Today in Hinduphobia November 22, 2019: Casual Appropriation and Demonization Round-Up: Om is a Cult, White Suit is a Cult, Bannon is Dharma…
The American cultural industries have been criticized for objectifying people of color and appropriating their cultural symbols on numerous occasions, but there seems to be an exceptionally extreme degree of stone-deaf indifference that seems to exist when it comes to Hindu people and Hindu cultural symbols.
In some cases of appropriation, we have at least witnesed voices of protest reflected in academic and activist settings about issues like sports businesses using Native American images (see, for example, the Media Education Foundation’s powerful documentary on the Washington “Redskins” war on Native dignity). However, it seems like Hindus are seen as dead and for all practical purposes gone when it comes to big media’s occasional “uses” of our names, images, and symbols.
The notion of treating a whole group of people as effectively “dead” or extinct is not a mere paranoid whim but the only way to diagnose a political reality. Native American writers and activists have often pointed this out (and Hindu Americans complacent with “model minority” myths would do well to learn from them): dominant, exploitative, soulless cultures resist change in many ways, and one of them is by pretending that whole groups of people simply do not exist any more even when they do. That is the myth that is deployed to deny living Native American struggles.
A different form of that same erasure tactic is in play with Hindus; except they do invoke our presence sometimes in the form of media tropes about saffron mobs, intolerant majorities (in India), or overprivileged minorities that ought to feel White Guilt for Hindu Privilege (here in the US). In any case, it seems that American media offers more agency to walking cadavers in its pop culture than it does to Hindu characters or symbols. We are non-existent, beyond a cartoon called Apu or a curious puppy that gets funny drunk called Raj. And most of all, every idea, artefact, and product of our ancestors’ cultural labor is now a free resource for non-Hindu elites to peddle in the pursuit of their economic, social, or political self-aggrandisement.
Today, The Boston Globe published an editorial cartoon by Ward Sutton supposedly about “The GOP’s Defense Strategies” that features a “cult” worshipping Donald Trump and a MAGA hat chanting “Om.” The artist may think that the word “Om” is a fair marker of a “cult” from inside the little world of overblown whiteness that he and his discourse inhabit, and perhaps he also believes that his art has no consequence for millions of Brown Hindus.
Unfortunately, that is not the case. There is a sustained campaign in both big media and some South Asian activist circles of demonizing Hindus in America as Trump supporters and Nazis who deserve to “punch a Nazi”-ed, deported, and generically disposed of as incurable deplorables who deserve no mercy before today’s self-styled progressive certitudes (or should I say, “cult” beliefs?). Sutton’s casual appropriation of the word “Om” may or may not be related to any thought on his part about what bearing this action might have for Hindus, but the context of growing “cult” smears against Hindus more directly is also a worrying trend that American Hindus ought to pay more attention to.
While Western media have carried out occasional attacks on Hindu gurus over the years even as Yoga-profiteers have sought to “rescue” Yoga from the Hindus with or without usual “white savior” posturing to go with it, what is especially disturbing in recent times is the effort to use the pre-loaded “Hindu=Cult” propaganda-equity against Democratic Presidential contender Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
Readers of this column might recall the elaborate hit-piece written by a creative writing professor in New York magazine a few months ago, as well as the condescending and rude inquisition that an NPR affiliate anchor subjected Rep. Gabbard to with pointed and relentlessly repetitive questions making her Hindu background seem outlandish to listeners (you can find my responses to both these events in my Medium page).
The latest salvo in this “cult” smear campaign against Tulsi Gabbard took the form of a now much-mocked New York Times fashion-analysis of the white suit worn by her in the recent Democratic Presidential debate. The Times columnist wrote that Tulsi’s “white suits are not the white suits of Ms. Clinton, nor even the white of Ms. Williamson” but are instead “the white of avenging angels and flaming swords” reminiscent of “somewhat combative righteousness” and “cult leaders” and having “connotations of the fringe”
(Side Note: After you catch your breath at the chutzpah with which big media seem to view their readers, you should also note the fascinating use of the disarmingly modest “somewhat” in there — it took me a while to notice this particular propaganda tactic; in the middle of spewing absurd lies, throw in a qualifier like “somewhat” or “perhaps” or “suggests” to make it seem like you are actually really quite objective and measured. I believe Arun Shourie spotted this tendency in the writings of India’s “Eminent Historians” in his book of the same name.)
I conclude with a few more examples of gratuitous appropriation and demonization from media and academia below.
Earlier this year, the New York Times used a photo of Steve Bannon with a red mark on his forehead suggesting his “white nationalist” views come from not his being white but by his .. being open to wearing a Hindu mark?
The Steve Bannon ticket to escaping white guilt by blaming Hindus has of course got a whole feature-film devoted to it now — the new documentary on Bannon is actually called “American Dharma”! Perhaps they will go back and renamed Birth of a Nation as Birth of Dharma, and Triumph of the Will as Triumph of Dharma now! That would be a convenient way to escape hard self-questioning about race and religion, wouldn’t it?
The stark conclusion we need to draw from this new line of cultural appropriation is that there has been a steady decline from gratuitous digs at Hindu deities and icons allegedly in a light-hearted mood (such as the Friends episode where a Ganesha is kicked and broken by an actor) to something even more disturbing than their mere cruel superstitious bigotry against us as “idolaters.” The recent trend has been to try and associate Hinduism with violence even when the people who have committed the violence are not even Hindu. We saw this when the New York Times went to town blaming Hindu caste-system for a Muslim blasphemy riot in Pakistan (and of course, Hitler, that goes on and on). We are also starting to see this in more seemingly casual “product placement” sort of Hinduism is Violence tacics. The Showtime series The Affair had an episode (thanks to Parth Parihar for sharing this) where a character celebrates a Krishna murthy seemingly respectfully, talking about how it’s her favorite deity and all; only to have Krishna used as a murder weapon (I was going to say spoiler alert but hey, what’s this when what they have despoiled with their religions is the whole plundered planet!)
At the root of this genocidal megalomania that no sane person would deem acceptable in a post-colonial universe is the problem not only of racism by Hindu-exception clause rampant in privileged white society (and that ‘privilege’ is important, this hate is not coming mostly from the American working class but from the media and academic upper classes) but also of utter obliviousness by privileged Hindus in America who have failed to invest their time, money, energy, nor even attention on symbols as markers of self-representation and political struggle.
Hindus have for generations watched quietly, or even actively participated in the snapping of our names and symbols from our worlds so they can be used anyway anyone wants. We do not even speak up when people use a word like “Swastika” for the Nazi Hooked Cross, not realizing we are being given the bill everyday for crimes done by others, we are being made the patsys for historic monstrosities, slowly, by the same interests that did these crimes.
The current trend in extreme appropriation is already widespread in academic circles, and it will soon become your reality in your offices and children’s schools too — that somehow Hindu-specific words and ideas can be used generically, to mean whatever the users wishes to talk about, and if you object you are a “Hindu Nationalist.” Look at this example of a white professor who used the word “brahmins” to describe white elitism, and then worse, has the chutzpah to say he took a class on South Asia and so the Brown woman who challenged him can stop complaining:
“It would all mean the same thing to me” — this is the Hinduphobic equivalent of the racist “They all look alike.”
Our troubles are imminent and huge, and yet we behave like we can escape them by ignoring them or by shooting the messenger (me and others writing about this issue for years now).
Unless the Hindu community diverts some of its collective energy from big temples and big boasting about spelling bee and CEO kids, we will be in for some major surprises that all our ‘model minority’ success in this country has robbed us of the most elementary human capacity to feel, understand, and act as agents upon this world.
You are marked for extinction, whether you like it or not. You have already given up your names, your gods, your temples, and your homelands most of all. You are being asked to give up the truth too, now, and unless that means something to you, makes you act, you are seriously failing dharma.
“Kill the Hindu, Save (and sell) the Programmer/Doctor/Engineer” is the racist, genocidal policy that exists today and affects your children whether you grasp it or not. Ask your temples, ask your community, ask your schools and colleges, ask your libraries, ask everyone you know: are they paying attention? Are they going to avert the tide? What is the story that two or three generations from now your descendants will say about you? Will they have the same memory that the simple Hindu diaspora that went as indentured workers under colonialism to remote island lands has about their ancestors who preserved their traditions, or will we, the American Hindus from “good education and good families” be laughed and derided as the complacent wealth-besotten fools who crawled when asked to bend?
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