Why Hindus must study the power of words if they want to protect 'vertical' next-generation Hinduism

In my earlier articles (click here and here ), I proposed that Hindus generally don’t feel a sense of imminent danger to themselves when other Hindus are facing harm because “Hinduism” is, like most indigenous, non-monotheistic traditions, more “vertical” than “horizontal.” Ancestral traditions, micro-nations existing in time, is what we are. Modern mass society, though, descends from “horizontal coercions”, congregational faiths, groups designed to mold the individual into being a part of the collective, through regular assembly and other techniques. I then fleshed out the culture of Hindus in America today as that of “Go with the Flow” Hinduism, subject to “By the Book” pressures of a modern, “horizontal” society, be it Christian or secular. I argued that the three or four generational cohorts (present day children, teens and young adults, parents, middle-aged/empty-nester parents) negotiating life here all go with the flow so much that we find huge drops in “vertical” continuity, far more than that between generations before. I suggested that we fail to understand this phenomenon sociologically because we see the “flow” as “natural,” like how a fish cannot really know it is in something called water. We are good at adjusting, accepting, going with the flow. But there are times when noticing and resisting threats to the flow are important. For that, we need to understand our location in time, space and culture better, and to communicate about that better. In this article, I will examine some communication implications of being “go with the flow” people in a “by the book” society with a focus on the power of words. Words and generations Let us start with a small linguistics experiment. If you are a Hindu parent who is reading this: What are some of the words you use with your children that seem to annoy them? What are some of the words they use to describe you or your opinions? Do your children think you are “cool,” or “based,” or “cringe,” or “fash” (fascist)? What are the words with which they frame whatever you might be practicing as your ancestral traditions; temples, pujas, festivals? What are the words they use to describe the past, more broadly, and the future? Your generation, and theirs? What words (or sensibilities) might have come from you or your elders, and what words or positions have come from their peers, school and social media? Now, the next step. If your grandfather or grandmother was living as a child or teenager now, say, via time travel, how would their language, daily life, and understanding of the world be? Let’s now apply this the other way too. If you are a teenager or a young adult reading this: what are the words that your parents or elders say that bother you? How do your parents come across on their social media profiles to you and your friends? Do you see value in what they say or what they seem to be trying to say? Or is it best to conclude that they come from a different era and you have your own world and problems to sort out? Have they offered words or insights that you think will stand by you beyond say, education, career, finance, or basic ethics insights? Have they used words that illuminate who you are, spark your imagination, and make you see the world, nature, society, and relationships, all in some wonderful manner? Whose words make you feel strongly? What are these words? And what words do you use when you feel something intensely? Are these words working for you when they leave your mouth, or your typing fingers? Do you like your name? Do you like your parents for giving you such a name? I begin this article about matters of existential survival with something as seemingly simple, trivial, and inconsequential as words, not grand recommendations about politics or religion or economics. Those are not my domain or my primary interest. My primary interest is in the media of communication, and the oldest medium of communication in history is the word or the spoken sound. Words and media, space and time Over hundreds of generations, our ancestors have passed down organised collections of sounds which he have learned to use from them. For a lesser timespan, visual representations of those sounds, writing, has also been passed down, though rarely on a scale as widespread and “natural” as speech. And then, for just about five hundred years or so, hardly 15 or 20 generations when you think about it, each generation has been collectively brought into an increasingly organized, centralized, uniform communication experience through the invention and spread of printing. Modern mass societies, or “horizontal coercion,” starts to happen on a much larger scale through printing, books, newspapers and so on. Then, with the invention of electrical and electronic technology, with the telegraph, radio and television, the generations just one century before our own time become part of vast instantaneous experiential collectives. Just think about it. If you asked the oldest generation in your family what their oldest grandparent’s childhood was like, or at least get a rough date for that, you can easily picture what time period and what communication technology they grew up in. My mother’s childhood (1930s-1940s), for example, saw the spread of cinema and the rise of radio. She of course had an unusual journey through all that because she became a star herself at the age of 16, a face known by millions through the power of mass media. But my mother, like many of our mothers or grandmothers too, experienced the “collective” through media. She used to tell me about how the people of her village in Andhra Pradesh gathered around the radio on 30 January, 1948 when Mahatma Gandhi was killed. We could say that the nation began to be experienced by people as part of an “imagined community” to use a famous concept from the social sciences. In my childhood (1970s-80s), TV played that role, Doordarshan, specifically, with a bit of VHS imports later on the side. Now, in the lives of children today (late “Gen Z” or early “Gen Alpha”), social media perhaps plays that role. Becoming part of a massive media audience, a horizontal collective experience through technology, has become a central part of each generation’s life and cultural education for the last hundred years. And that is just three or four generations, once again. Hold that image and let us return to the role of words now. If you are a parent, and then say “Hindu” to your child, how much of a resonance does it have, and what sort of resonance? Demonization of “Hindu” as a verbal project The sound “Hindu” has already been demonized, repeatedly and persistently, in your child’s school, in newspaper headlines, in Instagram memes, and so on. In school, the demonization happened probably in just one ancient history lesson in middle school. But in college, it will be even more. In classes, and not just “religion” classes but almost any social science core class, there will be a virtual free for all about running anything with the name “Hindu” down. In college dorms and social activities, there will be well-organized set ups for shaming the “Hindu” and Indian-descent students will be shamed by their peers for saying they are “Indian” (“because only ‘Native Americans’ can call themselves ‘Indian’ don’t you know, you must call yourself South Asian’ or you’re racist” – this is a real story, incidentally) Only a well-organised, top-down, establishment-approved, “by the book” Hinduism of the sort certain anti-Hindu “Hindu” groups are known for will be encouraged in colleges and then in the workplace. You might very well find your children justifying the genocide of Hindus in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and elsewhere, defending violent hate speech against Hindus, mockery of gods and temples, and at the same time claiming they are actually Hindus, while you are “Hindu Nationalists,” inspired by Hitler, Trump and Modi. Or, if they see through all that, they will plod on, but more and more privately (the wallpaper to doormat to target transition of successive cohorts of immigrant Hindus in America I mentioned earlier). Either way, the future, their future and the future of their children and your descendants, should we all so fortunate to have them and see them, will bear the consequences of the words we have used to live, the words we have used to describe life, and the words we have upheld as ones we live by, we live for. Now, the word “Hindu” itself, as a label, might now literally be the last word for ensuring their “vertical” well-being. It is after all a word only a few generations in popular use, and often as a response to being under duress by coercive horizontal systems (which of course are also pretty efficient at reproducing themselves vertically; the missions of the old days become the schools and NGOs of today, for example). But “Rama.” And “Amma,” and “Om,” … and so many words like that still remain, reproducing the joy of language you felt the first time you spoke as a child to make your parents happy, or the first cave-child spoke a hundred thousand years ago… Cultivating attention towards words So let us return in conclusion to the role of words in talking about Hinduphobia (or Hindu anything) with your children. First, recognise that the words you are learning and using to describe a certain experience you feel, a certain reality you know is out there, are coming from a different stream in the flow than your children. You see some professor or journalist spewing abuse on Rama or Durga, and you use certain words to hopefully push back on them; you call them “Marxist” or “woke.” Think of where you got these words from (most likely, the internet) and where your children get their responses to these words (from very well-organized institutions you yourself have pushed them to get into all their lives like ivy-league colleges, and from often very well-spoken, guru-like professors). Your kids will be in a bind now. They will have to choose one reality or another. Most likely, they will choose the other one, because it will make a lot more sense to them. They will put your views aside politely at best, or more confrontationally at worst. You have to pick your words and your battles. Second, timing and context for the use of words is important. Social media’s instantaneous nature and dynamics makes us react more quickly and thoughtlessly than is good for anybody. Many of us tend to use Twitter as a venting ground between work or errands. Silence, patience, and seeing words as disturbances in your peace that you can afford to wait on before reacting will help you. Third, recognise that words that are produced by coercive horizontal entities (schools, colleges, corporations, lobbies) are weaponized. There is a reason why they all say the same things, the same lies and half-truths. It is “a feature, not a bug,” as we say these days. Now, “verticals” lack the words (the vocabulary) for social science and political realities, as I showed in the earlier article. We also lack the networks to deploy words effectively (we have a few successful social media influencers and political leaders, sure, but their goal is not primarily to educate you, but to stimulate clicks and votes). Fourth, observe and learn from institutions and how they use words. What is that a professor might say or not say? A free Hindu on the internet can often say whatever they want, especially if they are anonymous. A public intellectual writing under their own name, on the other hand, is negotiating multiple constraints and possibilities with each word; your location in a disciplinary literature most of all. Hindus and Hindu groups, on the other hand, have a knee-jerk, go-with-the-flow peer-group approach to words. In the last 20 years, I have seen numerous instances where activist Hindus hesitate to say the most useful or effective word (usually, “racism” or “Hinduphobia”) when the opportunity arises, because they are fearful. And then, suddenly, they will burst out saying the most intemperate anti-Muslim slur one can think of. This happened most famously I understand in the case of a British Hindu leader who opposed the word Hinduphobia in a hate crime legislation, and then later had to resign because of anti-Muslim comments. Basically, what seems to happen in terms of sociolinguistics here is something like this: Hindu leaders and advocates are going with the flow (of words) in their social circles or social media channels, where, informally, they intuit that Hindus must simply not say words which make them sound like Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, or other minorities before their White employers. They think this will make them more acceptable to Whites. Now the children of these Hindus know a little better about what words to use and not use because these linguistic competencies they pick up from the mainstream institutions of this society and not just from imitating other Hindus. These institutions have now decreed of course that Hindus are white, or white-adjacent, or as far as Brahmins go, more white than white. So these children now grow up to become performers of whatever version of white guilt they have been groomed into in order to succeed in the corporate world. Fifth, be self-reflexive with words and learn to learn them all over again. I think the best way to do this is to keep playing with translations. Encourage your children to play word games in Telugu, Tamil, Sanskrit, whatever your mother tongue might be. The centrality of mother tongues to “vertical” traditions cannot be ignored if these traditions are to thrive again. As an aside, I think one of the main reasons the BJP fails frequently in going beyond a certain belt in India is that it has constantly confused Hindu mobilization with Hindi-uniformization. Perhaps it has figured that Hindus cannot be mobilised openly without seeming anti-Muslim, so has quietly settled on spreading Hindi everywhere. Unfortunately, despite the mass convenience of Hindi, it is a relatively recent invention and not ancestrally rooted enough perhaps to work as “horizontal coercers” in the way that party bosses and nationalists hope. Six, Hinduphobia equals Racism. It is not a disease. It is not a copy of “Islamophobia.” It is not a socialist conspiracy to undermine the great American meritocracy. You don’t have to support absurd charges of racism or perform as an American liberal for the sake of fitting in (I find it interesting that a social media influencer who long mocked Hindus for using the “racism” charge as an example of “Oppression Olympics” recently criticized an Indian-origin UK professor for allegedly denying the “oppression of lower castes” in India). The BJP-Indic-RW “ecosystem” unfortunately is following the logic of clicks and votes, and not intellectual rigour, or pedagogical compassion. It will criticize the liberals and “wokes” in America while not growing the debate about the excesses of the same model being used by their political bosses to win elections in India. To conclude, there is a way to talk about “Hinduphobia” on social media that can be rigorous, logical, careful, precise, and effective. At the moment though, there are many competing and sometimes confusing voices out there, and even confusing labels (“Hindumisia,” “Hindudvesha” etc.). Then there are scholars too who avoid the words Hinduphobia and Hinduism altogether, and yet provide the most rigorous critiques of how we have all got to where we are today (the Ghent School). I use “Hinduphobia” mostly in the context of media representations, backed up by a methodology I have published in a peer-reviewed chapter, which makes me view it as a form of colonial propaganda inseparable from what is commonly called racism (why “racism” itself is being appropriated by some racists to insist that Hindus, Asians, Jews etc. cannot be victims of racism is, of course, another, longer debate). It is only a first step, but I believe that learning never stops. That’s what being “vertical” in these insanely horizontally coercive times means I suppose. (Part 3 of Why Hindus Have No Sense of Collective Harm) Postscript: Some suggested readings on language and political change There is a lot of literature on language, politics, and persuasion in the contemporary context (although none of it seems to be from India or for Indians, specifically). Linguistics Professor George Lakoff’s slim book Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know your Values and the Frame the Debate (1994) is a good example of how social science and creativity can be applied to practical ends (in this case, teaching American liberals how to win back the narrative ground from charismatic communicators like Ronald Reagan). I am currently reading a book called Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln and Lady Gaga by Joseph J. Romm (2012) which makes the important point that as education in rhetoric (or effective persuasion in speech and writing) vanishes from schools, you will find a population that is less impressive in its communication skills, and also more suggestible in a way (you can’t detect how propagandists manipulate you if you are not trained to understand how words work in the first place). Finally, if you have not read it before, my e-book Writing Across a Cracked World: Hindu Representation and the Logic of Narrative (2018) might also be useful. The writer is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. He has authored several books, including  ‘Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence’ (Westland, 2015).  Views expressed are personal. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .