Sheldon Pollock faced harassment and critiques in Delhi after publishing his 1993 article, “Ramayana and Political Imagination in India” in The Journal of Asian Studies. At the time, Dr. Pollock taught at the University of Chicago. His Ramayana essay was repeatedly brought up in subsequent decades in US-based harassment by Rajiv Malhotra. Learn more

Jeffrey Kripal of Rice University faced repeated attacks, including death threats, from the Hindu Right for his analysis of the nineteenth-century Bengali saint Ramakrishna’s work and life, in Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (University of Chicago Press, 1995). Kripal soon moved away from the study of Hinduism because of the attacks. Learn more

Susan Wadley of Syracuse University was attacked for including a Dalit-authored song about the Ramayana in educational materials sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The attack was led by the Educational Council of Indic Traditions, an Internet discussion group founded by Rajiv Malhotra’s Infinity Foundation. Learn more

Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago received threats in the wake of an inflammatory article by Rajiv Malhotra attacking her and her students for their scholarship on a diverse range of aspects of Hinduism. This attack, using sexist language, was part of Mr. Malhotra’s larger break from the Religion in South Asia (RISA) Unit, part of the American Academy of Religion. Following the attack, Microsoft Encarta bowed to pressure to remove an article that Dr. Doniger had contributed on Hinduism. In 2003, Dr. Doniger had an egg thrown at her and was subjected to verbal attacks during a lecture on the Ramayana in London. Going forward, Dr. Doniger has been a recurrent target of Hindu Right attacks. Learn more

Romila Thapar was targeted in a signature campaign by the Hindu Right after her appointment as the first holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South at the Library of Congress in the United States. Dr. Thapar has also been subjected to larger and longer aggressions in India, both before and after the Kluge Chair controversy. Learn more

Paul Courtright of Emory University was subjected to a barrage of death threats and relentless harassment for his book, Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings, published eighteen years earlier by Oxford University Press. Under threat, Dr. Courtright’s Indian publisher, Motilal Banarsidass, withdrew the reissue of the Indian edition of Ganesa in 2003. Learn more

John (Jack) Hawley of Columbia University received a series of ad hominem attacks and bad-faith accusations by Rajiv Malhotra and Krishnan Ramaswamy of the Infinity Foundation. The accusations pertained to Dr. Hawley’s course at Columbia University’s Barnard College titled “Hinduism Here,” which was affiliated with Harvard Professor Diana Eck’s Pluralism Project. Dr. Hawley responded to the accusations directly. Learn more

Sarah Caldwell was attacked by Rajiv Malhotra for her work on the Hindu goddess in Kerala. Like other attacks initiated by Mr. Malhotra, the accusations focused on sexuality and Mr. Malhotra’s projection of a close association between Dr. Caldwell and the well-regarded scholar Wendy Doniger (in reality, Dr. Caldwell and Dr. Doniger had only a passing professional acquaintance). Learn more

James Laine of Macalester College and author of Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (Oxford University Press, 2003) was harassed by a Hindu right-wing group called the Sambhaji Brigade. Members of the group ransacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, India, where Dr. Laine had conducted some of his research, destroying thousands of priceless manuscripts. Dr. Laine’s acquaintances in India were also harassed. Learn more and here

The California Textbook Controversy erupted when two right-wing groups, the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation, lobbied California’s Curriculum Commission to alter several aspects of school textbooks regarding their presentation of Hinduism and South Asian history in line with Hindutva precepts. Their suggested changes included removing references to caste, patriarchy, and the Indus Valley Civilization. A group of scholars led by Harvard Professor Michael Witzel opposed the politically-motivated changes. Learn more

Noted translator and scholar AK Ramanujan’s celebrated essay, “Three Hundred Ramayanas” was targeted by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a RSS-affiliated student group with a penchant for violence. Dr. Ramanujan (d. 1993) was the William E. Colvin Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. The ABVP wanted to remove Dr. Ramanujan’s essay from Delhi University’s History syllabus; they committed acts of vandalism in pursuit of this end. Learn more

Anonymous emails threatened the organizer of a 2008 panel on "Representing and Misrepresenting Hinduism" at the annual American Academy of Religion conference. The panel went ahead with security. There have been a longer series of attempts, both before and after this event, to limit academic discourse on Hinduism at the AAR. Learn more

Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin, 2009) came under fire in India. The Shiksha Bachao Andolan, or the “Save Education Campaign,” led by Dinanath Batra filed a lawsuit against Dr. Doniger on grounds that her book was “intended to outrage religious feelings” per Section 295(a) of the Indian Penal Code. In 2014, Penguin settled the lawsuit by agreeing to pull and pulp remaining copies of Dr. Doniger’s book, causing widespread outcry. In the United States, the Hindu American Foundation used this episode to attack Dr. Doniger, while the American Academy of Religion supported Dr. Doniger’s academic freedom. The Hindus: An Alternative History was later republished by another Indian publisher. Learn more

AK Ramanujan’s highly-regarded essay, “Three Hundred Ramayanas” was again targeted for removal from Delhi University’s History syllabus. Delhi University’s Academic Council voted, overwhelmingly, to remove the essay in the midst of extreme pressure from Hindu Right groups. The decision prompted criticism and outcry from both Indian and international scholars. Learn more

The publication of Megha Kumar’s book Communalism and Sexual Violence: Ahmedabad since 1969 was disrupted by a lawsuit filed by “ban man” Dinanath Batra of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti (Save Education Movement Committee) due to fears of violence. This followed on the heels of Penguin agreeing to pull and pulp Doniger’s The Hindus. Learn more

Anantanand Rambachan, Professor at Olaf College, was smeared by Rajiv Malhotra’s partially plagiarized book Indra’s Net (2014). Mr. Malhotra called into question Dr. Rambachan’s Hindu identity and also tried to prevent Dr. Rambachan from participating in an interfaith dialogue in 2015. Learn more

Andrew Nicholson of the State University of New York at Stony Brook found that his book, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (Columbia University Press, 2011), had been extensively plagiarized and distorted by the known anti-intellectual Hindutva campaigner Rajiv Malhotra in his 2014 book, Indra’s Net. Learn more

Vinayak Chaturvedi of the University of California-Irvine has long been in the crosshairs of the Hindu Right for his work on VD Savarkar, the godfather of Hindutva ideology. Dr. Chaturvedi drew attention to Hindu Right attempts to inappropriately influence academic chair selections at the University of California-Irvine in 2015. In 2020, Dr. Chaturvedi’s parents were swatted in a blatant and potentially dangerous intimidation attempt. Learn more

Sheldon Pollock was the primary target of the Hindutva ideologue Rajiv Malhotra’s 2016 book The Battle for Sanskrit, which used a nativist model to attack Dr. Pollock’s scholarship on Sanskrit as the product of a non-Indian. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Pollock was subjected to a similarly nativist petition asking for his removal as head of the Murty Classical Library of India, which began publishing English translations of premodern texts from a variety of Indian languages in 2015. Also relevant is that, earlier in 2016, Dr. Pollock had signed scholarly statements condemning Indian government actions against students at a major university in Delhi. At the time, Dr. Pollock was the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University. Learn more

A second California Textbook controversy was launched when two right-wing groups, the Hindu American Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation, again tried to whitewash aspects of Hinduism and South Asian history in US textbooks. In addition to scholars, including Stanford University’s Thomas Hansen, Dalit groups also opposed the politically-motived changes as whitewashing and historically inaccurate. Learn more and here

Audrey Truschke has faced threats, online harassment, and attempts to imperil her employment and curtail her teaching at Rutgers University-Newark. The attacks originated overseas and from US-based Hindu Right organizations, including the Hindu American Foundation, the Coalition of Hindus of North America, and the Hindu YUVA (a project of the HSS). Dr. Truschke works on Indo-Muslim history and is also an outspoken advocate of human rights in India. Learn more

An all-women panel on gender and caste at the 17th World Sanskrit Conference in Vancouver, Canada was subject to misogynist heckling, casteist slurs, and Hindu nationalist attacks. The panel featured three women, including one Dalit scholar. The event showed, as one panelist later put it, "the regressive face of Indology." The 17th World Sanskrit Conference was also criticized for accepting financial support from India's BJP government and platforming BJP politicians. Learn more

Angana Chatterjee, a research scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, was scheduled to testify before the United States House Foreign Affairs Committee on the status of human rights in Kashmir. Days before her testimony, Dr. Chatterjee received a phone call from a person who said that somebody close to the Indian government wished her not to speak; the caller also reminded Dr. Chatterjee that she holds Indian citizenship. Learn more

In 2021, the Hindu American Foundation filed a defamation case against Dr. Audrey Truschke, along with the heads of three major US-based human rights and civil society groups: Hindus for Human Rights, Federation of Indian American Christian Organizations of North America, and Indian American Muslim Council. Dr. Truschke was conducting public-facing research on the US-based Hindu Right, including the Hindu American Foundation, when the suit was filed. Judge Amit Mehta dismissed the suit on two grounds in December 2022. Learn more and here

Dismantling Global Hindutva: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, an academic conference, faced severe threats and coercion tactics from Hindu Right groups in both the United States and India. Many individual organizers and participants received violent threats, which prompted some to withdraw from the conference. Hindu Right groups in the United States boasted that they spammed university sponsors with more than one million emails asking for condemnation of the event. One Hindu Right group in the United States admitted to trying to pressure the Indian government to lean on United States universities to withdraw their support. The severity of the pushback attracted significant media attention and also prompted support statements from PEN America, numerous scholarly groups, and individual academics (e.g., here and here). Learn more and here

The Hindu American Foundation filed a Title VI complaint against the University of Pennsylvania. The complaint concerned the support from departments and centers at UPenn for the Dismantling Global Hindutva conference as well as the involvement of a faculty member in the South Asia Scholar Activist Collective. Learn more

In 2019, Brandeis became the first institution of higher education in America to add caste to its non-discrimination policy, a much-lauded expansion of civil rights. Other institutions soon followed, including the California State University system–covering more than 400,000 students–in early 2022. The Hindu American Foundation has sought to reverse these civil rights protections on campus, including through a lawsuit against CSU. Learn more

Numerous Harvard professors were smeared by Rajiv Malhotra in his book, Snakes in the Ganga, and accompanying promotional materials. Mr. Malhotra relied strongly on far-right rhetoric that maligns anti-racism efforts and “wokeness.” Among his targets were Dr. Suraj Yengde, a Dalit scholar and activist whom Mr. Malhotra attacked using anti-black tropes. Learn more