Let’s Talk Hinduphobia
What it is… and what it isn’t
I wore a bindi for nearly the entirety of my senior year of college.
It’s not that I was particularly traditional: I was raised by semi-practising, liberal, agnostic parents who themselves were raised in very orthodox families. As a toddler I had an aksharaabhyaasam, the traditional South Indian ritual which takes place just before a child enters school. I grew up painting a silver bust of Lakshmi at the end of every summer, to celebrate Lakshmi puja. In the winter, weeks before Christmas lights went up, my family would gather to set off firecrackers for Diwali. But beyond a handful of ceremonies like this, we barely practiced. Although I myself have always believed in a higher power, mine is a formless, strongly monotheistic sort of belief, not what typically comes to mind when thinking about Hinduism.
So why did I wear a bindi?
I have plenty of less-enjoyable Hinduism-related memories from my childhood. I remember being told by a Catholic classmate that I’d go to Hell for believing in false deities. I remember the white Christian friend who stopped talking to me when she visited our home and saw idols on display. For a long time, I wanted to scrub the brownness away from me – a brownness which included Hinduism. Only when I hit the last part of my college career did something wake up inside me: I wanted to reclaim being brown, and that meant I wanted to reclaim being Hindu.
So on the bindi went. I had a stash of them, little dots ranging from red to glittery green, and before I left my apartment each morning I stuck one in between my eyebrows. I experimented with the position, chose makeup to match the colour, revelled in the feeling of visibly rebelling against American Christian hegemony. I did this for nearly a year – September 2018 to May 2019 – before I stopped.
Why did I stop? Organisations like the Hindu American Foundation have a ready explanation for that – the same thing which explained my self-hatred in my formative years: Hinduphobia.
Hinduism is a minority religion in the United States. Of course there must be Hinduphobia. And of course what I experienced as a child counted as Hinduphobia. But the word, I’ve found, is often drastically misused by the very people who define it. The first time I encountered the term “Hinduphobia” wasn’t on Instagram: it was during the virtual forum on caste protections hosted by the Santa Clara County Human Rights Commission – an event I wrote about a few weeks ago. I listened as, one after another, self-identified Hindu Americans – the vast majority of whom were savarna (upper-caste) and financially privileged – accused the Human Rights Commission and Equality Labs, a Californian organisation devoted to anti-caste activism, of “Hinduphobia”, for merely daring to have a discussion on caste.
I had ditched my bindi almost two years prior, and this was why: not because I was a victim of “Hinduphobia”, but because I hate what the usage of “Hinduphobia” – along with Hindu symbols like the bindi – have come to represent in the overwhelmingly-savarna diaspora. It is, quite frankly, a casteist dogwhistle. Undoubtedly there are instances of genuine Hinduphobia, but by and large they are swamped by disingenuous accusations levelled at Muslims as well as those members of the Dalit-Bahujan diaspora who speak out about the caste discrimination they face at the hands of the savarna elite. Take this tweet by the Hindu American Foundation:
This is, at best, word salad. At worst, it is an attempt to deliberately reframe Brahminism as an attack on Hinduism posed by non-Hindu extremists, with “antisemitism” and “colonialism” added in for extra appeal to historical oppression. “Brahminism” is indeed a fairly recent term, one coined by Dalit activist B. R. Ambedkar – but he himself repeatedly stated that it is not an attack on Brahmins, let alone all Hindus. As the previously-linked article in The Hindu stated:
opposing ‘Brahmanism’ does not entail being ‘anti-Brahmin’. To do so would imply that all Brahmins are responsible for these atrocities…
In a society which is riven by caste, a person may belong to the caste of Brahmins but not adhere to the core ethic of Brahmanism. He may even have morally disassociated himself from it. The resolution to burn the Manusmriti and thereby oppose Brahmanism was taken by Ambedkar jointly with G.S. Sahasrabuddhe, a Chitpavan Brahmin.
The article goes on to give a definition of Brahminism which is much clearer than the nonsensical allegations of white supremacy which pepper the Hindu American Foundation’s version:
What then is Brahmanism? It is a sociopolitical ideology that encodes a memory of an ideal past and a vision of society in the future, one in which Brahmins occupy the highest place not only as exclusive guardians of a higher, spiritual realm but also as sole providers of wisdom on virtually every practical issue of this world…
…their superior position in society and their superior knowledge stems from birth. This makes them naturally, intrinsically superior to all other humans, so superior that they form a separate species (jati) altogether. Nothing can challenge or alter this fact. No one becomes a Brahmin, but is born so.
In summation, “Brahminism” isn’t an antisemitic canard. It has no roots in colonialism. To adhere to Brahminism means, quite simply, to believe that you are innately superior to everyone from a “lower” caste, simply because you chanced to be born into a particular family. Is this a core tenet of Hinduism, to be so vehemently defended by one of the largest Hindu diaspora organisations? If it is – if Hinduism, as the HAF states, requires this supposed superiority to go unchallenged – is it worth defending at all?
The HAF’s attitude is, unfortunately, not uncommon. I have seen people compare those who call out Brahminism to Nazis. The vote to make caste a protected identity in Santa Clara County ground to a halt because of allegations of “Hinduphobia”. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, BAPS – one of the largest Hindu sects in the country, a group with direct ties to India’s ruling Bharathiya Janata Party – has been accused of trafficking Dalit workers from India and forcing them to build a massive temple complex in slavery-like conditions. Is this not Hinduphobia? Are these workers not being denied human rights based on a facet of their Hindu identity – their caste? Why does the HAF not jump to their aid?
There is one simple reason, the top layer of the complex soul-searching I’ve done for years now, which drove me to take off my bindis for good. I know what visibly Hindu items like the bindi have come to mean in the diaspora, which, unlike India itself, leans very homogeneously upper-caste. Here I know that Hindu symbols are often used as subtle endorsements of caste privilege, because many members of communities like the HAF do not even consider Dalit-Bahujan diaspora to be Hindu at all (despite the fact that many Dalits are Hindu, and many who try to convert out of Hinduism are denied that right).
I do not want to be a part of this campaign of disinformation and intimidation. I do not want to play into this false narrative about anti-caste work being “Hinduphobic”. I do not want to associate myself with communities who use “Hinduphobia” as a weapon against activists. This is not something to celebrate. This is not an attitude to be proud of.
Am I being Hinduphobic? Proponents of this silencing of anti-caste voices (especially those of Dalit-Bahujan activists) might say so, but I disagree. “Hinduphobia” implies an irrational critique, a hatred born from a desire to hate. My criticism of this nationalist, exclusionary, discriminatory movement is not irrational, and neither are the far more numerous and comprehensive criticisms which have been so eloquently set forth by Dalit-Bahujan organisations and people. They are born, pure and simple, from a genuine desire to see the toxic presence of casteism eradicated from the religion of our birth.
