From Examining Anti-Hindu Bias in American Public Education: The Endogenous Cycle of Hinduphobia, published in The Journal for the Council for Research on Religion in 2025. "Intellectually honest scholarly interruption and critique of the master narrative about Hindus and Hinduism are discredited with ad hominem attacks on the Hindu scholars themselves. This phenomenon extends more broadly into the very study of Hinduism, where Hindu scholars can be methodically excluded. As a simple experiment, I looked up the contributing authors to the following: the Bloomsbury Companion to Islamic Studies, the Bloomsbury Companion to Jewish Studies, and the Bloomsbury Companion to Hindu Studies. One notable difference between the three Contributors sections is that the Islamic and Jewish Studies volumes include paragraph-length biographies describing the authors’ scholarship, service, and experience as they relate to the respective religions; the Hindu Studies volume only lists the authors’ names, positions, and institutions. The most striking difference, however, is in the authors themselves. Out of the eight listed contributors in the volume on Islamic Studies, three have Muslim names. The Jewish Studies book includes twelve contributors, all of whom are Jewish. The Hindu Studies book also includes twelve contributors; not a single one of them has a Hindu name. While this is a limited examination, it is still compelling. Why are Hindu scholars uniquely excluded from a compendium of scholarly discourse about their own tradition? While there is scholarly chatter about authority and voice in Hindu Studies, these conversations flip the script, so to speak, back onto Indian politics, claiming that the rise in Hindu nationalism threatens the academic freedom of non-Hindu scholars of Hinduism. “Who Speaks for Hinduism?” is a series of articles published in 2000 by The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, which begins with this premise. Twenty-three years later, as a callback to the earlier publication, Supriya Gandhi, a scholar with a Hindu name, extends this narrative: [T]he succeeding years have witnessed the growing dominance of Hindutva as a cultural and political project of right-wing ethno-nationalism, which now looms large over academic inquiry into Hinduism. Today, Hindu nationalists leverage social media, capital, and the long arm of the Indian state to advance their claim of representing the authentic voice of Hinduism. I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting that non-Hindus are disqualified from being legitimate scholars of Hinduism because of race or religion. Rather than “who speaks for Hinduism?” the more troubling question I am asking is, “Why aren't more Hindus allowed to speak for Hinduism?” This is implicitly answered by the master narratives and evocative imagery of a looming, long arm of Hindutva reaching around the globe. Again, I am not suggesting that no Hindus are allowed to speak, but it does appear to me, a Hindu American scholar of education (not a scholar of religion or region), that the epistemic authority of Hindu scholars is recognized more readily if they espouse viewpoints that are tethered to the master narrative. By contrast, Hindu scholars (with the requisite academic credentials and training) who seek to critique the established scholarship on Hindus and Hinduism experience visible epistemic injustice; one can only imagine the constraints faced by the broader Hindu community and their capacity to be seen and heard as legitimate narrators of their own experiences and interpreters of their cultural and religious landscapes. Hinduphobia arises from a perfect storm of all of these mechanisms, from stereotypes to epistemic injustice, securing the permanency of the endogenous cycle of Hinduphobia and creating a permission structure for the scholars and journalists at elite institutions and media houses to ignore, dismiss, and demonize Hindu Americans, a mostly immigrant community." Download the full article here - creor-ejournal.library.mcgil….