Signals and Systems – Final ExamDate Due April 22, 2013, Mond.docx

Signals and Systems – Final Exam
Date Due: April 22, 2013, Monday @4:00 PM
Total = 100 points
Name:
Each question has three parts and each student will be
answering the part of each question assigned to him as indicated
below:
Part a
Part b
Part c
David
Marquidris
Jirreaubi
Question 1: Express the following complex numbers in polar
form: (10 points)
a. 3 + j4 b. -100 + j46 c. -23 + j7
Question 2: Let Z1 = 7 + j5 and Z2 = -3 + j4.
Determine the following in both Cartesian and Polar form: (10
points)
a. Z1/Z2 b. Z1*Z2 c. (Z1-Z2)/(Z1+Z2)
Question 3: Classify the signals below as periodic or aperiodic.
If periodic, then identify the period. (15 points)
a. x(t) = cos(4t) + 2sin(8t) b. x(t) = 3cos(4t) + sin(πt)
c. x(t) = cos(3πt) + 2cos(4πt)
Question 4: Determine if the following systems are time-
invariant, linear, causal, and/or memoryless? (15 points)
a) dy/dt + 6 y(t) = 4 x(t) b) dy/dt + 4 y(t) = 2 x(t) c.
y(t) = sin(x(t))

Question 5: Solve the following difference equations using
recursion first by hand (for n=0 to n=4) and then plot. Check
your solution using Maple or MATLAB (for n=0 to n=30).
Attach plots to your solution. (20 points)
a) y[n] + 0.5y[n-1] = 2x[n-1]; x[n] = δ[n], y[-1] = 0
b. y[n] + 2y[n-1] = 2x[n-1]; x[n] = δ[n], y[-1] = 0
c) y[n] + 1.2y[n-1] + 0.32y[n-2] = x[n]-x[n-1]; x[n] = u[n], y[-
2] = 1, y[-1]=2
Question 6. Solve the diﬀerential equations: (15 points)
a. x’’ + 4x’ + 13x = 0; x(0) = 3, x’(0) = 0
b. x’’ + 6x’ + 9x = 50 sin(t); x(0) = 1, x’(0) = 4
c. x’’ + 4x’ - 3x = 4et; x(0) = 1, x’(0) = -2
Question 7: Find the Fourier series of the function: (15 points)
a.
b.
c.
Signals and Systems
–
Final Exam
Total = 100 points
Name:

answering the part
of each question
assigned to him
as indicated
below:
Part a
Part b
Part c
David
Marquidris
Jirreaubi
Qu
estion 1
: Express
the following complex numbers in polar form:
(10 points)
a.
3 + j4
b.
-
100 + j46

c.
-
23 + j7
Question 2
: Let Z1 = 7 + j5 and Z2 =
-
3 + j4.
Determine the following in both Cartesian and Polar form:
(10 po
ints)
a.
Z1/Z2
b. Z1*Z2
c. (Z1
-
Z2)/(Z1+Z2)
Question 3
: Classify the signals belo
w as periodic or aperiodic. If periodic, then identify the period.
(1
5
points)

a.
x(t) = cos(4t) + 2sin(8t)
b. x(t) = 3cos(4t) + sin(πt)
c. x(t) = cos(3πt) + 2cos(4πt)
Question 4
: Determine if the following systems are time
-
invariant, linear, causal, and/or memoryless?
(1
5
po
ints)
a) dy/dt + 6 y(t) = 4 x(t)
b) dy/dt + 4 y(t) =
2 x(t)
c. y(t) = sin(x(t))
Question 5
: Solve the following difference equations using recursion first
by hand (for n=0 to n=4

) and then plot.
C
heck your solution using
Maple or
MATLAB (for n=0 to n=30).
Attach plots to your solution.
(
20
points)
a) y[n] + 0.5y[n
-
1] = 2x[n
-
1]; x[n] = δ[n], y[
-
1] = 0
b.
y[n] + 2y[n
-
1] = 2x[n
-
1]; x[n] = δ[n], y[
-
1] = 0
c) y[n] + 1.2y[n
-
1] + 0.32y[n
-

2] = x[n]
-
x[n
-
1]; x[n] = u[n], y[
-
2] = 1, y[
-
1]=2
Question 6
.
Solve the di
?
erential equation
s
:
(15 points)
a.
x
’
’
+
4
x
’
+ 13x = 0
;

x(0) = 3, x
’
(0) = 0
b.
x
’
’ +
6
x
’
+ 9
x =
50 sin(t)
;
x(0) = 1
, x
’(0) =
4
c.
x
’
’ +
4
x
’
-
3x =
4e

t
;
x(0) =
1
, x
’(0) =
-
2
Question 7
:
Find the Fourier series of the function
: (15 points)
a.
b.
c.
Signals and Systems – Final Exam

Total = 100 points
Name:
answering the part of each question assigned to him
as indicated below:
Part a Part b Part c
David Marquidris Jirreaubi
Question 1: Express the following complex numbers in polar
form: (10 points)
a. 3 + j4 b. -100 + j46 c. -23 + j7
Question 2: Let Z1 = 7 + j5 and Z2 = -3 + j4.
Determine the following in both Cartesian and Polar form: (10
points)
a. Z1/Z2 b. Z1*Z2 c. (Z1-Z2)/(Z1+Z2)
Question 3: Classify the signals below as periodic or aperiodic.
If periodic, then identify the period. (15 points)
a. x(t) = cos(4t) + 2sin(8t) b. x(t) = 3cos(4t) + sin(πt) c. x(t) =
cos(3πt) + 2cos(4πt)
Question 4: Determine if the following systems are time-
invariant, linear, causal, and/or memoryless? (15 points)
a) dy/dt + 6 y(t) = 4 x(t) b) dy/dt + 4 y(t) = 2 x(t) c. y(t) =
sin(x(t))
Question 5: Solve the following difference equations using
recursion first by hand (for n=0 to n=4) and then plot.
Check your solution using Maple or MATLAB (for n=0 to
n=30). Attach plots to your solution. (20 points)
a) y[n] + 0.5y[n-1] = 2x[n-1]; x[n] = δ[n], y[-1] = 0
b. y[n] + 2y[n-1] = 2x[n-1]; x[n] = δ[n], y[-1] = 0
c) y[n] + 1.2y[n-1] + 0.32y[n-2] = x[n]-x[n-1]; x[n] = u[n], y[-
2] = 1, y[-1]=2

Question 6. Solve the di?erential equations: (15 points)
a. x’’ + 4x’ + 13x = 0; x(0) = 3, x’(0) = 0
b. x’’ + 6x’ + 9x = 50 sin(t); x(0) = 1, x’(0) = 4
c. x’’ + 4x’ - 3x =
4e
t
; x(0) = 1, x’(0) = -2
Question 7: Find the Fourier series of the function: (15 points)
a.
b.
c.
164 ETHOS
Putting the “Fun” in Fundamentalism:
Religious Nationalism and the Split Self at
Hindutva Summer Camps in the United
States
Jessica Marie Falcone
Abstract Some Hindu immigrants to America – those who
subscribe to Hindutva values – desire full rights and
recognition in their adopted homeland even as they
simultaneously demand that so-called “migrants” to India
(that is, Muslims and Christians whose communities have

flourished in India for hundreds of years) acquiesce
to their vision of India as a “Hindu state.” In an American racial
landscape that structurally privileges whites, I
argue that the cultural categorization of Hindu immigrants into
a “lesser-than-whites” minority has only served
to fuel the growth of Hindu supremacist groups in the United
States. In this article, I draw on fieldwork with two
Hindu American summer camps in order to show that some
Hindu immigrants misrecognize and repress their
own current alienation in a manner that has subsequently
aggravated latent antipathies towards Muslim and
Christian communities in India. [religion, alienation, ethnicity,
Hinduism, diaspora, nationalism]
At Shantiniketan, a summer camp with a Hindu nationalist
(Hindutva) political bent based in
the suburbs of Washington, D.C. (hereafter, “the D.C. area”),1 a
distinct aversion to Islam
was a central aspect of community dogma.2 However, at a
facilitator-led discussion with
teenage campers about dating in 2001, Preeti, a college-aged
Hindu American volunteer–
counselor caused a stir by candidly admitting that back at
school she was in a relationship
with a Muslim American peer. The teenage campers, as well as
the adult supervisors, were
aghast. Mouths had literally dropped open. Neilesh, the primary
counselor for the teen
campers, a young man who had recently emigrated from India
for higher education in

the United States, visibly stiffened with shock. The gathered
campers and adults spent the
next 20 minutes enumerating the myriad “problems of marrying
non-Hindus,” especially
reinforcing the notion that Muslims of any race and African
Americans of any religion, were
completely out of the question as potential partners.
After a deluge of negative responses to her revelation, Preeti
retracted her statement (telling
me later that it was out of deference for her younger brother,
who was one of the teen
campers in the room), by saying that she was actually only
using it as an imaginary example
to show that she believed that two people could find happiness
together regardless of religion.
Neilesh sputtered a reiteration of her retraction with visible
relief: “She isn’t dating a Muslim!
She was just using it as a hypothetical example. She’s not
actually dating one!” Neilesh then
ETHOS, Vol. 40, Issue 2, pp. 164–195, ISSN 0091-2131 online
ISSN 1548-1352. C© 2012 by the American Anthropological
Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-
1352.2012.01245.x
Journal of the Society for
Psychological Anthropology
PUTTING THE “FUN” IN FUNDAMENTALISM 165
wrapped up the discussion by saying that marrying others
Hindus is the only way to keep
“the Hindu community united and strong.”

I departed from that “Education Session” with a reaffirmed
sense of the nature of the
intolerance promoted as an ideological platform for the
Hindutva group. I also came away
with a renewed recognition that while not everyone in the group
towed the party line,
dissenting voices were not comfortably tolerated. During the
session, Preeti had been all but
eviscerated, and Muslims and black Americans had fared no
better. But where did the vitriol
come from? In my fieldwork with Hindutva religious groups, I
encountered a significant
amount of antagonism to Muslims, as well as African Americans
(and occasionally Latinos).
I worked to understand why particular religious and ethnic
affiliations were so reviled, and
how had these antagonisms been cultivated in the youth groups
and affiliated summer camps
I studied.
In this contribution, I specifically address the cultural,
socioeconomic, psychological ele-
ments of the rise of diaspora Hindu extremism. Based on data
collected over more than a
year of intensive research in the greater D.C. area from 2001 to
2002 in both Hindu temples
(mandirs) and Hindu summer camps, I show that the “Yankee
Hindutva” (Prashad 2000)
phenomenon is not just a reflection of the popularity of
Hindutva on the subcontinent,
nor simply part and parcel of the vilification of Muslims post-
9/11, but, rather, that it also
represents the complicated psychological response of a
community that is wrestling with
some guilt for leaving the “homeland,” feeling compromised by

the racism of their adopted
nation, and facing a complex social history in which their
subject position vacillates between
dominance and subordination. Arguably, all forms of racism are
fed by misrecognitions of
the Other; by focusing on its manifestations in the United
States, I make a case that the
hatred evinced by Indian American supporters of Hindutva has
been created and sustained
by particular historical and cultural conditions in both India and
the United States. In point
of fact, the rise in diaspora extremism is at least partially linked
to the deep scars of the
past, such as colonialism and Partition in India, as well as to the
deep social dysfunction of
a present day adopted homeland: race and class stratification in
the United States. Through
analysis of my field data, I demonstrate that the hate speech of
Hindutva-affiliated summer
camps in the United States is a transnational narrative of the
relationship between two hi-
erarchical discourses, one Indian and one American, which both
feed on political Othering
so that a mainstream majority retains the fruits of power. In
India, the Hindutva ideology
preys on the fear of the Other in promoting Hindu unity against
Muslims and Christians,
while in the United States structural racism works against
people of color, including Indian
immigrants, because equality would diminish the white
supremacy that continues to exist in
the contemporary United States.
Social and economic explanations are only part of the
manifestation of Hindu nationalism
in the United States. There is an undeniable psychoanalytic

dimension as well. The mis-
recognition of the fact that the Hindu American subject
constitutes the “Stranger” in the
United States, just as the Muslim–Christian subject constitutes
the “Stranger” on the Indian
subcontinent, has produced an uncomfortable doubling
repressed by many, thereby enabling
166 ETHOS
Hindutva-sympathetic Americans to fetishize Hinduism and
redouble their hatred in acts
reminiscent of Freud’s repetition compulsion—that is, their acts
of hate are alienated and
misrecognized replays of their own past subjugation in the eyes
of others.
Only with some recourse to psychoanalytic theory can one
illuminate the extent of the
unconscious alienation and “instituted fantasy” (Žižek 1989)
evident in Hindu American
fundamentalisms. Unconscious alienation is an especially
significant element of the rise
in American Hindutva, accounting for the transformation in the
first generation diaspora
population who have turned to Hindu fundamentalism in the
United States even though
they had little to no interest in it when they lived in India.
Transformations in Hindutva in the United States
There have been several waves of South Asian immigration to
the United States beginning
with a tide of migrant laborers to California from the late 1800s

to the early 1900s, followed
by a swell of mostly educated professionals from the mid-1960s
to the mid-1970s, and
successive tightly regulated ebbs and flows of various
professionals, unskilled laborers and
family since then (Prashad 2000). Successive waves of South
Asian immigrants came to the
United States with different levels of education, capital, and
skill sets, and therefore Indian
Americans run the gamut of classes, regional affiliations, and
experiences with belongingness
and Othering. The fluidity of borders and categories, the
movement of money, ideas, and
people, as well as new technologies allowing for so much
contact between constantly shifting
bodies on both sides of the journey, has allowed “the diaspora”
to overspill its always already
frail walls. Rajan and Sharma (2006) follow Appadurai (1996),
Bauman (2000) and others to
note that it is no longer useful to treat home and diaspora as if
they are utterly differentiated,
bounded entities.
Hindu American religious practices have become more
regionally affiliated over time,3 but
the Hindutva bent has capitalized on a resurgence of Hindu
nationalism that seeks to erase
the multiple Hinduisms of India (and the diaspora) and coalesce
all Hindus into a single
cadre. Rajan and Sharma consider this “localization” grist for
the Hindutva mill and other
religious nationalisms:
the idea of community is rapidly coming to mean a religious-
ethnic (Hindu, Sikh,
Muslim, Tamil, Brahmin) identity, rather than a national one

(Indian, Pakistani, Nepali,
etc.). Read in conjunction with the growth of religio-ethnic
fundamentalisms in South
Asia, especially in its exclusivist, state-sponsored,
discriminatory form in India, and now
increasingly in Pakistan, this means that the South Asian
diaspora, with its wealth and
influence, and its anxiety over maintaining cultural ties to the
homeland, becomes a
power broker for the most heinous of ethnocentrisms back
home. [2006:20]
Hindutva activists argue that a Marathi-speaking Hindu from
Mumbai has more in common
with an Oriya-speaking Hindu from Bhubaneswar than she or he
does with a Marathi-
speaking Muslim from Mumbai.
Hindu extremism, which expanded its influence in the United
States in the mid- to late
1980s, was demonstrably rising in popularity among many
Hindu Americans throughout the
1990s (Kurien 2007a). Hindu extremism, also known as
Hindutva, Hindu fundamentalism,
or right wing Hindu ideology, is unique in the breadth of the
inclusivity that frames its
explicit exclusivity: it embraces all so-called “Indic” religions,
while vehemently rejecting
the right of “non-Indic” or “imported” traditions to exist in
India.4 So whether Sikhs,
Buddhists, Jains, and Indian indigenous peoples (adivasis) want
to be encompassed by the

Hindu Parivar’s (the institutionalized Hindutva community)
version of Hinduism or not,
they are considered Hindus under Hindutva rhetoric; the “non-
Indic” traditions of Islam
and Christianity, however, are treated as foreign contaminants.
The inclusiveness and exclusiveness of Hindutva’s brand of
Hinduism traces a distinct Self
and Other: “More than do many other religious movements,
then, fundamentalists define
themselves against a powerful Other: the We of Golwalkar’s
notorious RSS treatise necessar-
ily implies a ‘they.’ For Hindu fundamentalists the ‘theys’ have
always been many but after
independence have increasingly included a secular government
favoring religious pluralism”
(Gold 1991:576). The fact that Hindutva discourses routinely
reject more pluralistic visions
of Indian society does not mean that Hindutva is itself a
singular voice; there is a spectrum
of Hindutva on which there exists greater and lesser degrees of
vehemence for Hindu ascen-
dancy (and against minority views). For example, Deepa S.
Reddy’s recent study of Hindutva
nationalism (or ethnicism, as she prefers to term it for the
purposes of her book) makes an
intriguing point when she argues that Hindu nationalism can be
read as a particular critique
of modernity and secularism (2006), but she weakens her own
case by focusing solely on its
criticism, on the one hand, and honoring its devotion or bhakti
to the homeland, on the other
hand. Reddy claims that Hindutva should not be read as
extremism or pathology, and by
positioning both her subject and her study as an exercise in
bhakti or Hindu devotionalism,

she casts her autoethnographic reportage as an uncritical
acceptance, and even celebra-
tion, of Hindutva as a “way of Being” (2006:188).5 The
spectrum of views, and its implicit
critiques aside, Hindutva is essentially an ideology of
exclusivity, Othering, and religious
exceptionalism—this is the ugly reality of the whole story that
Reddy handily sidesteps. To
that end, I feel compelled to re-pathologize what Reddy has
tried to de-pathologize.
Hindutva ideology flows from India to the United States, yet
dollars flow backward from the
United States to India (Sabrang Communications–SACW:2002;
Therwath 2005). Ingrid
Therwath writes of Hindutva institutions, “that the Sangh
Parivar draws its funds from
foreign sources is a well-known fact” (2005). In effect,
Hindutva in the diaspora earns much
of the largesse that allows Hindutva politicians and organizers
in India to realize their political
agendas. Hindu fundamentalism in the United States is worthy
of careful scrutiny because
the substantial largesse raised here means that “Yankee
Hindutva” is complicit in current
Indian politics. There is anti-Hindutva resistance within the
Hindu American community,
much of it a progressive activism based in academia, but for all
that, Hindutva has a manifest
foothold on university campuses. The Hindu Student Council,
for example, a prominent
national group with chapters throughout the United States, is a
part and parcel of the
Hindutva family. During my work canvassing Hindu temples in
the greater metropolitan

168 ETHOS
D.C. area, it became clear that Hindutva was still a minority
perspective among Hindu
Americans, but it was gaining popularity at the time.
Hindu extremist ideology aims to systematically curb and
admonish the political authenti-
cation of Muslim and Christian Indians in India. By virtue of its
paralleled exclusions, this
stance mirrors the structural “possessive investment in
whiteness” of the mainstream United
States (Lipsitz 1998), in which white majority and privilege is
ferociously and systematically
guarded against incursion by peoples of color. The innumerable
racist structures of U.S.
society, bolstered in the hopes of maintaining white supremacy,
have unintended social con-
sequences, including the advancement of Hindutva discourse
among some Hindu American
communities.
The Model Minority Myth and Its Consequences
Contemporary ethnicity and race theories reinforce the
understanding that both ethnicity
and race are constructed and shifting categories (Barth 1969;
Bonilla-Silva 2006; Lipsitz
1998; Williams 1989), so much so that one is tempted to say
that race is utterly empty, until
one stops to recognize how much weight it carries in lived
experience. Although race is a
cultural construction indeed, this is an academic truism and not
a useful discursive endpoint.

Ethnic and racial categories are always in flux, and it is our task
as social scientists to trace
these transformations in time and space.
In the “post–Civil Rights” United States, whiteness is still
supreme,6 even though the orga-
nized white supremacy movement itself has arguably become a
fairly marginalized.7 Despite
this, George Lipsitz has written compellingly about the cultural
work that “mainstream
white America” has engaged in to maintain a position at the top
of the racial pecking order
(1998). Indeed, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva rightly observes that
even “color-blind” “non-racists”
are often responsible for ignoring, and even quietly promoting,
structural racism in con-
temporary U.S. society (2006). By embracing the notion of the
model minority and pitting
nonwhite groups against each other, the discourse of white
privilege in the United States
has created a multitiered racial hegemony (unlike South
Africa’s former apartheid structure
only in its lack of militant regulation).
The “model minority” stereotype was first coined by the
mainstream U.S. media in 1965
as a footnote to the civil rights movement, because according to
their narrative, while
African Americans were still protesting for more rights and
generally making mischief, the
Asian minorities were just working hard and succeeding without
making disruptive political
demands (Prashad 2000). Vijay Prashad has quite rightly argued
that from a mainstream
vantage point the model minority trope explicitly establishes
Asian immigrants as better-than

blacks and Latinos, while implicitly marking them as lesser-
than whites (2000). The model
minority myth creates a social currency that allows for Asians,
including Hindu Americans, to
be viewed in general as more intelligent and hard working than
other minorities: definitive
high-achieving nontroublemakers. There has been substantial
academic resistance to the
notion of the model minority, especially given some of the
problems (e.g., heightened
academic expectations that may be unrealistic and anxiety-
provoking) that accompany such
stereotypes (Dhingra 2007; Khandelwal 2002; Maira 2002;
Prashad 2000). For example,
Khandelwal writes, “As a result of their status as ‘successful
immigrants,’ these Indian ethnic
leaders distanced themselves from their less privileged
compatriots and rejoiced in their
‘model minority’ image” (2002:5). My research shows that
many Hindu Americans have
a significant attachment to the model minority myth, but that
there is a price to be paid
for that community’s general adherence to it strictures. Aside
from being complicit in the
continued subjugation of other racial groups, one of the other
tolls paid by South Asians
to be granted model minority status is relative political
disenfranchisement. Vijay Prashad
correctly observes that South Asian communities have generally
accepted the “model” mantle
wholesale in exchange for the attenuation of their U.S. political

voices (2000).8 In the
aftermath of 9/11, for example, many Sikh Americans felt
compelled to publically profess
their allegiance to Bush administration policies and demonstrate
their patriotism by wearing
flag pins, regardless of their actual opinions, to assert their
Americanness and maintain their
model minority privileges (Falcone 2006).
Hindutva has arguably given immigrant Hindus, who are
minorities abroad, surrounded
by societies that do not usually understand their religion and
often view their native place
as impoverished and “third world,” a focal point of pride in
their heritage, boosting their
communal self-esteem (Prashad 2000). He writes that in the
“white supremacist” climate of
the United States, many Indians have embraced Hindutva as an
antidote to their humbled
pride even though some were not supporters of Hindutva when
living in India: “Yankee
Hindutva offers a way for migrants to reconstruct their dignity
in a racist society. Through
their activities, they try to show that Indians have a great
culture, one even superior to U.S.
culture” (2000:147). Not incidentally, the Hindutva-tinged
Indian nationalism of “Yankee
Hindutva” may also mitigate any guilt that some Hindu
Americans feel about leaving behind
“Mother India” (and often even their birth mothers).9
Alienation in the United States
awakens hunger for the romanticized narrative of belonging,
acceptance, and Hindu unity
that Hindutva stories have constructed.
Building on this focused introduction to ideologies and realities

of Hindutva and racial
Othering that were ubiquitous in my Hindu American summer
camp field sites, I will now
address the issues of racialization and alienation through the
analysis of two detailed case
studies. Although Hindutva-charged camps are not the only
summer camps in the United
States to teach religious extremism,10 and nor do they teach
material widely divergent from
that available at Hindutva camps in India, the trends unfolding
in the Hindutva American
community are worth more careful examination. In the
following two sections, I will discuss
the summer camps themselves in turn as general sites of Hindu
identity formation, as well
as spaces in which the Hindutva ideology is reproduced and
cultivated.11
Putting the Fun in Fundamentalism: The Shantiniketan Camp
The Shantiniketan Summer Camp, my first case study, was the
product of a collaborative
effort between the local groups of the Hindu Swayamsevak
Sangh (HSS) and the Vishwa
170 ETHOS
Hindu Parishad (VHP),12 which often overlap in informal
membership and work closely
together. The HSS and the VHP are both Hindutva organizations
that have vehemently,
and sometimes violently, worked against the secular Indian state
in favor of an exclusionary
Hindu state.

The Shantiniketan Summer Camp brought together the children
and parents of the three
HSS Sunday schools and the general VHP membership in the
greater D.C. region (incl. the
Sunday school community at a Gujarati mandir where I had
been doing ethnographic work
for the nine months prior to the camp) for intensive education in
political, religious, and
cultural aspects of Hindutva ideology. The Shantiniketan
Summer Camp was a sleepaway
camp for both children and parents, and for that reason, it was
quite short—it ran over
the course of just four full days. There were approximately 100
people, including campers
from elementary, middle and high school, and a few dozen
parents and counselors. The
camp acted as a kind of extension of regular Hindutva Sunday
schools,13 provided a kind of
grand culmination to an annual calendar of Hindutva events, and
served as a way to promote
regional networks and connections between smaller local
groups.
Shantiniketan was run by elder VHP leaders, and a handful of
young male Indian “Hindutva
volunteers” (self-identifying as Hindutva karsevaks),14 the
latter of which had immigrated
over the past few years for higher education, many of whom had
been involved in RSS
activities at home. The parents of the campers, most of whom
had emigrated in the 1970s
and 1980s, however, had not necessarily been Hindutva
supporters back home in India.
During my pre-camp canvass, only a portion of these parents
indicated that they had held

Hindutva in high regard before immigrating to the United
States. Some of the parents
said that they joined just because they felt the need to do so
here in the United States,
because it helped them to feel they were contributing
meaningfully to their native land
(e.g., through fundraising for the VHP’s rural development
projects), or by advancing a
political agenda they felt new respect for. Others indicated that
they joined because of peer
pressure from within their temple community. “This is my
Gujarati mandir. This is the
youth group, and this is the camp. Why would I go anywhere
else?,” indicated one parent;
in other contexts in which we interacted this man signaled less
investment in Hindutva
than the karsevaks, but at the camp he seemed content to go
with the flow of the teachings
and activities. Most of the parents (who I talked to about this
topic) who did not support
the VHP before immigrating did say that they had a certain
amount of discomfort about
Muslims while in India: they felt that Muslims had too many
advantages, or that minority
groups were sometimes overbearing. It seemed that Hindutva
feelings had been present in
for these parents while in India, although most were not
members of organized Hindutva
groups before immigrating to the United States.
The promotion of Hindutva ideology at the camp was
accomplished through various ac-
tivities, including games, lectures, and events. The children
learned a set of drills and
formation, as well as what I can only describe as militant
yoga,15 that reflected the mission of

the leaders to militarize Hinduism. The atmosphere of discipline
was punctuated with loud
nationalist chants for Hindu solidarity by the karsevaks.
According to the karsevak coun-
selors, the games, races, and physical activities were all focused
on one of two goals: (1)
toughen the “soft” Hindu kids; discipline them; (2) teach and
play “Hindu” games, like
kabbadi, and “authentic Hindu” dances, such as Garba-raas.16
The drills, games and physical
program at Shantiniketan were largely imported from the
routines of RSS branches (shakhas)
in India (Jaffrelot 2005).
A Hindutva treasure hunt organized by the karsevak counselors
celebrated the story of the
Ramayana by couching the clues in terms of the Ramayana’s
famous places and characters,
even while simultaneously demonizing present-day Muslims as
the symbolic evil demon in
a modern adaptation of the classic Hindu tale. In most classic
versions of the Ramayana,
Ram’s wife Sita is abducted by a demon king, Ravana, and Ram
must wage war to rescue her.
Ravana was not a Muslim, but he was an alien, an outsider,
from the land of Lanka. At the
Shantiniketan summer camp, the four pictures of “demons” that
were placed in the center of
the targets during the arrow-shooting portion of the treasure
hunt were not Lankan enemies,
but, rather, Hindutva’s brand of contemporary enemies: (1)

Osama Bin Laden; (2) a Mughal
emperor; (3) Hitler; and (4) Pervez Musharraf (who was the
Pakistani president at the time).
It is notable that Bin Laden, the most wanted Muslim enemy of
the United States at the
time, not to mention the ubiquitously reviled Hitler, were both
equated to Musharraf, who
was one of the most valuable Muslim allies of the United States
at the time. The politics
of “Yankee Hindutva” are not mainstream U.S. politics. Hindu
extremists look at political
events with a specifically anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan focus.
The counselors and parents
were uneven in their explanations of the photos of the demons;
some groups of children had
a lengthy explanation of the Hindutva “demons” they were
shooting arrows at, while other
children shot away without really knowing what or who the
pictures represented.
Religious lessons and handouts at the camp highlighted Hindu
unity, strength, community
assertiveness, devotion, and aggressiveness. One controversial
lesson promoted at Shan-
tiniketan is that Hinduism is Hindutva, and Hindutva is
Hinduism. Vedanta teachers and
lessons were sought from outside of the VHP to certify and
approve the conflation, but
as I will discuss later in this article, any Vedantic teachings that
conflicted with significant
aspects of Hindutva ideology were not institutionally tolerated.
There were several camp events of a more specifically religious
nature, bent on celebrating
and teaching aspects of Hindu ritual. If these lessons were taken
apart from the Hindutva

discourse, they could be seen simply as Hindu spiritual
education. However, in the context
of the Hindutva camp, one goal of these programs was to create
linkages suggesting that
Hindu religious practice is inseparable from Hindutva political
ideology and discourse. The
young people I interviewed seemed convinced by this equation
of religion and politics,
for example several campers indicated that any challenge to the
politics of Hindutva was
itself anti-Hinduism. The lesson that Hindutva is Hinduism, and
not simply a particular
ideology among many, was an uncontested dogma by campers,
parents, elders, and karsevaks
alike.
172 ETHOS
The Hindutva agenda was also promulgated within the education
sessions hosted by kar-
sevaks for the parents, that is, the adult campers. During an
education session about the
elevation and superiority of “the classical ancient Hindu
culture,” a Hindutva follower
discussed the possibility of restoring the now-dry Sarasvati
River, which had been men-
tioned in the Vedas as part of the sacred landscape. Another
education session included
a long speech by an older VHP leader who lambasted his fellow
Hindus for not fight-
ing hard enough against the so-called Muslim and Christian
onslaught: “the battle is on.
If we don’t pull together we will lose the battle. They are saying
that we force adiva-

sis to convert form Christianity. The Christian missionaries are
trying to destroy us. We
are a just people. But we are miserly and we don’t give enough
time. It’s all baloney.
Stand up! If life has no obstacles then it’s not worth living!” A
third education session
revolved largely around the question of how to improve Hindu
(and especially Hin-
dutva) prestige in Western media. Working to control media
images of Hindus is one
of the core goals of the Sangh Parivar abroad (Katju 2005). The
karsevaks used the ed-
ucation sessions at the summer camp to promote movement
propaganda for the whole
family.
The two discussion sessions for the teen campers were titled:
“Coping with Cultural Clash?
How to be an assertive Hindu,” and “Parental Pressures and
Personal Aspirations: Preserving
our heritage and the importance of marriage within the Hindu
community.” The discussions
were intended to teach children that Hindus ought to be
aggressive and strong, as part of
the larger militancy campaign of Hindutva. The latter discussion
on dating and marriage,
which I described briefly in the introduction served to underline
Hindu unity at all costs.
The ideal dating and marrying pool for Hindutva-goers was
crystal clear at Shantiniketan:
Hindus should marry Hindus. The first part of the facilitated
discussion on dating had served
as an outlet for the impressions and frustration of the high
school aged campers, who were
generally not allowed to date (and often encouraged to avoid
socializing with the opposite

sex altogether).
Preeti, the counselor who had confessed to, and then retracted
her story about, dating a
Muslim, was very committed to Shantiniketan (and the regular
Gujarati Sunday school that
fed into the camp), but she did not conform to the political
beliefs of most of the other
counselors. She primarily worked with the youngest batch of
children, yet she said that
she had come to the “dating” discussion of the older campers
because the topic was of
personal interest to her. After her initial revelation, Preeti had
qualified her first statement
by saying that even if she did end up marrying her Muslim
boyfriend, she would raise her
children as Hindus. Her dialogue on interracial relationships led
me to believe that she was
very open-minded at school, but generally committed to her
Hindu identity as a bottom
line. Preeti’s brave outburst at the education session did serve
to underscore the back-stage
“hidden transcripts” of ambivalence among second-generation
Indian Americans. Second-
generation campers often talked more openly about dissent
among themselves, but there
was a disciplined line of reasoning within them that seemed to
respect certain ideologies
promoted by Hindutva, their parents, and others.
The social mores promoted by the Shantiniketan leaders and
karsevaks teach students and

parents about being a “good” Hindu, but the discussions at
Shantiniketan also strayed far
into the realm of what it means to be the “right” kind of
minority in the United States.
The night after the “Parental Pressures and Personal
Aspirations” discussion, for example,
the campers in their bunks talked about dating, and despite the
fact that I was the only
adult in earshot (or perhaps because of it), they reiterated and
reaffirmed the lessons of
who was permissible to date and who was not. “I would never
date a Muslim. My parents
would kill me,” said one preteen. Another young woman, called
Seema, continued, saying
something to the effect of, “Yeah, never. But I would date a
white guy . . . I would only
marry a Hindu, but I’d be open to dating white guys.” Other
girls chimed in about how their
parents would also disapprove if they tried to date a white
person (or date at all). Seema joked
about how she would bring home an African American Muslim
just to scare her parents,
so that they would accept anyone after that, even a white guy.
There were giggles, but also
loud exclamations. Seema, like Preeti earlier in the day, quickly
told her friends that she
was joking. In conversations like this at Shantiniketan, I
witnessed young people play with,
loosen, and yet also reaffirm the racial and religious boundaries
that their parents and Hindu
community had so explicitly prescribed.17
The educational discussions at Shantiniketan served as
reminders of the diversity of opinions
within the organization, yet helped to solidify my understanding
of the discourses of race,

religion, and hegemony being articulated. Without fail, campers
at both of the summer camps
I studied told me that they had lots of white and “Indian”
friends, but few or no African
American or Latino friends. As discussed in the previous
section, many Indian immigrants
have bought into the mores of U.S. racism, and this was clearly
true at Shantiniketan.
Most of my first generation Indian American informants
expressed to their children the
need to avoid dressing like, behaving like, or socializing with
African Americans; I heard this
from both the parents and the campers. A camper told me that
his mother had given away
the clothes he had bought with his friends at the mall, because
they were perceived to be
“too black.” Another camper told me that he was not permitted
to listen to hip-hop music at
home, so he would hide copies of CDs made by his friends, or
listen to rap at the homes of
his friends. “I lead a double life,” said one teenage, male
camper at Shantiniketan, “I tell my
parents what they want to hear and then I do whatever I want.
They don’t understand me,
but I don’t want to hurt their feelings. I like Bollywood music
okay, but it’s not cool. I can’t
listen to it at school. I love rap. I’ll never tell my mom
though—she would die!” I talked to
one mother who did not ban rap in her home, but she wished she
could; she said that by
allowing her teen to spend his money on rap, she was ensuring
that she could police him
better. The controversies raised by rap consumption were
invariably as much about the level
of immorality thought to be promoted by the music, as well as

the general notion shared by
most in the community that black culture had no place in the
home of a good Hindu family.
The compulsion of this ostensibly model minority community to
work to remain “better-
than” African Americans was manifestly clear in the myriad of
conversations in which parents
discussed how difficult it was keep black culture out of the
lives of their children. In addressing
174 ETHOS
the rising appropriation of aspects of “black culture” by Indian
youth, Sunaina Marr Maira
notes this is driven in part by intergenerational identity
formation, rebelliousness, and
also a creative “recoding of high/low relations” (2002:76). Like
Maira’s work, my research
demonstrates that the class positionality of Indian Americans
hinges on the maintenance
of the model minority typology, and therefore the consumer and
youth culture pressures
toward inculcating hip-hop music and fashion can been seen as
extremely dangerous class
play. The parents at Shantiniketan were nothing if not worried
about maintaining and
reproducing their class privileges, and their open racism was
symptomatic of the desire to
maintain model minority status.
Much of the general discussion at Shantiniketan in the summer
of 2002 revolved around
how to deflect the bad press that the VHP had received that

March during the Gujarat riots,
how to recruit new members, and how to propagate Hindu and
Hindutva pride. I will return
to this anxiety in detail in a later section. There was a sense of
unease about the reports
that some white coworkers and neighbors “misunderstood”
Hindutva, based on the “unfair
media coverage” of the Gujarat riots. The desire to control press
about Hindutva is directly
linked with the compulsion to be seen as pious, nontroublesome,
model minorities in their
adopted homeland.
The Fun Continues: The Chinmaya Mission
My second case study, The Chinmaya Mission Washington
Regional Center, is a Hindu tem-
ple that was established in Washington, D.C., in 1988. The
center is part of an international
organization of Vedantic education and activism called
Chinmaya Mission International.
According to the swami directing the Chinmaya Mission
summer camp, the organization
was founded by Swami Chinmayananda in India in the 1950s,
and boasted over 200 centers
in India and the diaspora. Its central mission, according to
devotees, was the spread and
advancement of the Hinduism prescribed in the Vedantas; in the
United States, the leader
of the camp told me, it was particularly important to educate
youth toward “Hindu pride”
and identification with their “Indian motherland.” In the
summer of 2002, the Chinmaya
Mission Summer Camp was a nine-week day camp that ran from
Monday through Friday for
children ages 6–12. The parents of these campers, most of

whom immigrated to the United
States in the 1970s and 1980s, were committed to giving their
children a Hindu education
to go along with their mainstream academic one. Parents of
Chinmaya Mission students in
the summer of 2002 were almost all middle or upper class; most
families had at least one
parent with college degrees or higher. Anthropologist Peter van
der Veer has observed that
the Chinmaya Mission has managed to construct an educational
program and discourse that
modernizes the Vedantic discourse for the needs of a rising
middle class in India and the
diaspora (1994). Van der Veer also observed that the Chinmaya
Mission was one of the first
Hindu institutions to take root in the diaspora, and many other
Hindu swamis and groups
(incl. the VHP) followed Chinmaya’s lead in focusing on Hindu
communities abroad.
The Chinmaya Mission is linked historically and ideologically
with the Hindutva fam-
ily, yet its members approach the question of Hindu-ness almost
entirely from a
religious revival perspective.18 Chinmaya Mission International
was first founded by Swami
Chinmayananda in India in 1953 with the purpose of spreading
the teaching of the Vedanta.
Swami Chinmayananda was also one of the founders of the VHP
as well as its first pres-
ident (Basu et al. 1993; Katju 2005; McKean 1996).19 As an

institution, the contemporary
Chinmaya Mission tends to foreground religious discourse and
background its politics, so
while the historical links to Hindutva illuminate larger
institutional goals, its immediate
connections to Hindutva are more subtle. For example, there
was a distinct understanding
in Mission discourse that Hindus are one exclusive, unified
community. Although two white
devotees held key positions of respect at the Mission at that
time, they were prevented from
ever becoming Swamis, and, according to several of my Indian
American informants there,
the white Hindus could never become “real Hindus.” Also, the
Chinmaya Mission Pledge
recited every afternoon during the aarthi prayer session subtly
evokes the Hindutva notion
of the “one Hindu family,” as well as the Hindutva emphasis on
militancy and discipline
to “fight,” as well as one’s duty to India. The Hindutva
evocations paired with the careful
vagueness of certain definitions is a notable example of the
underlying ambiguity with which
the Mission treats Hindutva, even though the relationship itself
is undeniable. The ambi-
guity regarding Hindutva politics seems to be a successful
stance for retaining membership
at Chinmaya though, because those parents who indicated they
embraced Hindutva were
standing side by side in worship with families that indicated
substantial discomfort with the
ideology.
Swami Harinanda, the resident acharya (spiritual teacher), who
is also the President of
the Chinmaya Mission Washington Regional Center, was the

head teacher at the summer
camp. He was assisted by Pooja, a brahmacharini (female
spiritual teacher in training), who
was a transnational young swami. Pooja was a young Hindu
Indian Australian (via South
Africa) who teaches in a Chinmaya center in East Asia during
the academic year. The
Chinmaya Mission in Washington, D.C., was going through a
period of intense growth
during my fieldwork period; while they had held weekend
teachings during the previous
academic year in local school cafeterias and gymnasiums, they
held the summer camp in
their newly finished temple. The temple itself was formally
consecrated at the end of the
summer.
A typical day at the Chinmaya Summer Camp had attendance
varying anywhere from 12 to 40
children, and included educational sessions on Vedantic
tradition, storytelling from Indian
epics, religious chanting, prayer, running games, memory
games, preparation for the Annual
Day skits and the Ramayana-inspired dance drama to be
presented to the current head of
Chinmaya International. In addition, every day there was a class
on one of the following:
arts and crafts (sometimes with a South Asian theme, although
not always), Indian dancing,
classical Indian singing, Hindi language class, or a class in
Indian Heritage.
The Vedanta class provided daily opportunities to observe the
ontology and morality es-
poused at the Chinmaya Mission. Lessons revolved around the
importance of “Guru,”

monotheistic polytheism, moral living, and the importance of
nurturing body, mind, and
176 ETHOS
intellect. Swami or Pooja told stories and fables often taken
from one of the Hindu epics,
usually either the Ramayana or the Mahabharata.
Swami and Pooja had quite different views on the place of
Hindutva politics in Hindu
religious culture. Swami Harinanda was somewhat evasive
about his opinion of Hindutva
politics during our interviews, but he did admit a strong sense
of respect for the Hindutva
Parivar. The Swami told me that there is a range of Hindutva
groups, and then he listed
from “worst” to “better”: Bajrang Dal, RSS, Shiv Sena, VHP,
BJP. He stated clearly that
he had less empathy for the “worst,” but had a great deal of
affinity for the “better.”
The swami’s camaraderie, partnerships and frequent socializing
with the VHP and HSS
karsevaks of Shantiniketan, became increasingly evident to me
over the months that I spent
at the Mission. During my period of involvement with the
Mission, he hosted VHP and RSS
followers at meals, invited members of those groups to the
Chinmaya Mission discourses
and talks, and accepted invitations to speak at VHP–HSS
events.
The Swami was exceptionally attuned to his audience, and
spoke according to the com-

position of his crowd. He was clearly cognizant of the lukewarm
reception that Hindutva
ideology had received in mainstream U.S. media outlets in the
wake of the Gujarat mas-
sacres in 2002; at least in the year plus that I was doing
research, while in mixed company,
Harinanda was careful to tread lightly about Hindutva values
and politics, whereas at the
VHP–HSS events, his messages were always in direct
accordance with Hindutva dogma.20
Brahmacharini Pooja, however, expressed and demonstrated
much more ambivalence about
Hindutva ideology, showing empathy with, and repulsion to,
disparate tenets. Pooja was
the one staff person at the Chinmaya Mission who admitted
candidly that Swami Chin-
mayananda had been involved in the founding of the VHP,
although she simultaneously
assured me that Swami Chinmayananda had moved on from the
VHP and therefore could
not be held responsible for what that organization had become.
She also told me that
Chinmaya Mission teachers and Swamis all over the world
approached the Hindutva issue
differently, as there was no mandate from the leadership about
politics. With some dis-
comfort, she revealed that most of the Swamis had Hindutva
tendencies, but she felt that
this was not the fault of the Chinmaya Mission institution itself.
Brahmacharini Pooja also
told me that she personally felt that it was unequivocally wrong
to promote violence against
Christians and Muslims as Hindutva groups have been known to
do. Yet, she noted that
much of the Hindu extremist agenda is fueled by the perception

that minorities in India
receive special treatment at the expense of the majority
Hindus—a perception that she her-
self agreed with: “It is hard to be a Hindu in India; there are
many injustices.” Pooja’s view
seemed to neatly reflect the kind of Hindu pride and
commitment that was deeply sensitive
and resentful of perceived injustices (past and present) and yet
balked at any suggestion
that Hindus should thus commit violence in the wake of their
communal frustrations.21 In
sum, Pooja’s views represent a less ideological end of the
Hindutva spectrum that exists in
Chinmaya Mission more generally.22 Pooja also participated in
a VHP–HSS event during
her summer in Washington, D.C., yet her intolerance of hate
speech was clearly evident,
because her negation of certain core Hindutva values shocked
the gathered assembly, as I
will discuss in a later section of this article.
At Chinmaya, as with Shantiniketan, there were deep
undercurrents of U.S. racism and
stereotypes. The Chinmaya Mission community members,
although more inclusive than
those at Shantiniketan, evinced many of the same stereotypes
and boundary-maintaining
racial discourses. Discomfort with Muslims and African
Americans was a general overarching,
if not ubiquitous, part of community culture. For example,
during a conversation about

Chinmaya Mission’s Hindu community, one dark-skinned South
Indian Hindu woman at
the Chinmaya Mission said to me, quite out of nowhere, as if
answering a question that
I hadn’t asked: “We’re not white like you, but we are white
compared to those people.”
“Those people?” I queried in response. “The blacks,” she said,
“In skin color we are more
like them, but in our culture we are more like whites.” As I
probed this question further with
Chinmaya Mission parents at subsequent teachings, I was told
by another child’s father that
“Even the darkest Indian is more white than the lightest skin
black person.” Skin pigment
was less important to these Chinmaya Mission parents than
ethnic markers that in their eyes
served to raise Asians above other minorities of color.
Although most of the youth I spoke to at both field sites stated
clearly that their parents
wanted and expected them to marry Indians or other Indian
Americans, a notable number
of youth had parents who had more specifically forbidden their
children to marry Muslims
and/or African Americans. One Chinmaya preteen told me that
her parents, “want me
to marry anyone who is a good person, even if they aren’t
Indian, as long as they’re not
Muslim . . . or black.” At Chinmaya, the younger children
indicated awareness of race in
different ways, such as by talking about the color of the kids
whose houses they could play
at after school. Race was not a prevalent topic of discussion at
the summer camp, nor during
the weekend events held during the school year, but insofar as
my informants consistently

articulated their relative “whiteness” over other minorities, I
felt compelled to pay attention
to the ways in which U.S. race relations had become embedded
in the process of Hindu
American identity construction.
The Hindu American Split Self: Racism and the Desire to be
Recognized
In exploring the contours of racism and hate speech at Hindutva
summer camps, I found
myself facing two distinct, but interrelated questions regarding
Hindutva-leaning Indian
American immigrants to the United States: Why teach their
children an aversion to African
Americans, whether implicitly or explicitly? And, why teach
aversion to Muslims, whether
implicitly or explicitly? In this section, I focus on the first
question, and link it to the ways in
which Hindus specifically, and Asians in general, as immigrants
have adapted to the mores
of U.S. race and ethnicity, and then return to the second
question.
My research is in direct accordance with Pawan Dhingra’s work
on Indian and Korean
immigrants in Dallas (2007), showing that many Hindu
immigrants rebuke racism when it
is directed at them, yet simultaneously give currency to racism
directed at black Americans.
178 ETHOS
My work also parallels Dhingra (2007) and Prashad’s (2000)

work insofar as identifying the
classism and racism at the root of the model minority discourse
is a factor in the widespread
acceptance of Hindu racism directed against nonwhites and non-
Asians.
My Hindu informants at both Chinmaya Mission and
Shantiniketan were vocally dismayed
by the racism directed against them in the United States. The
Hindus who immigrated to
the United States directly from India were used to being located
in the religious and racial
majority, and used to being a shade of brown in a sea of brown
peoples.23 They arrived on
the shores of the “land of the free” only to feel the hot gaze of
white mainstream Americans
on them: for some Hindu immigrants, the sudden shift in self-
consciousness must have been
akin to a transformational Hegelian master–slave moment in
which the subjectivity of one is
found to be contingent on the other.24 Lacan’s work on the
psyche also demonstrates that the
self is constructed in a dialectical relation with the Other
(1977), and for our purposes this
observation sheds light on a constitutive aspect of the
immigrant experience. Some Hindu
immigrants may have experienced the new racial hegemony as
Lacan’s Third, what he calls
“the Father” or “the Phallus” (what here can be identified as the
norm of white supremacy),
and hence suffered the Split Self, becoming the Hindu American
subject. The Third is power,
law, the way things are; it is society working on and through
itself toward the creation and
maintenance of hegemonies. In this case, the Third, this element
of power, has provided

an opportunity for racism to reproduce and strengthen itself at
the expense of diversity and
acceptance. Thus, out of deference to the social “laws” of the
racialized landscape of the
United States that they encountered on their emigration, the
Hindu American subject has
overwhelmingly accepted the crown of the model minority, and
the roses and thorns that
come with it.
W. E. B. Dubois’s theory of “double consciousness” also
illuminates the frustration that
Othered Hindu immigrants feel when alienated from themselves
by the gaze of a white
majority (1968). Dubois was writing about the effect of white
supremacy on black aspiration
in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, but his
observations have currency
in the contemporary racial landscape as well. Dubois wrote that
a “veil” of racism hung
between blacks and whites, and served as a socioeconomic wall
keeping blacks from equal
rights and divesting them of equal opportunities. Most
insidiously the wall served to divide
blacks from themselves through the appropriation of a more
powerful, more masterful
gaze.
It is a peculiar sensation, this “double-consciousness,” this
sense of always looking at
one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul
by the tape of a world
that looks on in amused, contempt and pity. One ever feels his
two-ness, an American,
a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings;
two warring ideals in one

dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being
torn asunder. [Dubois 1968
[1903]:3]
Writing almost a century later, Playthell Benjamin argues that
the double consciousness
metaphor is just as valid in today’s racial landscape as it was in
Dubois’s United States
(Crouch and Benjamin 2002). Dubois’s notion of “double
consciousness” perfectly explicates
the self-alienation perpetrated on other minorities by
contemporary white supremacy.
The Hindu subject new to the United States saw herself
reflected in the hegemonic glare
of racism; saw herself as the Other; saw herself as contingent;
saw her subject position as
dialectically constituted by the powerful and unfamiliar force of
U.S. racism. For example,
Lata Mani narrated two incidents that happened to her in one
week at her university, one
in which a white professor sized her up and refused to let her
into her building after hours
(race playing a factor), and another in which a Chicana janitor
opened a locked door for
her without a thought (class playing the dominant role in her
decision). She discussed how
being brought up in Bombay had not prepared her for U.S.
racism: “Not having grown up
as the Other of my society, I do not expect to be positioned as
such” (Frankenberg and Mani

1996:279). Although Dubois had grown up behind the “veil” of
racism, the experience of
“double consciousness,” of being split and reconstituted through
the eyes of the Othering
white majority is jolting to all of my Hindu informants. I did
not ask my Hindu informants
to share the specific memories they may have had of how they
were treated at the airport,
or when they first became Othered in the United States,25 but
some did tell me about
early developments in their race consciousness on coming to the
United States. One Hindu
woman with a daughter at the Chinmaya Mission said that she
arrived at the Chicago airport
in a saree in the mid-1970s, and that she will never forget how
much people stared at her,
how different she felt, and how a white teenaged girl and her
friends made fun of her outfit
as she waited for her luggage. As the woman recounted her
feelings, another woman sitting
with us, said that she did not feel anything unwelcoming when
she first arrived, but it was
weeks later when she heard a cashier at a grocery store call her
husband a “nigger” (and later
asked a friend what it meant) that she began to realize that some
people saw Hindus quite
differently than she thought they had. In India, the woman said,
she and her husband are
considered quite fair.
During a different interview with the parent of a Shantiniketan
camper, my informant said
that he felt different right away. From the moment he stepped
off the plane, he felt that
people were mistaking him for something other than a nice,
well-educated, Hindu man from

India: “The looks I got. . . . Nobody said anything to me.
Nothing bad, I mean to say. But
it was strange, because some people stared. Really stared, even
though it’s rude here [in the
United States]. So everyone was looking, but I really felt that
nobody was seeing me.” These
first uncomfortable memories are often followed by a litany of
others. The gentleman who
felt that he was being made invisible by aggressive staring
noted a whole list of moments
in which he felt racism impinge on his sense of belonging. He
talked about racist incidents
during which he was “snapped back” into that first feeling of
being treated like an alien.
Many in the Hindu community have felt reduced and
inauthentic, and yearned for recogni-
tion and acceptance from mainstream Americans (Prashad
2000). Ewing writes in her own
ethnography of Sufi pirs that “the constituting experience at the
heart of human subjectivity
is recognition by another” (1997:6). I argue that it is this desire
for recognition that moti-
vated the cultural exchange in which Hindu Americans
generally accepted the double-edged
180 ETHOS
myth of “the model minority” in exchange for political
disempowerment and what Vijay
Prashad would consider estrangement from other peoples of
color (Prashad 2000). The
Hindu subject then becomes Simmel’s “Stranger” (1985), a
necessary interlocutor against

which “mainstream white America” defines itself, as well as a
buffer against the category of
necessarily un-“model” minorities.
The power of U.S. racism to deign that minorities are visible,
while whites remain comfort-
ably “invisible” (Williams 1989), helps to explain the
conditions that led so many Hindus
to internalize the myth of the model minority. Many in the
Hindu American community
have accepted the “ideological fantasy” of the myth of the
model minority, and in doing
so they are unwittingly taking an active part in reconstituting
racism in the United States.
Ideological fantasy refers to the misrecognition of the illusion
that governs the Lacanian
“real” (Žižek 1989). It is the unconscious illusion that accepts
the myths structuring our
daily lives. Hindus do have agency, of course, as everyone both
simultaneously embodies
and lacks agency at once.26 Hindus who strive to affirm, and
reap the benefits of the model
minority myth, are making practical decisions (with ideological
implications) when they try
to make the best of their situation in the white supremacist
United States. Hindu Americans
enter a landscape fraught with racial sensitivity and are forced
to accommodate to it, in
the process remaking it, themselves, and the very character of
U.S. race mores in general.
Indeed, Lipsitz has noted that, “People of color have never been
merely passive victims of
white supremacist power. The active agency of aggrieved
communities has always served as
an important counterweight to white power” (1998:158). This is
true in the case of Hindu

Americans, who while mired in and constructed by
manifestations of white power, also effect
identity politics in ways that the white mainstream never
anticipated (such as engaging in a
resurgence of Hindutva ideology).
Given the intense activity of Hindutva in the diaspora, I found it
puzzling that there was
almost no corresponding engagement in the U.S. political arena
by D.C. area Hindu com-
munities during my fieldwork period.27 Directly after the
events of 9/11, my Hindu and
Sikh informants in the D.C. area endured the indignity of being
victimized twice over (be-
ing assaulted by Al Qaeda with the rest of the grieving nation
for being “Americans,” and
then being assaulted by other citizens of the United States who
abused them as if they were
part of Al Qaeda; Falcone 2006). Many of my South Asian
informants of various faiths had
to endure defaced cars, homes, and places of worship, as well as
new threats to their person.
A Hindu mandir in the D.C. area was vandalized soon after
9/11, but I observed that my
informants did nothing to protest these acts, and only counseled
each other to wait until the
tension receded with time. Parents of the children who attended
the Sunday school at the
defaced Hindu mandir told me that they feared that if they made
a public fuss, they would
be seen as troublemakers.
From late 2001 through 2002, my Hindu and Sikh informants
(belonging to more liberal
and more conservative congregations within each tradition) both
overwhelmingly reported

self-censorship regarding their political discussions with people
outside their own ethnic
communities, as well as perceived pressures to show their
support of the strikes against
Afghanistan even if they were actually against them (Falcone
2006). Some of my South Asian
informants who despised the Bush administration began
publicly praising it, erecting signs
lauding Bush in the front yards of their religious institutions, or
carrying signs at candlelight
vigils for the 9/11 victims that simultaneously praised U.S.
soldiers fighting in Afghanistan.
Many of my Hindu extremist informants were actually
supportive of George W. Bush in
general, and the Afghanistan strikes in particular, but even these
informants told narratives of
feeling compelled to remain quiet about the post-9/11 elevation
in racism against themselves
and their families. In more public spaces, political silence was
deafeningly loud; such low
civil engagement by a community immigrating from one of the
most active and densely
populated democracies in the world implicitly indicates the
presence of a social obstruction:
U.S. racism. I would argue that the political disenfranchisement
of South Asian Americans
has been both resisted and accommodated in different ways by
various communities in
the intervening years,28 but in the next section I show how one
of the by-products of this
obstructionist racism is an increasing rise in diaspora Hindutva.

(Mis)Recognizing the Stranger: Fantasy and Denial in the
Diaspora
Thus far, I have argued that many Hindus have accepted the
model minority subject position
as it is constituted by power itself, as well as how this
configuration serves to promote the
mores of white supremacy in the United States. Now I discuss
how these processes of U.S.
racism may have inadvertently served to advance the cause of
“Yankee Hindutva.” I will begin
by elaborating on a particularly telling incident of ideological
construction and maintenance
that shows, among other things, that Hindutva-leaning
Americans are extremely conscious
of how they are viewed in the U.S. media.
One hot summer day in 2002, my two research field sites
converged; the two Chinmaya
Mission teachers were both invited to speak at Education
sessions at the Shantiniketan
summer camp. The event starkly demonstrated the breadth of
conceptions of Hinduism
even in a Hindutva context, the level of investment in the
institutionalized fantasies of
Hindu ideology, and the vital importance of positive coverage
by the U.S. press. At the outset
of her session, one parent asked Brahmacharini Pooja what to
do about the unpopularity
of Hindu fundamentalism in the Western media: “Hindus are
being branded as fanatics.
The media always misportrays us. How can we give our kids
tools to counteract such
things?”

This concern with how Hindus in general, and Hindutva groups
in particular, are perceived
by the mainstream U.S. press is part of the new reality of the
diaspora experience as discussed
by Pnina Werbner, who rightly notes that it is the tendency of
new diasporic communities
“on the one hand, to fight for citizenship and equal rights in the
place of settlement, on the
other, to continue to foster transnational relations and to live
with a sense of displacement
and of loyalty to other places and groups beyond the place of
settlement” (2000:5). In
this delicate balancing act, there is substantial concern about
the way that one’s group is
being represented to the outside; good press is necessary to
maintain the edge that comes
with model minority status. The Hindutva community was
outraged that their political
182 ETHOS
views were being maligned, and they had been talking about it
among themselves in Hindu
Sunday school venues for the weeks leading up to the camp. In
response to this pointed
query about media representation, Pooja eventually replied that,
“One response . . . is
that we should know our culture so that we can be proud of it.”
Then she seized on the
following example: the way in which Gandhi’s achievement of
enlightenment enabled him
to gracefully accept his karma during times of political
upheaval. Because Gandhi is reviled
in the Hindutva community,29 Pooja’s deference to Gandhi

caused an immediate stir: many
audience members squirmed in their seats and sought eye
contact with one another. Soon
after, Pooja again raised the ire of her audience when talking
about how human beings must
actively combat hatred and prejudice:
The world is a reflection of our minds. How many have had
prejudice, like against
Muslims and blacks. Prejudice exists in our own minds so it
exists in the world. If hatred
didn’t exist in our hearts then there would be no hatred.
By critiquing prejudice directly, Pooja undermined Hindutva’s
fundamental antagonism
toward Muslims (and others), a primary tenet of Hindutva
ideology. Her audience became
increasingly riled and argumentative. Pooja replied to vocal
dissenters in the audience by
saying that prejudice is an unacceptable response to any
situation. She then referred back to
the first question about what to give youth facing “unfair”
media misportrayal of Hindus:
We can give our youth something to be able to fight fanaticism.
. . . We can only
fight fanaticism and hatred with love. If we fight hatred with
hatred then we have lost,
because we have not improved ourselves as persons. We can
only fight ignorance with
knowledge. We can only fight violence with non-violence.
Immediately after she concluded her talk, many of the karsevaks
and parents rushed into the
center aisle and quickly negated the ideas of her talk among
themselves: “she is just being

idealistic”; “that was spiritual advice, but not practical”; and,
“she is sweet, but naı̈ ve.”30
As I later walked with some of the oldest campers to lunch, I
asked Neilesh, a karsevak,
what he thought of Pooja’s talk. Neilesh was very disturbed and
agitated about the fact that
Pooja had said that Gandhi was enlightened. He told me that he
hates Gandhi and blames
him for the fact that India today is secular, and not explicitly a
Hindu state. Neilesh insisted
that the image of Gandhi as the benevolent instigator of
independence was a fallacy; he
also thought that Gandhi ought to have been assassinated earlier
than he actually had been.
This conversation took place in front of several campers, and
some of these middle-school-
age, second-generation Indian American girls elaborated by
saying that Gandhi was not
an important Hindu leader, that he had betrayed his people by
working with the Muslim
League, and that his assassination had come none too soon. At
this last point, I balked, and
challenged the young woman. Again, a middle-school-aged
female camper confirmed with
aplomb that it would have been better for Hindus if Gandhi had
been killed much sooner,
because according to her, Gandhi’s meddling was to blame for
the fact that so many Muslims
decided to stay in India after partition. A short time later,
another karsevak bounded up to
us, and smugly reported that he had finally gotten Pooja to
admit that violence can be used

in cases of genuine self-defense. He then cheerfully noted that
because Hindus are definitely
“under threat of extinction” from the Muslim population of
South Asia, Hindutva’s militancy
can still be seen as legitimate and Vedantically sanctioned.
Pooja’s talk at the Shantiniketan Summer Camp and its
aftermath clarified that the definition
of Hindu-ness is clearly contested among institutions and
ambiguous within them, even
among groups with Hindutva loyalties. Also significant is the
fact that despite internal
debate, the ideological discourse at Shantiniketan grew
stronger, not weaker by way of
dissent. The Shantiniketan’s community’s fierce attachment to
Hindutva even in the face
of public shaming by the media, and negation by a Hindu
religious leader in their midst
is intriguing. I had witnessed the anxious perception of
Hindutva-leaning Americans that
indicated fear of compromising their model minority status
through their politics. But
Hindutva activists were upset by unsympathetic portrayals of
Hindutva in the U.S. media
for both socioeconomic and psychological reasons. The
Orientalist myth of the pre-Muslim
Hindu Utopia and the model minority myth, both originally
posited by non-Hindu white
hegemonies, are two “instituted fantasies” (Žižek 1989) or
Lacanian symptoms (Lacan 1977)
constituting the “Yankee Hindutva” subject position.
One could argue that Hindutva itself can be seen in terms of a
deluded attempt to return to the

unified “womb” of Hindu-ness, for in the arguably mystified
view of Hindu fundamentalists,
Muslim and Christian outsiders disrupted the golden age of the
utopian Hindu civilization.
This primal narcissism is itself, arguably, at least in part, an
Orientalist, postcolonial remnant,
yet its effects continue to be embodied in the present, a
testament to the fact that while power
has no will of its own, it has a life of its own. The Hindu
American has a new distance, a
new alienation to deal with: immigration to a racist nation. So
the Hindu American Split
Self yearns for impossible reconstitution, evoking the Hegelian
notion of the Unhappy
Consciousness. The Hindutva ethic appeals to the desire for an
“Ideal-I,” which in this
case represents the return to the primordial dream, that is, a
completely unified totality, the
preseparate and precontingent (as in, Freud’s “oceanic
feeling”). The Hindutva-sympathetic
Indian in Gujarat yearns for a fictional Hindu golden age, and
the Hindutva-sympathetic
Indian in the D.C. area yearns for a return to an undifferentiated
home in which their skin
color was invisible under the cover of these Hindutva fantasies
of ancient Hindu utopias.
Not only does the political disempowerment of Hindus inherent
in U.S. racism make the
fictions of Hindutva seem more compelling but also the
misrecognition of the comparable
“possessive investments” in power serves as grist for the
psychic mill, fanning the flames of
resentment. Here I am referring to the fact that the Otherness
imputed to the immigrant
Hindu is uncomfortably familiar: Hindu immigrants are literally

perceived as the Muslim
Other by Americans, as evinced by the slew of my Hindu
informants who have had to bear
taunts like “Go home, Osama!”
In arguing that there is an element of pathology in extremist
discourses, I follow Andrew
Willford’s use of Freud and Heidegger’s notion of the uncanny
double in his analysis of the
fetishization of the Tamil ethnic signifier in Malaysia (2006).
Willford writes that doubling
184 ETHOS
is an essential part and parcel of the process of becoming an
ethnic self, and shows that
the uncanny feeling of this double can be profoundly disturbing
especially in cases of social
repression: “Postcolonial demarcations of ethnic boundaries,
and with them hierarchical
assertions of an ethnosymbolic hierarchy, I argue, can produce
uncanny doubles.” Extending
this astute observation to my own ethnographic case, as first
generation Hindu immigrants
face the racism of the contemporary United States, they see
themselves in the eyes of
“mainstream white America” as the outsider Other, the stranger,
the migrant, and the
inauthentic. This produces a feeling of uncanny doubling,
because it is uncomfortably
familiar, and extremely discomfiting. The feeling of the
“uncanny” (Freud 1953), then,
is a partial recognition of that which is familiar: the Hindutva
perspective in India that they

impute onto Muslims is similarly defined as outsider Other, the
stranger, the migrant, and
the inauthentic.
Thus, the flare-up in anti-Muslim sentiment among some first
generation Hindu immi-
grants in the United States stems, a least in part, from an
uncanny partial recognition of
Muslims as their doppelgangers or their “double” in the
Freudian sense. In the diaspora,
Hindu Americans suddenly embody the Stranger subject
position that belongs the non-Indic
religious followers in India; this partial recognition is so
traumatic to those who revile the
Muslim and Christian Other that the uncanny moment is
necessarily repressed, and that
repression serves to nurture and enflame the outright revulsion
of the Muslim and Chris-
tian Other of India by some Hindu Americans. Borrowing
Andrew Willford’s reading of
Heidegger’s uncanny double (2006), I argue that the doubling
effect here “ensnares” the
Hindutva-embracing U.S. subject.
Just as when one pokes at a sore, it is the subsequent relief of
the pain that provides the
thrill of pleasure and the illusion of control.31 As the repetition
compulsion is part of
the masochistic part of the human psyche that defies the
pleasure principle, arguably the
Hindutva-leaning American, by obsessing over the Muslim–
Christian Stranger in India, is
compulsively revisiting traumatic moments of partial
recognition faced on immigrating to
the United States when they were forced to become the Stranger
themselves.

Each one of my conversations with my informants about racial–
religious difference in India
and the United States was extremely uncomfortable. Hindus,
like other South Asians, are
acutely aware of their status in the United States, as Othered, as
“lesser-than-white.” I
collected many stories from adult Hindu informants about how
non–Asian Americans stared
them down in public places, threatened them on the Metro, and
mocked them in the work
place. One man broke down in tears as he told me about how his
son was being bullied at
school, and how it deeply upset him that the kids had called his
12-year-old “Osama.” He was
perplexed and extremely angry that Americans cannot generally
tell the difference between
Hindus and Muslims. He said that this kind of confusion would
never have happened in
India, and he felt that he needed to work hard to educate
Americans about Hinduism.32
My informants reported feeling particularly vulnerable and
fragile post-9/11. The mis-
recognition of Hindus by Americans left one informant feeling
“raw” and “victimized.”
She said, “We pay taxes. We are legal immigrants, so we
shouldn’t be treated like trash.
We aren’t Mexicans who ran across the border. We aren’t
terrorists from Pakistan. We
are good people—Hindus.” This informant exposed some of her

own racial and social
prejudices, even as she decried the racism of others. A set of
middle-school-age girls at
Shantiniketan’s precamp meeting had a discussion with me
about post-9/11 changes in their
experience:
Seema: The biggest difference is that now everyone asks, “Are
you Muslim?” We were visiting this
red-neck town down south and everyone turned around and
looked at us when we walked in
the restaurant. It didn’t help that my parents were speaking in
Gujarati, which sounds like any
foreign language to them. It was like they were wondering, “Are
you going to bomb the
Burger King?!”
Mona: Now people look at you, and judge you based on your
skin color. It wasn’t like this before.
Manusha: I’m not Muslim, but I wouldn’t be ashamed if I were.
When people ask I say, “No I’m not
Muslim,” not because I’m anti-Muslim, I’m just clarifying.33
Seema: My parents wanted to go to visit the Pentagon last fall
to visit the terrorist site, but I was,
“Why?! Are you crazy?! You’ll be attacked!”
Manusha: It’s our skin. Brown skin! Once we clear up the fact
that we’re not Muslim, then it is okay. But
it’s those looks you get all the time in public places that are so
annoying. You can’t wear a
sticker on your forehead saying, “I’m not Muslim.”
Sita: After 9/11 my parents bought 30 American flags. But I
don’t feel more American. I feel more

separated than ever.
Seema: We’re the only colored people in the neighborhood I
live in, and after 9/11 we had our tires
slashed five times!
Mona’s comment about how she had not felt judged by her skin
before 9/11 is particularly
fascinating, because it begs the question: did the intensified
racial profiling of South Asians
post-9/11 serve as a transformative moment in the racial
identities of these children that
mirrors their parents’ stories of becoming conscious of racism
in the first place? In general,
it seems that second generation Hindu Americans have
demonstrated more flexibility and
complexity in their understanding of race in the United States,
but as the exchange above
indicates, there are elements of racism and intolerance in their
discourse as well. Still, I would
like to clarify that the psychological misrecognitions that I have
observed in their Hindutva-
leaning parents was produced under different conditions, so it
would be problematic to
equate them.
During some of my conversations about prejudice, especially
toward the end of my fieldwork
period, I tried to juxtapose the way that Americans treat
immigrants (as lesser-than to varying
degrees) with the way that Hindus suggest “immigrants” (such
as long-since, often centuries-
since, migrated and/or converted Muslims and Christians in
India) ought to be treated. In
interviews, I would say something to the effect of, “Well, I can
understand why Hindus in

America want to be treated like equals. I am ashamed that
people here treat you poorly . . . I
wonder though, don’t Muslims in India just want to be treated
like equals? So if you see them
as relative newcomers to India, just like you are newcomers
here, then. . . . ” With members
of the Shantiniketan community this provocation was met with
one of two reactions: anger
or denial. The informants who raged against my somewhat
inelegant equivalence told me
186 ETHOS
that the situation is entirely different because Muslims are “out
to rule the world,” or that
the premise was wrong because the United States is a land of
immigrants who had no rightful
owners to claim it as Hindus rightfully claim India. One of the
informants who got angry at
me for this line of questioning never spoke to me again.
Another initially shocked informant
began cheerfully bringing books by Hindutva sympathizers,
such as David Frawley (2000),
to his Hindutva Sunday school for me to read.
The majority of my interlocutors did not care to argue with me
when I compared Hindus in
United States with Muslims in India—instead they just looked
shocked, as if I had uttered a
profanity, and then simply disengaged; either glossing over the
matter entirely, changing the
subject or just ending or leaving the conversation. Not one of
my informants at Shantiniketan
seemed to think that this was a reasonable comparison, or if

they did, they would not discuss
it. Needless to say, I eventually stopped pursuing this line of
questioning lest I be barred
from the camp and all subsequent Sunday school gatherings
altogether, but in the final push
of my research I doubtlessly did some damage to my field
relationships, as some informants
realized (some perhaps for the first time) that their efforts to
educate me may not have
succeeded in aligning my views with their ideology.34
At Chinmaya, the parents who I talked with who held Hindutva
in no particular esteem were
unphased by my discussion of the similarities between Hindutva
ideology and U.S. racism.
In fact, one set of parents heartily agreed with me. A Hindu
Indian generally unoffended
by, ambivalent about, or amiable toward Indian Muslims would
probably not repress the
partial recognition with such vehemence, and therefore would
ostensibly not compulsively
revisit that partial recognition with such fervor. This would help
explain why my first
generation Hindu American informants and friends outside of
Hindutva Parivar institutions
have remained wholly unsympathetic to its ideology. U.S.
racism does not necessarily lead
Hindus to embrace the Hindutva, but it may very well feed the
institution through the
mechanisms of fetishization and misrecognition I have
described at length already; those
whose Hinduism is not supremacist would have no partial
recognition of Othering, and no
need to repress said misrecogniton.
Even some more Hindutva-leaning Chinmaya Mission parents

were more receptive to this
comparison than their Shantiniketan peers, although they were
often quick to state their
view that Muslims were widely known to be more militant and
violent than Hindus. The
handful of very conservative Hindutva sympathizers I met at
Chinmaya were hard to engage
on this topic, and I got basically the same two responses
(anger–denial) from them that I
did from Shantiniketan parents. This is a case of partial self-
estrangement, in which some
Hindu Americans have unconsciously transferred their revenge
from the logical object of
their anger, white supremacy (and some Christian supremacist
discourse to boot), to a far
easier target, the site of their misrecognized “double,” that is, to
the beleaguered Muslims
and Christians of India. The fact that so many of my informants
would shut down at the
mention of this doubling could be seen as an indication that it
touches a sore nerve, an
exposed wound.
Hindu American communities have arguably accepted the
fantasy of the model minority
because social nodes of power have given all the appearance of
rewarding Hindu Americans
for their better-than-ness even while branding them with lesser-
than-ness. Judith Butler
confirms this as she writes about how attachment is neurotic in
its own unrecognizability to
the subject: “that one is dependent on power for one’s very

formation, that that formation is
impossible without dependency, and that the posture of the
adult subject consists precisely
in the denial and reenactment of this dependency” (1997:9).
Butler goes on to argue that
the dependency on outside forces in the construction of the self
means that invariably the
subject is particularly vulnerable to exploitation: “Bound to
seek recognition of its existence
in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making,
the subject seeks the sign of
its own existence outside itself, and in a discourse that is at
once dominant and indifferent”
(1997:20). The white majority in the United States is indeed
dominant almost to the point
of indifference in its relationship to the social world of Hindu
Americans. Hindu Americans
at the mercy of a white supremacist ethnoscape have embraced
the model minority myth
as a general rule, but their situation has also led some first
generation Hindu Americans to
revel in, as well as distort, the memory of where they do have
the power to be dominant and
exploitative: India.
Hindutva-embracing Americans are drawn to a fantasy of a
Hindu golden age, or a new
Hindu India that is cleansed of interlopers, but while they do
not explicitly connect this
desire to the alienation of U.S. racialized social landscapes, it
emerges through the use
of Lacanian tools. For example, Lacan’s Symbolic Order, the
imposition of law, has also
been explored fruitfully in an ethnographic context by
Katherine Pratt Ewing in her book
on Sufi masters in Pakistan. Ewing shows that the social order

as made manifest through
language splits the self, which then desires its reconstitution
into the false nostalgia of its
undifferentiated past. Ewing writes,
with this positioning in the Symbolic Order comes also the
alienation of the subject,
an inchoate awareness that something has been left behind, an
experience of being
somehow split, of not being fully recognized in the subject
position where one has
been fixed. This experience is the source of an impossible
desire. Desire is first, and
beneath it all, a desire for wholeness and plentitude—an
imaginary unity based on an
unremembered experience of merger with the mother. [1997:28]
Applying these observations to the case of Hindu Americans at
hand helps to clarify the inner
turmoil: if one takes a Symbolic Order in this case to be the
habitus of U.S. racism, which a
Hindu immigrant migrates into, then it is possible to posit
alienation, psychic damage, and
finally the fetishization of the Ideal-I, the imaginary image in
the mirror: in this case, it takes
form as a singular Hindu paradise, or the utopian Mother India.
Hindutva-embracing immigrants do not themselves make an
explicit connection between
racism in the United States and their interest in expelling non-
Indic groups from India,
but such misrecognitions are necessarily uncritical and
unreflexive.35 The prevalence of the
psychological misrecognition I have identified in Hindutva-
leaning Americans gets to the
heart of the fact that it is not enough for anthropologists to

focus on the cultural, political
188 ETHOS
and economic nodes of Hindu identity formation; we must look
deeper, and tease out the
ways in which the psychic distress of being Othered has
unrecognized consequences.
Conclusion
In this article, I have acknowledged the psychological and
emotional aspects behind the
rise of Hindutva in the United States. My fieldwork indicated a
ferocity of attachment to
hatred that belies prevailing notions that social, political, and
economic causes are the only
motivating factors for embracing Hindutva ideology.
Many first-generation Hindu immigrants in the United States are
stoked by extant racial
hegemonies into accepting the myth of the model minority. The
“lesser-than” quality of
the Hindu American subject position in a white-dominated
society motivates some to rely
on the myth of the Hindu Utopia for self-esteem and a sense of
being “greater-than.” The
corresponding partial recognition of the “double,” the Muslim
stranger in India as analogue
to the Hindu stranger in the United States, also leads some first
generation Hindus to repress
their identification with a familiar object of revulsion, often
furthering Hindutva narratives
in subsequent compulsive repetitions of the distress of that

traumatic partial recognition.
Finally, the misrecognition of the illusory constructions both
shaping and being shaped by
Hindutva-sympathetic Americans works to feed the “instituted
fantasy” that continues to
alienate.
The second generation talks a lot about their experiences with
racism, fantasies of being
white (Iyer and Haslam 2006), or exclusion by virtue of
difference.36 Although some campers
seemed challenged and anxious about the overt differences and
Othering conducted by their
non-India peers in the United States, other children have
adapted by either going with the
flow, or conversely by situating themselves outside of it.
However, when Hindutva creeps
into fun and games in the heat of a summer camp, some children
do internalize the hatred
of the double (the Indian Muslim, in this case) taught by parents
and counselors, and are
arguably being ensnared along with them. Of course, many
Hindu Americans have suffered
U.S. racism and feelings of alienation without the
corresponding sublimated revulsion to
the partial recognition and without recourse to Hindutva, but
this variability likely stems
from personal differences in the discomfort level in the partial
recognition itself. Therefore,
a Hindu Indian generally amiable toward Indian Muslims would
not have had a partial
recognition to repress or compulsively revisit.
I would argue that the fetishization of Hindu-ness happens on
many different levels and to
many different degrees, as evinced by the fuzzy continuum of

Hindutva from HSS karsevaks,
Shantiniketan parents, Swami Harinanda, Seema, Preeti, and
Pooja; these fetishizations, in
their multiplicity of forms, are fueled in part by the repressed
partial recognition of the
stranger. Myths implicit in U.S. racism, as well as Hindutva’s
fantasy of a Hindu utopia, are
testaments to the grasping attachments and “possessive
investment” in majority privilege.
To heal the fissures that persistently feed dialectical cycles of
fear and hatred, the stranger
must be recognized: racist non-Indian Americans must
recognize the Hindu “stranger” as
a politically authentic fellow American, and intolerant Hindus
must recognize the Muslim–
Christian “stranger” as a politically authentic fellow Indian. It
is high time that the Stranger
is finally acknowledged as nothing more than a misrecognized
aspect of the self.
JESSICA FALCONE is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at
Kansas State University.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Funding for this research was provided by
the Pew Charitable Trust’s Religion and the New
Immigrants Project (under the institutional supervision of the
Life Cycle Institute), as well as Harvard

University’s Pluralism Project. I would like to thank the readers
of early drafts of this article, especially the editors
and anonymous reviewers at Ethos, for offering helpful advice
along the way.
1. For the purposes of this article the terms religious
fundamentalism, religious nationalism, and religious extremism
are interchangeably defined as a movement within the main
body of a religion, which narrows the spectrum of
acceptable behaviors based on conservative interpretations of
foundational text, histories or identities, often in
tandem with some measure of intolerance, political
appropriation or violence. In no way does the use of the
term fundamental suggest something actually essential about the
text or tradition itself, because it refers only to
a particular, and contested interpretation. Working with
extremist informants presents its own challenges, so for
more on the tribulations of researching and writing about
informants with whom one vehemently disagrees, please
see Falcone 2010.
2. Over the course of the 2001–02 academic year, I studied
ritual and practice at Hindu mandirs and Sikh
gurudwaras, and attended “Sunday schools” at these institutions
to watch particular engagements with the second-
generation Indian American children. Subsequently, over the

summer of 2002, I was invited to volunteer at the
Hindu summer camps, so while the camp season is relatively
short, I was able to contextualize the activities within
their regular religious activities. All informants were aware of
my presence as a researcher, and had given informal
consent to be observed and interviewed; Human Subjects
approval was received under the auspices of the Life
Cycle Institute at Catholic University of America. The proper
names of all nonhistorical personages have been
altered to protect their privacy, but I have not altered the names
of institutions.
3. My informants from throughout the South Asian community
in Washington, D.C., speak with a certain amount
of nostalgia about “the old days” of the 1960s and 1970s when
there were very few of them, and so their rituals,
groups, and religious identities were more inclusive. A Hindu
family that ran a progressive Hindu meeting group
in the Maryland suburbs claimed that in the beginning they were
the original Hindu community of the greater
D.C. area, but as more people came regional groups split apart;
from the Hindu group emerged a South Indian
Hindu group; from the South Indian Hindu group a Tamil Hindu
temple group was birthed. This narrative is
often repeated by others, but when the narrator belongs to one

of the newer communities the tale is often told with
pride, rather than lament.
4. Hindu nationalism can be traced back to in the early 20th
century; as the Independence Movement in India
gained steam, several Hindutva leaders began debating the
essentials of Hindu-ness. It is the pan-Hindu historical
narrative of fundamentalism that has retained maximum
currency in contemporary India, while attempts to reform
Vedic practice are seen as mere sidebars of the main thrust of
the Hindutva project.
5. Even if we grant Reddy her observation that Hindutva can be
viewed as a form of protest against secularism, non-
Hindutva readers may find themselves wondering why, simply
because it is a form of critique against modernity, it
ought to be thus tolerated, embraced and feted? Thus, Reddy’s
work on Hindutva, in my view, takes the postmodern
acceptance of different views to its paralyzing, apolitical
extreme.
190 ETHOS
6. The South Asian immigrant to the United States may be
embedded in a “postcolonial” identity, one in which
the independence and autonomy of the Indian state stands in

sharp contrast to the not too distant past of white,
British domination. Although taking to heart both Ahmad’s
critique of the “postcolonial” as being entirely subject to
colonization (1992), as well as Frankenberg and Mani’s sense
that the “post” in “postcolonial” is somehow premature
and problematic (1996), it would seem that the postcolonial is at
least useful in that it reminds researchers that
overcoming the racial domination of whites over a people of
color, is part and parcel of collective Indian national
identity. Frankenberg and Mani also show that the United States
is not “postcolonial” at all, and suggest that a
better term to describe the post in question is “post-Civil
Rights,” to indicate a rupture between the racial mores of
before and after the Civil Rights movements of the mid-1950s
through the 1970s.
7. White supremacy is still considered a marginal movement,
despite an uptick in white supremacist activity
that accompanied the election of Barack Obama as president in
2008, the stock market crash of 2008 and Great
Recession, and the subsequent rise of the Tea Party and other
groups.
8. Prashad also writes about several exceptions to the rule: the
handful of Indian American radicals who have
united with non-“model” minorities to work toward social

justice, as well as the fact that some working-class
Indians occasionally identify more as “black” than “white”
(2000). Also, he notes that some upper- and middle-class
suburban Indian American teens, not unlike many of their white
peers, adopt African American fashions, musical
preferences, and affect to rebel against their parents. In the end,
Prashad’s basic critique of Indian American
collusion with the white hegemony stands, despite his carefully
delineated caveats.
9. Guilt is one psychic motivation that can easily lead Hindu
Americans toward Hindutva. Hindu Americans have
left their love object, the “homeland,” “Mother India” (“Bharat
Ma”) behind, a fact that compels some guilt in many
Hindu Americans. As Judith Butler has cogently explained, guilt
is a means of preserving the love object from one’s
potentially destructive violence (1997:25). Ambivalence toward
India can be read in the very fact of immigration,
especially because the large majority settle in the United States
and return to India only for visits. Because many
immigrants also leave their biological mothers behind on the
subcontinent, a conflation of mother and Mother
India can evoke enormous emotional investiture.
10. For example, the use of a summer camp venue to teach
politicized religious discourse to young people was

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