hinduphobia inventory
Click the button to open a checklist that helps you identify signs of Hinduphobia in your classroom or school.
If you answer “yes” to one or more of the questions on the checklist, it may be time to take a closer look at how Hinduphobia shows up in your educational environment.
Hinduphobia can be embedded in course materials, syllabi, lesson plans, activities, field trips, school programs, student organizations, and even in casual conversations about current events. These biases have been baked into Western education and media for centuries, often going unnoticed or unchallenged.
These checklists are designed as both reflective tools and conversation starters. Use them to guide critical examination, foster awareness, and begin the process of addressing and correcting these patterns in your classroom, school, or institution.
COMMON HINDUPHOBIC ARGUMENTS AND STRATEGIES
One of the keys to identifying, surviving, and dealing with Hinduphobic attacks is recognizing common arguments and strategies.
Note: This list is not exhaustive, and each of the items is not mutually exclusive. Western news media and social justice spaces regularly normalize many of these arguments.
“HINDUPHOBIA DOESN’T EXIST.” The argument here is that Hinduphobia is a modern invention created by political extremists to mask or even justify Islamophobia.
STEREOTYPES. The danger of a stereotype about a community is not that it’s a lie, but that it is often a sliver of fact that is plucked out of context. Its significance or role is then exaggerated, and it is repeated so often by people in positions of power that it comes to be understood by the general public as representative of the entire truth about that community. These stereotypes are never positive, as they erase and reduce people. Because the stereotype becomes the common understanding of the truth, when anyone articulates context or a counterexample, it is interpreted as an attempt to silence “the truth” or mocked as “out of touch with reality.”
“I’M CRITICIZING HINDUTVA, NOT HINDUISM.” This argument has little to do with any complex, authentic understanding of Hindutva, but typically uses a caricature of religious extremism that is premised on cherry-picked quotes and misrepresentations. As we have seen repeatedly, this inevitably ends up being an attack on Hinduism itself and is rarely just a discussion of politics.
CLAIMING THE MORAL HIGH GROUND. Hinduphobes often position themselves and their claims as having a claim on morality, creating a false dichotomy. “Either you agree with my assessment of Hinduism, or you believe in oppressing people.” This argument prevents any rational, civil discourse.
GASLIGHTING. There are several ways that Hindus are gaslit by Hinduphobes, including:
Erasing Hindu history under the pretense of fighting “Islamophobia.” (This is, of course, a false dichotomy.)
Claiming that violent Hindu political extremists are posing as Hindu (American) students.
Claiming that Hindus have never experienced discrimination for being Hindus in the West.
Claiming that Western academia isn’t biased against Hinduism.
REDUCING HINDUISM TO CASTE AND/OR GENDER DISCRIMINATION. It’s important to note that these aren’t critiques of Hindu society; they accuse Sanatana Dharma itself of being premised on discrimination and oppression.
AMPLIFYING ONLY CERTAIN HINDU VOICES TO DEMONSTRATE LEGITIMACY. The “I have a Hindu friend” argument. Any Hindu who disagrees is silenced or, worse, accused of being “fascist” or “fundamentalist.”
REPETITION. Words (i.e. fascism, Nazi, pogrom, genocide) and ideas (i.e. Hinduism is Brahmanism) are repeated so frequently that they become “fact” in describing Hindus and Hinduism.
CONFLATION. Issues related to both contemporary and historical Hinduism are falsely compared with issues related to the US/Global North. This creates a kind of (false) moral shorthand – if you understand how white supremacy works, then you know exactly how “Brahminical supremacy” works and why both whiteness and Brahmanism are social constructs designed to oppress others. This moral shorthand makes it easy and enticing for people to latch onto the idea that Hinduism is morally corrupt without appearing discriminatory. Of course, this is nothing but a contemporary reinvention of the savior mentality that rationalized colonization. This argument often reinscribes the Aryan Invasion Theory as historical fact.
How is Hinduphobia normalized?
While some instances or experiences of Hinduphobia are overt and intentional, making them easy to name, there are many instances where it is subtle, coded, and even justified, making it more difficult to name, explain, and advocate against. It can be helpful to remember why Hinduphobic rhetoric often goes unchecked in the West.
HINDUPHOBIA IS NORMALIZED BY
Popular colonized views of Sanatana Dharma that are controlled by the dominance of Western academia
A general lack of knowledge about Hindu trauma and persecution
The conventional wisdom of Western progressive social, news, and entertainment media
Ignorance and avoidance of the Working Definition of Hinduphobia
The assumption that Western thinking, problems, and solutions are universally applicable
IDENTIFYING, UNPACKING, EXPLAINING, AND COMBATING HINDUPHOBIA IS NOT EASY
This is difficult and often uncomfortable work, especially because it begins with examining our own lenses and assumptions. Hinduphobia is deeply embedded in popular narratives about India and Hinduism. Much of what is commonly taught about Hindu history, philosophy, and Sanatana Dharma has been filtered through the lens of colonial-era Indology and later South Asian studies. These frameworks have often distorted and misrepresented Hindu traditions, and their influence has permeated school curricula in India and around the world to such an extent that these distortions are now widely accepted as fact.
What makes this even more complex is that these inherited “facts” have been absorbed into contemporary social justice language and frameworks. In many cases, ideas rooted in Hinduphobic assumptions are now linked with dominant understandings of morality, oppression, and liberation. This makes it especially difficult to name or challenge Hinduphobic statements—even when they are overt—because doing so can appear to contradict progressive or anti-oppressive values. Recognizing Hinduphobia, then, requires intellectual clarity, humility, and moral courage. It demands a willingness to question dominant narratives, revisit historical sources, taking social risks, and listen deeply to those who have been misrepresented.
Case Study: The Aryan Invasion Theory and the Racialization of Hindus
You may have heard the claim that “Hindus are the white people of India”—framed as a “brave truth” that any Hindu who questions it is “fragile” or “unwilling to confront their privilege.” But where does this idea come from?
Surprisingly, it stems from a racist assumption in 19th-century European academia.
Scholars in the German academy and elsewhere doubted that people of color could have produced the sophisticated science, literature, and philosophy found in the ancient Indian tradition. They theorized that this knowledge must have come from an outside, white-skinned group, thus constructing the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT). According to AIT, light-skinned Aryans from outside India invaded the subcontinent and imposed their language and culture on the darker-skinned indigenous population.
This theory has since been debunked across three disciplines—linguistics, archaeology, and genetics—yet it continues to persist in textbooks, classrooms, and even in some academic and activist discourse in the West.
Today, AIT has been rebranded under the guise of anti-racism: light-skinned Aryans are said to have stolen indigenous knowledge systems, giving rise to a narrative of “thousands of years of caste oppression” by Hindu upper castes. While caste discrimination is a real issue that must be addressed honestly and across all Indian religious communities, the AIT-based assumption that some Hindus are not indigenous to India perpetuates a racist, anti-indigenous narrative. It also conflates caste with race, which obscures both the historical record and the lived realities of diverse Hindu communities.
The label “Hindus are the white people of India” is also based on the claim that, as a demographic majority, Hindus hold structural power similar to white Americans. But this superimposes Western frameworks of race and power onto a different civilizational and historical context. Majorities in post-colonial societies are not automatically beneficiaries of systemic privilege. No one calls Ghanaians the “white people of Ghana,” or Algerians the “white people of Algeria.”
Ironically, this narrative is often repeated by people of color in the West, including some South Asian Americans, who leverage racial justice language to reinscribe a colonial and Hinduphobic theory as truth. Hindu Americans are expected to accept this narrative without question, and when they offer scholarly counterarguments, they’re often accused of trying to “rewrite history.”
This, too, is a form of Hinduphobia.
So the next time someone asserts that “Hindus are the white people of India,” ask them:
What are you basing that on? Do you know where that idea comes from?
This is just one example.
As you can see, these colonial lenses and narratives are insidious. There is a lot of work to be done to disentangle colonial theories and lenses from conventional wisdom about Hinduism. You may already have a strong intuitive Hinduphobia detector. You know something feels off, but you’re not able to put your finger on it or successfully communicate it. The more you equip yourself with knowledge and with community, the more your vivekam and skill will blossom, and the more easily you’ll know – straight away – that you have experienced or witnessed Hinduphobia and how to educate those around you.
THIS IS WHY IT CAN BE HELPFUL TO:
Make yourself familiar with the Working Definition of Hinduphobia.
Keep unlearning and unpacking what you’ve been taught about Hindu and Indian history, and critically examine what is being produced about both from the Western Academy. (The Resources Guide in this manual is a good start.)
Check out the Hindu American Students’ Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.
Join communities that take up the complex work of decolonization and Hinduism through readings, discourse, and other media. Hindu Students Council, Hindu YUVA, and Hindu Decoloniality (on Facebook) are great places to start!
Take courses about Hinduism taught within Hindu institutions, including those that are focused on critically examining Western scholarship.
Attend Understanding Hinduphobia’s annual conference and/or watch conference sessions online.
HISTORICAL HINDUPHOBIA IN THE UNITED STATES
There is a common—but misleading—claim made by some South Asian scholars and activists that Hinduphobia is a recent invention, coined by “Hindu nationalists” as a way to mimic the term Islamophobia and deflect criticism of Hindu communities. This narrative is not only inaccurate, it is a form of erasure. There is a documented history of Hinduphobia in the United States, going back to the early 19th century—long before significant Hindu immigration, and even before most Americans had direct contact with Hindu individuals. As early as the 1800s, American Protestant missionaries, journalists, and early scholars described Hinduism in deeply pejorative terms: as idolatrous, superstitious, degenerate, and irrational. These portrayals shaped U.S. popular and academic narratives about India and Hinduism for generations. Importantly, these misrepresentations emerged after the passage of the First Amendment, revealing that religious freedom in the U.S. has not always extended to non-Abrahamic or non-Western traditions in practice.
The idea that Hinduphobia is a fabricated or opportunistic term ignores this long history of bias, distortion, and exclusion, and often serves to silence Hindu voices who attempt to name or challenge it.
Contrary to claims that Hinduphobia is a recent construct, there is a well-documented history of anti-Hindu sentiment in the United States dating back to the early 19th century. The Hindoo History project offers a compelling visual archive of this history through curated newspaper clippings, advertisements, and public discourse from that era. These historical records demonstrate that Hinduphobia has deep roots in Western narratives, challenging the notion that it's a modern fabrication. By examining these sources, educators and scholars can better understand how longstanding biases have shaped contemporary perceptions of Hinduism. Below are some clips from the account.
Below is a curation of archival media clippings shared by Hindoo History that illustrate this historical narrative.
The title page of Mabel Potter Daggett’s 1911 essay, “The Heathen Invasion of America”
“Eve is eating the apple again. It is offered as a knowledge of the occult that shall solve the riddles of existence. Yoga, that eastern philosophy the emblem of which is the coiled serpent, is being widely disseminated here. And before a charm that seemingly they cannot resist, thousands of converts are yielding to the temptation to embrace its teaching of strange mysteries. Literally yoga means the ‘path’ that leads to wisdom. Actually it is proving the way that leads to domestic infelicity and insanity and death. They are priests from ‘East of Suez’ who with soft spoken proselytizing have whispered this mysticism into the ears of the American woman. While the churches of America are spending twenty million dollars annually in the cause of foreign missions the pagans have executed an amazing flank movement; they have sent their emissaries to us. Today the tinkling of temple bells ring out with a derisive, jarring note in a Christian land.
(From Hindoo History) “The image above was published as a comic in Harper’s Weekly in 1871. Although this is a bit of a jump in our timeline, I wanted to share the comic because it is a useful distillation of the clips we’ve shared thus far. Pictured is a lone Protestant pastor protecting a group of school children. In the background, we see the Vatican. And at first glance, the creatures crawling out of the River Ganges appear to be crocodiles, but look closer and you’ll see that they are actually Catholic Bishops, marked by their distinctive headwear.
The picture was no doubt meant to evoke in its audience the accounts of “Hindoos” sacrificing children in their rivers. A strange juxtaposition for sure, but one that illustrates just how deeply early American attitudes towards Hindus were shaped by preexisting religious prejudices, specifically against Catholics. Although the “Hindoo” was the quintessential “Other” in early missionary correspondence, the emphasis on heathen idolatry, immoral priests, and superstition was intended to create a parallel in the average American’s mind with Catholicism, which in the mainstream American protestant imagination posed a far more real threat to the national culture. As such, the blending of images here gives us an especially clear insight into what the “Hindoo” represented in the public imagination.”
Some clips from Mitchell’s geography textbook, A System of Modern Geography, which Michael Altman notes had the widest circulation of any textbook before 1900. The first page of the textbook, a colorized depiction of different cultures indicating which “stage of civilization” each inhabits. The Hindoos were considered “half-civilized”. (From @hindoohistory)
“Q: Who are the pagans or heathens?
A: Those who believe in false Gods, and worship idols, beasts, birds, serpents, etc.”
“Though nearly the whole of this vast multitude is involved in heathen darkness, yet the exertions of Christian missionaries... will no doubt in time enlighten the nations, and lead to the spiritual redemption of this great continent.”
“They [the Hindoos] are an indolent and spiritless race, excessively superstitious; and are described as being nearly destitute of moral honesty.
They are divided into four castes, or classes... these castes are forbidden to intermarry, or even eat or drink together.
The religion of the Hindoos is a degrading system of paganism.”
“The European or Caucasian is the most noble of the five races of men. It excels all others in learning and arts, and includes the most powerful nations of ancient and modern times.”