BY AUDREY TRUSCHKE
In early March 2021, I awoke to a social media barrage of misogynist and bigoted slurs, unhinged accusations, and threats to hurt me and my family. For a few days, I thought little about this. Since 2015, I have suffered online harassment from those who dislike my scholarship, especially a branch of the global right known as the Hindu Right that advocates a political doctrine of Hindu supremacy and targets US-based scholars. Over the past six years, I have become, by necessity, calloused to the worst humanity has to offer: hate, prejudice, and rage. This recent bout was the worst yet.
Weeks later, two human rights activists used the term blitzkrieg to describe the Hindu Right’s assault against me that peaked in March–April 2021. The social media hate was extreme, with violent threats prompting law enforcement involvement in multiple cities. An anonymous petition called for the Rutgers administration to curtail my academic freedom (instead, they supported me). The Hindu Right has used similar tactics, successfully, to chill academic freedom in India. In the US context, they found allies in white nationalists and Islamophobes who joined the assault against me.
I did not withstand this alone. Academics, activists, and civil society groups came to my defense, and we stood together in solidarity. My colleagues of South Asian descent penned a statement of “unreserved support,” endorsed by other scholars. The letter clarified that my “respect for Hindus and Hinduism” was compatible with “a critical examination of Hindutva, a political ideology.” In addition, statements of support were issued by human rights and civil society groups, the Rutgers faculty-grad union, Rutgers’s South Asian Studies Program, and, most recently, the Rutgers University Senate Executive Committee. Many who signed these letters paid a price, becoming targets of hate and threats themselves. Some of my colleagues and administrators of color received especially heinous, racist pushback.
Just when the social media storm calmed a bit in mid-April 2021, I received a letter threatening a lawsuit. The letter came from a law firm that has represented Donald Trump and now represents another right-wing client: the Hindu American Foundation (HAF). HAF has ties with the RSS, a paramilitary group in India, and is widely known to promote an extreme right agenda. I am currently researching HAF as part of a project on the US-based Hindu Right. In early May, HAF filed their lawsuit suing four leaders of human rights and civil society organizations, plus me, for alleged defamation. I am still mulling over the grim reality of a punitive financial price for academic research.
I remain unclear about what set off this recent onslaught, but, generally, my research poses challenges for the Hindu Right. I work on Indo-Persian rule, presenting India’s Muslim kings of old as historical figures and highlighting Hindu-Muslim interactions in premodernity. Such research cuts against the Hindu Right’s politics of grievance, which demonizes Muslims in India’s past to justify their accelerating oppression of Muslims in India’s present. In addition, I research abuses of history and revisionism that are critical to the political ideology of Hindutva. The Hindu Right has repeatedly used hateful attacks to try to dissuade my research.
In the midst of such assaults, do I and other scholars of South Asia have academic freedom—the ability to research, teach, and engage in public discussions without intimidation? How might we shore up this precious and essential dimension of academic life that enables critical thought to thrive?
The Perils of Majoritarian History
The anonymous petition against me demonstrates how the Hindu Right seeks to infringe on academic freedom. Especially eyebrow-raising is that it objects that I teach a broad range of historical Indian traditions and experiences, including Dalit perspectives. Dalits are on the lowest rung of the caste system, a social hierarchy that Ambedkar, a twentieth-century Indian intellectual, argued was rooted in Hindu thought. Regardless of one’s position on Ambedkar’s argument, there is no question that understanding caste is essential to understanding Indian history and contemporary Indian society. Caste-based discrimination is a significant, growing issue in the United States, including in New Jersey. I teach Dalit perspectives with pedagogical thoughtfulness and with an urgency to give this historically oppressed group a voice in the narration of South Asian history.
Pushback against including Dalit voices in teaching on South Asia is akin to conservative pushback in other contexts such as the mobilization against the 1619 Project. While that project aims to “reframe” US history and center the contributions of Black Americans, my inclusion of Dalit voices in classes at Rutgers–Newark does not approach such ambitious goals. Pushback against even my circumscribed measure to include voices of the historically oppressed is an alarming threat to the heart of the humanities.
Uncreative Fiction Begets Unsavory Reality
While some of the petition pushes an anti-diversity stance, much of it is unmoored from reality. I decline to repeat its unfounded accusations, but I am interested in how baseless allegations pose a threat.
They do so, in part, because of the voices that the petition coopts and homogenizes. The petition purports to be authored by Rutgers students, although there is no proof of that authorship, and some Rutgers–New Brunswick students have identified an outside source for the petition. I have taught hundreds of South Asian descent students over the past fifteen years and have never faced a complaint or accusation from any of them. The shadowy architects of these hateful attacks infringe on Hindu students’ individuality and voices by claiming, falsely, to speak for all of them.
This inane petition needs neither to be accurate nor persuasive to achieve its goals. Perhaps its hidden authors sought to make an example of me, dissuading others with similar pedagogies and research. The US-based Hindu Right has endorsed such tactics recently. Additionally, perhaps the attackers sought to manufacture outrage that would gobble up time and energy I could have devoted to research.
In the past three months, I have consulted with police departments, a prosecutor, attorneys, digital security experts, university administrators, scholarly groups, journalists, and many colleagues. So have other academics who supported me and became targets. All of this has detracted from our collective scholarship, while instilling fear across campuses.
One result, for now, is a toxic environment in which some scholars can survive, but none of us can thrive academically. We must not resign ourselves to merely hold back those who would choke us. Our cornerstone values of diversity, knowledge, and critical thought demand space and support so that all devoted to intellectual inquiry can flourish in our research, teaching, and public engagement efforts.
Guest blogger Audrey Truschke is associate professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University–Newark and the author, most recently, of The Language of History, published in January.
