Talk Cancelled
Hinduism’s adherents, nowhere more so than in the United States, have displayed a marked tendency to turn towards various forms of digital media, and in particular the internet, to forge new forms of Hindu identity, endow Hinduism with a purportedly more coherent and monotheistic form, refashion our understanding of the history of Hinduism’s engagement with practitioners of other faiths in India, and even engage in debates on American multiculturalism. Furthermore, the aspiration to create linkages across Hindu groups worldwide, embrace Hindus in remoter diasporic settings who are viewed as having been severed from the motherland, and create something of global Hindu consciousness, has a fundamental relationship to India’s ascendancy as an ’emerging economy’ and the confidence with which its Hindu elites increasingly view the world and their prospects for prosperity and political gain. This talk will explore these aspects of Hindu American internet activism and politics.
Author Bio
Vinay Lal is a cultural critic, writer, blogger, and Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Lal’s intellectual and research interests include South Asian history, comparative colonial histories, the Indian diaspora, public and popular culture in India, cinema, cultures of sexuality, the global histories of nonviolence, and the thought of Mahatma Gandhi. All of his work is deeply permeated by an awareness of the politics of knowledge systems and the desire to strive for the ecological survival of plurality.
Lal’s seventeen authored and edited books include the two-volume Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City (Oxford, 2013); Deewaar: The Footpath, the City, and the Angry Young Man (Harper Collins, 2011); Political Hinduism (Oxford, 2009); Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi (Penguin, 2005); The History of History (Oxford, 2003); and two books co-edited with Ashis Nandy. He is a founding member of the Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics and editor of the book series emerging from the Collective, most recently India and Civilizational Futures (Oxford, 2019). His The Fury of Covid-19: The Politics, Histories, and Unrequited Love of the Coronavirus was published by Pan Macmillan (India) in late 2020.
