Because I study media and propaganda, I view the survival of Indian indigenous traditions (Hinduism, Sanatana Dharma, and so on) as a triumph of resistance to not just conquest but also coercion, conversion, persuasion & propaganda.

First a definition of terms. I view the birth and spread of expansive totalitarian ideologies (expansionist monotheisms, and so-called secular enlightenment civilizing missions) as prime case studies in propaganda. Other, lesser examples of Propaganda can exist, sure. But the monotheisms and mono-non-theisms are the gold standards of propaganda. EVERYONE has to BELIEVE and OBEY the same ONE thing. That one thing will of course claim to be the one thing that explains EVERYTHING.

The First Wave

The first wave of attacks on deities, temples, and sacred sites did not lead to mass change in “belief: in India (say, CE 900-1700s). There was genocide, destruction of temples, conversion through life threats, torture, poverty-inducing discriminatory economic policies, and such, but it is fair to say that very few Hindus left their gods, traditions, and ancestors because of “loss of faith.”

In other words, it was mostly conquest, coercion, and cruelty, which won converts. No one budged from the traditions of their ancestors simply out of some great inner change of heart or mind brought about by respectful and loving debates.

Little surprise then, that for several centuries, or several dozen generations, Hindus continued with intergenerational continuity (IGC) uninterrupted and a clear understanding in their actions that our minds are ours, and their (invader) minds are theirs, and the latter are not alright, so yes, where we can, we will defend the temples, we will fight.

Temple-Destruction to Mind Reconstruction

But then, as Professor Arvind Sharma notes in his book The Rulers Gaze, British imperialism turned the target from obvious ones like temples to the invisible realm – of the mind. That changed everything, even if it was not immediately obvious.

The breaks in IGC from one generation to another from say the 1850s till now have been incrementally larger with each passing generation. I still recall Amartya Sen’s story from The Argumentative Indian that he grew up in a house where no pujas were performed. There were books, but no IGC in terms of traditions and ceremonies. That is perhaps two generations disconnected right there, a void to be filled with “Veda dot pdf” (as my friend Halley Kalyan calls it), and it explains a lot of things about his inability to grasp Hindu concerns or even Hindu life all around him in India.

But such breaks in IGC, like Amartya Sen’s example, were still among elites, maybe even a fraction of the elites. Even after 1947, most ‘science’ elites (ISRO, BARC types, for example) stayed totally “trad” at home even if they were working at the cutting-edge of science and technology. I suppose they never let the “scientific temper” Nehru slogans of the time intrude into their home lives.

Nehru and After

The larger project of breaking IGC of course did not stop.  Bollywood went from soft-secular-socialism in the 1950s to outright denigration by the 1970s which many of us grew up without even noticing. The denigration of Hindu gods, temples, and women, of course, went hand in hand with the glorification of gangsters and killers.

But still, something kept IGC together even into the 1990s, which was when the first Indian generation to out-earn its parents thanks to liberalization policies grew up. Maybe because MNCs were finally allowed into the large Indian market after many decades, or maybe because the state-induced guilt trip about the 1992 demolition hadn’t really turned the newly rich and rising Hindus into self-loathers, marketing companies did not really mess with the IGC overtly (guilt-tripping was there, for sure, after all the Colonial Cousins sang Krishna Nee Begane Baro with a line asking Rama to “forgive us for what we’ve done”).

Channel V called itself a family channel in demographics though a youth channel in attitude. There was huge cultural change in the 1990s (the kids born in the 1980s and teens in the 1990s; India’s “Millennials”). Fashions, language, media, lots of things changed. But then, even into the early 2000s, national pride (Maa Tujhe Salam, Vande Mataram, Japanese Ramayana etc.) were still popular.

After 2001

But the ground of cultural production, and the war on IGC, shifted powerfully in the time that followed, from the early 2000s onwards. We can see this at the US/Western level, and also in India.

At the global level, the traditional MEC’s (“Middle Eastern Colonialism” per J. Sai Deepak’s coinage) arm of terror was swinging wildly, but they were also finessing takeover of the British approach too: propaganda, psy-ops, media, and education.

After a couple of years of backlash in the US to the brazen 9/11 massacre, the power of persuasion did its trick. The new MEC powers bought school curricula, academic conferences, colleges, celebrities, and pop culture. These instruments were well in place to tap into the growing anti-war and anti-Bush sentiment in America after the hoax about WMDs became common knowledge. By 2008, many Americans were apologizing profusely for Iraq, Guantanamo, and racism; which is quite understandable. But soon after that, the ground of American moral self-reflection slipped from mere apologies to architectural atonement of a rather awkward kind – they even were calling for a mosque to be built near the site of the 9/11 attacks.

And by 2017 January, they were normalizing group prayers in airports as protests because Trump had threatened a ban on visas for people from some Islamic countries. The campaign against Trump became a campaign against “white supremacy” and “Islamophobia,” and sexism, and transphobia and homophobia. During the 2017 Superbowl ads, the flavor of the year was clear; the “rainbow”-hijab alliance was here to stay. By 2024, it was back in the streets again, this time for Palestine.

India’s Unending UPA Experiment

In India, meanwhile, the priming of the children and youth started promptly after the government change in 2004. The NCERT civics textbooks issued in 2005, which are still in use now with just some minor additions, transformed the educational experience. These new books were not just stating facts about the constitution and government as old books did, but immersing children in keen observation and role-playing scenarios through comic strips and activities.

In a way, Indian children probably became more “woke” to social injustice even before the Americans perhaps. You cannot simply forget what these books have taught you to notice in real life all around you: inequality, class, gender, all the obvious things that should inspire and provoke passion for service to society. But the way it was done was of course not to turn children in genuinely conscientious citizens, but ideologues instead.

The key course of action offered to children in these textbooks became protests and agitations; even more than democracy and voting. And of course, the cause attributed to social inequality and oppression was almost always “religious” – it was Hinduism.

This period started in Indian pop culture with “Rang de Basanti,” the Millennial Indian’s guide to action. Nearly two decades later, even as the “Gen Z” Indians (born between 1995-2010) leave college and enter the workforce, the message of protest remains: “Archie, Archie life isn’t just for kicks/ Archie, Archie, everything is politics” was the key song (from the 2023 Archies movie on Netflix).

Will Today’s Parents Learn? The India Situation

Finally, I come to the main issue in terms of failure to learn and launch resistance to this latest phase of propaganda aimed at destroying IGC.

Earlier generations of Hindus had an instinct about propaganda when they saw it especially if it was of the obvious religious or missionary kind. They rejected it outright, or at least just listened politely but did not let it get to them (of course, even that might not be true anymore given the situation one can see in Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere).

But what is it about the present phase of woke/social change/protest propaganda and its threat to Hindu IGC that Hindu parents failed to see?

In India, the answer is straightforward. Many Hindus found themselves in a reassuring bubble post-2014 for political reasons. They saw their favorite party winning elections. They saw spectacles showcasing Hindu revival like Ayodhya and Kashi; and even a global triumph for Bharat with the PM’s overseas stadium events, GDP numbers, diplomatic pushbacks, space missions, vaccine-friendships, and so much more.

The new optimism was also picked up in pop culture. Movies celebrating nationalism and civilization did well. Given this upbeat mood, most patriotic, devout Hindu parents probably feel very sure their children are growing up feeling exactly the same way, and will grow up into a world where Hindu expression and well-being are going to be guaranteed.

I certainly hope so, and wish that today’s Hindu children in India will not encounter rude surprises of a reality-bashing magnitude in the 2030s or 2040s when they are grown up and have to deal with work, family, and children of their own.

Will Parents Learn: The US Situation

On that note, I should turn to the situation for parents in the US.

In the US, even as the new rainbow-hijab alliance took over the imagination of every school, college, workplace in America, Hindu Americans failed to read the room.

The story goes back a bit.  By the late 1990s, racism/supremacism/elitism were utterly finished as acceptable talking points in society. The old immigrant model of trying to fit in by conforming “upward,” voting and acting conservative, was no longer working as it did. Maybe some parents still did it, but American schools were already transforming their children into a different paradigm for the future.

The great Republican/Conservative/RW run of the American public sphere was over. From the 1990s, the talking points would now be all revolution, social justice, radical equality and such – even if the actual policies of wars for profit, unbridled corporate greed, and indifference to fellow humans would go on. To put it simply, it was no longer “cool” to flaunt your big society status in America even if you were really raking it in like never before with the new “knowledge economy.”

Hindus, somehow, did not get this at all. Maybe they took the post 1991 Indian consumerist brashness with them there, I am not sure.

But other immigrant groups more determined to take narrative control knew exactly what to do to capture the cultural mainstream. Here is an example. In the 1940s, as Venkat Dhulipala’s study of partition shows, some Muslim League supporters were arguing that they absolutely should not be identified with South Asians of “lower castes.” But by the 2000s, the next generation of South Asian academics and activist groups were saying the opposite:  Muslims were actually part of a great, global oppressed-group identity alongside Blacks, Dalits, Adivasis, Indigenous Groups (check out this article on the Palestinian PR geniuses who yoked the idea of Muslim victimhood with that of Black victimhood in America).

And by contrast, now “White/Jew/Hindu” became Apartheidists by merely existing (and no surprise perhaps that a lot of this framing is said to have taken off at the 2001 UN Conference on Racism where “Zionism” and “Caste-System” were proposed as the next “apartheids” to be dismantled).

One has to admire the multigenerational narrative suppleness here.  The Partition-era generation was arguing for a place “at the top” against Whites/Europeans. The Post-civil rights era generation is arguing for a place “at the bottom,” convincing along the way most of the really historically ravaged groups like US indigenous genocide survivors that somehow the other “settler-genocide” project-purveyors are also the victims so US colleges should fly “free Kashmir” flags and have poor displaced Hindu Kashmiri kids have to walk under it and pretend their ancestors were the settler colonizers of Kashmir!

Meanwhile, Hindu Americans, softened from reality by personal success, and occasional flattery in the form of articles in Forbes and Nat Geo and invites to White House events, still believe that their “boasting upwards” will grant them protection from what they think are pesky, insignificant, unwashed, unpaid, little lefty activists on the fringes of shiny society, not realizing they are digging deeper into the exact TRAP that global propaganda psyops have laid for them in their CHILDREN’s minds.

“EVIL RICH RACIST OPPRESSIVE OLD PEOPLE” is the category every White-Jewish-Hindu kid has been taught to believe in the last 20 years.

Now what about the “old people” among others? Well, there, outside of the W-J-H Apartheid-Zionist-Hindutva oppressor consortium, the assumption is that there are only “equals,” of all ages, genders, even sexualities don’t you know?

This, is the real “parent trap” Hindus have fallen into. The more you boast and try to show your kids you are at the top, the more they expect the behavior expected now of people “at the top” – take the knee for George Floyd, wear only black for Holi, abolish the Hindu name that may be casteist, eventually, topple the statue or turn it into “palimpsest.”

So, why do Hindu parents fail to see what obviously other adults in the US have done? I think it’s in part due to our “mimesis” learning style (for more on this, please see the book As Others See Us by S.N. Balagangadhara). We don’t work on a theory born out of books to describe society and us (or if we do, they’re all their books to start with). We imitate, and if it seems to work, we just go on with it.

But the problem now is that we are imitating badly on two fronts:

a) we are still imitating upwards, I think, because that’s what all the “jatis” had to do in colonial British India in the early 1900s for jobs, respect, “white adjacency” etc. so even after seven of independence, we think that’s how society works and abhor any suggestion of “victim” ness (of course, some of our talk-show-leaders will say “don’t play ‘oppression olympics’ over Hinduphobia in America” but also say “caste system is greatest system of oppression” in India)

b) we also have a very uncritical idea of “upwards” now. Perhaps in earlier colonial days, there was a distinction made between what to imitate and what was still different, what was ours. Maybe because of that Hindus could still tell when they were being denigrated, insulted, hurt by Hindu-haters. Now, because upward-looking Hindus are so convinced they are on a superior trajectory, they are utterly okay with insults and hate as long as it makes them feel they are part of an elite; for example, “stand-up comedians” who denigrate Hinduism (watch this Sangam Talks video here); Bollywood stars and TV soaps razing Hindu names with contempt PK, “Wokeflix”, and perhaps the specific example that triggered this long post: someone told me there are ads on the Jio shopping app telling consumers “how to get the exploited, abused, enslaved, male-gaze commodified women Heeramandi look.”

Truth-talking for IGC

Finally, to conclude on an action note of even a small kind: even if you don’t want to tell your children to stand up and fight Hinduphobia because you worry it will spoil studies and visa prospects, at least tell them to stare hard at the insults and see them as such. One of the biggest crises with IGC breakdown in the Jewish community is the fact that a whole younger cohort of deculturated Jewish Americans don’t realize that they are being hated or insulted even (according to Bari Weiss in her book How to Fight Anti-Semitism). Now after the Hamas attacks, we are seeing the sorry state of some Jewish (and of course some ‘South Asian’) Americans acting as if they don’t understand that being massacred is actually a bad thing, and are more committed to magnifying the inevitable “collateral damage” from Israeli responses than acknowledging that Jewish people were slaughtered brazenly on October 7 and that cannot be condoned in any way.

Think of how much the commonsense has shifted in two generations. No one could have treated 9/11 the way 10/7 is being treated in important institutions like universities and by celebrities. In fact, one detail about 10/7 is particularly frightening. What happened to the whole mythology about the global multicultural transnational “Gen Z”? Could we have ever imagined that youngsters in America of the sort who would enjoy outdoor music concerts have failed to feel a drop of empathy for youngsters in Israel quite like themselves getting targeted while at a music concert? Something has profoundly shifted in terms of how persuadable people have become in this social media age.

Neither the immediate memory of 10/7 nor the once un-ignorable phenomenon of the Holocaust seems to evoke any pause in the righteous rage all around. And this, despite Jewish Americans being a community that has spent millions of dollars to memorialize its suffering. In spite of it all, there is a tipping point among its own, especially in America, where Gaza matters, not the Shoah.

And that gaze from Gaza is going to Kashmir for sure.

The memory of the Holocaust got wiped out with just two decades of intelligent narrative building by their rivals. What then of the Hindus, who have no foothold at all in academia, media, or any major institution, or worse, in the popular global imagination, about our history, our suffering, our -mostly successful- resistance? In academia, there is no Aurangzeb, or Moplah, or Direct Action Day, or the 1971 Bangladesh Hindu massacres, or the 1990 Kashmiri Pandit genocide, or the relentless terror strikes on Mumbai, Hyderabad, New Delhi, and other Indian cities from 1993 to 2008. There is no record in the “paper of record.” There is no record, in the Indian government even, or in any think-tank or research center funded by the same Indian moneybags Hindus simp for on social media of any Hinduphobia or Hindu genocide.

In 2021, the “Hindu Nationalists” were seething at the arrogance of Rihanna for her rude Ganesha-photo and farmer-agitation comments. In 2024, some of them were claiming some imaginary victory over her because a billionaire paid her millions of dollars to perform for his guests.

Something cripplingly stupid keeps happening to Hindus when it comes to wealth and wealthy people.

Our kids are seeing it and rejecting it.

But what they will take up after rejecting this unhealthy, temporary status-snobbery vasana we have at the moment, is the question. For having our duties to do still for the next generation beyond just paying for college and filling them with empty boasts about how being Hindu will get them into C-Suites and Fortune magazine covers, let’s return to reality.

Our ancestors kept this sacred thread of IGC intact through sheer determination and an abhorrence of delusions. The present generation of Hindu parents, in India and especially abroad, my fellow “Gen X” ers and some older “Millennials,” you need to cut loose of delusions of grandeur asap. The “top” of the American status pyramid rich and not so rich Hindu Americans feel rightfully entitled too has shifted. The “top” of the Indian economic pyramid may be privately culturally-rooted (and hurrah and Hari Om for them for that); but please, they haven’t bought you or your kids a thing the way the Qatari royals have for their kids and grandkids!

The future of sanatana dharma isn’t premised on anything other than just you and your children and this present moment, no politicians, no billionaires, but just two generations in time, bonded by karma together to find something sacred and joyous to do before the last of the IGCs is snapped.

So, please, learn to see the world together with your children, and if your elders are around, get them involved too. Sit and watch their world together. Their NCERT textbooks. Their celebrity “woke” messages and campaigns. Don’t judge them for their good intent or mock them for their baby steps towards you and the enormous rapidly eroding sense of an ancient past embodied in you.

There are many things you could point out to them and they to you. But since I am a media studies teacher and I started with this issue of propaganda. Please, just do one thing. Watch that show on Netflix, read that book or article in the mainstream press, and ask your children to think of why some people are so desperate that they would pour billions of dollars into unprofitable shows and movies no one even likes.

It is because they need “propaganda.” We don’t.

Ask your kids to think why that need exists, why that vacuum exists.

Teach your children to feel pity, yes.  But with ruthless clarity to keep to your own intact.

India will survive, and maybe, even win the world. In time. As nature. No other way is worth it, or even possible for us, frankly.