Welcome to Eternal Path! This week we feature: a wild online fight over keywords in an Indian History book and an aesthetic!
Hinduphobia Highlight: Academic Keyword Search-Gate
Professor Lavanya Vemsani, Distinguished Professor of History in the Department of Social Sciences at Shawnee State University, recently released a book, published by Springer, titled “Handbook of Indian History” which features essays and research from a wide variety of academics across the full breadth of Indian history (linked here). Most readers of this publication will know that Western academia at best treats Hinduism neutrally and at worst, especially in the case of bad faith actors like Audrey Truschke, is often weaponized against Hindus. Some observers refer to American academia in particular as minefields of Hinduphobia.
So that brings us to this week’s fracas. Upon the release of Vemsani’s book, Professor Brannon Ingram at Northwestern University, a self-proclaimed scholar of Islam in South Asia, released this tweet (which as of time of writing, 9am EST on Sunday 11/24/2024 had nearly 900,000 views)
and immediately followed it up with a tweet casting aspersions on Vemsani’s supposed biases.
Additionally, other Islamist “scholars” such as Shabana Mir of the “American Islamic College”, Saib Bilaval of Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Jonathan AC Brown of Georgetown University entered the debate and started spewing bile at Hindus. Jonathan AC Brown of Georgetown University is an interesting character. Married to an al-Jazeera journalist, and with extended in-laws involved in the Muslim Brotherhood. Observers have pointed out that Brown has defended: Islamic slavery, Islamic oppression of non-Muslims and was praised by an extremist Islamic scholar for defending the “values of Islam” in academia.
The funniest part is that Ingram didn’t search properly. Academic Sarah Gates was one of the first to identify this (private account), and Dr. Makarand Paranjape publicly tweeted the actual numbers, finding that the coverage of Islam and Muslims was likely quite proportional to their population percentage in modern India and also to the period that Islam was the dominant force in India vis-a-vis the long length of Indian history.
In the meantime, however the damage was done. Then, the Indian American Muslim Council, and Maktoob Media (a known peddler of Islamist misinformation) started peddling the usual Hinduphobic nonsense using the Ingram article as the main thrust of their claim that Hindutva was taking over academia. The IAMC tweet is linked here and the Maktoob Media article linked here.
When confronted about the incorrect numbers, Ingram doubled down and claimed the actual numbers, which were off by a factor of 10, were unimportant and that the fact that his pet ideology wasn’t centered in the book was the real problem. He also tried to backtrack and claim he was not Hinduphobic in discussions with Professor Aseem Shukla from the University of Pennsylvania (linked here).
Curiously, folks on Twitter have found some other instances of Brannon Ingram displaying Hinduphobia. The first is in response to some animals found killed in New York City that racists were blaming on Haitians. Ingram commented to claim that it could be Hindu animal sacrifices instead. Now our readers know that we at Eternal Path are big advocates of Vedic animal sacrifice, known as pashubali in Sanskrit, but in this case Ingram’s point was essentially “Hey you racists don’t go after Haitians, it might have been Hindus!”. Source link here.
As of the time of publication 3pm EST Sunday 11/24/2024, Ingram has deactivated his Twitter account. What is the big lesson here? That academia continues to be anti-Hindu, and that Hinduphobes need to be publicly refuted and ridiculed at every turn.
Aesthetic: Nathlaung Kyaung Temple, Bagan (Burma)
