Tag: Diaspora

Browncast: Vishal Ganesan; The Hindu Case Against Hinduism?

Another Browncast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!

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.

Continue reading Browncast: Vishal Ganesan; The Hindu Case Against Hinduism?

Why the Diaspora is not as interesting to me

A friend of the podcast mentioned with a bit of surprise that so much of it was focused on India as opposed to the Indian Diaspora (you can substitute “South Asia(n)” into “India(n)”). When this weblog was started at the end of 2010 it was probably more Diasporic in orientation. That was the era when Sepia Mutiny was winding down, after all.

Today I’m not as interested in Diasporic topics for two reasons. First, the Diasporic identity in the USA is pretty stable and clear. Most Indian Americans are basically Americans with their own particular cultural twist or accent.  This is widely understood. In particular, culturally young Indian Americans have assimilated to the same broad identity as liberal white Americans (with some exceptions). The big questions of who and what brown Americans are going to be seem to have been answered.

The second issue is that India is a bigger deal today than it was in the 2000s. From a purely anthropological perspective, what’s going on with 1.3 billion Indians (+ 400 million other assorted South Asians) is more interesting to me than the concerns of tens of millions of Diasporic browns.

(the exception is something like an interview with an India American going through the modern arranged marriage; in contrast, telling me you only date other South Asians is not too interesting, as it’s basically what everyone else does, but brown)

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