Today in Hinduphobia March 14, 2020: Disease, Disgust and Dehumanization from Katherine Mayo to “Cow-Piss” Tweets and Coronavirus
Imagine the phrase “Feces-covered-meat eater.”
Awful? Unable to imagine such a phrase anywhere in respectable media today? Of course. Such a nasty phrase has no place at all in polite society, even if issues of hygiene and safety are on everyone’s minds (factual aside: animals covered by feces, pus and vomit from other caged animals stacked above them were an issue in recent ‘wet market’ closings in China as reported here).
It is judgmental, racist, and given the incidents of violence taking place here and there against Asian people in relation to the coronavirus panic, utterly reckless.
Now, consider another disgust-evoking label.
“Cow-piss drinker.”
This phrase is used routinely by journalists, celebrities, professors, and political leaders as a smear against one group, just one group of people, regardless of whether the label represents them or not. And most of the time, they utter this without the slightest bit of remorse or consequence for them professionally.
The only exception perhaps was the case of the NPR producer Furkan Khan who tweeted that Hindus ought to convert out of their urine and dung worshipping religion and solve India’s problems. NPR said she resigned, but never formally apologized to Hindus for that slur. Nor did they bother to acknowledge that their reporter’s writing on India might be tainted given the outing of her bigotry. Khan’s articles remain on NPR’s website without any indication at all that such an incident ever happened. It is as if someone who reported on African Americans or Chinese Americans or Muslims or Jews today could still have their work hosted on a major news platform as if it was all fine even after they revealed themselves to be raging, hateful racists, Islamophobes or Anti-Semites elsewhere.
This incident happened last September. NPR promised a group of researchers and activists who presented a petition signed by several thousand listeners that they would investigate our concerns and never got back. The slanted coverage of news from India, where Hindus are erased from any representation when they are murdered, kidnapped, raped or violently expelled, continues. Worse, the “cow urine” slur continues to remain in public usage. And those using it probably also know that the issue around this slur is not just about stereotyping, but about cold, demonstrated genocidal action directed at Hindus. On Valentine’s Day last year, an Islamic militant blew up forty Indian policemen in Pulwama in Kashmir. His rationale: they were part of what he called an “impure, polytheistic, cow-piss-drinking” religion.
Got a Pandemic? No Problem, Blame a Hindu.
I have returned to this column after a break of several weeks to share my concern about the creeping Hinduphobic racism that seems to be coming up once again in the light of the global concern over the coronavirus outbreak. While we are rightly calling out racism and xenophobia when it surfaces against people of East Asian descent at this time, it is disturbing to see that major media outlets and public figures are turning to all sorts of exaggerated, counter-factual, and ultimately racist judgments about the situation in India.
Naturally, these sweeping and skewed judgments about a country which is by most accounts taking the coronavirus concern with great seriousness have led to strong criticism from Indian commentators and experts.
The real concern around this continuing media campaign of fear-mongering about India is the much deeper history of racism directed against Indians and Hindus in particular in the form of tropes about disease, health, and cleanliness. Even a quick look at the major representations of Hinduism and India in American media and popular culture will remind us that this particular set of tropes has remained a constant one (and in the shadow of the more recent terrorist attack and the brutal violence against Hindus in the recent riots in Delhi, and in the form of the ubiquitous cow-urine smear, an even more disturbing one).
Dirt, Disease and Disgust in Colonial Discourse
From the days of the 19th century Christian missionaries concocting lurid tales about India for their ‘civilizing mission,’ the trope of Hindus as a dirty and disease-spreading people has been a constant one in the Western colonial and neocolonial racist imagination.
Andrew Rotter writes in Comrades at Odds: The United States and India 1947–1964:
“The process of constructing Others on the basis of illness, sexuality and race had serious implications for American perceptions of Indians. Americans and most Westerners represented India as a disease-ridden place inhabited by sexually perverted, dark-skinned people.”
The key motive in such a construction was not simply about setting up racial (or religious differences) between the colonizer and the colonized, but more precisely about using illness as a marker of evidence for the alleged lack of self-control of the native. Sickness, as Rotter observes, “embodies the loss of control.” Constructing a whole people and their culture as basically lacking elementary control over their body, and more specifically, their bodily functions and emissions, becomes a way of achieving a deep demonization of the Other and asserting a naked sort of supremacism over them.
After all, if the people of India appear to readers of Katherine Mayo or others in the West as little more than subhuman organisms wallowing in things like “spit, snot, perspiration, blood, urine and feces” (Rotter’s examples), how could anyone find the moral or intellectual will to imagine them not as Others but as fellow humans? That, in a nutshell, is the problem that persists to this day. Hinduphobia has dehumanized Hindus so much that its consumers and supporters proudly promote its normalization without the slightest hint of revolt at its open racism and religious bigotry.
Why else has the trope of Hinduism as a source of dirt, disgust, and disease outlasted the formal end of British colonialism in 1947; and the civil rights transformation of the United States in the 1960s that allowed Indian/Brown immigration but only just so, without any real introspection about the bizarrely dated and racist ways in which their cultures and traditions were being lied about in their children’s textbooks and in popular culture? Should we ignore the existence of a racist trope simply because the political conditions of their original creation (White supremacy, monotheistic intolerance, colonialism) are not “officially” the same now?
Katherine Mayo and the Fear of Hindu Contagion
Hindus in America who are in denial of this alarming cultural reality would do well to revisit the situation faced by Indians exactly one hundred years ago, and the master-text of anti-Hindu racism from that time, Katherine Mayo’s Mother India. Mayo was a racist, religious supremacist with borderline eugenicist beliefs who operated on a clear hierarchal conception of the people she knew: White Protestants on top, Muslims just below, and Hindus at the bottom. And when Hindus and other Indian-origin people living in America in the 1920s sought to make a case for their right to continue to reside here, Mayo most would have none of it at all. She would write the book that would make her name synonymous with racism and Hinduphobia.
While most of as realize that Mayo was a racist and colonial apologist who wanted to delegitimize the Indian independence movement, what we are perhaps less aware of the precise way in which she sought to position her racist-religious supremacist attacks on Hinduism as a global public health concern, and through well recognized tropes of filth, disgust and disease at that. Mrinalini Sinha (1998) notes in her critical introduction to Mother India that Mayo’s original plan was to focus on cholera in India (and not plague) because it would allow her to focus on a man-made disease (she worried perhaps that rats would let Hindus off her hook!). Mayo sought the support of health officials in London and Geneva, who were somewhat skeptical of her case. All the same, Mother India abounds in fear-mongering xenophobic tropes of the sort that Trump and Bannon were criticized for in recent times, and worse. While Mayo reminds her readers strategically of how close India is to the United States (“Bombay is but three weeks journey from New York… and some knowledge… concerning so big and today so near a neighbor should be a part of our intelligence and our self-protection”, p. 75) what’s even more disturbing is the vivid picture of filth, degradation, and disease she paints around Hindu women and children in examples such as the following.
The first example describes, allegedly, the scene at a Kali temple in Calcutta:
“Meanwhile, and instantly, a woman who waited behind the killers of the goat has rushed forward and fallen on all fours to lap up the blood with her tongue… while half a dozen sick, sore dogs, horribly misshapen by nameless diseases, stick their hungry muzzles into the lengthening pool of gore.” (p 71).
Note the ways in which ugly, repulsive details are highlighted here. The aim is to create disgust, and contempt — not only for the person of the woman described here, but her beliefs and culture as a whole. Hinduism is that religion for which women get down on all fours, like dogs, and then lap up goat blood from the alongside grotesquely malformed and diseased dogs at that. Propaganda at it’s best, or worst.
What is even more disturbing than her degrading and dehumanizing depiction of Hindu women is the subtle eugenicism embedded in her cruel gaze when it falls upon Hindu infants and the very process of Hindu babies being born as it were. When a Hindu woman shows Mayo her baby:
“Just now I happened to look at a matronly high-caste woman with an intelligent clean-cut face… She sat down on the floor to show her baby… This revealed his whole little body caked in a mass of dry and half-dry excreta” (p 185)
And when Hindu babies are about to be born into this world, there is only filth, disease, and a mid-wife who seems to bear all sorts of European witch-hunt mythology on her body now:
“And it is into this evil-smelling rubbish-hole that the young wife creeps when her hour is come upon her… (on a) little support of cow-dung or of stones..” (139)
“(The dhai is) at her dirtiest, a bearer of multiple contagions.. (with a) Witch-of-Endor face (and) vermin-infested elf-locks, her hanging rags, her dirty claws… (and her) long unwashed hand, loaded with dirty rings and bracelets and encrusted with living contaminations.” (139–140)
Disgust and Dehumanization
The description of human beings in animal-like situations and with animal-part-terminology is a powerful took of dehumanization campaigns. As David Livingston Smith (2011) writes in his study Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others, “nobody dehumanizes others by imagining them to be appealing animals…dehumanized people are often perceived as … dangerous predators, unclean animals, or prey.” (p. 251–252).
Mayo’s figure of the Hindu is clearly in the category of the “unclean animal here.”
The key question now is: why? Mayo had a motivation, or two, or more. She was a race and religion sort of supremacist. She was a xenophobe. She didn’t want Hindus in America. She didn’t want Hindus taking back their own country in India. She didn’t want Hindus in this world. Period.
But what of the time since? What of the argument that everything that has appeared in the New York Times, Time magazine, Hollywood, school textbooks, everyday life, that fits the contemptible attitudes of a Mayo towards Hindus does not constitute racism anymore (or worse, that it’s such a deflection from and by something called ‘Hindu Nationalism’) because Hindus are a majority in India and a somewhat economically successful minority in the United States?
We have a whole ‘dominant paradigm’ in academia and journalism today sticking to its ugly racism on that point, resisting a million calls for truth, change, and justice, even as our fears and vulnerabilities only grow.
Was Mayo just a thing of the past?
Let us consider one more point from Smith on the nature of dehumanization, particularly the use of disgust as a tool of dehumanization:
“Disgust appears to be a uniquely human trait. Other animals reject food that they do not like, but they don’t show signs of revulsion like humans do… coming into contact with something nasty, thinking of it as nasty is quite another.”
The question to consider now is simply whether an empirical study of “Hindu” depictions in Western journalism and popular culture would show a marked change from the days of Mayo or not (Rotter writes that Mayo’s book was profoundly influential in shaping American elite perceptions of India till as late as the 1950s, foreign policy sorts, journalists, and Hollywood producers most of all). Did the hippy, free love and Yoga boom of the 1960s, or the ‘model minority’ Hindu community ensure that the Mayo sort of racism was a thing of the past now? The only change, as I wrote in the context of my analysis of Bernie Sanders a few months ago, is that after the 1960s, the framework of “race” vanished from explicit play in the American discourse on Hindus. But under the pretext of a seemingly post-religious, secular, multicultural, liberal critique of “Hindu Nationalism,” what we have witnessed is the perpetuation of not only the Mayo-hallucination of Hinduism as evil incarnate, but its festering into something even more dangerous today: the smearing of any dissent from it as morally invalid, as “far right” or “fascist” as it were.
Recall every one of what we can only think of as Hindu ‘money-shots’ in the bizarre vomiting of racist hatred that has come forth in the hundred odd years since Mayo, an ugly and grotesque pool of lies in which unfortunately many colonized brown elite collaborators too swim today. Recall the effort that has been made, by writers, professors, movie-makers, stand-up comics, a whole string of mediocre and genius communicators, all aimed at that one goal regarding Hinduism; “thinking of it as nasty.” It never ended with Mayo’s image of the Hindu woman lapping goat blood from the floor of the Kali temple alongside misshapen dog-mouths. It played itself out in hundreds of images over many decades; photos of fly-covered children in slums, begging bowls and outstretched hands interspersed with White Christian faces of charity and false-god-accusations. It was in City of Joy and Attenborough’s Gandhi and all the Mother Theresa hagiographies, our postcolonial suffering an ornament to their convoluted and baseless fiction of moral -and religious — supremacy. It erupted into comical cleverness in monkey-brain soups and snake-stuffed-python dinners in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. And in the same week that Pakistani terrorists went on a massacre in Mumbai, a bizarre British fantasy of Hindu oppressiveness called Slumdog Millionaire presented the unforgettably vivid image of a boy rising from the sewage pit covered in human shit.
And of course, Gardner Harris of the New York Times went studying Indian shitting habits to claim that the Hindu scriptures were to blame somehow. Always back to Hinduism. White Skin, Brown Bums. Fanon would have quite a few things to say indeed. And not to forget the new White Skin stand-ins in perpetuating the colonial gaze — CNN’s series called Believer in which host Reza Aslan went to do some some cannibal tourism in India. More disgust.
Weaponization of Disgust against a Collective Identity is Dangerous
Disgust in nature is one thing. Disgust as a creation of a weaponized cultural industry and a corrupt military industrial communications complex sold out to narrow medievalist influence groups is quite another matter. Now, as media keeps us either informed or fearful or distracted as it so chooses, it is necessary for anyone who wishes to avoid the sort of terrible fate that so many Hindus have faced in India just a few days ago to wake up to their systemic targeting as objects of disgust by the media and call it out. I could not help recall the ugly fiction of Slumdog Millionaire’s sewage scene as I saw the heartbreaking photos of a Hindu serviceman’s lifeless hand sticking out of the filthy water near a Delhi slum last week (read more at this Link, but watch out for a painful, graphic image). If you are a Hindu, even a post-religious, non-identifying, ‘all secularisms are the same’ believing sort of Hindu, you better recognize that what is happening in media today against Hinduism, Hindus and India is massively, macabrely abnormal.
If India has the slightest sense of sovereignty as.a country, and if Indian Americans have even a bit of self-respect as a community, we should be using every legal, cultural, and intellectual tool we can use to effect a complete ban on terms like “cow urine drinker” in media and social media.
People in India who choose to protect their cows, or use their products as disinfectant or magic potions are free to do so legally, and morally. If you don’t believe in it, just ignore it. No ‘cow urine drinker’ caused wildlife endangerment and extinction, Amazon rainforest burnings, global pandemics, colonialisms, and all that their dominon-addled worldview and history ever did. If media continue to use the cow-urine smear, or any other disease and disgust smear against Hindus, it should be viewed as nothing less than an act of genocidal intent. That is what it is.
