Today in Hinduphobia March 2, 2021: Rashmi of Udupi Versus the Racists and Hindu-Haters of Oxford
Rashmi Samant is Not the Villain Here.
It has been truly heart-breaking (but also inspiring) to see Rashmi Samant speak about the barbaric racism that she and her parents have been subject to by various people associated with the University of Oxford. As a friend commented today, Rashmi’s experience is grotesquely reminiscent of that of Hypatia, the respected scholar of Alexandria who was savagely killed by a mob of fanatical Christians for being a woman, brilliant, and well, Not Christian.
I am of course, relieved, frankly, that unlike the insane scenes depicted in the movie Agora about the Christian destruction of Alexandria’s library and richly learned past, this story has seen the safe return of Rashmi back to her home in another seat of learning and tradition, our own Udupi.
I have to mention these comparisons and contexts because without them, I do not know how well or how effectively we can even understand what just happened here, and what is happening more generally to students from India or from Indian-origin families in universities in the West.
For decades, Indian students (and their parents), have worked hard to not just secure “admission” into these coveted institutions, but also to pay the astronomical amounts of money involved in studying there. Farms have been sold or mortgaged, homes lost, families and relations strained, and so many struggles only those who have been through them know about, just to ensure that somehow the next generation has a comfortable and perhaps more meaningful life (often confusing the two goals).
But what is it exactly that universities in the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere, are giving their students from India in return for their presence, pounds, dollars, and lives and labor, most of all?
I do not know too much about Rashmi’s journey except what she has shared, including the very relevant fact that she is a first-generation college student, something universities in the West often brag about.
From her writing, she seems brilliant and genuinely perceptive about coloniality and education. From her reasoning about why she resigned, she seems deeply empathetic and ethical. And from her decision to now write about the targeting of her family for simply being Hindu by an Oxford staff member, she seems like exactly the sort of student Western universities neck-deep in their own auto-legitimized Hinduphobic racism need to wake up and panic about.
I choose my words carefully. I always do. But for this child of Udupi, I do with even more care and conviction. These citadels of racist filth need to be dusted off. And it is Indian students, like Rashmi, and their parents, who need to step up to doing this.
Kill the Indian, Save their Tuition Dollars
The basic reality that the hundreds of thousands of Indian students in universities around the world need to recognize is that they have no protection against anything, really. Universities run by old racist white bosses and dons and served by colonized South Asian sycophants have constructed a bizarre system of lies and hate around the bodies, lives, and dreams of the same people who eagerly come to their campuses year after year naively believing that they are somehow being treated very well. The truth is that while Western universities may offer some token privileges and comforts to their tuition-paying Indian customers such as welcome parties and gym facilities, they do not do anything beyond this to protect Indians from unfair and dishonest treatment by the university. In fact, they seem to be going out of their way to do the opposite.
Consider this reality: universities recognize and protect against various forms of discrimination and hatred against their community members based on certain definitions of identity; but somehow, when that identity is “Indian” or “Hindu”, suddenly it ceases to exist as a human-rights-worthy identity; you could be subjected to a vicious, hateful, lie campaign for being Hindu by a university employee, as Rashmi was recently, and the university would apparently not need to act on this at all.
Logically, an attack on a woman of color and first-generation foreign student for her religion would be treated instantly as an offense of multiple dimensions; sexism, racism, religious bigotry, classism, xenophobia. But in the madhouse of privilege and obfuscation that is the higher education biz, it is apparently quite okay to weigh the wholly imaginary “privilege” of her “Hinduness” into an erasure of all injustice one might face for being Hindu, and a woman, and a person of color, and a first generation foreign student.
This is the reality. It’s widespread, and Rashmi’s modern-day Alexandrian scholar-hunt is the tipping point. But the reality also needs to be understood accurately, and without the usual tadka/ popu (“flash in the pan”) noise of social media outrage that vanishes after the usual rants about “Cultural Marxists” and “Leftists.”
That stuff, frankly, gets you nowhere.
Leftists. Oppression Olympians. Whatever you call “them,” it matters little because “they” have erected fire-walls around their favored groups, religions, identities, invested in kavachams for their children, unlike the SUV-Stock-Market-Ivy League-Spelling Bee-Kids boasting clueless Hindoos.
We have done so little for our college-going children, especially those of us who boast about our “achievements” in Silicon Valley and Wall Street and the like.
Two Reality Checks
The reality in higher education that Indian students, parents, and of course, our social media experts, need to recognize is that “protection” for each identity group has been actively, painstakingly, and relentlessly fought for within these institutions by students, activists, academics, philanthropists, and others for decades. Indian students, academics, and even some donors and philanthropists too have of course been a part of these universities for several decades now, and yet, somehow we have not even started the conversation on the issue of our dignity as human beings, our human rights, our right to say: Bleep you! You’re a racist if you say this or do this with us, and you will pay for it, you Bleeper-bleeper.
So, that’s reality number one. Indians and especially Hindus, have in spite of having given millions of dollars and pounds in fees to universities not done the homework on how their children will be treated for the “identity” in this insane corporate-ivory-tower hallucinated “identity”-based “difference is good” pretending capitalist world (Indians who are not Hindus, such as Muslims, do get the legal and academic protection from universities through the concept of Islamophobia which is widely recognized in academia as a reality Muslims face that must be eradicated, which is wholly understandable since people have worked hard to get this recognition unlike Hindus).
Basically, we are getting what we paid for, or didn’t pay for, all these years; we allowed our social scientists, artists, writers, activists, dreamers, social-changers, to find employment, and worse, even meaning and value, not in our own community’s onto-ethical vision, but in that of interests hell-bent on profiting off the enslavement, humiliation, and destruction of our community, our lands, our gods, our people.
That, unfortunately, is reality number two. What it means to be “Indian” in any institution today, primarily higher education (as a student, teacher, employee), but also, rapidly in virtually any other institution (schools, offices, HR policies), has been shaped by forces and interests enjoying the rise of identities manufactured under colonial and neocolonial regimes of power, the South Asia Studies map of identities as it were. In this lurid academic-war-capitalist-religious-fundamentalist daydream, “Hindus” and “India” are marked for disappearance for because they are somehow, incredibly, the same thing as “Nazi” or “White” in their threatening nature towards Muslims, Sikhs, Dalits, Adivasis, and others. This daydream was shared publicly in one form as a seemingly innocent children’s curriculum debate in California in 2016, but is now coming true with all the frenzy of a Jahr-Null rally from The Man in the High Castle in other places.
One billion people, not just “India” as a cartographical abstraction, an “imagination,” are in the process of being actively reset from their own conceptions of life, family, nature, everything, into becoming the McWorkers and McConsumers of a soulless global tyranny. Unless every Hindu fights, this is how it will be for every Hindu from now on. You can, and will be, destroyed on whim for being who you are. Your only choice will be to conform and comply even more degradingly, abandoning your names (“casteist”), temples (“sexist”), festivals (“atmospherist”), and worst of all, truth itself, at best comforting yourself with internet anonymity shouting “RW” slogans on Twitter against the insanity of the “Leftists.”
The other choice is to fight. Not type on your phone for RTs but fight in ways that will make a change in the real world.
Unless every Hindu fights, this is how it will be for every Hindu, anywhere on earth. Or Mars. If they do go there.
The Warning Signs
And how will it be?
Let us start with a review of what happened to Rashmi. Soon after a historic win in the student election (on a strong anti-colonial plank at that) in a pompous British campus, Rashmi is charged with offenses against three communities with a history of prejudice against them (though historically, not one of these communities can say that it was Rashmi’s community, in any way, which has been responsible for such prejudice against them; Rashmi was not a White Christian European or American making comments on Asians, Jews, or others… but anyway).
While each of these alleged offenses bears the mark of different contexts, and possible differences of interpretation, (I can totally think of an elderly Telugu, or Kannada speaker from my extended family who doesn’t fully get the idioms and nuances of English find the word “hollow” a natural and not inappropriate descriptor for humanity in the presence of an exhibit about genocide), it is what happened afterwards that tells the real story.
(And by the way, how come white-favored brown celebrities who pose for selfies in genocide sites like Priyanka Chopra are conveniently forgiven and not deplatformed from Netflix or the world media while a first-generation brown student is hated on so viciously for something less callous than a selfie? Or celebrities who insult indigenous sacred sites like Hungry Games Jennifer?)
The first sign that this was about reasserting colonial privilege against a bright young Indian student rather than a clear-cut offense on her part was the fact that several newspaper reports actually begin to throw in her criticism of a white racist colonizer into the same category of offensiveness as her comments which were said to have hurt the Jewish, Asian, and Trans communities.
Who exactly is piggy-backing on this exactly?
The second sign is so obvious THAT should have got a resignation or termination by now: a post-doctoral staff member at the university makes an outrageously offensive Hinduphobic post targeting Rashmi and her parents for simply being Hindu.
Key parts of the text transcribed from above:
“Rashmi Samant, the Hindu president-elect of Oxford University Student Union resigned yesterday… following a long list of allegations of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-semitism, making light of Hitler’s genocides, transphobia. All these are typical characteristics of far Right forces India…
This is the viral photo which shows her relatives (possibly parents) celebrating the destruction of a mosque in India and the establishment of a Hindu temple on the site.
She has come to Oxford from Manipal Institute of Technology in Karnataka, whose official website displays a photo of Modi, the supreme leaders.
She has come to Oxford directly from coastal Karnataka, which is a bastion of Islamophobic far Right forces…
She nicely fooled Oxford students under the disguise of ‘decolonization.’ Yes, far Right Desi forces hate White people and Western modernity because they want to reinstate sanatan Hindutva culture with its inherent caste-based tortures and most violent form of patriarchy.
Of course, they are always ready to destroy statues of non-Hindutva people, be it Muslims, or Christians, or liberal Hindus.”
We live in a strange world indeed that it’s so easy to say someone was “anti-semitic” or “transphobic” based on a bad pun and a superfluous sentence, but a university employee, a post-doctoral researcher, denouncing a student for being Hindu in the most unscholarly, presumptuous, and bigoted manner, is not questioned by his university at all?
What is the criteria this Oxford employee uses to make a difference between “Hindutva” (of which he claims to be an expert in his bio), and “Hinduism” (as many South Asia scholars and activists insist)? There is none at all. He has a word-salad ready to stick on her after identifying right off the bat as a Hindu (something none of the aggrieved parties have apparently found relevant to their complaints about her as far as I know either). And when you inspect that odious word-salad (transphobia, antisemitism etc.) you find the word “Islamophobia” in there too. Once again, as far as I know, no one complained that Rashmi’s social media posts were Islamophobic (the complaints were only Holocaust-pun, Trans-sentence, Asian offensive Instagram phrase). How does this post-doc Hindutva history expert imagine an allegation now of her Islamophobia too?
And speaking of history, how does one characterize a 2020 picture of a student’s parents celebrating their beloved temple’s rebuilding as a celebration of the destruction of a mosque in 1992?
This man’s Hindutva-expertise is clearly a myth.
How does a British-Bengali (possibly “Aryan” ) man tarnish the people of a whole region in (possibly “Dravidian”) south India as far Right Islamophobic?
Is it because Udupi has a revered Krishna temple where the popular and egalitarian Pejawar Swami even invited local Muslim devotees to enjoy an iftar meal once?
How does a man presume to decide that he is a better judge of “sanatan Hindutva violent patriarchy” or whatever he calls it more than a woman, a woman he is trying to smear ?
This latter-day Cyril of Token Conniving needs to be called out by every Hindu student in Oxford for his vicious oyster-shell brandishing misogyny and hate.
When Will Universities Reign in Hinduphobic Staff?
Rashmi Samanth is the latest, and the worst case we have seen. Yet.
Before this:
There has been this.
And this:
And this:
A few days ago, the Vice President of the Indian Student Association in an American university wrote to the administration after the violent attack on a Gandhi statue in a nearby city requesting a message from the university to the Indian community assuring them of their safety. This was one of the most broad-minded, empathetic, rational, and logical statements I have seen from a student in this complex world of identity politics and increasing identity-rationalized violence: Gandhi can be debated, yes. But an attack like this isn’t about Gandhi the alleged racist as much as Gandhi the Indian. Indian students, your Indian students, are worried. And your university uses and prospers off Gandhi’s name even now, claiming to promote its ideals. Would a note of sympathy be too much to expect?
The university has not replied.
Since then, I believe, it has duly sent out emails of concern and support to Asian students about Anti-Asian violence in America. And also wished them on Chinese New Year.
It’s beautiful…
… To be anything but an Indian student in a foreign university?
Unless every Hindu fights, this is how it will be for every Hindu, anywhere on earth.
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