The Global Turn in Nationalism: The USA as a Battleground for Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism

Abstract

Hindu nationalism operates on a global scale today. Evinced by the transnational networks of the Sangh Parivar and the replication of strategies such as amending textbooks and patriotic rewriting of history, politics and discourse of Hindu nationalism are not solely contained to the territorial boundary of the nation. In this globalized battle for and against Hindu nationalism, the United States of America serves as an important site. In light of this, this article puts together existing scholarship on diasporic Hindu nationalism with late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century deterritorial history of Indian nationalism to present a broader framework for historicizing Indian activism in the US. It argues that while long-distance Hindu nationalism in the US cannot be traced before the 1970s, examining the early experiences of Indian activists in the US offers useful insights with which to evaluate the ongoing battles of Hindu nationalism in the US and opens another field of enquiry: Hindutva’s counterpublic.

1. Introduction

In September 2018, Chicago hosted a three-day congress that drew in thousands of attendees. The event, which took place in the Westin Hotel, commenced with the agenda to provide a “global platform” for the “global Hindu community”. This was the second meeting of the World Hindu Congress (WHC) after the inaugural event in 2014 held in New Delhi. The organization’s seemingly innocuous goal—to “connect, share ideas, inspire one another, and impact the common good”—belied the Hindu nationalist agenda and composition of its members.1 The WHC was founded by Swami Vigyananand, the joint General Secretary of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP). The Chicago event saw the attendance of the then Vice President of India, Venkaiah Naidu, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief, Mohan Bhagwat, who was invited as the keynote speaker.

What unfolded on the third day of the event further contradicted its publicized agenda. As Bhagwat rose to speak, six activists chanted “RSS turn around, we don’t want you in this town” (Singh 2018, para. 2). According to one report, these young activists were physically attacked by some of the attendees. They were “choked, kicked, punched and spat on” while the attendees echoed, “Bharat Mata Ki Jai (Victory to Mother India)” (Singh 2018, para. 3). One activist recounted being called “a dirty Muslim”, while another heard her life and that of her mother being cursed (Singh 2018, para. 5). For these activists, the violence they encountered symbolized the betrayal of the intimate—coming from those they perceived as “aunties and uncles”—and the weight of long-distance ethnoreligious nationalism (Singh 2018, para. 4). Within seconds they were transformed from fellow citizens and members of organizations that advocated for South Asians (Chicago South Asians for Justice, Alliance for Justice and Accountability) into the enemy of Bharat Mata.2 The organizers of the event, on the other hand, celebrated the high attendance rate as a fitting tribute to Swami Vivekananda’s performance at the Parliament of the World’s Religions held in the same city in 1893. Unsurprisingly, the violence unleashed at the event was erased from the official website.

These events, both the conference and its uninvited guests who seized it as their own stage, demonstrate the centrality of the United States of America in global Hindu nationalism and the ongoing battle against it. The globalist aspiration of contemporary Hindu nationalism finds a strategic foothold in the US. Take the following promotion of the 2023 WHC: “Hindus are a 1.2 billion strong community, comprising 16% of the world’s population with presence in around 200 countries. Across the world, we are the leaders and catalysts in all spheres of human endeavour”.3 This statement suggests that the pride of belonging to what the WHC calls the “global Hindu community” rests on the increased visibility of Hindu public figures and the global presence of Hindus, many of whom do not subscribe to Hindu nationalist ideologies. Given the sheer number of Indian residents in the US, the living legacy of Vivekananda, about whom the conference made numerous references, and the unfaltering fealty to Bharat displayed by Hindu supremacist organizations in the US, the selection of Chicago as the first international location for the WHC is not surprising.

The US not only hosts international events, but it also drives some of the debates surrounding contemporary Hindutva. The Dismantling Global Hindutva Conference of 2021 and its protesters, for example, received much attention across the world. It has also fueled the ongoing campaigns led by Hindu advocacy groups to launch a new project of documenting Hinduphobia that not only records present-day incidents of hate crime, but also revises the experiences of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian migrants and immigrants in the US.

These developments remind us that the history of migration, not just immigration and the formation of the diaspora, plays an important role in the memory politics of Hindu nationalism. Putting together the existing scholarship on diasporic Hindu nationalism with the deterritorial history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian activists, this article argues that while long-distance Hindu nationalism in the US cannot be traced before the 1970s, examining the early experiences of Indian activists in the US offers useful insights with which to evaluate the ongoing argument of Hinduphobia without dismissing the existence of racism. The article will first sketch the development of Hindu nationalism in the multicultural environment of the US to contextualize the importance of documenting history for contemporary Hindu American organizations that seek to protect Hindu supremacy. Then, it will examine historical examples of early Indian migrants to highlight the flaws of the Hinduphobia argument and open another field of enquiry: Hindutva’s counterpublics.

2. Transnational Hindu Nationalism in the USA

2.1. Multiculturalism and Hindu Nationalism in the Diaspora

Scholars often point to three moments in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century when discussing the rise of transnational Hindu nationalism in the US. The first one is the introduction of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 that lifted the quota of immigrants coming from outside Northwestern Europe. The second moment is the economic liberalization in India in 1991 that led to the emergence of “globally recognizable and increasingly technocratic middle class” and the Hinduization of national culture in India that was often accompanied by violence (Basu 2016, p. 3). The last moment that is referenced as a catalyst for long-distance Hindu nationalism is the aftermath of 9/11 that saw the exploitation of the rise of Islamophobia in the US as well as in India (Kurien 2012; Sikka 2022).

Throughout these phases, the “peculiar mixture of racism and multiculturalism” sustained the institutionalization of organizations with ideological and political ties to the Sangh Parivar (Jaffrelot and Therwath 2007, p. 279). The Vishva Hindu Parishad America (VHPA) was established in 1970—five years after the 1965 Immigration and Naturalizations Act—and spread to different states by 1974 (Truschke 2022, p. 4). The Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) was founded in 1989 to offer off-school activities such as team sports and building temples, contributing to the formation of local Hindu communities as they did in other countries such as Kenya, Great Britain and Canada. While some of these organizations distance themselves from politics in India and position themselves as strictly catering to the needs of the local Hindu communities, a closer look often reveals personal connections to the Sangh Parivar and underlying support for Hindutva. The Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), for example, declares that it “does not participate in political activism; and it does not support any political ideology”. Yet, it attributes its inspiration to the RSS and provides decontextualized and depoliticized definition of Hindutva as “simply the essence of being a Hindu, i.e., promoting Dharma and fostering peace”.4 The Hindu American Foundation (HAF), which was founded in 2003, similarly detaches itself from politics in India, even though many of its leading members are known supporters of the BJP and the Modi regime (Truschke 2022). One of the founders of HAF, Mihir Meghani, even composed a manifesto for the BJP called “Hindutva: The Great Nationalist Ideology” in 1998, proving that “multiculturalism often… exacerbate, rather than weaken, diasporic nationalism” (Kurien 2007, p. 160).

As scholars have argued, multiculturalism is a double-edged sword. It encourages private and public embracing of “ethnic heritage” that legitimizes both expressions of pride and an “ethnic victimization discourse” (Kurien 2007, p. 160). This is evident in how some of the Hindu advocacy organizations often create a grey zone between fighting for and controlling recognition. For example, the VHPA created the American Hindu Against Defamation (AHAD) in 1997 to inspect defamatory representations of Hinduism in the media and scholarship. Although AHAD is no longer active, other organizations have taken up its surveillance methods. The HAF, for example, publishes records of associations that it sees as anti-Hindu especially those that fight caste discrimination, support the rights of South Asians and oppose the BJP such as the Coalition Against Genocide (HAF 2013, see Note 6). These initiatives are less concerned with protecting Hindus or Hinduism, as they proclaim, but more with protecting how they are perceived, as they pick different enemies—Western scholars, secular scholars and non-practicing Hindus, to name a few examples—to assert constant victimhood. This cycle of victimhood is often fueled by a combination of contemporary and historical evidence that are weaved together to create a sense of continuity.

One such operation that has recently united different Hindu advocacy organizations with different levels of adherence to the principles of Hindutva is documenting Hinduphobia. The objective of documenting Hinduphobia is to demonstrate institutionalized and systemic bias against Hindus. While there are incidents of hate crime and racist slurs targeting Hindu Americans, the argument of systemic Hinduphobia seems to serve as another means of strengthening the claims of marginalization that has always propelled the campaigns for Hindu nationalism in India and elsewhere (Hansen 1999; Kurien 2007; Longkumer 2020). The question of the validity of the term and its applicability aside, it should be taken seriously as it highlights how Hindu supremacist organizations continue to harness multiculturalism and liberalism to reposition themselves (Hansen and Roy 2022; Longkumer 2020).

2.2. Hinduphobia

What is Hinduphobia? According to the Understanding Hinduphobia project (UH), which hosted a conference in 2022 by the same name with the Boston University chapter of the Hindu Student Council (HSC), Hinduphobia is “a set of antagonistic, destructive, and derogatory attitudes and behaviors towards Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism) and Hindus that may manifest as prejudice, fear, or hatred”.5 Hinduphobic acts range from “microaggression to genocide” that result from conscious or unconscious bias.6 The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) has a webpage dedicated to “Hinduphobia and Anti-Hindu Hate glossary” that lists Hinduphobic vocabulary and corresponding explanations on why they are considered as Hinduphobic. A comparison between its early version, published in April of 2021, and its most recent version, published in August of 2023, reveals that the definition of Hinduphobia continues to evolve depending on the evidence that the members of these groups discover.7

According to the HAF website, potential victims of Hinduphobia include children, university students and elected officials. The anticipated perpetrators of Hinduphobia are broad—”those who deny the existence of Hinduphobia and anti-Hindu hatred”—and simultaneously specific—“South Asian professors” who are marginalizing Hindu students for “political motives”.8 As of August 2023, there are twenty-two words classified as Hinduphobic. Some, such as the “idol worshipper”, are traced back to the stereotypes from the Christian missionary literature. Others, such as the “model minority”, reflect the social and economic mobility of Asian Americans. The word “exotic”, despite its applicability to ethnic minorities, is introduced as carrying Hinduphobic connotations dating back to the “Mughal and European colonial rule”, the designated Others of Hindu nationalism. The glossary gets updated regularly. “Bhakt”, which denotes those who support Narendra Modi, was added to the list in May 2021, and “Pajeet”, which originates from a meme that appeared on the 4chan website in July 2015, was added in May 2022.

Unlike its changing glossary, Hinduphobia as an argument in the US is rooted in the debates around the representation of Hinduism in textbooks and academic literature. What gained public attention with the California textbook controversy of 2005 (Visweswaran et al. 2009) continues today with the support of other initiatives like those led by the concomitant activism led by Rajiv Malhotra of the Infinity Foundation, which is known for intervening in how South Asian history is taught in US universities (Truschke 2022, p. 10; Kurien 2007, pp. 192–209). The Infinity Foundation advertised a scholarship for a PhD topic on Hinduphobia in 2005 (Kurien 2007, p. 194), and in 2016 Malhotra published a book titled Academic Hinduphobia: A Critique of Wendy Doniger’s Erotic School of Indology. Since then, Malhotra has maintained his position as a pioneer in surveying academic Hinduphobia. One of the first articles directly addressing Hinduphobia that is cited by both HAF and UH flags Maholtra as the one who coined the concept (Long 2017, p. 797). This article, “Reflections on Hinduphobia: A Perspective from a Scholar-Practitioner” written by Jeffery D Long and published in the journal founded by Vivekananda Prabuddha Bharata, criticizes “intellectual imperialism” embedded in existing academic portrayal of Hinduism (Long 2017, p. 800). Despite his attempts to distinguish between “Apparent Hinduphobia” and “Real Hinduphobia”, Long’s description of the term with the words “racism” and “irrationality” and his statement that “Hinduphobe seeks Hinduism’s eradication” (Long 2017, p. 798) blur the boundaries between criticizing and controlling the process of knowledge production.

Such in-between-ness in which the argument of academic Hinduphobia is grounded also characterizes the Hindu advocacy groups’ pursuit of documenting Hinduphobia. To incorporate Hinduphobia in their identity politics, organizations such as the HAF, UH, HSC and CoHNA (Coalition of Hindus of North America) face the need to not only record contemporary incidents of hate crime but also to revise history. The attempts to simultaneously universalize and localize Hinduphobia as a historical reality is reflected in the above-mentioned glossary produced by the HAF. As briefly shown, it decontextualizes definitions and examples, erases other victims of oppression, and irons out the heterogeneity of Hindu communities. Spearheading the historicization of Hinduphobia is the UH, which provides primary sources on its website that range from nineteenth-century newspaper reports from England, an essay written by Sudhindra Bose in 1914 for the Michigan-based journal The Cosmopolitan Student to the Indian Constituent Assembly proceedings. These sources are used to prove the historicity of Hinduphobia and to highlight that Hindus have always been subjected to prejudice.

While Hindus, like other victims of colonialism, faced discrimination that often resulted in violence, as the next section will show, the linkage between the experiences of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indians, like Bose, and the argument of perennial Hinduphobia rests on a tenuous thread. It neglects key contexts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: the fact that there were diverse groups of Indian migrants, that the term “Hindu” referred to those from India and that the cultural and religious representation of Hinduism enjoyed positive reception in addition to pushbacks. Emblematic of the “patriotic turn in memory politics” and history writing of today (Kończal and Moses 2022, p. 153; Sarkar 2022), the documenting Hinduphobia initiative remind us of the importance of the early history of migration and immigration in the discourse of Hindu nationalism.

3. Indian Activists in the USA between the 1890s and 1920s

3.1. “The Hindu Invasion”

For late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of Indians in the US to be relevant to the argument of Hinduphobia, two things must be established: That there was constant discrimination specifically targeting Hindus and that historical actors were cognizant of such bias.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw racialized discrimination against Indians entering the US. Even though Indians often insisted on their “whiteness” by referring to their Aryan heritage, as was the case made by Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923, they were positioned against white residents and denied permanent settlement, naturalization and faced many other restrictions throughout the early twentieth century. However, the racism they experienced was not created in a vacuum. It was part of a broader anti-Asian movement that surfaced in the late nineteenth century from the Page Act of 1875, which denied entry of certain “undesirable” East Asians, to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

To stoke fear against Indians entering North America, newspapers circulated the trope of “Hindu invasion”. The term “Hindu” then included everyone from India, and one group against whom the trope of Hindu invasion was used was the Indian laborers, mostly Sikh farmers from Punjab who were recruited by the Western Pacific Railroad. The Asiatic Exclusion League, which was initially created in 1905 to mobilize against Japanese and Korean immigrants, perceived these Indian laborers, as they did East Asians, to be a threat to the employment of white workers. It estimated that there were 10,000 Indian workers in California. In reality, these workers were small in number with a total of less than 6000 Indians in the Pacific states, and only 300 new immigrants were arriving annually in the first two decades of the twentieth century (Chakravorty et al. 2017, pp. 8, 6). Nevertheless, newspapers channeled the narrative of “Hindu Invasion”, describing their arrival as “hordes of Hindus” that were “invading the state” of Washington (“Have we a Dusky Peril?” 1906, p. 16). Anti-Asian sentiments were further incited as the Sikh workers were grouped and compared with Japanese and Chinese laborers. The article on “Hindu Invasion” hypothesized that “the dusky Asiatics in their turbans” would become the new enemy of the working class replacing the “Yellow Peril” (“Have we a Dusky Peril?” 1906, p. 16). These reports and the campaigns of the Asiatic Exclusion League led to the Bellingham riot in 1907 when Indian workers were brutally attacked by white laborers and were driven out of town. The Bellingham riot was part of a series of other anti-Asian attacks that unfolded in the year of 1907 in Vancouver and San Francisco that targeted Chinese and Japanese laborers, respectively.

Three years after the attacks, newspapers continued to perpetuate the similar narrative of the Hindu invasion. An article referencing the Asiatic Exclusion League reported on the “stream”, “band” and “flow” of Indians to sustain the illusion of endless immigration. This article also dismissed the workers as an “unmitigated nuisance” and “on the whole, inferior” (“What the World is Doing: A Record of Current Events” 1910, p. 15). The nativist sentiment and its underlying xenophobia of the article was made further conspicuous as it described the changing scenery of San Francisco. It captioned a photograph of workers with the sentence: “A familiar sight along the waterfront of San Francisco... a few years ago a turban would have attracted a crowd”. It also expressed objection to the development of the Sikh community as it stated, “in San Francisco and its suburbs “Hindu town” is now as familiar as Chinatown or any other distinctly foreign settlement”. These anti-Indian and anti-Asian sentiments became more explicit in the 1917 Immigration Act, which created the “Asiatic Barred Zone”, and in the ruling of the 1923 United States vs. Bhagat Singh Thind case that denied Indians the right to naturalization on the arbitrary basis of race.

The trope of Hindu invasion was not only used against Sikh laborers but also against Hindu gurus. One article titled “The Heathen Invasion” published in 1911 in the New York monthly Hampton Columbian Magazine shows how the spread of Hinduism, which was embraced by many intellectuals and wealthy women, was also contested by leading literary figures. The article was written by Mabel Potter Daggett, a writer, journalist and suffragette, and opened with an overview of how new religions—Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Bahaism and Sufism—were planting their roots in America, a “Christian land” (Daggett 1911, p. 399). She mainly took issue with the socialization of Indian male monks and their American female audience which was captured in the subtitles of the article: “American women losing fortunes and reason”. Excerpts from this article were reproduced in another New York based periodical, Current Literature. This essay similarly referred to the Parliament of the World’s Religions as “open[ing] the gates to the Oriental propagandists” (“The Heathen Invasion” 1911, p. 538). It pointed to Vivekananda, Abhedananda and the Vedanta Society as paving the road for the expansion of “Buddhist, Hindoo, Muslim, and Zoroastrian places of worship” that spread “up and down the land”, and highlighted the gendered composition of these gatherings, describing the scene as a “grave menace... especially to the women of the country” (“The Heathen Invasion” 1911, pp. 538, 540). It concluded with a statement on yoga from the first page of Daggett’s article in which she explained: “literally, yoga means the ‘path’ that leads to wisdom. Actually, it is proving the way that leads to domestic infelicity and insanity and death” (“The Heathen Invasion” 1911, p. 540). Although yoga remains a topic of much heated debate involving Hindu advocacy groups and Christian protesters in America, Daggett’s accusation of yoga leading to death would hardly appeal to either group or to the wider public (Jain 2014). Nevertheless, Daggett’s article and its reproduction show how the narrative of invasion was also used against religious personalities and especially against those who were warmly received by women.

These campaigns against labor and religious migrants reveal the anxiety of the dominant population. More specifically, the trope of invasion indicates that the fear was triggered by the “mobility capital” of the migrants as much as by their settlement (Chatterji 2013). Both the Colliers’ article and Daggett’s essay described the changing urban landscape whether in the burgeoning “Hindu town” in San Francisco or new temples—Buddhist temple in Seattle, Krishna temple in Los Angeles, Vedanta Society’s Hindu Temple in San Francisco and Zoroastrian temple in Chicago to name a few from Daggett’s list (Daggett 1911, pp. 399–400). In addition to physical mobility and changing urban landscape, social mobility presented another issue for these writers: Collier’s article anticipated the disruption of the labor market imposed by Sikh workers, while Daggett imagined the destruction of American Christian households by Hindu gurus who were taking “women away from home and family” (Daggett 1911, p. 411).

These experiences of Indian migrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century show that the racism that they faced held the mirror to the systemic biases embedded in American society. Just like how the Bellingham riot was part of the violence that unfolded against Japanese, Chinese and Korean workers, the criticism against Hindu gurus came in tandem with attacks on their female patrons, reflecting the ingrained xenophobia and patriarchy of the time. These complexities of labor, race, religion and gender do not neatly fit into the argument of perpetual victimhood that historicizing Hinduphobia projects seek to capture.

How well does the second criterion—the recognition of Hinduphobia by Hindus in America—hold up the contemporary argument of Hinduphobia? A closer examination of the essay written by Sudhindra Bose entitled “Hinduphobia”, which appears in the resources provided by Hindu advocacy groups, shows that his argument and use of the term Hinduphobia challenge rather than validate their appropriation of him. To begin with, Bose was a cosmopolitan. He served as the president of the Hindustan Association of America, which represented Indian students of all backgrounds in the US or as one of its pamphlets explained, “Hindus unified peoples of India not as Hindus, Mohammadans and Christians;… sons and daughters of India but not as Brahman, sudra, and untouchables” (Shastri 1915, p. 5). He wrote several essays that displayed his commitment to providing education opportunities for Indian students in the US, his sensitivity to the racial discrimination faced by African Americans, and his acknowledgement of the relatively privileged position of Indian students compared to other minority groups (Bose 1911; Bose 1919). The essay “Hinduphobia, published in 1914 in The Cosmopolitan Student, similarly exhibited his advocacy for Indian immigrants. In it, Bose protested the deportation of Har Dayal and responded to the proposal of the Hindu Exclusion Act by John Raker, the congressional representative for California. Although Raker initially used the term “Hindu” to build on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, his main objective was the “exclusion of Asiatic laborers” including Indian workers (cited in Munshi 2016, p. 70). The culmination of Raker’s repeated attempts to introduce the Hindu Exclusion bill was the Immigration Act of 1917, which limited Indian immigration not due to their race or religion, but their place of origin located within the Asiatic Barred Zone. In his article on Hinduphobia, Bose also made this clear. His use of the term Hindu entailed Sikh laborers as well as Indian students, and he fought for both. He explained that Indian workers were coming from the “rice-fields of India” and thus not presenting any threat to American skilled workers and highlighted both the value of American education and of interracial brotherhood between Indian and American students (Bose 1914, p. 40). Although he pleaded for the prioritization of Indian students should the immigration of labor migrants be restricted, he opposed broader exclusionary acts against Indians for their unfairness and damage to the “national dignity” of India (Bose 1914, p. 40). His use of the term Hinduphobia in his article also suggests Bose did not take Raker’s Hindu exclusion bill to be representative of the general position of most people. He described Hinduphobia not as a constant problem, but a temporary bout of madness, “an acute attack” akin to a “stage fright” (Bose 1914, p. 40).

Although race remained an issue that was evoked to curtail the rights of Indians, the example of Bose cited by contemporary Hindu advocacy groups does not support the Hinduphobia argument. What Bose’s article on Hinduphobia shows is a historical example of Indians fighting for the rights of Indians in the US as well as in the subcontinent. In this, it points to another important historical aspect—the US as a battleground for Indian activism. The next section will show how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century deterritorial movements unfolded around elevating Indian nationalism, rather than Hindu nationalism, and how they bear resemblance to the rise of Hindutva’s global counterpublics.

3.2. Deterritorial Movements

As historians have established, nationalist activities took place both within and outside the subcontinent. In addition to London, Paris and Tokyo, many political actors took to the US to challenge colonial depiction of India and to gather supporters for their anticolonial pursuit. Their deterritorial politics, which“aimed at forging transnational communities of affiliation and solidarity” (Manjapra 2010, p. 3), took various shapes from collaboration with anarchists to using newspapers, photographs, and films to shape wider public opinion on the colonial question. While the long-distance nationalism of these political actors has received much scholarly attention whether as an organized affair—such as the Ghadar Party and its transnational revolutionary operations—or as individual case studies—such as the life and works of MN Roy and the “cosmopolitan nationalism” of Sarojini Naidu and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, there were also religious and cultural figures who contributed to the national causes (Parr 2022).

The first publicly recognized Indian personalities emerged from the Parliament of the World’s Religions held in Chicago in 1893. This event marked a new moment for transnational religious movements. Although Vivekananda is perhaps the most famous name affiliated with the Parliament, many other delegates benefitted from the international exposure that the event offered. The Ceylonese Buddhist who stood on the stage as a member of the Theosophical Society, Anagarika Dharmapala, the “Yankee Muslim” Alexander Russell Webb whose patrons included Muslim communities in Bombay, Hyderabad, and Rangoon, and the Jain representative Virchand Gandhi embarked on lecture tours following their attendance at the Parliament. They contested existing misconceptions and portrayed their faith as universally adaptable (Kemper 2015; Ziolkowski 1993). Tolerance and universal brotherhood became staple themes in their lectures, contributing to what Srinivas Aravamudan has called “Guru English”, a cosmopolitan discourse that fused “theolinguistic subtlety” of South Asian religions with “metaphysical mastery” (Aravamudan 2006, p. 267). Their much-publicized tours and establishment of religious organizations have been interpreted as the dawn of religious pluralism in the United States (Seager 1993) as well as a crucial moment that shaped the American discipline of comparative religious studies (Masuzawa 2005).

Although this period has been understood as an important juncture in the setting of the “globalization of Hinduism within the American context” (Waghorne 2009, p. 129), it also saw the rise of religious missionaries other than Hindu gurus or speakers who attended the Parliament. Throughout the twentieth century, new religious personalities entered the US and influenced American culture. Hazrat Inayat Khan, the Sufi teacher and renowned musician, laid the ground for organized Sufism in the US between 1910 and 1912. The Ahmadiyya movement, which reached the US with the arrival of Mufti Muhammad Sadiq in Detroit in 1920 and spread through the publication of The Moslem Sunrise (now Muslim Sunrise), attracted many Black jazz musicians (Bivins 2015).

While Hinduism was not the only religion affiliated with India that was known to the non-Indian public, it gained more traction than other religions for several reasons. It had already influenced intellectual and religious movements such as Transcendentalism and Theosophy. It also became conflated with the word “Hindu” that was used to describe everyone from India. As Har Dayal explained in the Modern Review, “The Americans call everything that pertains to India by the name ‘Hindu’: e.g., Hindu music, the Hindu alphabet, Hindu politics, etc...’Indian’ art would be understood to mean the art of the Redskins” (Har Dayal 1911, p. 2). The third, and perhaps most impactful, factor that contributed to the recognition of Hinduism in wider American society was the popularization of Hindu personalities.

Americans continued to encounter India through the works of, and about, Hindu figures, which, as Christophe Jaffrelot and Ingrid Therwath have argued, had longer implications in the development of the VHPA (Jaffrelot and Therwath 2007). Throughout the twentieth century an interest in Hindu personalities grew. Biographies of Ramakrishna, Gandhi and Vivekananda written by Romain Rolland were published in the 1920s and 1930s, and the works of literary figures and experts, such as Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu and Ananda Coomaraswamy gained readership. Performance art, too, gathered a following. The choreographer and dancer Uday Shankar popularized what he called “Hindu ballet”, a mixture of classical Indian dance and ballet, to his American audience. The demand for Shankar’s performance increased so much so that his sponsors ranged from famous writers such as Ida Tarbell, Irvin S. Cobb and the feminist thinker Fannie Hurst, to philanthropists such as William Guggenheim. A single concert of Shankar was an advertisement for India. From travel agencies, stores selling Indian crafts and fabrics to restaurants and their “real Hindu curry dishes”, the brochures for his concert resembled a directory.9

The appeal of Hindu public figures reached its peak with MK Gandhi. Following the Salt March in 1930 and the Round Table Conferences in 1930–1932, both of which attracted much press attention across the world, Gandhian ideas of non-violence became familiar to many anti-imperialists, “liberals, pacifists, intellectuals, and some clergymen” as well as prominent Black intellectuals (Lal 2008, p. 48). As Vinay Lal has shown, many Indians in the US recognized the positive responses to Gandhi and volunteered as his spokesperson (Lal 2008, pp. 48–49). An organization was even created around his name in New York: the All-World Gandhi Fellowship. Established by the transnational cultural entrepreneur Kedarnath Das Gupta in roughly 1932, this organization promoted ahimsa and satyagraha in the vernacular as the main principles of pacifism. Das Gupta involved Unitarian ministers and rabbis as the board members and sought to recruit various intellectuals and social activists including W.E.B Du Bois and the suffragette Jane Addams.10 Overall, the All-World Gandhi Fellowship lived a short life and left little footprint. It eventually combined its agenda with the American League for India’s Freedom, an organization based in New York, and turned its focus to raising American awareness on the Indian colonial condition.11 Nevertheless, it continued to emphasize Indian “cultures, religions and philosophies” in the plural as a way of raising American interest in Indian causes and declared no “boundaries of country, race, or creed”, even though it rooted its pacifist ideals in ahimsa, dharma and retained Gandhi’s name (All-World Gandhi Fellowship n.d., p. 1).

The intercultural works of these Indian figures produced nationalist repercussions both in India and in America. Upon his return to the subcontinent, Vivekananda shared his vision for the nation in his speeches and in his Bengali writings, “appropriat[ing] the conservative and the popular elements of Hinduism” (Basu 2002, p. 3) and laying the ground for Hindu nationalism (Sharma 2013). Similarly, Uday Shankar’s performance abroad had implications in the nationalization of Indian dance. While he was making his name known in London and New York, reformers and revivalists in India were debating how to define classical dance. As scholars have argued, “the revivalist and reconstructive movement of Indian classical dance” corresponded to the development of Indian nationalism which sought to rewrite the history of dance as well as dancers, erasing devadasi and nautch dancers (Chakravorty 2000/01, p. 110). “Hindu ballet” as introduced to the American audience by Uday Shankar, who was not a trained classical dancer, thus further “removed” dance “from its original practitioners… who were not all Hindus” (Chakravorty 2000/01, p. 112).

Within America, too, the positive receptions of Hindu personalities influenced the works of Indian students. An article published in the Hindustan Review in 1908 titled “India and the Outside World” written by Mahesh Charan Sinha, a Kayastha student enrolled in a graduate program in Oregon, illustrates how the appeal of Hindu gurus bolstered his view of the importance of international representation of India and how this conviction led him to elevate Hinduism as the public face of Indian civilization.

In this article, Sinha stressed the significance of recognition and consumption of a national culture by outsiders. Building on his analysis of Christian missionaries in India he wrote, “the fact is that national civilization, particular acquirements of a country, special qualifications and importance of a people require advertisement and trumpeting as much as other commodities of commercial value” (Sinha 1908, p. 47). He noted that “in America the ‘Hindu’ is synonymous with a being highly intellectual, remarkably tolerant and catholic in his views, … a descendant of an ancient civilized race.” (Sinha 1908, p. 48). He continued, “every Hindu in America is considered to be a messenger of universal peace, he alone will bring about the harmony of the sect-ridden world” (Sinha 1908, p. 49). To ride the wave of public approval of Hindu figures, he encouraged further migration of brahmins, yogis and pandits as well as musicians, dancers and artists to work in foreign countries to “be useful to India, for their recognition and their reputation in the foreign countries is the glory of India” (Sinha 1908, p. 49).

Sinha’s call for the representation of Indian civilization by Hindu figures reflected his sensitivity to American perception of Indians and his positionality as a Hindu student rather than his belief in Hindu nationalism. He had always formed his opinions based on international frameworks. He grounded his criticism of orthodox Hindus in his personal observations from his travels and in the context of “the rest of the globe”, to cite his own words (Carroll 1979, p. 294). His emphasis on Hindu representation in the US similarly rose from what he perceived to be in demand by Americans. He held that Vivekananda, Vedanta Society, Swami Rama Tirtha and Annie Besant had primed America to be “ready to embrace Hindu ideals” and saw the twentieth century as an opportune moment to further build on their work (Sinha 1908, p. 49). His stereotyping of Hindus as “entitled to move in the society of the learned” rose from the elite circles within which Hindu gurus operated and the self-perception of Hindu students that was not uncommon in his time (Sinha 1908, p. 48). As Maia Ramnath has shown, even within the Ghadar Party, many Hindu members held a view of an implicit division of labor: “students and organic intellectuals” saw themselves as “the real brains of the operation”, and the “Sikh workers largely as the muscle and the moneybags” (Ramnath 2011, pp. 35, 36). His suggestion that Hindus served as best ambassadors of Indian culture was rooted in how they were viewed by Americans rather than in his belief in a specific national culture of India.

As these examples show, the deterritorial activities of cultural figures, students and political activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were heterogeneous but interlinked. The works of Indian visitors overlapped with those of immigrant lobbyist as they corrected misconceptions about Indian customs and religions perpetuated by the missionary literature and sought to change people’s opinions on the Indian colonial question. Rather than early examples of long-distance Hindu nationalism, they present an example of an anti-imperial counterpublic that was similarly being formed across the world.

4. Hindutva’s Counterpublics

It is this aspect of early Indian counterpublics in the US that could potentially provide a new framework for analyzing contemporary mobilization against Hindu nationalism. Counterpublic, as argued by Michael Warner, maintains a distance from authority, has “a critical relation to power” and it is “mediated by print, theatre, diffuse networks of talk, commerce, and the like”, rather than based on a specific demography (Warner 2002, p. 56). In their resistance against variations of Hindu nationalism, individual activists and non-profit organizations in the US use different types of media and methods, involve people from diverse backgrounds and frame their causes within both domestic and global contexts.

Many organizations work horizontally. The passing of the anti-caste discrimination bill in Seattle in February of 2023, for example, was a result of the collaboration between multiple associations including the Ambedkar International Center, Equality Lab, Indian American Muslim Council and National Academic Coalition for Caste Equity, to name a few. Some, such as the Chicago South Asians for Justice and the Alliance for Justice and Accountability that sent activists to protest the 2018 WHC, lived a short life. Others like the Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR), which was created in 2019, campaigns “for pluralism, civil and human rights in South Asia and North America” and has overseas chapters in India, UK and Australia.12 The internet has also provided a canvas for anti-Hindutva discourse. In addition to the webinar format of the 2021 Dismantling Global Hindutva Conference, the members of the South Asia Scholar Activist Collective (SASAC) published the Hindutva Harassment Field Manual online in 2021, providing resources, guidelines, and a glossary of terms that shape debates on Hindutva.13

One of the crucial differences between Hindu advocacy groups that support the ideas of Hindu nationalism and these anti-Hindutva organizations is in their self-positioning. The HSS, HAF, and UH take the “soft” neo-Hindutva strategy (Anderson 2015) by denying any connection to Indian political parties and separating their work from other activities endorsed by Hindu nationalists. In contrast, anti-Hindutva organizations such as the HfHR and SASAC draw references to events unfolding outside the US. They contextualize their activism and its implications within the global framework of Hindu nationalist operations. They also raise awareness on other forms of discrimination within and outside Hindu communities. (same as Note 12). In their transnational references, audiences, and networks as well as in their advocacy for causes both specific to the local condition and beyond, these anti-Hindutva associations resemble the works of early Indian activists whose efforts to change public opinion on India simultaneously served the rights of Indian immigrants and those in India.

Audrey Truschke suggests that the “flurry of more recent opposition to Hindutva in the United States is a proportionate response to the increased power of this ideology in India and its efflorescence in America” (Truschke 2022, p. 12). The growing relevance of the US as a battleground for and against Hindu nationalism also calls for a new historicization of Indian activism in the US to not only respond to contemporary appropriation of the past but also to open new analytical fields for examining the diversification of transnationalism surrounding Hindu nationalism.

5. Conclusions

The World Hindu Congress, with which this article began, will take place once more in November 2023 in Bangkok. The new theme is Jayasya Aayatnam Dharma, “Dharma, the Abode of Victory”. The official advertisement of the WHC highlights how this upcoming meeting will “provide avenues for collaboration among Hindu leaders, activists, and thinkers for the Hindu resurgence.” It also emphasizes how the conference would instill “that grand pride of being a Hindu”. (same as Note 3). From the wording of resurgence to the pride of belonging, the theme alludes to a shared past and regeneration of historical connections, one that echoes the Greater India Theory. Crucial to the Greater India Theory is mapping the “ancient overseas Hindu ‘culture colonies’” (Bayly 2004, pp. 724–25), and the 2023 WHC is not hesitant to allude to such geography in Southeast Asia. The official website for the 2023 event details that India and Southeast Asia “share common Dharmic and cultural values” and lists the “magnificent symbols of a shared heritage”: “Wat Phra Si Rattana Satsadaram (Thailand), Angkor Wat and Phnom Kulen (Cambodia), Prambanan and Borobudur (Indonesia), Bagan (Myanmar), Kedaram (Malaysia), Cham Temple, Mỹ Sơn (Vietnam) and Vat Phou (Laos)” (See Note 3). As the organizers prepare to set the stage in Bangkok for their Greater India project, it will be an important event for scholars working on transnational Hindu nationalism to observe whether the argument of Hinduphobia will appear and whether the event will see another staging of counterpublics. Doing so will lay out the framework for future research on Hindutva’s counterpublic: If Hindu nationalism has become globalized in its operation and globalist in its aspirations, how do its counterforces map onto this geography? To what extent does the increased mobilization against global Hindu nationalism remain a movement in the Anglosphere?