Putting the “Fun” in Fundamentalism: Religious Nationalism and the Split Self at Hindutva Summer Camps in the United States

Abstract

AbstractSome 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]