ñ scholar tracks Hindu nationalism’s global disguise
Top photo: Flags of the Party flags of India's conservative Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena. (Photo: Al Jazeera English/Wikimedia Commons)
Ethnic studies Professor NishantUpadhyay delves into the gap between image and reality in Hinduism
Hinduism, like most religions, has a reputation.
According to Nishant Upadhyay, a ñ associate professor of ethnic studies, it is tied to a deep and ancient reverence for the natural world and offers a peaceful, colorful alternative to the spiritual traditions many Westerners grew up with.
For Upadhyay (they/them), that reputation poses a problem.
NishantUpadhyay, a ñ associate professor of ethnic studies, notes that Hinduism, like most religions, has a reputation.
“Hinduism has this reputation, especially in a place like Boulder, where it’s seen as this religion that’s environmentally friendly, animal friendly, cares about women and queer folks, cares about peace and non-violence,” they say.
“But it has always been deeply caste-ist and patriarchal,” Upadhyay adds.
That gap between image and reality is at the heart of , published in the Amerasia Journal, which traces a pattern of right-wing Hindu diaspora organizations forging “solidarities” with Indigenous peoples across the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
They argue these gestures are not acts of genuine allyship, but more calculated moves in service of Hindu nationalism, a political ideology with a far different agenda than the one being advertised.
“We have to be very careful when Hindu nationalists use this framework of indigeneity because this is deeply fraught and violent. We can’t come here and say Hindus are in solidarity when Hindus are actually oppressing indigenous, caste-oppressed and Muslim communities in India,” Upadhyay says.
Indians on Indian lands
Upadhyay, associate chair of Graduate Studies in ñ’s Department of Ethnic Studies, is also the author of . The book was recently awarded “Outstanding Contribution in Social Sciences” by the . Their recent work is a continuation of the book that closely examines the proliferation of the Hindu nationalist movement in the diaspora.
To understand Upadhyay’s argument, it helps to understand the landscape in which their work is taking place.
“I’m looking at more recent formations of the diaspora in the last 100 years to North America, which is a very different form of migration than indentured labor migrations of South Asians to the different colonies under the British empire,” Upadhyay says.
“My focus is more on folks who are willingly moving with caste, class and religious privileges, capital and mobility. A lot more ‘skilled’ workers have moved more willingly in the past several decades, mostly to North America, Western Europe and Australia,” they add.
Upadhyay argues that dominant-caste Hindu immigrants in the U.S. and elsewhere aren't simply racialized minorities navigating racism in white settler states. Rather, in the way these communities relate to the lands they now inhabit, Upadhyay likens them to settlers rather than allies of indigenous peoples.
“Because India was able to become independent in 1947, when we move here, we are racialized, but we don’t really understand the realities of violence that indigenous communities continue to face,” they say.
Hindu nationalism further complicates the picture.
“The Hindu nationalist ideology is about a century old. The project claims that India should only belong to Hindus, specifically dominant caste Hindus, and anyone who’s not a Hindu should not be part of it,” Upadhyay explains. “So the violence is targeted primarily at Muslim and Christian communities in India.”
“Saffronwashing is a way to talk about how Hindu nationalists normalize and make invisible the violences perpetuated against caste-oppressed, indigenous and religious-minority communities in India. They portray Hinduism as environmentally friendly, peace-loving, non-violent, yoga-loving, colorful festivals and spicy food,” explains ñ scholar Nishant Upadhyay.
Under Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, now in his third term, that ideology has become deeply entrenched in Indian political and social life. Upadhyay says it has also traveled with the diaspora.
A familiar playbook
The attempts at allying with indigenous communities Upadhyay examines follow a similar script.
In 2016, during the Standing Rock protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline, Hindu American organizations issued statements claiming kinship with the Standing Rock Sioux.
“Hindu nationalist groups started coming out with these statements saying, ‘We are indigenous to India, and we were colonized by the British. You are indigenous, and you’ve been colonized by the Europeans and the American state. So, we understand your struggles, and we want to be in alliance with you,’” Upadhyay recounts.
The pattern repeated when unmarked graves of Indigenous children were discovered at former residential school sites in Canada, and again when Native Hawaiian protectors rallied against the construction of a massive telescope on the sacred summit of Mauna Kea. In Australia, Hindu organizations point to DNA studies suggesting genetic links between Indian and Aborigine populations as evidence of ancient kinship.
Each gesture, Upadhyay argues, is a form of what they and other scholars call “saffronwashing”—a term borrowed from the similar logics of greenwashing and pinkwashing.
“Caste is very important to think about and name. … This is a longer genealogy of violence that dominant caste Indians have imported with themselves when they’ve come here. So, it’s a conversation we need to be having much more proactively and keep fighting against,” says Nishant Upadhyay. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
“Saffronwashing is a way to talk about how Hindu nationalists normalize and make invisible the violences perpetuated against caste-oppressed, indigenous and religious-minority communities in India. They portray Hinduism as environmentally friendly, peace-loving, non-violent, yoga-loving, colorful festivals and spicy food,” Upadhyay explains.
“They project these cultural things about Hinduism but erase the violences that hide beneath those cultural practices.”
For Western audiences unfamiliar with caste, the danger in these solidarity gestures may be hard to see. That disguise is the problem.
Caste is among the oldest systems of structural oppression in human history. It predates European colonialism by thousands of years and extends well beyond the borders of India and Hinduism.
“Caste is very important to think about and name. … This is a longer genealogy of violence that dominant caste Indians have imported with themselves when they’ve come here. So, it’s a conversation we need to be having much more proactively and keep fighting against,” Upadhyay says.
For Hindu nationalists in the diaspora, the goal, Upadhyay says, is to normalize and mainstream themselves. Within progressive spaces, interfaith coalitions and anti-racist organizing, Hindu nationalist messaging can be normalized, and any criticism of India’s treatment of its own minorities can be suppressed. In the last decade, there have been cases of diasporic Hindu nationalist groups going after scholars, writers and activists critical of the Hindu nationalist regime in India, caste violence, Islamophobia and the occupation of Kashmir.
Already, Upadhyay points out, Hindu nationalist influence has shaped K-12 textbook battles, hiring cultures in Silicon Valley and the political landscape at the highest levels of American government across both parties.
“This impacts all of us,” they say.
What real solidarity looks like
Upadhyay is careful to distinguish the solidarities they critique from others that they see as genuine and decolonial. Kashmiri, Tamil, Punjabi, Dalit and Tibetan diaspora communities, they argue, have modeled a fundamentally different approach rooted in an honest acknowledgment of their own position, histories and complicities.
“We left our homelands because our people are oppressed and now we are refugees or immigrants here, but we have also become settlers,” they say, describing the framework these communities embrace. “That’s a very different articulation and practice of solidarity.”
At its core, the question is whether a community treats its own suffering as unique and self-contained or accepts its connection to a broader web of struggle and liberation.
For Upadhyay, only one of those orientations can sustain real solidarity.
“We can learn from these decolonial frameworks where interlinking of oppression and liberation is at the forefront,” they say.
That work, Upadhyay says, begins at home. The task they set for themselves, and for others in dominant-caste diaspora communities, is to look inward first.
“We have to examine how caste, race and indigeneity have shaped our own privilege before presuming to stand beside those whose lands and lives remain on the line,” Upadhyay says. “We have to fight together because our liberation is interconnected.”
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