The Meaning and Limits of "Hinduphobia" Discourse in the Diaspora

Preliminary note: Many of the ideas here build off my previous essay, “The Hindu Case Against Hinduism.” If you have not already, I would recommend reading that piece before you read this one.

On December 23, 1906, the front-page of the Los Angeles Herald featured a debate on the treatment of women in India between one Mrs. S. A. Merritt, a Los Angeles-based Christian missionary and Baba Bharati, an Indian journalist-turned-swami who arrived in America in the early 20th century to spread the gospel of Krishna devotion.

Merritt cites the allegedly systemic practice of child marriage in India and the “zemana” (i.e., secluded quarters for women) as evidence for her contention that the Hindoo woman lives a life of misery, citing the Manu Smriti¹ to bolster her claim that said subjugation is intrinsic to the “Hindoo” religion. Bharati in response calls Merritt’s argument a “missionary myth,” and argues that such views of India are the product of the “business-basis upon which the Christian missionary enterprise in India is principally founded and sustained.”

According to Bharati, such pictures of degradation acted as effective advertising for the missionary project, noting that missionaries “believe in continuous advertising” and that “their myths about the Hindoo religion and customs and treatment of women are advertised so repeatedly and systematically that they cannot fail to induce belief, and funds through belief.”

Los Angeles Herald, 1906

Exasperated, Baba Bharati goes on to declare that “I have stood these heaps of untruths for the last four years of my sojourn in this country with the indifference and equanimity born of my Hindoo forefather,” but “telling the real truths about the matter has at least become necessary.”

Baba Bharati argues persuasively that the India that Americans knew was in fact not India at all, but rather a figment of the missionary imagination. This was a charge that was not just confined to newspaper reports and missionary journals either.

Bharati, an erstwhile journalist and acquaintance of Rudyard Kipling, criticized Kipling’s novel Kim as presenting a false picture of India, due to Kipling’s failure to appreciate “the spiritual understanding— the inner life— of India.” Bharati would go on to publish a serialized novel titled Jim, an Anglo-Indian romance written to “counter the misinformation of Kipling’s Kim”.

Swami Abhedananda, the influential head of the Vedanta Society in New York, voiced a similar skepticism regarding the prevailing representation of India and the “Hindoo” in an article published in The Morning News in 1900, noting that it was only when he came to America that he heard “that Hindu mothers throw their babies into the Ganges to be eaten by the crocodiles,” or that the Hindus have a habit “of throwing themselves under its [the Juggernaut’s] wheels to obtain salvation.”

The Morning News, 1900

The disputations between missionaries and itinerant “Hindoo” swamis in the early 20th century took place against a backdrop of seismic cultural and economic change. Rapid industrialization increased the demand for labor, leading to a small but newly visible population of Indian immigrants along the West Coast.

Meanwhile on the cultural and religious front, the American elite driven by the rationalist and scientific spirit that was fueling economic growth found themselves increasingly alienated from mainline American Protestantism. In the place of established church we see during this period a blossoming of new denominations that drew on Christianity and Hindu spirituality alike.

Movements like New Thought, Theosophy, and Vedanta were a part of this new wave of religions that presented a challenge to the religious establishment. Vedanta in particular enjoyed surprising popularity among the upper crust of American society, with prominent heiresses and socialites forming some of the most dedicated followers of Swami Vivekananda and his nascent Vedanta Society.

As the American religious landscape shifted, we see in contemporaneous newspapers an upsurge in material relating to the degradation of women in India. The Hindoo swami or guru— once characterized as a mysterious but harmless purveyor of magic— was transformed into a sinister figure who sought to deceive innocent American women, lure them away from their families, and steal their money.

In 1914, the American writer Elizabeth Armstrong Reed published Hinduism in Europe and America in which she characterized the Hindu Guru as “modern money-making invention” and warned that the growth in yoga and Hindu spirituality would lead to domestic instability (Reed 117).

The Tacoma Times, 1912

The notion that the “Hindoo” posed a threat to American women was echoed by the suffragist and writer Mabel Potter Daggett who, in her 1911 essay titled The Heathen Invasion of America, warned readers that American women were “losing fortunes and reason seeking the eternal youth promised by the swarthy priests of the far east.”

For establishment critics like Daggett, the India as described in missionary literature became an important symbol of what America would become if the Hindu cultural influx continued unabated. Drawing on the proliferation of accounts of widow burning (i.e., sati) and child marriage, Daggett asks “what has paganism done for the women of the East that the women of the West want aught with it?”

Far from liberating Indian women, Daggett—like Merritt in her debate with Baba Bharati— points to the seclusion of women in the “zemana” and the practice of child marriage, arguing that far from being liberated, that “women’s position in India is the most degraded of anywhere in the world.”

The surprise expressed by Baba Bharati and Swami Abhedananda at the prevailing image of India and the “Hindoo” is relatable. Like the itinerant swamis of the early 20th century, Hindus today often find themselves confronted with public representations of their spiritual tradition is at odds with their lived experience. While we may not be told that Hindus sacrifice their infants to crocodiles in the Ganges, in recent years the public perception of Hinduism and India has taken a decidedly negative turn.

The response by Hindu Americans to this shift today mirrors that of itinerant travelers from India in the early 20th century. The 2005 California textbook controversy I discussed at some length in my previous essay is paradigmatic.² In that case, parent groups and activist organizations identified school textbook material that they believed represented a jaundiced view of their religion, and, like Swami Vivekananda and his successors, sought to present their own version of “Hinduism” in line with their understanding as practitioners of the tradition.

Since then we have seen an increasingly systemized response to prejudicial representations of “Hinduism” in the public sphere, evidenced by the popularization of the term “Hinduphobia.” Broadly defined as a set of “antagonistic, destructive, and derogatory attitudes and behaviors towards Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism) and Hindus that may manifest as prejudice, fear, or hatred,” Hinduphobia has become a byword for the Hindu diaspora’s attempt to correct the prevailing understanding of Hindu spiritual tradition in the popular imagination and academia alike.

The introduction of “Hinduphobia” into the discourse has not been without controversy. In 2024, Democratic Congressman Shri Thanedar from Michigan introduced a bill in the House of Representatives condemning Hinduphobia. Thanedar explained that he was motivated by a “substantial increase of attacks on Hinduism,” and “misinformation being circulated.” Thanedar then said that “having practiced Hinduism, having grown in a Hindu household, I know what Hinduism is.” “It is a very peaceful religion,” Thanedar continued, “it is not a religion that attacks others, it is not a religion that is aggressive against others.”

In opposition to the bill, certain left-aligned Hindu and “South Asian” activist groups argued that “the term ‘Hinduphobia’ was invented by the Indian far-right to shut down criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.” Hindus for Human Rights argued further that “in many cases, instances of anti-Indian sentiment, general xenophobia, or even mistaken Islamophobia are misleadingly labeled as ‘Hinduphobic’ regardless of whether or not there is any evidence to support claims of religious motivation” and that “claims of ‘Hinduphobia’ have routinely been weaponized to smear anyone — including self-identifying Hindus — who criticizes the current Indian government.”

Like Daggett in her Heathen Invasion of America, Hindus for Human Rights and their allies see the attempt by Hindus to push back on the prevailing representation of “Hinduism” as a facade for a pernicious religious agenda. Indeed, Daggett insisted that Swami Vivekananda’s high-minded Vedanta philosophy was a gateway to full-blown heathenism, claiming that although “the imported religions of the Orient… are offered to the uninitiated as beautiful philosophies,” they are “inevitably sprung from the soil of paganism and are tinctured with their practices.”

Similarly, a 2024 statement released by Savera, an organization affiliated with Hindus for Human Rights, accuses Hindu organizations in America of hiding “behind a facade of multiculturalism and diversity,” echoing Daggett’s words over a century earlier. Daggett’s accusation of “beautiful philosophies” masking pagan decadence thus finds its mirror image: the charge that Hindu Americans today conceal extremism behind the language of pluralism.

The continuity in the discourse regarding “Hinduism” in America is one sense a vindication. Hinduphobia is not, as is critics suggest, a recent invention of Hindu Nationalists designed to squelch criticism of the Indian government. Instead, it points to a persistent desire of Hindus to extricate themselves from pre-conceived, prejudicial representations of “Hinduism” and define their spiritual tradition for themselves.

In the case of both the early Hindu travelers to America and modern day Hindu Americans, attempts to exercise this agency have been met with stiff resistance. Why was the American religious establishment in the early 20th century so concerned about the Vedanta Society’s efforts to define Hindu thought in a rationalist mould for an urbane, elite audience? And why are activist groups today so keen on perpetuating a particular picture of “Hinduism” that is so apparently at odds with the views and experiences of members of the tradition?

It is worth noting that in the 2005 California textbook dispute, it was not just activist groups who opposed the suggested edits, but even a group of scholars who accused the parent groups of “white washing” their religion and playing into a Hindu Nationalist agenda. To understand the persistence of this dynamic over time, we need to examine the conceptual origins of “Hinduism” itself.

When Daggett and her allies in the American religious establishment were attacking growing Hindu cultural and spiritual influence in America in the early 20th century, they were drawing on centuries of missionary reports and scholarship that had collectively established a particular image of the “Hindoo religion” in the public imagination. This image did not emerge in a vacuum, but was a product of a particular set of political and ideological interests that shaped the material that entered the American public consciousness.

This historical process is typified in the life of Claudius Buchanan. Born near Glasgow in 1766, Buchanan was appointed as a chaplain with the East India Company (“EIC”) and spent much of his working life in and around Calcutta spreading the gospel to the heathen Hindus.

During this period the East India Company stymied Christian evangelism in India. The EIC was a business and first and foremost interested in keeping goods and money flowing, which meant keeping religious tension to a minimum. The EIC regularly patronized local temples and won favor from native rulers by helping fund festivals, much to the chagrin of local missionaries.

Claudius Buchanan grasped that missionary access in India was a public-opinion problem as much as a theological one. His book Christian Researches in Asia (1811) furnished American readers with visceral scenes of “Juggernaut”³—devotees crushed beneath chariot wheels, infants sacrificed—cast in Old Testament tones. Reprinted across New England newspapers and journals like The Panoplist, these images converted pity and disgust into policy.

An excerpt from Buchanan’s Christian Researches in Asia

Donations swelled, and by 1812 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions dispatched its first missionaries to India. The flood of missionary reports and newspaper dispatches that followed solidified in the public imagination the idea of a degraded “Hindoo religion,” confirmed Protestantism as religion’s summit, and legitimized a civilizing mission abroad.

The material published in American newspapers fit seamlessly into a schema of “religion” that had emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, shaped by the Protestant Reformation and global exploration. The former fractured Christianity and the consequent blossoming of denominations required a method of thinking about “religion” in the abstract.

The European encounter with other cultures compounded this process, and the observation of “religion-like” behavior among non-European peoples led scholars to posit that the religious impulse was in fact inherent to human nature. What emerged was a progressive or evolutionary model of religion, in which various spiritual traditions were categorized and graded according to their proximity to Protestant Christianity, which was axiomatically accepted religion’s evolutionary zenith.

The systemization of world religions was inextricably linked with the categorization of various cultures according to their level of “civilization.” While Protestant countries in Northern Europe were considered enlightened, so-called “heathen” cultures like India were deemed “half-civilized.”

Enlightened civilizations were marked by freedom, democracy and egalitarianism, all of which were thought to emerge from Protestantism, while India, as a half-civilized culture, was distinguished by the false religion of “Hindooism,” which in turn led to hierarchy and stagnation due to the practice of caste.

The introduction of Sanskrit texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Manu Smriti complicated matters somewhat. Scholars studied these texts in translation and detected not just a system of law, but hints of a “primordial monotheism” that was thought to be the sole possession of the “civilized” peoples of the world.

But this too was explained by the emergent theory of religion: The Hindus, they argued, once practiced a monotheistic religion, but were contaminated by the priestly caste, who dragged them down into a cesspool of superstition and idolatry. This so-called “declension theory” of the Hindu religion became the dominant paradigm for understanding India during this period.

Although the 19th century saw elite adoption of Hindu spiritual ideas, the missionary perspective always held the place of prominence in public culture, and the figure of the “Hindoo” that emerged served a domestic function of articulating America’s identity as a Protestant nation by contrast.

For example, the proliferation of missionary reports from India coincided with the arrival of Catholic immigrants in substantial numbers from Europe and stories of wily priests using superstition and even magic to trick the masses tapped into an anti-clerical prejudice widespread among American Protestants at the time, and descriptions of the hierarchical Hindoo mapped on to contemporaneous critiques of the Catholic Church.

The comic below, titled The American River Ganges and published in Harper’s Weekly in 1871 reflects this confluence, with reptilian bishops crawling out of the “American River Ganges” towards groups of frightened children, with the Vatican and a decrepit American public school in the background.

The notion that pernicious heathen influence posed a threat to American children and the national culture more broadly was a key characteristic of early representations of the “Hindoo.” Indeed, in an antebellum America searching for a national identity, the “Hindoo” became a key foil, a symbol of everything an American was not, and religion played a key role in the comparison.

We see this process of identity formation play out in school textbooks from this period. In Mitchell’s System of Modern Geography, the most widely circulated geography textbook in American prior to 1900, the “religion of the Hindoos” is distinguished from Protestantism by its “system of caste” and its “gross idolatry”:

Whereas the Hindoo religion was steeped in superstition and paganism, Protestant Christianity was defined by freedom, democracy and egalitarianism (Altman 56-7).

Then, as is the case now, early Hindu travelers to America had to contend not just with the prevailing attitudes towards the “Hindoo” and India shaped by missionary literature, but with the conceptual structure of religion that had emerged out of a distinctly Eurocentric intellectual and cultural milieu.

How Hindus responded to this challenge at that time not only gives us important insights into the exigencies of public discourse in America, but also illuminates how these constraints shaped (and continue to shape) Hindu self-understanding. In his famous 1893 speech at the World’s Parliament of Religions, Swami Vivekananda could have said that the “Hinduism” Americans were reading about was a figment of the missionary imagination. That the whole notion of “religion” was a Eurocentric imposition that did not comport with Hindu self-understanding. But he did not. On the contrary, Swami Vivekananda introduced himself as a representative of the “mother of religions,” and proudly declared that belonged to a “religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance.”

By appropriating “Hinduism” for his own ends, Swami Vivekananda was not just asserting the greatness of his spiritual tradition in the face of centuries of missionary-driven demonization. He was also tapping into a nascent nationalist desire for India to be admitted to the high table of global civilization.

But the acceptance of “Hinduism” as a “religion” during the colonial encounter also had costs, most prominently the incorporation of Hindu spiritual tradition into a distinctly Western hierarchy of spiritual development.

By being named a “religion,” the complex world of Indian spiritual traditions and philosophies was inserted into a schema in which it could only ever appear as deficient. In this sense, what we identify as “Hinduphobia” was and is not a psychological reaction to an objective study of Indic spiritual traditions; it was inherent in the very conceptual framework that made those traditions intelligible to the West. “Hinduism” entered global consciousness already marked as a failure, its alleged pathologies serving to confirm the West’s own self-image as spiritually and morally advanced.

Although the specific idiom of Protestant Christianity has faded, the underlying structure has endured. In the secular age, progressivism now occupies the place once held by Protestantism as the measure against which all cultures and political forms are judged. Here, “Hindutva” or “Hindu Nationalism” has come to perform the same role that “the religion of the Hindoo” once did. It stands as the deviant other of progressive theology, the figure through which the liberal anglophone elite, a group that increasingly includes Hindus themselves, reaffirms its moral superiority.

None of this denies that chauvinism or harmful practices exist or that they warrant critique. My claim is narrower: the grammar of evaluation already codes Hindu agency as deficient—first the idolater who fails true faith, now the illiberal who fails true progressivism.

The forms of language have changed, but the hierarchy of evaluation remains intact, and in each case, the conception of the Hindu as the “other” serves a domestic political and ideological function. The category of Hinduphobia therefore names not just prejudice but a deeper epistemic structure that continually reproduces Hindu inferiority, whether in the register of religion or of politics. But by focusing on “Hinduphobia,” we avoid engagement with these deeper epistemic structures, and reinforce the idea of “Hinduism” as a “religion” that can be compared to other religions against which it will always fall short.

We should not make the mistake of externalizing this problem entirely and placing all of the blame on outside forces who harbor anti-Hindu views. Attempts by Hindus to force-fit their spiritual traditions into a Protestant mould are fundamentally awkward and at odds with ground reality.

Like in the 2005 California textbook case, when we transform spiritual traditions that are grounded in ritual praxis and idiosyncratic conceptions of the divine into a well-defined doctrinal creed, we render ourselves vulnerable to the accusation that such assertions are driven by politics and ideology, rather than a social consensus among practitioners of Hindu spiritual traditions about how those traditions should be defined and communicated in the public sphere.

The result is an asymmetry in the public discourse around “Hinduism.” When scholars and activists claim that “Hinduism” is inherently casteist or fanatical, such claims enjoy legitimacy because they are consistent with intellectual structure through which “Hinduism” is intelligible to the West in the first place. But when Hindus themselves take issue with this characterization, they are accused of advancing a parochial political or ideological agenda. In the early 20th century, that agenda was referred to as heathenism or paganism, and is today referred to as “Hindutva” or “Hindu Nationalism.”

If one believes (like I do) that “Hinduism” is a false conceptual category that ought to be rejected⁴, then their argument is not entirely without merit. In fact, one could argue that all accounts of “Hinduism” are fundamentally a reflection of the speaker’s particular position, a sort of ideological Rorschach test.

The activist and parent groups who challenged the textbook material in 2005 presented a version of “Hinduism” that emphasized its monotheistic character and characterized caste as a social rather than a religious phenomenon, but such a view— even if sincerely held— cannot be deemed any more “objective” than the prejudicial material they were challenging in the first place.

What is particularly nefarious about the prevailing dynamic, however, is the unwillingness to recognize that this subjectivity applies both ways. The group of scholars and activists who pushed back on the suggested edits accused Hindu activist groups of bring Hindu Nationalists who wanted to “white wash” their religion, but were willfully blind to the fact that the characterization of “Hinduism” they were defending was itself a product of an ideologically-driven process to construct “Hinduism” as a religion that could serve as an effective foil for Protestant Christianity. This double standard persists today.

To reiterate a point I made in my previous essay, this is not a call to reject “religion” as a conceptual category and return to a mythical, “indigenous” mode of understanding. I see this position as unrealistic and, frankly, undesirable, especially in the diasporic context.

“Religion” is not a conceptual category that stands alone, but is rather embedded in a comprehensive system of ideas and sentiments that collectively form the basis for the modern, secularized society in which we live and think. We have no choice but to engage with these categories and adapt our spiritual traditions according to their limits, but it cannot be done in a haphazard manner.

“Hinduphobia” plays a critical role as an accessible entry-point for Hindus into this discursive maze. It is a necessary preliminary step for Hindus to scrutinize the public discourse around their spiritual traditions so that they can better understand the nature of the challenges that we face.

But fixating on the prejudice in the public sphere forces Hindu Americans into a defensive and reactive mindset, which distracts us from the more fundamental question of how to effectively adapt Hindu tradition to our present socio-political circumstances.

The scrutiny of prevailing representations of “Hinduism” cannot be an end in and of itself. We must, to quote the philosopher J.L. Mehta, “strive to recapture, from the perspective of our own station in time and place, the truth revealed and yet hidden in our religious tradition and express it for our time, for ourselves” (Mehta 127).

_________________________

Altman, Michael. Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Balagangadhara, S. N. All Roads Lead to Jerusalem: The Impact of Western Scholarship on the Study of Indian Religions. Brill, 2005.

Balagangadhara, S. N. “Orientalism, Postcolonialism, and the ‘Construction’ of Religion.” Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism, edited by Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens, and Rajaram Hegde, Routledge, 2013, pp. 127-141.

Mehta, J.L. India And the West: The Problem of Understanding. Scholars Press, 2001.

Reed, Elizabeth A. Hinduism in Europe and America. Open Court Publishing Co., 1914.

1. Also known as the Mānava-Dharmaśāstra or “Laws of Manu,” the Manu Smriti is one of the oldest and most influential Sanskrit texts on law, duty, morality, and social order in the Hindu tradition. Most scholars place it between 200 BCE and 200 CE. The Manu Smriti held a place of prominence in early Indological study as it was one of the first Sanskrit texts translated into English. William Jones, the British orientalist who founded the Asiatic Society in 1784, relied on the Manu Smriti as a guide in his codification of “Hindu Law,” though it should be noted that the text was never accepted as a single, codified source of law for any Hindu polity.

2. “While the contestation over Hindu identity in America has intensified in recent years, we saw a preview of these disputes in 2005, when the California State Board of Education (“CSBE”) conducted its periodic review of the state’s sixth-grade social studies textbook. During the public comment period, two Hindu American advocacy groups, the Vedic Foundation (“VF”) and Hindu Education Foundation (“HEF”), submitted 117 suggested edits to the CSBE which, among other things, rejected the polytheistic characterization of Hinduism in favor of a monotheistic model and characterized caste as a cultural rather than a religious practice. Although the edits were initially accepted by the CBSE, Michael Witzel, the prominent Harvard Sanskritist, soon became aware of the campaign to change the textbooks and rallied a number of scholars and activist groups to push back against VF and HEF’s edits. The CBSE would eventually accept Witzel et. al.’s position and roll back their acceptance. According to an NPR report written at the time, the group of scholars led by Witzel claimed that the groups proposing the changes were Hindu Nationalists and accused them of trying to “white-wash” history. The dispute between the two sides saw emotional testimony delivered in front of school board committees, heated newspaper editorials, and a plethora of academic work on what the fight over textbook representations meant in the broader context of Indian politics.”

3. “Juggernaut” is an anglicization of Jagannath, the form of Vishnu worshipped at the eponymous temple in Puri, Orissa. The annual Rath Yatra or chariot procession of Jagannath draws thousands of pilgrims every year.

4. Here I follow the work of S.N. Balagangadhara who argues that when “Hinduism” emerged as an object of study during the colonial period, its descriptive content reflected the experiential reality of the British, which was in turn shaped by a conceptual web— represented by the term “religion”— that emerged from a specific cultural and intellectual milieu. Importantly, this understanding of Indic spiritual traditions did not comport with Hindu self-understanding, though many Hindus did appropriate the idea of “Hinduism” for their own ends. I discuss Balagangadhara’s ideas in greater detail in my previous essay.