Research Paper

The research paper is an act of scholarship which requires that you utilize a minimum of three scholarly reputable and academically sound sources. It should be around five pages long and include citations of your sources and a bibliography.

164 ETHOS

Putting the “Fun” in Fundamentalism:
Religious Nationalism and the Split Self at
Hindutva Summer Camps in the United
States

Jessica Marie Falcone

Abstract Some Hindu immigrants to America – those who subscribe to Hindutva values – desire full rights and
recognition in their adopted homeland even as they simultaneously demand that so-called “migrants” to India

(that is, Muslims and Christians whose communities have flourished in India for hundreds of years) acquiesce

to their vision of India as a “Hindu state.” In an American racial landscape that structurally privileges whites, I

argue that the cultural categorization of Hindu immigrants into a “lesser-than-whites” minority has only served

to fuel the growth of Hindu supremacist groups in the United States. In this article, I draw on fieldwork with two

Hindu American summer camps in order to show that some Hindu immigrants misrecognize and repress their

own current alienation in a manner that has subsequently aggravated latent antipathies towards Muslim and

Christian communities in India. [religion, alienation, ethnicity, Hinduism, diaspora, nationalism]

At Shantiniketan, a summer camp with a Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) political bent based in
the suburbs of Washington, D.C. (hereafter, “the D.C. area”),1 a distinct aversion to Islam
was a central aspect of community dogma.2 However, at a facilitator-led discussion with
teenage campers about dating in 2001, Preeti, a college-aged Hindu American volunteer–
counselor caused a stir by candidly admitting that back at school she was in a relationship
with a Muslim American peer. The teenage campers, as well as the adult supervisors, were
aghast. Mouths had literally dropped open. Neilesh, the primary counselor for the teen
campers, a young man who had recently emigrated from India for higher education in
the United States, visibly stiffened with shock. The gathered campers and adults spent the
next 20 minutes enumerating the myriad “problems of marrying non-Hindus,” especially
reinforcing the notion that Muslims of any race and African Americans of any religion, were
completely out of the question as potential partners.

After a deluge of negative responses to her revelation, Preeti retracted her statement (telling
me later that it was out of deference for her younger brother, who was one of the teen
campers in the room), by saying that she was actually only using it as an imaginary example
to show that she believed that two people could find happiness together regardless of religion.
Neilesh sputtered a reiteration of her retraction with visible relief: “She isn’t dating a Muslim!
She was just using it as a hypothetical example. She’s not actually dating one!” Neilesh then

Journal of the Society for
Psychological Anthropology

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 165

wrapped up the discussion by saying that marrying others Hindus is the only way to keep
“the Hindu community united and strong.”

I departed from that “Education Session” with a reaffirmed sense of the nature of the
intolerance promoted as an ideological platform for the Hindutva group. I also came away
with a renewed recognition that while not everyone in the group towed the party line,
dissenting voices were not comfortably tolerated. During the session, Preeti had been all but
eviscerated, and Muslims and black Americans had fared no better. But where did the vitriol
come from? In my fieldwork with Hindutva religious groups, I encountered a significant
amount of antagonism to Muslims, as well as African Americans (and occasionally Latinos).
I worked to understand why particular religious and ethnic affiliations were so reviled, and
how had these antagonisms been cultivated in the youth groups and affiliated summer camps
I studied.

In this contribution, I specifically address the cultural, socioeconomic, psychological ele-
ments of the rise of diaspora Hindu extremism. Based on data collected over more than a
year of intensive research in the greater D.C. area from 2001 to 2002 in both Hindu temples
(mandirs) and Hindu summer camps, I show that the “Yankee Hindutva” (Prashad 2000)
phenomenon is not just a reflection of the popularity of Hindutva on the subcontinent,
nor simply part and parcel of the vilification of Muslims post-9/11, but, rather, that it also
represents the complicated psychological response of a community that is wrestling with
some guilt for leaving the “homeland,” feeling compromised by the racism of their adopted
nation, and facing a complex social history in which their subject position vacillates between
dominance and subordination. Arguably, all forms of racism are fed by misrecognitions of
the Other; by focusing on its manifestations in the United States, I make a case that the
hatred evinced by Indian American supporters of Hindutva has been created and sustained
by particular historical and cultural conditions in both India and the United States. In point
of fact, the rise in diaspora extremism is at least partially linked to the deep scars of the
past, such as colonialism and Partition in India, as well as to the deep social dysfunction of
a present day adopted homeland: race and class stratification in the United States. Through
analysis of my field data, I demonstrate that the hate speech of Hindutva-affiliated summer
camps in the United States is a transnational narrative of the relationship between two hi-
erarchical discourses, one Indian and one American, which both feed on political Othering
so that a mainstream majority retains the fruits of power. In India, the Hindutva ideology
preys on the fear of the Other in promoting Hindu unity against Muslims and Christians,
while in the United States structural racism works against people of color, including Indian
immigrants, because equality would diminish the white supremacy that continues to exist in
the contemporary United States.

Social and economic explanations are only part of the manifestation of Hindu nationalism
in the United States. There is an undeniable psychoanalytic dimension as well. The mis-
recognition of the fact that the Hindu American subject constitutes the “Stranger” in the
United States, just as the Muslim–Christian subject constitutes the “Stranger” on the Indian
subcontinent, has produced an uncomfortable doubling repressed by many, thereby enabling

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Hindutva-sympathetic Americans to fetishize Hinduism and redouble their hatred in acts
reminiscent of Freud’s repetition compulsion—that is, their acts of hate are alienated and
misrecognized replays of their own past subjugation in the eyes of others.

Only with some recourse to psychoanalytic theory can one illuminate the extent of the
unconscious alienation and “instituted fantasy” (Žižek 1989) evident in Hindu American
fundamentalisms. Unconscious alienation is an especially significant element of the rise
in American Hindutva, accounting for the transformation in the first generation diaspora
population who have turned to Hindu fundamentalism in the United States even though
they had little to no interest in it when they lived in

India.

Transformations in Hindutva in the United States

There have been several waves of South Asian immigration to the United States beginning
with a tide of migrant laborers to California from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, followed
by a swell of mostly educated professionals from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, and
successive tightly regulated ebbs and flows of various professionals, unskilled laborers and
family since then (Prashad 2000). Successive waves of South Asian immigrants came to the
United States with different levels of education, capital, and skill sets, and therefore Indian
Americans run the gamut of classes, regional affiliations, and experiences with belongingness
and Othering. The fluidity of borders and categories, the movement of money, ideas, and
people, as well as new technologies allowing for so much contact between constantly shifting
bodies on both sides of the journey, has allowed “the diaspora” to overspill its always already
frail walls. Rajan and Sharma (2006) follow Appadurai (1996), Bauman (2000) and others to
note that it is no longer useful to treat home and diaspora as if they are utterly differentiated,
bounded entities.

Hindu American religious practices have become more regionally affiliated over time,3 but
the Hindutva bent has capitalized on a resurgence of Hindu nationalism that seeks to erase
the multiple Hinduisms of India (and the diaspora) and coalesce all Hindus into a single
cadre. Rajan and Sharma consider this “localization” grist for the Hindutva mill and other
religious nationalisms:

the idea of community is rapidly coming to mean a religious-ethnic (Hindu, Sikh,
Muslim, Tamil, Brahmin) identity, rather than a national one (Indian, Pakistani, Nepali,
etc.). Read in conjunction with the growth of religio-ethnic fundamentalisms in South
Asia, especially in its exclusivist, state-sponsored, discriminatory form in India, and now
increasingly in Pakistan, this means that the South Asian diaspora, with its wealth and
influence, and its anxiety over maintaining cultural ties to the homeland, becomes a
power broker for the most heinous of ethnocentrisms back home. [2006:20]

Hindutva activists argue that a Marathi-speaking Hindu from Mumbai has more in common
with an Oriya-speaking Hindu from Bhubaneswar than she or he does with a Marathi-
speaking Muslim from Mumbai.

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 167

Hindu extremism, which expanded its influence in the United States in the mid- to late
1980s, was demonstrably rising in popularity among many Hindu Americans throughout the
1990s (Kurien 2007a). Hindu extremism, also known as Hindutva, Hindu fundamentalism,
or right wing Hindu ideology, is unique in the breadth of the inclusivity that frames its
explicit exclusivity: it embraces all so-called “Indic” religions, while vehemently rejecting
the right of “non-Indic” or “imported” traditions to exist in India.4 So whether Sikhs,
Buddhists, Jains, and Indian indigenous peoples (adivasis) want to be encompassed by the
Hindu Parivar’s (the institutionalized Hindutva community) version of Hinduism or not,
they are considered Hindus under Hindutva rhetoric; the “non-Indic” traditions of Islam
and Christianity, however, are treated as foreign contaminants.

The inclusiveness and exclusiveness of Hindutva’s brand of Hinduism traces a distinct Self
and Other: “More than do many other religious movements, then, fundamentalists define
themselves against a powerful Other: the We of Golwalkar’s notorious RSS treatise necessar-
ily implies a ‘they.’ For Hindu fundamentalists the ‘theys’ have always been many but after
independence have increasingly included a secular government favoring religious pluralism”
(Gold 1991:576). The fact that Hindutva discourses routinely reject more pluralistic visions
of Indian society does not mean that Hindutva is itself a singular voice; there is a spectrum
of Hindutva on which there exists greater and lesser degrees of vehemence for Hindu ascen-
dancy (and against minority views). For example, Deepa S. Reddy’s recent study of Hindutva
nationalism (or ethnicism, as she prefers to term it for the purposes of her book) makes an
intriguing point when she argues that Hindu nationalism can be read as a particular critique
of modernity and secularism (2006), but she weakens her own case by focusing solely on its
criticism, on the one hand, and honoring its devotion or bhakti to the homeland, on the other
hand. Reddy claims that Hindutva should not be read as extremism or pathology, and by
positioning both her subject and her study as an exercise in bhakti or Hindu devotionalism,
she casts her autoethnographic reportage as an uncritical acceptance, and even celebra-
tion, of Hindutva as a “way of Being” (2006:188).5 The spectrum of views, and its implicit
critiques aside, Hindutva is essentially an ideology of exclusivity, Othering, and religious
exceptionalism—this is the ugly reality of the whole story that Reddy handily sidesteps. To
that end, I feel compelled to re-pathologize what Reddy has tried to de-pathologize.

Hindutva ideology flows from India to the United States, yet dollars flow backward from the
United States to India (Sabrang Communications–SACW:2002; Therwath 2005). Ingrid
Therwath writes of Hindutva institutions, “that the Sangh Parivar draws its funds from
foreign sources is a well-known fact” (2005). In effect, Hindutva in the diaspora earns much
of the largesse that allows Hindutva politicians and organizers in India to realize their political
agendas. Hindu fundamentalism in the United States is worthy of careful scrutiny because
the substantial largesse raised here means that “Yankee Hindutva” is complicit in current
Indian politics. There is anti-Hindutva resistance within the Hindu American community,
much of it a progressive activism based in academia, but for all that, Hindutva has a manifest
foothold on university campuses. The Hindu Student Council, for example, a prominent
national group with chapters throughout the United States, is a part and parcel of the
Hindutva family. During my work canvassing Hindu temples in the greater metropolitan

168 ETHOS

D.C. area, it became clear that Hindutva was still a minority perspective among Hindu
Americans, but it was gaining popularity at the time.

Hindu extremist ideology aims to systematically curb and admonish the political authenti-
cation of Muslim and Christian Indians in India. By virtue of its paralleled exclusions, this
stance mirrors the structural “possessive investment in whiteness” of the mainstream United
States (Lipsitz 1998), in which white majority and privilege is ferociously and systematically
guarded against incursion by peoples of color. The innumerable racist structures of U.S.
society, bolstered in the hopes of maintaining white supremacy, have unintended social con-
sequences, including the advancement of Hindutva discourse among some Hindu American
communities.

The Model Minority Myth and Its Consequences

Contemporary ethnicity and race theories reinforce the understanding that both ethnicity
and race are constructed and shifting categories (Barth 1969; Bonilla-Silva 2006; Lipsitz
1998; Williams 1989), so much so that one is tempted to say that race is utterly empty, until
one stops to recognize how much weight it carries in lived experience. Although race is a
cultural construction indeed, this is an academic truism and not a useful discursive endpoint.
Ethnic and racial categories are always in flux, and it is our task as social scientists to trace
these transformations in time and space.

In the “post–Civil Rights” United States, whiteness is still supreme,6 even though the orga-
nized white supremacy movement itself has arguably become a fairly marginalized.7 Despite
this, George Lipsitz has written compellingly about the cultural work that “mainstream
white America” has engaged in to maintain a position at the top of the racial pecking order
(1998). Indeed, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva rightly observes that even “color-blind” “non-racists”
are often responsible for ignoring, and even quietly promoting, structural racism in con-
temporary U.S. society (2006). By embracing the notion of the model minority and pitting
nonwhite groups against each other, the discourse of white privilege in the United States
has created a multitiered racial hegemony (unlike South Africa’s former apartheid structure
only in its lack of militant regulation).

The “model minority” stereotype was first coined by the mainstream U.S. media in 1965
as a footnote to the civil rights movement, because according to their narrative, while
African Americans were still protesting for more rights and generally making mischief, the
Asian minorities were just working hard and succeeding without making disruptive political
demands (Prashad 2000). Vijay Prashad has quite rightly argued that from a mainstream
vantage point the model minority trope explicitly establishes Asian immigrants as better-than
blacks and Latinos, while implicitly marking them as lesser-than whites (2000). The model
minority myth creates a social currency that allows for Asians, including Hindu Americans, to
be viewed in general as more intelligent and hard working than other minorities: definitive
high-achieving nontroublemakers. There has been substantial academic resistance to the
notion of the model minority, especially given some of the problems (e.g., heightened

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 169

academic expectations that may be unrealistic and anxiety-provoking) that accompany such
stereotypes (Dhingra 2007; Khandelwal 2002; Maira 2002; Prashad 2000). For example,
Khandelwal writes, “As a result of their status as ‘successful immigrants,’ these Indian ethnic
leaders distanced themselves from their less privileged compatriots and rejoiced in their
‘model minority’ image” (2002:5). My research shows that many Hindu Americans have
a significant attachment to the model minority myth, but that there is a price to be paid
for that community’s general adherence to it strictures. Aside from being complicit in the
continued subjugation of other racial groups, one of the other tolls paid by South Asians
to be granted model minority status is relative political disenfranchisement. Vijay Prashad
correctly observes that South Asian communities have generally accepted the “model” mantle
wholesale in exchange for the attenuation of their U.S. political voices (2000).8 In the
aftermath of 9/11, for example, many Sikh Americans felt compelled to publically profess
their allegiance to Bush administration policies and demonstrate their patriotism by wearing
flag pins, regardless of their actual opinions, to assert their Americanness and maintain their
model minority privileges (Falcone 2006).

Hindutva has arguably given immigrant Hindus, who are minorities abroad, surrounded
by societies that do not usually understand their religion and often view their native place
as impoverished and “third world,” a focal point of pride in their heritage, boosting their
communal self-esteem (Prashad 2000). He writes that in the “white supremacist” climate of
the United States, many Indians have embraced Hindutva as an antidote to their humbled
pride even though some were not supporters of Hindutva when living in India: “Yankee
Hindutva offers a way for migrants to reconstruct their dignity in a racist society. Through
their activities, they try to show that Indians have a great culture, one even superior to U.S.
culture” (2000:147). Not incidentally, the Hindutva-tinged Indian nationalism of “Yankee
Hindutva” may also mitigate any guilt that some Hindu Americans feel about leaving behind
“Mother India” (and often even their birth mothers).9 Alienation in the United States
awakens hunger for the romanticized narrative of belonging, acceptance, and Hindu unity
that Hindutva stories have constructed.

Building on this focused introduction to ideologies and realities of Hindutva and racial
Othering that were ubiquitous in my Hindu American summer camp field sites, I will now
address the issues of racialization and alienation through the analysis of two detailed case
studies. Although Hindutva-charged camps are not the only summer camps in the United
States to teach religious extremism,10 and nor do they teach material widely divergent from
that available at Hindutva camps in India, the trends unfolding in the Hindutva American
community are worth more careful examination. In the following two sections, I will discuss
the summer camps themselves in turn as general sites of Hindu identity formation, as well
as spaces in which the Hindutva ideology is reproduced and cultivated.11

Putting the Fun in Fundamentalism: The Shantiniketan Camp

The Shantiniketan Summer Camp, my first case study, was the product of a collaborative
effort between the local groups of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) and the Vishwa

170 ETHOS

Hindu Parishad (VHP),12 which often overlap in informal membership and work closely
together. The HSS and the VHP are both Hindutva organizations that have vehemently,
and sometimes violently, worked against the secular Indian state in favor of an exclusionary
Hindu state.

The Shantiniketan Summer Camp brought together the children and parents of the three
HSS Sunday schools and the general VHP membership in the greater D.C. region (incl. the
Sunday school community at a Gujarati mandir where I had been doing ethnographic work
for the nine months prior to the camp) for intensive education in political, religious, and
cultural aspects of Hindutva ideology. The Shantiniketan Summer Camp was a sleepaway
camp for both children and parents, and for that reason, it was quite short—it ran over
the course of just four full days. There were approximately 100 people, including campers
from elementary, middle and high school, and a few dozen parents and counselors. The
camp acted as a kind of extension of regular Hindutva Sunday schools,13 provided a kind of
grand culmination to an annual calendar of Hindutva events, and served as a way to promote
regional networks and connections between smaller local groups.

Shantiniketan was run by elder VHP leaders, and a handful of young male Indian “Hindutva
volunteers” (self-identifying as Hindutva karsevaks),14 the latter of which had immigrated
over the past few years for higher education, many of whom had been involved in RSS
activities at home. The parents of the campers, most of whom had emigrated in the 1970s
and 1980s, however, had not necessarily been Hindutva supporters back home in India.
During my pre-camp canvass, only a portion of these parents indicated that they had held
Hindutva in high regard before immigrating to the United States. Some of the parents
said that they joined just because they felt the need to do so here in the United States,
because it helped them to feel they were contributing meaningfully to their native land
(e.g., through fundraising for the VHP’s rural development projects), or by advancing a
political agenda they felt new respect for. Others indicated that they joined because of peer
pressure from within their temple community. “This is my Gujarati mandir. This is the
youth group, and this is the camp. Why would I go anywhere else?,” indicated one parent;
in other contexts in which we interacted this man signaled less investment in Hindutva
than the karsevaks, but at the camp he seemed content to go with the flow of the teachings
and activities. Most of the parents (who I talked to about this topic) who did not support
the VHP before immigrating did say that they had a certain amount of discomfort about
Muslims while in India: they felt that Muslims had too many advantages, or that minority
groups were sometimes overbearing. It seemed that Hindutva feelings had been present in
for these parents while in India, although most were not members of organized Hindutva
groups before immigrating to the United States.

The promotion of Hindutva ideology at the camp was accomplished through various ac-
tivities, including games, lectures, and events. The children learned a set of drills and
formation, as well as what I can only describe as militant yoga,15 that reflected the mission of
the leaders to militarize Hinduism. The atmosphere of discipline was punctuated with loud

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 171

nationalist chants for Hindu solidarity by the karsevaks. According to the karsevak coun-
selors, the games, races, and physical activities were all focused on one of two goals: (1)
toughen the “soft” Hindu kids; discipline them; (2) teach and play “Hindu” games, like
kabbadi, and “authentic Hindu” dances, such as Garba-raas.16 The drills, games and physical
program at Shantiniketan were largely imported from the routines of RSS branches (shakhas)
in India (Jaffrelot 2005).

A Hindutva treasure hunt organized by the karsevak counselors celebrated the story of the
Ramayana by couching the clues in terms of the Ramayana’s famous places and characters,
even while simultaneously demonizing present-day Muslims as the symbolic evil demon in
a modern adaptation of the classic Hindu tale. In most classic versions of the Ramayana,
Ram’s wife Sita is abducted by a demon king, Ravana, and Ram must wage war to rescue her.
Ravana was not a Muslim, but he was an alien, an outsider, from the land of Lanka. At the
Shantiniketan summer camp, the four pictures of “demons” that were placed in the center of
the targets during the arrow-shooting portion of the treasure hunt were not Lankan enemies,
but, rather, Hindutva’s brand of contemporary enemies: (1) Osama Bin Laden; (2) a Mughal
emperor; (3) Hitler; and (4) Pervez Musharraf (who was the Pakistani president at the time).
It is notable that Bin Laden, the most wanted Muslim enemy of the United States at the
time, not to mention the ubiquitously reviled Hitler, were both equated to Musharraf, who
was one of the most valuable Muslim allies of the United States at the time. The politics
of “Yankee Hindutva” are not mainstream U.S. politics. Hindu extremists look at political
events with a specifically anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan focus. The counselors and parents
were uneven in their explanations of the photos of the demons; some groups of children had
a lengthy explanation of the Hindutva “demons” they were shooting arrows at, while other
children shot away without really knowing what or who the pictures represented.

Religious lessons and handouts at the camp highlighted Hindu unity, strength, community
assertiveness, devotion, and aggressiveness. One controversial lesson promoted at Shan-
tiniketan is that Hinduism is Hindutva, and Hindutva is Hinduism. Vedanta teachers and
lessons were sought from outside of the VHP to certify and approve the conflation, but
as I will discuss later in this article, any Vedantic teachings that conflicted with significant
aspects of Hindutva ideology were not institutionally tolerated.

There were several camp events of a more specifically religious nature, bent on celebrating
and teaching aspects of Hindu ritual. If these lessons were taken apart from the Hindutva
discourse, they could be seen simply as Hindu spiritual education. However, in the context
of the Hindutva camp, one goal of these programs was to create linkages suggesting that
Hindu religious practice is inseparable from Hindutva political ideology and discourse. The
young people I interviewed seemed convinced by this equation of religion and politics,
for example several campers indicated that any challenge to the politics of Hindutva was
itself anti-Hinduism. The lesson that Hindutva is Hinduism, and not simply a particular
ideology among many, was an uncontested dogma by campers, parents, elders, and karsevaks
alike.

172 ETHOS

The Hindutva agenda was also promulgated within the education sessions hosted by kar-
sevaks for the parents, that is, the adult campers. During an education session about the
elevation and superiority of “the classical ancient Hindu culture,” a Hindutva follower
discussed the possibility of restoring the now-dry Sarasvati River, which had been men-
tioned in the Vedas as part of the sacred landscape. Another education session included
a long speech by an older VHP leader who lambasted his fellow Hindus for not fight-
ing hard enough against the so-called Muslim and Christian onslaught: “the battle is on.
If we don’t pull together we will lose the battle. They are saying that we force adiva-
sis to convert form Christianity. The Christian missionaries are trying to destroy us. We
are a just people. But we are miserly and we don’t give enough time. It’s all baloney.
Stand up! If life has no obstacles then it’s not worth living!” A third education session
revolved largely around the question of how to improve Hindu (and especially Hin-
dutva) prestige in Western media. Working to control media images of Hindus is one
of the core goals of the Sangh Parivar abroad (Katju 2005). The karsevaks used the ed-
ucation sessions at the summer camp to promote movement propaganda for the whole
family.

The two discussion sessions for the teen campers were titled: “Coping with Cultural Clash?
How to be an assertive Hindu,” and “Parental Pressures and Personal Aspirations: Preserving
our heritage and the importance of marriage within the Hindu community.” The discussions
were intended to teach children that Hindus ought to be aggressive and strong, as part of
the larger militancy campaign of Hindutva. The latter discussion on dating and marriage,
which I described briefly in the introduction served to underline Hindu unity at all costs.
The ideal dating and marrying pool for Hindutva-goers was crystal clear at Shantiniketan:
Hindus should marry Hindus. The first part of the facilitated discussion on dating had served
as an outlet for the impressions and frustration of the high school aged campers, who were
generally not allowed to date (and often encouraged to avoid socializing with the opposite
sex altogether).

Preeti, the counselor who had confessed to, and then retracted her story about, dating a
Muslim, was very committed to Shantiniketan (and the regular Gujarati Sunday school that
fed into the camp), but she did not conform to the political beliefs of most of the other
counselors. She primarily worked with the youngest batch of children, yet she said that
she had come to the “dating” discussion of the older campers because the topic was of
personal interest to her. After her initial revelation, Preeti had qualified her first statement
by saying that even if she did end up marrying her Muslim boyfriend, she would raise her
children as Hindus. Her dialogue on interracial relationships led me to believe that she was
very open-minded at school, but generally committed to her Hindu identity as a bottom
line. Preeti’s brave outburst at the education session did serve to underscore the back-stage
“hidden transcripts” of ambivalence among second-generation Indian Americans. Second-
generation campers often talked more openly about dissent among themselves, but there
was a disciplined line of reasoning within them that seemed to respect certain ideologies
promoted by Hindutva, their parents, and others.

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 173

The social mores promoted by the Shantiniketan leaders and karsevaks teach students and
parents about being a “good” Hindu, but the discussions at Shantiniketan also strayed far
into the realm of what it means to be the “right” kind of minority in the United States.
The night after the “Parental Pressures and Personal Aspirations” discussion, for example,
the campers in their bunks talked about dating, and despite the fact that I was the only
adult in earshot (or perhaps because of it), they reiterated and reaffirmed the lessons of
who was permissible to date and who was not. “I would never date a Muslim. My parents
would kill me,” said one preteen. Another young woman, called Seema, continued, saying
something to the effect of, “Yeah, never. But I would date a white guy . . . I would only
marry a Hindu, but I’d be open to dating white guys.” Other girls chimed in about how their
parents would also disapprove if they tried to date a white person (or date at all). Seema joked
about how she would bring home an African American Muslim just to scare her parents,
so that they would accept anyone after that, even a white guy. There were giggles, but also
loud exclamations. Seema, like Preeti earlier in the day, quickly told her friends that she
was joking. In conversations like this at Shantiniketan, I witnessed young people play with,
loosen, and yet also reaffirm the racial and religious boundaries that their parents and Hindu
community had so explicitly prescribed.17

The educational discussions at Shantiniketan served as reminders of the diversity of opinions
within the organization, yet helped to solidify my understanding of the discourses of race,
religion, and hegemony being articulated. Without fail, campers at both of the summer camps
I studied told me that they had lots of white and “Indian” friends, but few or no African
American or Latino friends. As discussed in the previous section, many Indian immigrants
have bought into the mores of U.S. racism, and this was clearly true at Shantiniketan.

Most of my first generation Indian American informants expressed to their children the
need to avoid dressing like, behaving like, or socializing with African Americans; I heard this
from both the parents and the campers. A camper told me that his mother had given away
the clothes he had bought with his friends at the mall, because they were perceived to be
“too black.” Another camper told me that he was not permitted to listen to hip-hop music at
home, so he would hide copies of CDs made by his friends, or listen to rap at the homes of
his friends. “I lead a double life,” said one teenage, male camper at Shantiniketan, “I tell my
parents what they want to hear and then I do whatever I want. They don’t understand me,
but I don’t want to hurt their feelings. I like Bollywood music okay, but it’s not cool. I can’t
listen to it at school. I love rap. I’ll never tell my mom though—she would die!” I talked to
one mother who did not ban rap in her home, but she wished she could; she said that by
allowing her teen to spend his money on rap, she was ensuring that she could police him
better. The controversies raised by rap consumption were invariably as much about the level
of immorality thought to be promoted by the music, as well as the general notion shared by
most in the community that black culture had no place in the home of a good Hindu family.

The compulsion of this ostensibly model minority community to work to remain “better-
than” African Americans was manifestly clear in the myriad of conversations in which parents
discussed how difficult it was keep black culture out of the lives of their children. In addressing

174 ETHOS

the rising appropriation of aspects of “black culture” by Indian youth, Sunaina Marr Maira
notes this is driven in part by intergenerational identity formation, rebelliousness, and
also a creative “recoding of high/low relations” (2002:76). Like Maira’s work, my research
demonstrates that the class positionality of Indian Americans hinges on the maintenance
of the model minority typology, and therefore the consumer and youth culture pressures
toward inculcating hip-hop music and fashion can been seen as extremely dangerous class
play. The parents at Shantiniketan were nothing if not worried about maintaining and
reproducing their class privileges, and their open racism was symptomatic of the desire to
maintain model minority status.

Much of the general discussion at Shantiniketan in the summer of 2002 revolved around
how to deflect the bad press that the VHP had received that March during the Gujarat riots,
how to recruit new members, and how to propagate Hindu and Hindutva pride. I will return
to this anxiety in detail in a later section. There was a sense of unease about the reports
that some white coworkers and neighbors “misunderstood” Hindutva, based on the “unfair
media coverage” of the Gujarat riots. The desire to control press about Hindutva is directly
linked with the compulsion to be seen as pious, nontroublesome, model minorities in their
adopted homeland.

The Fun Continues: The Chinmaya Mission

My second case study, The Chinmaya Mission Washington Regional Center, is a Hindu tem-
ple that was established in Washington, D.C., in 1988. The center is part of an international
organization of Vedantic education and activism called Chinmaya Mission International.
According to the swami directing the Chinmaya Mission summer camp, the organization
was founded by Swami Chinmayananda in India in the 1950s, and boasted over 200 centers
in India and the diaspora. Its central mission, according to devotees, was the spread and
advancement of the Hinduism prescribed in the Vedantas; in the United States, the leader
of the camp told me, it was particularly important to educate youth toward “Hindu pride”
and identification with their “Indian motherland.” In the summer of 2002, the Chinmaya
Mission Summer Camp was a nine-week day camp that ran from Monday through Friday for
children ages 6–12. The parents of these campers, most of whom immigrated to the United
States in the 1970s and 1980s, were committed to giving their children a Hindu education
to go along with their mainstream academic one. Parents of Chinmaya Mission students in
the summer of 2002 were almost all middle or upper class; most families had at least one
parent with college degrees or higher. Anthropologist Peter van der Veer has observed that
the Chinmaya Mission has managed to construct an educational program and discourse that
modernizes the Vedantic discourse for the needs of a rising middle class in India and the
diaspora (1994). Van der Veer also observed that the Chinmaya Mission was one of the first
Hindu institutions to take root in the diaspora, and many other Hindu swamis and groups
(incl. the VHP) followed Chinmaya’s lead in focusing on Hindu communities abroad.

The Chinmaya Mission is linked historically and ideologically with the Hindutva fam-
ily, yet its members approach the question of Hindu-ness almost entirely from a

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 175

religious revival perspective.18 Chinmaya Mission International was first founded by Swami
Chinmayananda in India in 1953 with the purpose of spreading the teaching of the Vedanta.
Swami Chinmayananda was also one of the founders of the VHP as well as its first pres-
ident (Basu et al. 1993; Katju 2005; McKean 1996).19 As an institution, the contemporary
Chinmaya Mission tends to foreground religious discourse and background its politics, so
while the historical links to Hindutva illuminate larger institutional goals, its immediate
connections to Hindutva are more subtle. For example, there was a distinct understanding
in Mission discourse that Hindus are one exclusive, unified community. Although two white
devotees held key positions of respect at the Mission at that time, they were prevented from
ever becoming Swamis, and, according to several of my Indian American informants there,
the white Hindus could never become “real Hindus.” Also, the Chinmaya Mission Pledge
recited every afternoon during the aarthi prayer session subtly evokes the Hindutva notion
of the “one Hindu family,” as well as the Hindutva emphasis on militancy and discipline
to “fight,” as well as one’s duty to India. The Hindutva evocations paired with the careful
vagueness of certain definitions is a notable example of the underlying ambiguity with which
the Mission treats Hindutva, even though the relationship itself is undeniable. The ambi-
guity regarding Hindutva politics seems to be a successful stance for retaining membership
at Chinmaya though, because those parents who indicated they embraced Hindutva were
standing side by side in worship with families that indicated substantial discomfort with the
ideology.

Swami Harinanda, the resident acharya (spiritual teacher), who is also the President of
the Chinmaya Mission Washington Regional Center, was the head teacher at the summer
camp. He was assisted by Pooja, a brahmacharini (female spiritual teacher in training), who
was a transnational young swami. Pooja was a young Hindu Indian Australian (via South
Africa) who teaches in a Chinmaya center in East Asia during the academic year. The
Chinmaya Mission in Washington, D.C., was going through a period of intense growth
during my fieldwork period; while they had held weekend teachings during the previous
academic year in local school cafeterias and gymnasiums, they held the summer camp in
their newly finished temple. The temple itself was formally consecrated at the end of the
summer.

A typical day at the Chinmaya Summer Camp had attendance varying anywhere from 12 to 40
children, and included educational sessions on Vedantic tradition, storytelling from Indian
epics, religious chanting, prayer, running games, memory games, preparation for the Annual
Day skits and the Ramayana-inspired dance drama to be presented to the current head of
Chinmaya International. In addition, every day there was a class on one of the following:
arts and crafts (sometimes with a South Asian theme, although not always), Indian dancing,
classical Indian singing, Hindi language class, or a class in Indian Heritage.

The Vedanta class provided daily opportunities to observe the ontology and morality es-
poused at the Chinmaya Mission. Lessons revolved around the importance of “Guru,”
monotheistic polytheism, moral living, and the importance of nurturing body, mind, and

176 ETHOS

intellect. Swami or Pooja told stories and fables often taken from one of the Hindu epics,
usually either the Ramayana or the Mahabharata.

Swami and Pooja had quite different views on the place of Hindutva politics in Hindu
religious culture. Swami Harinanda was somewhat evasive about his opinion of Hindutva
politics during our interviews, but he did admit a strong sense of respect for the Hindutva
Parivar. The Swami told me that there is a range of Hindutva groups, and then he listed
from “worst” to “better”: Bajrang Dal, RSS, Shiv Sena, VHP, BJP. He stated clearly that
he had less empathy for the “worst,” but had a great deal of affinity for the “better.”
The swami’s camaraderie, partnerships and frequent socializing with the VHP and HSS
karsevaks of Shantiniketan, became increasingly evident to me over the months that I spent
at the Mission. During my period of involvement with the Mission, he hosted VHP and RSS
followers at meals, invited members of those groups to the Chinmaya Mission discourses
and talks, and accepted invitations to speak at VHP–HSS events.

The Swami was exceptionally attuned to his audience, and spoke according to the com-
position of his crowd. He was clearly cognizant of the lukewarm reception that Hindutva
ideology had received in mainstream U.S. media outlets in the wake of the Gujarat mas-
sacres in 2002; at least in the year plus that I was doing research, while in mixed company,
Harinanda was careful to tread lightly about Hindutva values and politics, whereas at the
VHP–HSS events, his messages were always in direct accordance with Hindutva dogma.20

Brahmacharini Pooja, however, expressed and demonstrated much more ambivalence about
Hindutva ideology, showing empathy with, and repulsion to, disparate tenets. Pooja was
the one staff person at the Chinmaya Mission who admitted candidly that Swami Chin-
mayananda had been involved in the founding of the VHP, although she simultaneously
assured me that Swami Chinmayananda had moved on from the VHP and therefore could
not be held responsible for what that organization had become. She also told me that
Chinmaya Mission teachers and Swamis all over the world approached the Hindutva issue
differently, as there was no mandate from the leadership about politics. With some dis-
comfort, she revealed that most of the Swamis had Hindutva tendencies, but she felt that
this was not the fault of the Chinmaya Mission institution itself. Brahmacharini Pooja also
told me that she personally felt that it was unequivocally wrong to promote violence against
Christians and Muslims as Hindutva groups have been known to do. Yet, she noted that
much of the Hindu extremist agenda is fueled by the perception that minorities in India
receive special treatment at the expense of the majority Hindus—a perception that she her-
self agreed with: “It is hard to be a Hindu in India; there are many injustices.” Pooja’s view
seemed to neatly reflect the kind of Hindu pride and commitment that was deeply sensitive
and resentful of perceived injustices (past and present) and yet balked at any suggestion
that Hindus should thus commit violence in the wake of their communal frustrations.21 In
sum, Pooja’s views represent a less ideological end of the Hindutva spectrum that exists in
Chinmaya Mission more generally.22 Pooja also participated in a VHP–HSS event during
her summer in Washington, D.C., yet her intolerance of hate speech was clearly evident,

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 177

because her negation of certain core Hindutva values shocked the gathered assembly, as I
will discuss in a later section of this article.

At Chinmaya, as with Shantiniketan, there were deep undercurrents of U.S. racism and
stereotypes. The Chinmaya Mission community members, although more inclusive than
those at Shantiniketan, evinced many of the same stereotypes and boundary-maintaining
racial discourses. Discomfort with Muslims and African Americans was a general overarching,
if not ubiquitous, part of community culture. For example, during a conversation about
Chinmaya Mission’s Hindu community, one dark-skinned South Indian Hindu woman at
the Chinmaya Mission said to me, quite out of nowhere, as if answering a question that
I hadn’t asked: “We’re not white like you, but we are white compared to those people.”
“Those people?” I queried in response. “The blacks,” she said, “In skin color we are more
like them, but in our culture we are more like whites.” As I probed this question further with
Chinmaya Mission parents at subsequent teachings, I was told by another child’s father that
“Even the darkest Indian is more white than the lightest skin black person.” Skin pigment
was less important to these Chinmaya Mission parents than ethnic markers that in their eyes
served to raise Asians above other minorities of color.

Although most of the youth I spoke to at both field sites stated clearly that their parents
wanted and expected them to marry Indians or other Indian Americans, a notable number
of youth had parents who had more specifically forbidden their children to marry Muslims
and/or African Americans. One Chinmaya preteen told me that her parents, “want me
to marry anyone who is a good person, even if they aren’t Indian, as long as they’re not
Muslim . . . or black.” At Chinmaya, the younger children indicated awareness of race in
different ways, such as by talking about the color of the kids whose houses they could play
at after school. Race was not a prevalent topic of discussion at the summer camp, nor during
the weekend events held during the school year, but insofar as my informants consistently
articulated their relative “whiteness” over other minorities, I felt compelled to pay attention
to the ways in which U.S. race relations had become embedded in the process of Hindu
American identity construction.

The Hindu American Split Self: Racism and the Desire to be Recognized

In exploring the contours of racism and hate speech at Hindutva summer camps, I found
myself facing two distinct, but interrelated questions regarding Hindutva-leaning Indian
American immigrants to the United States: Why teach their children an aversion to African
Americans, whether implicitly or explicitly? And, why teach aversion to Muslims, whether
implicitly or explicitly? In this section, I focus on the first question, and link it to the ways in
which Hindus specifically, and Asians in general, as immigrants have adapted to the mores
of U.S. race and ethnicity, and then return to the second question.

My research is in direct accordance with Pawan Dhingra’s work on Indian and Korean
immigrants in Dallas (2007), showing that many Hindu immigrants rebuke racism when it
is directed at them, yet simultaneously give currency to racism directed at black Americans.

178 ETHOS

My work also parallels Dhingra (2007) and Prashad’s (2000) work insofar as identifying the
classism and racism at the root of the model minority discourse is a factor in the widespread
acceptance of Hindu racism directed against nonwhites and non-Asians.

My Hindu informants at both Chinmaya Mission and Shantiniketan were vocally dismayed
by the racism directed against them in the United States. The Hindus who immigrated to
the United States directly from India were used to being located in the religious and racial
majority, and used to being a shade of brown in a sea of brown peoples.23 They arrived on
the shores of the “land of the free” only to feel the hot gaze of white mainstream Americans
on them: for some Hindu immigrants, the sudden shift in self-consciousness must have been
akin to a transformational Hegelian master–slave moment in which the subjectivity of one is
found to be contingent on the other.24 Lacan’s work on the psyche also demonstrates that the
self is constructed in a dialectical relation with the Other (1977), and for our purposes this
observation sheds light on a constitutive aspect of the immigrant experience. Some Hindu
immigrants may have experienced the new racial hegemony as Lacan’s Third, what he calls
“the Father” or “the Phallus” (what here can be identified as the norm of white supremacy),
and hence suffered the Split Self, becoming the Hindu American subject. The Third is power,
law, the way things are; it is society working on and through itself toward the creation and
maintenance of hegemonies. In this case, the Third, this element of power, has provided
an opportunity for racism to reproduce and strengthen itself at the expense of diversity and
acceptance. Thus, out of deference to the social “laws” of the racialized landscape of the
United States that they encountered on their emigration, the Hindu American subject has
overwhelmingly accepted the crown of the model minority, and the roses and thorns that
come with it.

W. E. B. Dubois’s theory of “double consciousness” also illuminates the frustration that
Othered Hindu immigrants feel when alienated from themselves by the gaze of a white
majority (1968). Dubois was writing about the effect of white supremacy on black aspiration
in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, but his observations have currency
in the contemporary racial landscape as well. Dubois wrote that a “veil” of racism hung
between blacks and whites, and served as a socioeconomic wall keeping blacks from equal
rights and divesting them of equal opportunities. Most insidiously the wall served to divide
blacks from themselves through the appropriation of a more powerful, more masterful
gaze.

It is a peculiar sensation, this “double-consciousness,” this sense of always looking at
one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world
that looks on in amused, contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American,
a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one
dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. [Dubois 1968
[1903]:3]

Writing almost a century later, Playthell Benjamin argues that the double consciousness
metaphor is just as valid in today’s racial landscape as it was in Dubois’s United States

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 179

(Crouch and Benjamin 2002). Dubois’s notion of “double consciousness” perfectly explicates
the self-alienation perpetrated on other minorities by contemporary white supremacy.

The Hindu subject new to the United States saw herself reflected in the hegemonic glare
of racism; saw herself as the Other; saw herself as contingent; saw her subject position as
dialectically constituted by the powerful and unfamiliar force of U.S. racism. For example,
Lata Mani narrated two incidents that happened to her in one week at her university, one
in which a white professor sized her up and refused to let her into her building after hours
(race playing a factor), and another in which a Chicana janitor opened a locked door for
her without a thought (class playing the dominant role in her decision). She discussed how
being brought up in Bombay had not prepared her for U.S. racism: “Not having grown up
as the Other of my society, I do not expect to be positioned as such” (Frankenberg and Mani
1996:279). Although Dubois had grown up behind the “veil” of racism, the experience of
“double consciousness,” of being split and reconstituted through the eyes of the Othering
white majority is jolting to all of my Hindu informants. I did not ask my Hindu informants
to share the specific memories they may have had of how they were treated at the airport,
or when they first became Othered in the United States,25 but some did tell me about
early developments in their race consciousness on coming to the United States. One Hindu
woman with a daughter at the Chinmaya Mission said that she arrived at the Chicago airport
in a saree in the mid-1970s, and that she will never forget how much people stared at her,
how different she felt, and how a white teenaged girl and her friends made fun of her outfit
as she waited for her luggage. As the woman recounted her feelings, another woman sitting
with us, said that she did not feel anything unwelcoming when she first arrived, but it was
weeks later when she heard a cashier at a grocery store call her husband a “nigger” (and later
asked a friend what it meant) that she began to realize that some people saw Hindus quite
differently than she thought they had. In India, the woman said, she and her husband are
considered quite fair.

During a different interview with the parent of a Shantiniketan camper, my informant said
that he felt different right away. From the moment he stepped off the plane, he felt that
people were mistaking him for something other than a nice, well-educated, Hindu man from
India: “The looks I got. . . . Nobody said anything to me. Nothing bad, I mean to say. But
it was strange, because some people stared. Really stared, even though it’s rude here [in the
United States]. So everyone was looking, but I really felt that nobody was seeing me.” These
first uncomfortable memories are often followed by a litany of others. The gentleman who
felt that he was being made invisible by aggressive staring noted a whole list of moments
in which he felt racism impinge on his sense of belonging. He talked about racist incidents
during which he was “snapped back” into that first feeling of being treated like an alien.

Many in the Hindu community have felt reduced and inauthentic, and yearned for recogni-
tion and acceptance from mainstream Americans (Prashad 2000). Ewing writes in her own
ethnography of Sufi pirs that “the constituting experience at the heart of human subjectivity
is recognition by another” (1997:6). I argue that it is this desire for recognition that moti-
vated the cultural exchange in which Hindu Americans generally accepted the double-edged

180 ETHOS

myth of “the model minority” in exchange for political disempowerment and what Vijay
Prashad would consider estrangement from other peoples of color (Prashad 2000). The
Hindu subject then becomes Simmel’s “Stranger” (1985), a necessary interlocutor against
which “mainstream white America” defines itself, as well as a buffer against the category of
necessarily un-“model” minorities.

The power of U.S. racism to deign that minorities are visible, while whites remain comfort-
ably “invisible” (Williams 1989), helps to explain the conditions that led so many Hindus
to internalize the myth of the model minority. Many in the Hindu American community
have accepted the “ideological fantasy” of the myth of the model minority, and in doing
so they are unwittingly taking an active part in reconstituting racism in the United States.
Ideological fantasy refers to the misrecognition of the illusion that governs the Lacanian
“real” (Žižek 1989). It is the unconscious illusion that accepts the myths structuring our
daily lives. Hindus do have agency, of course, as everyone both simultaneously embodies
and lacks agency at once.26 Hindus who strive to affirm, and reap the benefits of the model
minority myth, are making practical decisions (with ideological implications) when they try
to make the best of their situation in the white supremacist United States. Hindu Americans
enter a landscape fraught with racial sensitivity and are forced to accommodate to it, in
the process remaking it, themselves, and the very character of U.S. race mores in general.
Indeed, Lipsitz has noted that, “People of color have never been merely passive victims of
white supremacist power. The active agency of aggrieved communities has always served as
an important counterweight to white power” (1998:158). This is true in the case of Hindu
Americans, who while mired in and constructed by manifestations of white power, also effect
identity politics in ways that the white mainstream never anticipated (such as engaging in a
resurgence of Hindutva ideology).

Given the intense activity of Hindutva in the diaspora, I found it puzzling that there was
almost no corresponding engagement in the U.S. political arena by D.C. area Hindu com-
munities during my fieldwork period.27 Directly after the events of 9/11, my Hindu and
Sikh informants in the D.C. area endured the indignity of being victimized twice over (be-
ing assaulted by Al Qaeda with the rest of the grieving nation for being “Americans,” and
then being assaulted by other citizens of the United States who abused them as if they were
part of Al Qaeda; Falcone 2006). Many of my South Asian informants of various faiths had
to endure defaced cars, homes, and places of worship, as well as new threats to their person.
A Hindu mandir in the D.C. area was vandalized soon after 9/11, but I observed that my
informants did nothing to protest these acts, and only counseled each other to wait until the
tension receded with time. Parents of the children who attended the Sunday school at the
defaced Hindu mandir told me that they feared that if they made a public fuss, they would
be seen as troublemakers.

From late 2001 through 2002, my Hindu and Sikh informants (belonging to more liberal
and more conservative congregations within each tradition) both overwhelmingly reported
self-censorship regarding their political discussions with people outside their own ethnic
communities, as well as perceived pressures to show their support of the strikes against

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 181

Afghanistan even if they were actually against them (Falcone 2006). Some of my South Asian
informants who despised the Bush administration began publicly praising it, erecting signs
lauding Bush in the front yards of their religious institutions, or carrying signs at candlelight
vigils for the 9/11 victims that simultaneously praised U.S. soldiers fighting in Afghanistan.
Many of my Hindu extremist informants were actually supportive of George W. Bush in
general, and the Afghanistan strikes in particular, but even these informants told narratives of
feeling compelled to remain quiet about the post-9/11 elevation in racism against themselves
and their families. In more public spaces, political silence was deafeningly loud; such low
civil engagement by a community immigrating from one of the most active and densely
populated democracies in the world implicitly indicates the presence of a social obstruction:
U.S. racism. I would argue that the political disenfranchisement of South Asian Americans
has been both resisted and accommodated in different ways by various communities in
the intervening years,28 but in the next section I show how one of the by-products of this
obstructionist racism is an increasing rise in diaspora Hindutva.

(Mis)Recognizing the Stranger: Fantasy and Denial in the Diaspora

Thus far, I have argued that many Hindus have accepted the model minority subject position
as it is constituted by power itself, as well as how this configuration serves to promote the
mores of white supremacy in the United States. Now I discuss how these processes of U.S.
racism may have inadvertently served to advance the cause of “Yankee Hindutva.” I will begin
by elaborating on a particularly telling incident of ideological construction and maintenance
that shows, among other things, that Hindutva-leaning Americans are extremely conscious
of how they are viewed in the U.S. media.

One hot summer day in 2002, my two research field sites converged; the two Chinmaya
Mission teachers were both invited to speak at Education sessions at the Shantiniketan
summer camp. The event starkly demonstrated the breadth of conceptions of Hinduism
even in a Hindutva context, the level of investment in the institutionalized fantasies of
Hindu ideology, and the vital importance of positive coverage by the U.S. press. At the outset
of her session, one parent asked Brahmacharini Pooja what to do about the unpopularity
of Hindu fundamentalism in the Western media: “Hindus are being branded as fanatics.
The media always misportrays us. How can we give our kids tools to counteract such
things?”

This concern with how Hindus in general, and Hindutva groups in particular, are perceived
by the mainstream U.S. press is part of the new reality of the diaspora experience as discussed
by Pnina Werbner, who rightly notes that it is the tendency of new diasporic communities
“on the one hand, to fight for citizenship and equal rights in the place of settlement, on the
other, to continue to foster transnational relations and to live with a sense of displacement
and of loyalty to other places and groups beyond the place of settlement” (2000:5). In
this delicate balancing act, there is substantial concern about the way that one’s group is
being represented to the outside; good press is necessary to maintain the edge that comes
with model minority status. The Hindutva community was outraged that their political

182 ETHOS

views were being maligned, and they had been talking about it among themselves in Hindu
Sunday school venues for the weeks leading up to the camp. In response to this pointed
query about media representation, Pooja eventually replied that, “One response . . . is
that we should know our culture so that we can be proud of it.” Then she seized on the
following example: the way in which Gandhi’s achievement of enlightenment enabled him
to gracefully accept his karma during times of political upheaval. Because Gandhi is reviled
in the Hindutva community,29 Pooja’s deference to Gandhi caused an immediate stir: many
audience members squirmed in their seats and sought eye contact with one another. Soon
after, Pooja again raised the ire of her audience when talking about how human beings must
actively combat hatred and prejudice:

The world is a reflection of our minds. How many have had prejudice, like against
Muslims and blacks. Prejudice exists in our own minds so it exists in the world. If hatred
didn’t exist in our hearts then there would be no hatred.

By critiquing prejudice directly, Pooja undermined Hindutva’s fundamental antagonism
toward Muslims (and others), a primary tenet of Hindutva ideology. Her audience became
increasingly riled and argumentative. Pooja replied to vocal dissenters in the audience by
saying that prejudice is an unacceptable response to any situation. She then referred back to
the first question about what to give youth facing “unfair” media misportrayal of Hindus:

We can give our youth something to be able to fight fanaticism. . . . We can only
fight fanaticism and hatred with love. If we fight hatred with hatred then we have lost,
because we have not improved ourselves as persons. We can only fight ignorance with
knowledge. We can only fight violence with non-violence.

Immediately after she concluded her talk, many of the karsevaks and parents rushed into the
center aisle and quickly negated the ideas of her talk among themselves: “she is just being
idealistic”; “that was spiritual advice, but not practical”; and, “she is sweet, but naı̈ve.”30

As I later walked with some of the oldest campers to lunch, I asked Neilesh, a karsevak,
what he thought of Pooja’s talk. Neilesh was very disturbed and agitated about the fact that
Pooja had said that Gandhi was enlightened. He told me that he hates Gandhi and blames
him for the fact that India today is secular, and not explicitly a Hindu state. Neilesh insisted
that the image of Gandhi as the benevolent instigator of independence was a fallacy; he
also thought that Gandhi ought to have been assassinated earlier than he actually had been.
This conversation took place in front of several campers, and some of these middle-school-
age, second-generation Indian American girls elaborated by saying that Gandhi was not
an important Hindu leader, that he had betrayed his people by working with the Muslim
League, and that his assassination had come none too soon. At this last point, I balked, and
challenged the young woman. Again, a middle-school-aged female camper confirmed with
aplomb that it would have been better for Hindus if Gandhi had been killed much sooner,
because according to her, Gandhi’s meddling was to blame for the fact that so many Muslims
decided to stay in India after partition. A short time later, another karsevak bounded up to
us, and smugly reported that he had finally gotten Pooja to admit that violence can be used

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 183

in cases of genuine self-defense. He then cheerfully noted that because Hindus are definitely
“under threat of extinction” from the Muslim population of South Asia, Hindutva’s militancy
can still be seen as legitimate and Vedantically sanctioned.

Pooja’s talk at the Shantiniketan Summer Camp and its aftermath clarified that the definition
of Hindu-ness is clearly contested among institutions and ambiguous within them, even
among groups with Hindutva loyalties. Also significant is the fact that despite internal
debate, the ideological discourse at Shantiniketan grew stronger, not weaker by way of
dissent. The Shantiniketan’s community’s fierce attachment to Hindutva even in the face
of public shaming by the media, and negation by a Hindu religious leader in their midst
is intriguing. I had witnessed the anxious perception of Hindutva-leaning Americans that
indicated fear of compromising their model minority status through their politics. But
Hindutva activists were upset by unsympathetic portrayals of Hindutva in the U.S. media
for both socioeconomic and psychological reasons. The Orientalist myth of the pre-Muslim
Hindu Utopia and the model minority myth, both originally posited by non-Hindu white
hegemonies, are two “instituted fantasies” (Žižek 1989) or Lacanian symptoms (Lacan 1977)
constituting the “Yankee Hindutva” subject position.

One could argue that Hindutva itself can be seen in terms of a deluded attempt to return to the
unified “womb” of Hindu-ness, for in the arguably mystified view of Hindu fundamentalists,
Muslim and Christian outsiders disrupted the golden age of the utopian Hindu civilization.
This primal narcissism is itself, arguably, at least in part, an Orientalist, postcolonial remnant,
yet its effects continue to be embodied in the present, a testament to the fact that while power
has no will of its own, it has a life of its own. The Hindu American has a new distance, a
new alienation to deal with: immigration to a racist nation. So the Hindu American Split
Self yearns for impossible reconstitution, evoking the Hegelian notion of the Unhappy
Consciousness. The Hindutva ethic appeals to the desire for an “Ideal-I,” which in this
case represents the return to the primordial dream, that is, a completely unified totality, the
preseparate and precontingent (as in, Freud’s “oceanic feeling”). The Hindutva-sympathetic
Indian in Gujarat yearns for a fictional Hindu golden age, and the Hindutva-sympathetic
Indian in the D.C. area yearns for a return to an undifferentiated home in which their skin
color was invisible under the cover of these Hindutva fantasies of ancient Hindu utopias.

Not only does the political disempowerment of Hindus inherent in U.S. racism make the
fictions of Hindutva seem more compelling but also the misrecognition of the comparable
“possessive investments” in power serves as grist for the psychic mill, fanning the flames of
resentment. Here I am referring to the fact that the Otherness imputed to the immigrant
Hindu is uncomfortably familiar: Hindu immigrants are literally perceived as the Muslim
Other by Americans, as evinced by the slew of my Hindu informants who have had to bear
taunts like “Go home, Osama!”

In arguing that there is an element of pathology in extremist discourses, I follow Andrew
Willford’s use of Freud and Heidegger’s notion of the uncanny double in his analysis of the
fetishization of the Tamil ethnic signifier in Malaysia (2006). Willford writes that doubling

184 ETHOS

is an essential part and parcel of the process of becoming an ethnic self, and shows that
the uncanny feeling of this double can be profoundly disturbing especially in cases of social
repression: “Postcolonial demarcations of ethnic boundaries, and with them hierarchical
assertions of an ethnosymbolic hierarchy, I argue, can produce uncanny doubles.” Extending
this astute observation to my own ethnographic case, as first generation Hindu immigrants
face the racism of the contemporary United States, they see themselves in the eyes of
“mainstream white America” as the outsider Other, the stranger, the migrant, and the
inauthentic. This produces a feeling of uncanny doubling, because it is uncomfortably
familiar, and extremely discomfiting. The feeling of the “uncanny” (Freud 1953), then,
is a partial recognition of that which is familiar: the Hindutva perspective in India that they
impute onto Muslims is similarly defined as outsider Other, the stranger, the migrant, and
the inauthentic.

Thus, the flare-up in anti-Muslim sentiment among some first generation Hindu immi-
grants in the United States stems, a least in part, from an uncanny partial recognition of
Muslims as their doppelgangers or their “double” in the Freudian sense. In the diaspora,
Hindu Americans suddenly embody the Stranger subject position that belongs the non-Indic
religious followers in India; this partial recognition is so traumatic to those who revile the
Muslim and Christian Other that the uncanny moment is necessarily repressed, and that
repression serves to nurture and enflame the outright revulsion of the Muslim and Chris-
tian Other of India by some Hindu Americans. Borrowing Andrew Willford’s reading of
Heidegger’s uncanny double (2006), I argue that the doubling effect here “ensnares” the
Hindutva-embracing U.S. subject.

Just as when one pokes at a sore, it is the subsequent relief of the pain that provides the
thrill of pleasure and the illusion of control.31 As the repetition compulsion is part of
the masochistic part of the human psyche that defies the pleasure principle, arguably the
Hindutva-leaning American, by obsessing over the Muslim–Christian Stranger in India, is
compulsively revisiting traumatic moments of partial recognition faced on immigrating to
the United States when they were forced to become the Stranger themselves.

Each one of my conversations with my informants about racial–religious difference in India
and the United States was extremely uncomfortable. Hindus, like other South Asians, are
acutely aware of their status in the United States, as Othered, as “lesser-than-white.” I
collected many stories from adult Hindu informants about how non–Asian Americans stared
them down in public places, threatened them on the Metro, and mocked them in the work
place. One man broke down in tears as he told me about how his son was being bullied at
school, and how it deeply upset him that the kids had called his 12-year-old “Osama.” He was
perplexed and extremely angry that Americans cannot generally tell the difference between
Hindus and Muslims. He said that this kind of confusion would never have happened in
India, and he felt that he needed to work hard to educate Americans about Hinduism.32

My informants reported feeling particularly vulnerable and fragile post-9/11. The mis-
recognition of Hindus by Americans left one informant feeling “raw” and “victimized.”

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 185

She said, “We pay taxes. We are legal immigrants, so we shouldn’t be treated like trash.
We aren’t Mexicans who ran across the border. We aren’t terrorists from Pakistan. We
are good people—Hindus.” This informant exposed some of her own racial and social
prejudices, even as she decried the racism of others. A set of middle-school-age girls at
Shantiniketan’s precamp meeting had a discussion with me about post-9/11 changes in their
experience:

Seema: The biggest difference is that now everyone asks, “Are you Muslim?” We were visiting this
red-neck town down south and everyone turned around and looked at us when we walked in
the restaurant. It didn’t help that my parents were speaking in Gujarati, which sounds like any
foreign language to them. It was like they were wondering, “Are you going to bomb the
Burger King?!”

Mona: Now people look at you, and judge you based on your skin color. It wasn’t like this before.
Manusha: I’m not Muslim, but I wouldn’t be ashamed if I were. When people ask I say, “No I’m not

Muslim,” not because I’m anti-Muslim, I’m just clarifying.33

Seema: My parents wanted to go to visit the Pentagon last fall to visit the terrorist site, but I was,
“Why?! Are you crazy?! You’ll be attacked!”

Manusha: It’s our skin. Brown skin! Once we clear up the fact that we’re not Muslim, then it is okay. But
it’s those looks you get all the time in public places that are so annoying. You can’t wear a
sticker on your forehead saying, “I’m not Muslim.”

Sita: After 9/11 my parents bought 30 American flags. But I don’t feel more American. I feel more
separated than ever.

Seema: We’re the only colored people in the neighborhood I live in, and after 9/11 we had our tires
slashed five times!

Mona’s comment about how she had not felt judged by her skin before 9/11 is particularly
fascinating, because it begs the question: did the intensified racial profiling of South Asians
post-9/11 serve as a transformative moment in the racial identities of these children that
mirrors their parents’ stories of becoming conscious of racism in the first place? In general,
it seems that second generation Hindu Americans have demonstrated more flexibility and
complexity in their understanding of race in the United States, but as the exchange above
indicates, there are elements of racism and intolerance in their discourse as well. Still, I would
like to clarify that the psychological misrecognitions that I have observed in their Hindutva-
leaning parents was produced under different conditions, so it would be problematic to
equate them.

During some of my conversations about prejudice, especially toward the end of my fieldwork
period, I tried to juxtapose the way that Americans treat immigrants (as lesser-than to varying
degrees) with the way that Hindus suggest “immigrants” (such as long-since, often centuries-
since, migrated and/or converted Muslims and Christians in India) ought to be treated. In
interviews, I would say something to the effect of, “Well, I can understand why Hindus in
America want to be treated like equals. I am ashamed that people here treat you poorly . . . I
wonder though, don’t Muslims in India just want to be treated like equals? So if you see them
as relative newcomers to India, just like you are newcomers here, then. . . . ” With members
of the Shantiniketan community this provocation was met with one of two reactions: anger
or denial. The informants who raged against my somewhat inelegant equivalence told me

186 ETHOS

that the situation is entirely different because Muslims are “out to rule the world,” or that
the premise was wrong because the United States is a land of immigrants who had no rightful
owners to claim it as Hindus rightfully claim India. One of the informants who got angry at
me for this line of questioning never spoke to me again. Another initially shocked informant
began cheerfully bringing books by Hindutva sympathizers, such as David Frawley (2000),
to his Hindutva Sunday school for me to read.

The majority of my interlocutors did not care to argue with me when I compared Hindus in
United States with Muslims in India—instead they just looked shocked, as if I had uttered a
profanity, and then simply disengaged; either glossing over the matter entirely, changing the
subject or just ending or leaving the conversation. Not one of my informants at Shantiniketan
seemed to think that this was a reasonable comparison, or if they did, they would not discuss
it. Needless to say, I eventually stopped pursuing this line of questioning lest I be barred
from the camp and all subsequent Sunday school gatherings altogether, but in the final push
of my research I doubtlessly did some damage to my field relationships, as some informants
realized (some perhaps for the first time) that their efforts to educate me may not have
succeeded in aligning my views with their ideology.34

At Chinmaya, the parents who I talked with who held Hindutva in no particular esteem were
unphased by my discussion of the similarities between Hindutva ideology and U.S. racism.
In fact, one set of parents heartily agreed with me. A Hindu Indian generally unoffended
by, ambivalent about, or amiable toward Indian Muslims would probably not repress the
partial recognition with such vehemence, and therefore would ostensibly not compulsively
revisit that partial recognition with such fervor. This would help explain why my first
generation Hindu American informants and friends outside of Hindutva Parivar institutions
have remained wholly unsympathetic to its ideology. U.S. racism does not necessarily lead
Hindus to embrace the Hindutva, but it may very well feed the institution through the
mechanisms of fetishization and misrecognition I have described at length already; those
whose Hinduism is not supremacist would have no partial recognition of Othering, and no
need to repress said misrecogniton.

Even some more Hindutva-leaning Chinmaya Mission parents were more receptive to this
comparison than their Shantiniketan peers, although they were often quick to state their
view that Muslims were widely known to be more militant and violent than Hindus. The
handful of very conservative Hindutva sympathizers I met at Chinmaya were hard to engage
on this topic, and I got basically the same two responses (anger–denial) from them that I
did from Shantiniketan parents. This is a case of partial self-estrangement, in which some
Hindu Americans have unconsciously transferred their revenge from the logical object of
their anger, white supremacy (and some Christian supremacist discourse to boot), to a far
easier target, the site of their misrecognized “double,” that is, to the beleaguered Muslims
and Christians of India. The fact that so many of my informants would shut down at the
mention of this doubling could be seen as an indication that it touches a sore nerve, an
exposed wound.

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 187

Hindu American communities have arguably accepted the fantasy of the model minority
because social nodes of power have given all the appearance of rewarding Hindu Americans
for their better-than-ness even while branding them with lesser-than-ness. Judith Butler
confirms this as she writes about how attachment is neurotic in its own unrecognizability to
the subject: “that one is dependent on power for one’s very formation, that that formation is
impossible without dependency, and that the posture of the adult subject consists precisely
in the denial and reenactment of this dependency” (1997:9). Butler goes on to argue that
the dependency on outside forces in the construction of the self means that invariably the
subject is particularly vulnerable to exploitation: “Bound to seek recognition of its existence
in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of
its own existence outside itself, and in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent”
(1997:20). The white majority in the United States is indeed dominant almost to the point
of indifference in its relationship to the social world of Hindu Americans. Hindu Americans
at the mercy of a white supremacist ethnoscape have embraced the model minority myth
as a general rule, but their situation has also led some first generation Hindu Americans to
revel in, as well as distort, the memory of where they do have the power to be dominant and
exploitative: India.

Hindutva-embracing Americans are drawn to a fantasy of a Hindu golden age, or a new
Hindu India that is cleansed of interlopers, but while they do not explicitly connect this
desire to the alienation of U.S. racialized social landscapes, it emerges through the use
of Lacanian tools. For example, Lacan’s Symbolic Order, the imposition of law, has also
been explored fruitfully in an ethnographic context by Katherine Pratt Ewing in her book
on Sufi masters in Pakistan. Ewing shows that the social order as made manifest through
language splits the self, which then desires its reconstitution into the false nostalgia of its
undifferentiated past. Ewing writes,

with this positioning in the Symbolic Order comes also the alienation of the subject,
an inchoate awareness that something has been left behind, an experience of being
somehow split, of not being fully recognized in the subject position where one has
been fixed. This experience is the source of an impossible desire. Desire is first, and
beneath it all, a desire for wholeness and plentitude—an imaginary unity based on an
unremembered experience of merger with the mother. [1997:28]

Applying these observations to the case of Hindu Americans at hand helps to clarify the inner
turmoil: if one takes a Symbolic Order in this case to be the habitus of U.S. racism, which a
Hindu immigrant migrates into, then it is possible to posit alienation, psychic damage, and
finally the fetishization of the Ideal-I, the imaginary image in the mirror: in this case, it takes
form as a singular Hindu paradise, or the utopian Mother India.

Hindutva-embracing immigrants do not themselves make an explicit connection between
racism in the United States and their interest in expelling non-Indic groups from India,
but such misrecognitions are necessarily uncritical and unreflexive.35 The prevalence of the
psychological misrecognition I have identified in Hindutva-leaning Americans gets to the
heart of the fact that it is not enough for anthropologists to focus on the cultural, political

188 ETHOS

and economic nodes of Hindu identity formation; we must look deeper, and tease out the
ways in which the psychic distress of being Othered has unrecognized consequences.

Conclusion

In this article, I have acknowledged the psychological and emotional aspects behind the
rise of Hindutva in the United States. My fieldwork indicated a ferocity of attachment to
hatred that belies prevailing notions that social, political, and economic causes are the only
motivating factors for embracing Hindutva ideology.

Many first-generation Hindu immigrants in the United States are stoked by extant racial
hegemonies into accepting the myth of the model minority. The “lesser-than” quality of
the Hindu American subject position in a white-dominated society motivates some to rely
on the myth of the Hindu Utopia for self-esteem and a sense of being “greater-than.” The
corresponding partial recognition of the “double,” the Muslim stranger in India as analogue
to the Hindu stranger in the United States, also leads some first generation Hindus to repress
their identification with a familiar object of revulsion, often furthering Hindutva narratives
in subsequent compulsive repetitions of the distress of that traumatic partial recognition.
Finally, the misrecognition of the illusory constructions both shaping and being shaped by
Hindutva-sympathetic Americans works to feed the “instituted fantasy” that continues to
alienate.

The second generation talks a lot about their experiences with racism, fantasies of being
white (Iyer and Haslam 2006), or exclusion by virtue of difference.36 Although some campers
seemed challenged and anxious about the overt differences and Othering conducted by their
non-India peers in the United States, other children have adapted by either going with the
flow, or conversely by situating themselves outside of it. However, when Hindutva creeps
into fun and games in the heat of a summer camp, some children do internalize the hatred
of the double (the Indian Muslim, in this case) taught by parents and counselors, and are
arguably being ensnared along with them. Of course, many Hindu Americans have suffered
U.S. racism and feelings of alienation without the corresponding sublimated revulsion to
the partial recognition and without recourse to Hindutva, but this variability likely stems
from personal differences in the discomfort level in the partial recognition itself. Therefore,
a Hindu Indian generally amiable toward Indian Muslims would not have had a partial
recognition to repress or compulsively revisit.

I would argue that the fetishization of Hindu-ness happens on many different levels and to
many different degrees, as evinced by the fuzzy continuum of Hindutva from HSS karsevaks,
Shantiniketan parents, Swami Harinanda, Seema, Preeti, and Pooja; these fetishizations, in
their multiplicity of forms, are fueled in part by the repressed partial recognition of the
stranger. Myths implicit in U.S. racism, as well as Hindutva’s fantasy of a Hindu utopia, are
testaments to the grasping attachments and “possessive investment” in majority privilege.
To heal the fissures that persistently feed dialectical cycles of fear and hatred, the stranger
must be recognized: racist non-Indian Americans must recognize the Hindu “stranger” as

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 189

a politically authentic fellow American, and intolerant Hindus must recognize the Muslim–
Christian “stranger” as a politically authentic fellow Indian. It is high time that the Stranger
is finally acknowledged as nothing more than a misrecognized aspect of the self.

JESSICA FALCONE is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Kansas State University.

Notes

Acknowledgments. Funding for this research was provided by the Pew Charitable Trust’s Religion and the New

Immigrants Project (under the institutional supervision of the Life Cycle Institute), as well as Harvard

University’s Pluralism Project. I would like to thank the readers of early drafts of this article, especially the editors

and anonymous reviewers at Ethos, for offering helpful advice along the way.

1. For the purposes of this article the terms religious fundamentalism, religious nationalism, and religious extremism

are interchangeably defined as a movement within the main body of a religion, which narrows the spectrum of

acceptable behaviors based on conservative interpretations of foundational text, histories or identities, often in

tandem with some measure of intolerance, political appropriation or violence. In no way does the use of the

term fundamental suggest something actually essential about the text or tradition itself, because it refers only to

a particular, and contested interpretation. Working with extremist informants presents its own challenges, so for

more on the tribulations of researching and writing about informants with whom one vehemently disagrees, please

see Falcone 2010.

2. Over the course of the 2001–02 academic year, I studied ritual and practice at Hindu mandirs and Sikh

gurudwaras, and attended “Sunday schools” at these institutions to watch particular engagements with the second-

generation Indian American children. Subsequently, over the summer of 2002, I was invited to volunteer at the

Hindu summer camps, so while the camp season is relatively short, I was able to contextualize the activities within

their regular religious activities. All informants were aware of my presence as a researcher, and had given informal

consent to be observed and interviewed; Human Subjects approval was received under the auspices of the Life

Cycle Institute at Catholic University of America. The proper names of all nonhistorical personages have been

altered to protect their privacy, but I have not altered the names of institutions.

3. My informants from throughout the South Asian community in Washington, D.C., speak with a certain amount

of nostalgia about “the old days” of the 1960s and 1970s when there were very few of them, and so their rituals,

groups, and religious identities were more inclusive. A Hindu family that ran a progressive Hindu meeting group

in the Maryland suburbs claimed that in the beginning they were the original Hindu community of the greater

D.C. area, but as more people came regional groups split apart; from the Hindu group emerged a South Indian

Hindu group; from the South Indian Hindu group a Tamil Hindu temple group was birthed. This narrative is

often repeated by others, but when the narrator belongs to one of the newer communities the tale is often told with

pride, rather than lament.

4. Hindu nationalism can be traced back to in the early 20th century; as the Independence Movement in India

gained steam, several Hindutva leaders began debating the essentials of Hindu-ness. It is the pan-Hindu historical

narrative of fundamentalism that has retained maximum currency in contemporary India, while attempts to reform

Vedic practice are seen as mere sidebars of the main thrust of the Hindutva project.

5. Even if we grant Reddy her observation that Hindutva can be viewed as a form of protest against secularism, non-

Hindutva readers may find themselves wondering why, simply because it is a form of critique against modernity, it

ought to be thus tolerated, embraced and feted? Thus, Reddy’s work on Hindutva, in my view, takes the postmodern

acceptance of different views to its paralyzing, apolitical extreme.

190 ETHOS

6. The South Asian immigrant to the United States may be embedded in a “postcolonial” identity, one in which

the independence and autonomy of the Indian state stands in sharp contrast to the not too distant past of white,

British domination. Although taking to heart both Ahmad’s critique of the “postcolonial” as being entirely subject to

colonization (1992), as well as Frankenberg and Mani’s sense that the “post” in “postcolonial” is somehow premature

and problematic (1996), it would seem that the postcolonial is at least useful in that it reminds researchers that

overcoming the racial domination of whites over a people of color, is part and parcel of collective Indian national

identity. Frankenberg and Mani also show that the United States is not “postcolonial” at all, and suggest that a

better term to describe the post in question is “post-Civil Rights,” to indicate a rupture between the racial mores of

before and after the Civil Rights movements of the mid-1950s through the 1970s.

7. White supremacy is still considered a marginal movement, despite an uptick in white supremacist activity

that accompanied the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, the stock market crash of 2008 and Great

Recession, and the subsequent rise of the Tea Party and other groups.

8. Prashad also writes about several exceptions to the rule: the handful of Indian American radicals who have

united with non-“model” minorities to work toward social justice, as well as the fact that some working-class

Indians occasionally identify more as “black” than “white” (2000). Also, he notes that some upper- and middle-class

suburban Indian American teens, not unlike many of their white peers, adopt African American fashions, musical

preferences, and affect to rebel against their parents. In the end, Prashad’s basic critique of Indian American

collusion with the white hegemony stands, despite his carefully delineated caveats.

9. Guilt is one psychic motivation that can easily lead Hindu Americans toward Hindutva. Hindu Americans have

left their love object, the “homeland,” “Mother India” (“Bharat Ma”) behind, a fact that compels some guilt in many

Hindu Americans. As Judith Butler has cogently explained, guilt is a means of preserving the love object from one’s

potentially destructive violence (1997:25). Ambivalence toward India can be read in the very fact of immigration,

especially because the large majority settle in the United States and return to India only for visits. Because many

immigrants also leave their biological mothers behind on the subcontinent, a conflation of mother and Mother

India can evoke enormous emotional investiture.

10. For example, the use of a summer camp venue to teach politicized religious discourse to young people was

well documented in the film, Jesus Camp. The award-winning documentary showed the ways in which Christian

evangelicals taught a version of religion that was inextricably linked to conservative politics to their young charges—

a new “Army of God” (Grady and Ewing 2006). Some critics and filmgoers felt that the camp was guilty of

brainwashing. Ironically, the campers in Jesus Camp evinced moments of racism, anti-Islam, and hate speech that

were strikingly similar to the discourse of some kids at the Shantiniketan Camp.

11. In 2002, I worked as a participant-observer at two summer camps serving mostly middle- and upper-class

Hindu Americans in the D.C. area. I had been working within these communities in the context of their larger

temple educational and religious practices (and weekend–Sunday schools) for the preceding year. In both cases I

was invited to do research and serve as a camp volunteer primarily charged with shuttling campers from one activity

to the next.

12. The HSS is “the American kin” of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is the far-right Hindu supremacist

group once banned for the murder of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Prashad 2004). Despite the fact that the

HSS is sometimes publicly elusive about its RSS affiliation, the fact that the HSS is an international arm of the RSS

has been well-documented (Mathew and Prashad 1999; Sabrang Communications–SACW 2002; Therwath 2005).

13. I attended dozens of Sunday school (Bal Gokalum) events and activities over the course of the nine months

preceding the summer camp. The texts used by the Bal Gokalum were published by the VHP, and many of

the activities were sponsored directly by VHP and HSS members. The Bal Gokalum students were called on

to participate in (give readings, sings songs, etc.) at an event directly after the Gujarat Riots of 2002; at this

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 191

event, Hindus were urged to support the pogrom of Muslims in the riots, because the humiliation of Hindus is

“our humiliation.” One speaker said, “What is happening in India affects us. The media is distorting things. We

shouldn’t be apologetic. . . . They [Muslims] need to get the message: don’t fool with us anymore. [applause].

. . . We must be Hindu first, then other identities. We must carry on our heritage. And we have to be proud

of our Hindu heritage.” Another speaker touched on the distress the community was feeling about the media’s

misrepresentation. He berated the VHP community in the area for not taking more action: “No one has replied to

these false articles, or sent a letter to the Times or Post. . . . We are not radicals like they say. Become an activist,

but the VHP are not radicals, or against anyone, just pro-Hindu.”

14. Karsevak means volunteer in Hindi. It is used in many contexts, but in contemporary Indian parlance it has

come to have a particular association with Hindutva activists. A Hindutva karsevak is a strong supporter of the

Hindutva ideology, and one of the hands-on activists doing work with and for any of the affiliated organizations of

the Hindu Parivar.

15. The Hindutva version of the “sun salutation” was routinized by counselors with terse fast-paced counting in

Hindi and stands in sharp contrast to slower yogic or lay practices on the subcontinent that emphasize spiritual

development and meditation through physical practice. The militancy of the yoga at the camp, the style of which

is a direct import from RSS camps in India, is intended to train, discipline, and harden the campers.

16. “Kabbadi,” “Garba-raas,” and other Indian games and dances at the camp cannot be simply taken as uncritically

“Hindu,” for whatever their origins may have been, they have taken on regional or national affiliations, that transcend

religion for many people, for example, there are Christian, adivasis, and Muslims in Gujarat who see Garba-raas

as a dance form that is their regional birthright, despite claims from Hindutva voices to the contrary (Mehta and

Bhayani 2003; Trivedy 2003).

17. This discussion, and many others like it that I observed or participated in, also demonstrates the intergen-

erational divide at Shantiniketan. The parents of these very girls had talked to me often about how U.S. dating

culture is foreign to them, and banned in their homes. The girls talked just as often of their frustration at be-

ing so often stymied from socializing with friends, overcontrolled. The generation gap was a frequent topic of

conversation.

18. There is a wide spectrum of Hindu fundamentalisms, as organizations within the movement are decentralized

and their connections sometimes veiled. Supporters of the Chinmaya Mission are quick to point out that it is

unfair to mention the Chinmaya Mission in the context of Hindu fundamentalism, because organizations such as

Shiv Sena are so essentially different than a Vedantic institution such as the Chinmaya Mission. I would concede

that while the Chinmaya Mission is itself not the most active group in the loose constituency with ties to Hindu

fundamentalist organizations, it is has never formally broken with its founder’s Hindutva leanings and there is

evidence that aspects of the Hindutva ideology are a common subtext in current practice. I am not asserting that

the Chinmaya Mission is a part of the Sangh Parivar, but neither can it be completely acquitted of its connections

and complicity therein.

19. The Swami admitted his Hindutva proclivities when he was put on the spot by an anthropologist at a talk on

the year of his death in 1993; after first trying to duck the question by saying the biography that exposed that he

was a VHP founder had been unauthorized, he finally gave the following account: “When your pope came to India

[Paul VI in December 1964], he said he was going to convert 125 people to Christianity. Public opinion made him

withdraw his plan but I was in Bombay and announced that I would convert 200 people to Hinduism and I did.

Then I had the idea to start a group to work for conversions. I didn’t have enough people of my own so I asked the

RSS for their help. Guruji [RSS head, Golwalkar] liked the idea and had thousands of workers everywhere. The

VHP has grown into a mighty force. It is all over the world. After I started the VHP, I returned to my own mission

as spiritual teacher of Vedanta. Anyone can do the work of the VHP. I have been invited to the VHP’s conference in

Washington as the keynote speaker and will be given an award” (McKean 1996:102). Clearly, the deceased Swami

192 ETHOS

Chinmayananda, who is revered by the current crop of swamis and acharyas teaching at Missions around the world,

was proud of his achievements with VHP, yet his general unwillingness to publicly link the Chinmaya Mission and

the VHP underscores the fact that he was cognizant that the connection could undermine the Mission’s reputation

as apolitical.

20. For example, in one lecture at the Shantiniketan camp, Swami Harinanda argued for suppressing caste distinc-

tions in favor of Hindu unity, yet defended the practice of same-caste marriages. Throughout the talk he indicated

that caste is actually meaningless in terms of the potential of any individual to be equal and achieve greatness outside

their birth status, however, he seemed to indicate that marrying into one’s caste made certain sense, just as people

tend to marry within their class because they want someone similar to themselves. This is the standard perspective

on caste in Hindutva ideology.

21. For a sympathetic discussion of this hypersensitive perspective of wounded Hindu pride, see Reddy

2006.

22. I have found myself wondering whether the fact that Pooja was a carefully sheltered temporary guest (for only

two months) in the United States, and therefore not an immigrant or an Indian American who would be forced

to permanently face the vagaries of U.S. racism, the model minority complex or “Yankee Hindutva,” affected (and

modulated) how she broached the issue of Hindu nationalism in general.

23. Indian issues with skin color are also legion, and I do not mean to gloss the differentiation between fairer

and darker skin tones in India, which could be the subject of a full article in and of itself. However, the

contours and geography of U.S. racism is altogether different than the fetishization of fairer skin coloring in

India.

24. It may seem disingenuous to suggest that all Hindus had the same shocking experience of racism, but I would

caution that I am only identifying a general pattern, and not a universal Hindu experience in the United States.

I should also mention that the converse experience was as personally jarring as the pattern I have noted above;

the experience of traveling and living as a Caucasian woman in South Asia, where I was suddenly quite racially

“visible,” and yet seen as “weaker” by virtue of my sex, has helped me to understand that the uprooted self is forced

to reconstruct and adapt itself in accommodation to the gaze of the new Other, even and perhaps especially, when

we do not like how we are being perceived.

25. To be specific, I never explicitly asked my informants if they could remember their first experiences with

racism in the United States. While writing up my research years later, I very much wish that I had asked more first

generation informants to talk more about these initial experiences and impressions.

26. Here I defer to Butler’s examination of the manner through which the ambivalence of the subject is both

affected and causing (1997:17).

27. The general trend of politics outside the public glare among Hindu Americans during my fieldwork from 2001

to 2002 has changed somewhat because as a few South Asians have entered the political arena (e.g., Bobby Jindal,

Swati Dandekar, Nikki Haley). Although many of my informants celebrate these politicians because their ethnic

background presumably reflects a greater acceptance of South Asian Americans by other Americans, I have had

many Hindu American informants note bitterly that the most successful mainstream Indian American politicians

are invariably Christian. For more on emergent political groups, see Kurien 2007b.

28. Prema Kurien’s work on political and civic engagement by Indians in the diaspora provides excellent in-

sights onto a more active polity (2007b). She writes that Indian American political engagements have been ham-

pered by the deep divide between pro-Hindutva and anti-Hindutva groups. This polarization aside, it is certain

that emergent lobbying groups have worked to ensure that Indian Americans are more politically engaged now

than they were during my fieldwork from 2001 to 2002. It remains to be seen whether these new groups will

PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 193

provide a means for Indian Americans to engage with mainstream politics and campaigns (e.g., the national

immigration, environment, or antiwar debates) or whether they will focus more on issues of ethnic representa-

tion. Kurien’s work shows that the U.S. India Action Political Committee (INPAC), formed in 2002, has tried

to lobby for both Hindutva groups and more secular “South Asian” groups, but has succeeded in drawing as

much ire as praise from both sides, as they have failed to adequately represent the views of all their constituents

(2007b).

29. Gandhi is usually a celebrated figure in Indian history, but he is utterly demonized in Hindutva discourse for

his supposed accommodation to Indian Muslims and failure to make India an exclusively Hindu state. As part of

the RSS fold, the HSS supporters are fervently anti-Gandhi. Notably, Gandhi’s convicted murderer was a former

RSS karsevak, and the RSS was temporarily banned directly following Gandhi’s assassination.

30. I continue to wonder if Pooja’s age and gender made her testimony and teachings easier for the Hindutva-

embracing audience to ignore.

31. Freud once narrated the story of how his grandson mitigated his pain at his mother’s constant disappearances

and reappearances by actively playing a game to make a ball disappear for it to reappear, hence giving himself the

pleasure of a sort of illusory control. For more on the fort/da game, see Freud (1920).

32. The same man was upset that his son told him that his classmates had asked ignorant questions, like whether

Hindus will go to hell, or whether Hindus bow down to cows. He made it his business to tell his sons’ friends about

Hindu beliefs, and he felt that it was equally important to explain which symbols were associated with Hinduism as

opposed to either Sikhism or Islam.

33. Manusha’s rather tolerant comment about Muslims was fascinating as well, because she was attending a

Hindutva Sunday school event. I followed up on this during the same conversation. Manusha and many of her

friends will often decry general statements made by their parents and grandparents, such as “Muslims are bad,” or

“If a person isn’t Indian and Hindu, they are a bad person.” The girls seemed attuned to the fact that I was probing

about this, and they didn’t want to look racist. They would say, “I’m not anti-Muslim, but . . . ” and then tell me

stories about how Muslims boys harass and rape Hindu girls after garba events, and how the Gujarat riots were

good insofar as Hindus were “finally standing up to Muslim bullies.” One girl said, “I know it sounds bad, but I

think the Muslims totally deserved it. Hindus are always the ones to get in trouble for everything, and Muslims

usually get away with it.” Another responded, “Hindus are usually portrayed as the bad guys. But the Muslims

had attacked us first and we were just defending ourselves.” The girls clearly believed the Hindutva rhetoric on

Hindu–Muslim relations, even if they were conscious of how it might “sound bad” to me.

34. See more on the consequences of this ruptured rapport, as well the ethical questions that emerged in its wake,

in Falcone 2010.

35. Butler’s formulation of the abject denial of the subject is echoed in Žižek’s (1989) conception of ideological

fantasy. Žižek builds on Marx’s notion that commodity fetishism is an enactment of a fundamental, “they do not

know it, but they are doing it,” misrecognition (1989:30). Henrietta Moore makes a similar observation when she

writes, “however crucial the concept of knowledgeable actor is to an emancipatory social science, we must be wary

of positing the actor as superhumanly knowledgeable; that is, we must acknowledge that no one can ever be fully

aware of the conditions of their own construction” (1994).

36. This is not to suggest that racism leads to an overwhelming sense of exclusion all the time. Many Indian

Americans report that they have the benefit of being able to draw on the best of both worlds. For all their political

hubris and hate mongering, the Hindu Sunday schools and camps arguably do help to instill a sense of pride in

their heritage that does somewhat mitigate some of the damage of U.S. prejudice.

194 ETHOS

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