YOUTH, CRISIS, AND THE POLITICAL LIFE OF GLOBAL HINDUISM

Abstract

The idea of ‘youth’ has emerged as a particularly central, and contested, issue within the shifting cultural politics of diasporic Hinduism. Familiar and longstanding questions about immigration and cultural/religious transmission are transforming into newly articulated political concerns and discourses. This discussion examines some of the ways in which the idea of youth has been invoked and mobilized by different diasporic public Hindu voices, especially in the American context. I examine, for instance, how ‘youth’ has come to preoccupy the protracted debates over academic representations of Hinduism, the public advocacy of newer organizations such as the Hindu American Foundation, as well as American Hindu endorsements of the post-9/11 war on terror. Hindu youth figures centrally here, often wrapped up with intensifying discourses of threat and vulnerability, with the fate and nature of youth emerging as key concerns in the politics of culture, identity, security, and representation.