We #HinduAmericans have the unique (mis)fortune to have Indian visitors drop by for a bit and arrogate the immense privilege of platforms such as @TheAtlantic to import their casteist obsessions & counterfactually transfer those anxieties on us. (Thread)
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
You come from a casteist family that dunked on your servants? You want to slam our model minority myth as “flattening”?

Fine.

But your “caste travels” tropes “flatten” varna/jati/etc & expose an entrenched #Hinduphobia & shocking ignorance of Hinduism. Yet you’re platformed.
I mean @TheAtlantic article leads with that Equality Labs survey debunked by the same @CarnegieEndow survey the article also cites! The EL survey excluded the majority of South Asians that identify with no caste & only counted folks like the author identifying as “upper caste” 3/
Author doesn’t mention that Carnegie found that 95% of Indian Americans have no experience w/ caste disc. in the US! If they face discrimination, it is 5-7x more likely due to their religion or skin color. So little empathy/understanding of our lived experience. 4/
Colonized consciousness is so ingrained in India, that brown people like this author are clueless about the racist & Hinduphobic stereotypes they perpetuate about themselves!

Come on!

Purusha of Purusha Sukta is not Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva.

Caste is not race or color.

5/
So @JeffreyGoldberg, perhaps unwittingly, you just promoted racist tropes conflating caste with Hinduism, false depictions of deities & a call to police a brown micro-minority at colleges for something rarely reported.

You’re on more solid ground with a story on snake charmers.

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More from @SuhagAShukla

15 Sep
Reflecting on #dghconference, this was among the most disturbing moments. The same speaker @CeMIS_unigoe who made that repulsive phallus metaphor, put up photos of two men named in the #Cisco case with a casteist slur. They were rendered mute victims of a public spectacle.
Activist-scholars like the one from @CeMIS_unigoe & those in the US pushing for a caste category actually believe that Hindus are so entirely abhorrent that they should be marked a suspicious class and targeted based on their race, national origin, ethnicity, & religion.
It crystallizes for me why we're seeking intervention in the #Cisco case. If caste activists succeeded, companies, states & counties could police one community --Indians & Hindus -- tar them & internationalize names based on allegations alone. This is our formal stance👇
Read 4 tweets
10 Jul
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but c'mon! In response to @HinduAmerican's #Hinduphobia glossary, a few South Asianists released a "manual" denying the existence of #Hinduphobia, thereby trafficking in it!
-Thread-
hinduamerican.org/hindu-hate-glo…
Remember also that because of one of the "manual" author's track record of #Hinduphobia, a conference was actually held on her university's main campus @RutgersU where her Chancellor called #Hinduphobia & anti-Hindu hate out & the concept was fully defined hindustudentscouncil.org/2021/press-rel…
Back to the "manual": it denies #Hinduphobia by denying anti-Hindu bias ever occurs on a "horrific scale." My God.
-Bangladesh Hindu genocide?
-Hindu girls targeted & raped in Pakistan?
-Hindus cleansed from Kashmir?
-generational trauma from temple dest/colonization?
Erased. 3/
Read 8 tweets
29 Jun
The @pewresearch survey of 30,000 Indians has fascinating findings that we will discuss in detail tomorrow evening.

Sharing here a few quick takes showing how Indians see religious tolerance as a central part of who they are as a nation. Tolerance seen as a civic virtue. 1/
Most Hindus in India believe religious diversity benefits the country.

Factoid: BJP supporters were most likely to champion religious diversity (two-thirds). 2/
How about a surprise?

India's Hindus and Muslims believe equally in the concept of Karma! Hindus & Muslims believe in Karma even more than all other Dharma religious traditions. 3/
Read 9 tweets
28 Jun
This week was #InternationalYogaDay2021, and its a great time to reflect on the global conversation that we @HinduAmerican sparked 11 years ago with our #TakeBackYoga Campaign. Some of the highlights 1/
hinduamerican.org/projects/hindu…
There was @aseemrshukla's Washington Post debate with Deepak Chopra covered here nytimes.com/2010/11/28/nyr… 2/
Read 5 tweets
1 Jun
#PSA HinduAmericans: Last night, a twitter lynch mob fueled by the anonymous troll Kashmir separatist StandWithKashmir targeted a documentary filmmaker attacking her work.

Why? She spoke at a @HinduAmerican event about water issues. That's it. This will keep happening. (thread)
This Hindu American filmmaker was gaslit after someone had a disagreement over one of her documentaries over something unrelated to HAF. So her HAF presentation was used as some sort of twisted confirmation bias "gotcha" to slam her work. 2/
Said filmmaker correctly stated that her talk was about water, that HAF is a 501(c)3 & speaking at an event hardly implies conformity w/ all positions.

Not enough for the @twitter mob. A tech scholar @UVA went straight for cancellation. Condemn HAF, else, your career is over. 3/
Read 7 tweets
21 May
There’s Doniger, Thapar, Pollock, Yengde, Nussbaum, Chomsky & more “repudiating” @HinduAmerican! Could there be a greater endorsement of our work? Could there be a stronger statement that HAF has shaken these academics with a record of anti-Hindu scholarship to the core? 1/
These academics with too little to do today but attack @HinduAmerican are known for sullying their fields with exoticized, eroticized interpretations of Hinduism. I wrote more on these ethical failings here: m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_49…
And who can forget @aseemrshukla ‘s derailed takedown of Doniger’s factual and interpretive errors in her work on Hinduism first published in @washingtonpost & archived here?indiafacts.org/on-wendy-donig…
Read 4 tweets

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