Roundtable on Hindutva Harassment of Academics in North America Hindu Supremacists in a White World Audrey Truschke * HINDU RIGHT assaults on North American academics unfold within, to borrow WEB Du Bois’s phrase, a “white world” (Du Bois 2007, 69). Tis context is critical for understanding how Hindu supremacists have advanced some of the broad goals of white supremacy through anti-intellectual atacks. Scholars have long recognized that the Hindu Right—a broad group of individuals who sympathize with aspects of the political ideology known as Hindutva or Hindu nationalism—advances a narrow agenda of prejudice within the white-dominated context of North America. In 2000 Vijay Prashad argued “Yankee Hindutva fghts a bigoted culture [racist culture in the US] with its own bigoted worldview” (Prashad 2000, 320). In 2000 Biju Mathew and Vijay Prashad drew atention to “Yankee Hindutva’s afnity with US racism” (Mathew and Prashad 2000, 523). In 2007 Prema Kurien warned about the essentialist tendencies of “Hindu American groups,” whose “challenge to Eurocentrism is grounded in an essentialist, unicultural, valorized model of Indianness that is in many respects the mirror image of what they seek to critique” (Kurien 2007, 184). In 2022 the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies (FCHS) Collective analyzed how Hindu supremacist discourse “mimics and reformulates the discursive griev- ances of white supremacy culture” (Feminist Critical Hindu Studies 2022). I build on these arguments by analyzing one key shif indicated by the South Asia Scholar Activist Collective’s (SASAC) Selective Timeline of Hindu Harassment of Scholars: namely, the Hindu Right pre- dominantly targeted white scholars in the 1990s to early 2000s, whereas in more recent years they have directed their ire primarily against scholars of South Asian descent. In progressing from white targets to scholars of color, I argue that the Hindu Right has relied on the tools of white supremacy readily available in the United States context and, in so doing, has erected roadblocks to progressive atempts to diversify the North American academy. In the initial wave of atacks on academics documented on the SASAC’s Timeline, beginning in the 1990s, the Hindu Right focused on a handful of white scholars, ofen atributing alleged misinterpretations of Hinduism or Sanskrit texts to the scholars being non-South Asian. Te complaints constitute a depressing laundry list of retrograde stances. For instance, members of the Hindu Right objected to frank, even admiring discussions of sexuality in premodern Indian © Te Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. * Audrey Truschke, Department of History, Rutgers University-Newark, 175 University Avenue, Newark, NJ 07102, USA. Email: aat119@newark.rutgers.edu. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2023, XX, 1–4 htps://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfad027 Roundtable Piece Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jaarel/lfad027/7205783 by guest on 27 June 2023