I'm convinced American discourse is fundamentally incapable of engaging with South Asian culture/history/society in any complex way. Conversations about identity are always vexed either in culturally essentialist/racist "curry people" ways, or now in the "Hindu regressive" way.

It's not that we aren't any of these things (ok no, any dunks on curry are unacceptable) but even the most well-intentioned liberals seem to want to reduce postcolonial legacies to ancient-culture regression be it caste, religion, patriarchy or state repression.

And in this unnuanced boiling down of everything to cultural malaise, they lose all ability for material analysis of how colonial law & postcolonial state apparatuses changed land relations, social equations & favored bureaucratic recognitions of certain identities over others.

Like identity politics is MATERIAL above all else, but there is an increasing tendency to treat identity politics simply as a clash of cultures & a civilizational battlefield in a way that stomps down on anything contradictory within that society.

Like migrant Brahmin-savarnas can't be ignorant functionaries of American state apparatus - they have to have nefarious connections to Indian state or be secretly Sanghi/Hindu supremacists. Like identitarian religious/caste interests dominate, but class interests are irrelevant.

I also think South Asians' racial formation in the US matters less than their cultural formation -- their "brownness" is less important than their cultural Otherness. They're painted as finicky about food, religious practices, marriage but less as the biologically fictive Other.

In any case, all these muddled thoughts have been circling in my brain for a long time because of how impossible it is to talk about the specificities of my work & activism in spaces that accommodate really rich, complex thinking about American life/culture. Really vexed affair.

I also do think those of us engaged in anti-Sangh agitations here run the risk of reifying caste-Hindu culture as essential & always residually operating in the background of Indian-Americans. Like it's possible Preston Kulkarni & Raja Krishnamoorti are simply invested in...

... US imperialism as American citizens of a certain class, a migrant Brahmin+suburban class implicated in accumulation of land & wealth in this country rather than investments in Hindu & caste supremacy. We have to engage with this instrumentalization of "Hindu" culture then.

And particularly without suggesting that Indian-Americans can never be totally American but always operating with "Hindu interests" or something on their mind. Kulkarni-Krishnamoorti I doubt are doing that. Instead I'd rather deal with the messy truth that they're fully American.