About this episode
This episode features a conversation with the founding members of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, also known as the Auntylectuals. We began with each of them reflecting on their pathway into Hindu Studies and how the questions of caste and gender shaped their approaches to this field. We then discussed their motivations for starting the collective and what interventions they hoped to make through it. This took us deeper into some thorny topics: caste as a form of embodied knowledge that is often accompanied by the denial of its continued social power; the politics of Hinduism in North America where Hindus are both predominantly upper caste and a racial minority; the relationship between Hinduism and Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism; the traffic in language and tactics between Hindutva and Zionism; and the efforts to push back against the movement to make caste a protected category in U.S. anti-discrimination law.
Guests:
Shreena Gandhi: Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University
Harshita Kamath: Professor of Telugu Culture, Literature, and History, Emory University
Sailaja Krishnamurti: Professor of Gender Studies, Queen’s University
Shana Sippy, Professor of Religion, Centre College
Mentioned in the episode:
Rajiv Malhotra: an ideologue of the Hindu nationalist movement in the U.S. and founder of Infinity Foundation
Harshita Kamath, Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance
Amar Chitra Katha: an Indian comic book publisher whose comics are hugely popular and widely available in India and the Indian diaspora.
Sailaja Krishnamurti, “Learning about Hindu Religion through Comics and Popular Culture,” David Yoo and Khyati Y Joshi eds. Envisioning Religion, Race and Asian Americans, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 207-226, 2020.
Babri Masjid: a 16th century mosque that became the target of Hindu nationalist mobilization and was destroyed by vigilante mobs in December 1992.
Marko Geslani, “A Model Minority Religion: The Race of Hindu Studies,” American Religion, forthcoming.
Thenmozhi Soundarajan, The Trauma of Caste
Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, “
