr. Omar Ali: We just sort of concluded that even within India, there is no such consensus. So why would there be such a consensus?
Vishal: I think in India, eventually it’ll happen. I mean, I think that the pressures of this fight that you’re talking about, I mean, I think in some ways there’s maybe like a convergent evolution going on, you know, like certainly in India, you’re going to have, more kind of centralization. You’re going to have more people who are like, I was just reading this article about in the Kumbh Mela, you know, they had, I guess some group of, of, of Sadhus or, you know, there’s all these, like, it’s so crazy. Like in the, the kind of internal structure of Hindu tradition in India, it’s very complicated. And you have these groups of like, The holy people saw those who, you know, have millions of followers or whatever, But apparently they came together and they decided that they had to create some sort of like code of conduct or something You know, like they had to create like a code of conduct that we should be accepted by all Hindus in India You know, I don’t know the details of it I just saw an article about it, but I mean that is like natural pressures that are going to be acting
Dr. Omar Ali: my impression is that just some small group of people decided this is an opportunity to do it. Indeed. That’s rhetoric enough.
Vishal: I think it was like a VHP, which is like an RSS.
Dr. Omar Ali: But it’s not going to become. Like,
Amey: VHP doesn’t have as much cultural salience as as their detractors and even themselves would like to project.
Vishal: Yeah, I mean, but the point is that they’re responding, they’re responding to very real pressures, right? And I think that it’s inevitable that more Hindu groups are going to be alive to that requirement, right? Because that’s the only way to actually effectively fight this battle without just doing the same thing over and over again. And I think in the diaspora, we’re subject to the same pressures, right? I mean, if we’re concerned about the kind of public representation of Hindu traditions or whatever, like, you have to ask yourself pragmatically, well, what do you do about that?
Vishal: And I think that really the only thing you can do is to kind of build institutions that not only create like social consensus, but also are engaging in the sort of arena of knowledge production and are doing it from a perspective of like, you know, this is the official kind of perspective and we have to you know, defend it against people who might argue differently. I think that’s kind of really the next step if you want to decisively win that battle, rather than just, you know, constantly going after the biases and prejudices of other people, which is good that people are doing because I think it awakens people to the systemic biases that do exist, but it ultimately has limited utility in the long run anyway, I think.
Dr. Omar Ali: It may be that you just have to get India richer and a lot of these things will sort themselves out.
Vishal: Maybe.
Dr. Omar Ali: That’s the Marxist view at least. My sort of residual Marxism speaking, that you know, once you get the economics right, other things will follow. I don’t actually believe that in some strong sense anymore, But I think there is something to it. India being a very poor, very, you know, like weak country is itself a reason why all these crises were happening. You reverse that situation and many other situations Will become irrelevant.
Vishal: I don’t know if I have the patience for India to catch up
Amey: I mean, I mean, there’s a reason why I’m sitting here in Silicon Valley Yeah, and but yeah, it is as an as an Indian. That’s that’s always an exasperating The question. But yeah, I think you
Dr. Omar Ali: may- I think we are out of time. Yeah. But I think this was a good, interesting discussion and we should definitely, this will open up actually, I think we’ll get some feedback hopefully and we’ll also think about it ourselves.
Amey: So I can
Dr. Omar Ali: do part 2 we will have more intelligent questions.
Amey: Indeed, I can only imagine how your mentions were like on Twitter when you published this.
Vishal: Honestly not that bad. I mean I think that it was maybe because it was couched in an early…
Amey: Yeah, and also you’re forcing your interlocutors to actually read your arguments, which, you know, which most people on Twitter just don’t have patience.
Dr. Omar Ali: Yeah, Please,
Vishal: frontierdharma.substack.com, please subscribe. Please read it.
Dr. Omar Ali: Please read Vishal’s article, The Hindu Case Against Hinduism, and give your own opinion. And I think in a sort of a Hindu fashion, you’re allowed to give opposing opinions also.
Vishal: Yeah, no blasphemy here. Say whatever you want.
Amey: Yes, and thanks Vishal for joining us and thanks Omer.
Vishal: Yeah, this was a lot of fun. Thank you