The long game is to wrench every sign of civilisational continuity from India and attribute it to foreign sources, however speculative. The pattern is two centuries old.
In May 2026, historian Audrey Truschke surveyed the Pashupati seal—India’s most iconic Harappan relic—and decreed it “not Shiva,” but a proto-Elamite import, some Eurasian “lord of animals” from ancient Iran. The yogic posture, the Indus format, and specific Indian fauna—elephant, rhinoceros, water buffalo—were dismissed as mere decorative noise… irrelevant. This was no stray spat over steatite fragments; it was another move in a long game: to wrench every sign of civilisational continuity from India and attribute it to foreign sources, however speculative. The pattern is two centuries old. In 1835, Thomas Macaulay—a man blind to Sanskrit—declared a single European library shelf worth all native Indian literature, demanding Indians be educated into contempt for their own traditions. James Mill wrote his “History of British India” (1817) without ever visiting the land, yet confidently branded Hindu society as despotic, stagnant, and superstitious. The Asiatic Society of Bengal ran a cottage industry of forced equivalences—Janus with Ganesha, Saturn with Manu—not to understand India, but to annex it into a European conceptual order.
What they dismantled was no cultural backwater. Angus Maddison’s reconstructions show India’s world income share at 30-33% in 1 CE, staying near 24-25% through 1700, before plunging to 4% by 1950 under British rule. A civilisation dominating global output for centuries was redefined as stagnant precisely as it was shackled and drained. Today’s Western academic writing on Hinduism still rests on that colonial scaffolding, however loudly it proclaims itself “critical” or “postcolonial.” The Pashupati episode is merely the latest crack in the façade.
The theoretical rot begins with a category error. The Western academy insists on cramming Hindu traditions into “religion,” a category shaped by Christian Europe—with its churches, creeds, jealous gods, and rigid splits between sacred and secular. There is no precise Sanskrit equivalent; dharma is not doctrine, moksha is not a ticket to heaven, and karma is no moral accounting of “sin.” Once Hinduism is baptised as “a religion,” the wrong questions follow: is it “tolerant” like a liberal church? Does it have a founder, a fixed creed? These are not neutral inquiries; they drag in Abrahamic assumptions and fault Hindu traditions for not conforming. It is like weighing the colour blue and declaring it “defective” because it has no mass.
Into this misclassification, Indian postcolonialists imported Edward Said’s Orientalism as a one-size-fits-all critique. Said wrote for the Middle East and Islam, using Foucault and Gramsci to argue that Western representations were entwined with power. Copy-pasted to India, his framework became an epistemic trap: Western scholarship was “Orientalist,” yet Hindu self-representation was dismissed as “nationalist” or “communal.” Critics like Ibn Warraq and Bernard Lewis outlined Said’s cherry-picking, but Indian academics embraced his lenses as a ready weapon—every confident Hindu voice could be tarred as “Hindutva” and ignored. Western critics became “post-Orientalist” heroes; Hindus defending their own civilisation were disqualified a priori.
Marxist historiography provided a second imported cage. In JNU, the Delhi School of Economics, and elsewhere, Marxism became near-dogma; Romila Thapar, shaped by D.D. Kosambi and R.S. Sharma, critiqued colonial periodisation but never stepped outside Western materialism. Core Hindu categories—dharma, karma, moksha, bhakti, non-dual consciousness—were relegated to “superstructure,” their metaphysical content dismissed as ideological foam on an economic “base.” In this scheme, you do not study Hindu thought; you dissect it as a symptom. Colonial contempt for “superstition” was simply rebranded as “scientific socialism.”
Meanwhile, the Aryan Invasion/Migration Theory, a 19th-century racial fantasy, continues to lurk. Maddison’s data show India holding a quarter of world output well before colonialism; yet textbooks still casually teach that Vedic culture was brought by fair-skinned “Aryans” from outside. Archaeology along the dried Saraswati and genetic studies have undermined the invasion model and questioned migration variants, but the theory survives for an epistemic function: move the origin of Vedic culture out of India, and any claim to continuity becomes suspect—easy to deride as chauvinist myth.
On another flank, the psychoanalytic school turns sacred narratives into Freudian case material. Wendy Doniger and her imitators cheerfully sexualise and pathologise Hindu deities, reading myths through a Freudian/Lacanian keyhole. It is difficult to imagine comparably “playful” readings of Muhammad or Jesus being tolerated in these institutions. When Hindu scholars protest this double standard, they are dismissed as “saffronists” or “fascists,” their complaints written off as repressed prudery rather than arguments about method and respect. This is not fearless inquiry; it is punching down behind a tenure shield.
Sheldon Pollock’s “critical philology” adds another layer of pre-judgement. He insists Sanskrit is saturated with “toxicity” and “social poisons,” calling for philology to “transcend” these contaminants. His Ambedkar Sanskrit Fellowship is presented as arming the oppressed to decode the “ideology of oppression” in classical texts. Behind the noble rhetoric lies a simple move: presuppose civilisational guilt, then comb through texts to extract confessions. Sanskrit becomes not a vehicle of philosophy and poetry, but a criminal record.
These theories harden into classroom practice and research protocol. In Western religion departments, Hinduism is reduced to “caste, cows, and curry,” with endless case studies of oppression and exotic ritual, while the robust philosophical traditions shaping global conversations on mind and consciousness are sidelined. Rajiv Malhotra documented how Vedantic ideas influenced 1960s American explorations of consciousness; yet this hardly appears in “Hinduism 101” courses, which instead drill students in a view of Hindu civilisation as a bundle of social pathologies.
Underneath is a rigged epistemic hierarchy. Insider voices—practising Hindus, traditional scholars, or sympathetic interpreters—are pre-labelled as “naïve,” “devotional,” or “apologetic.” Outsiders are enthroned as “objective” and “scientific.” The Hindu University of America described this candidly: Western methods presuppose the primitiveness of their objects of study and treat this as axiomatic. Age, continuity, and resilience—virtues anywhere else—become proof of backwardness here. The only Hindu academic fully accepted is the one who agrees loudly that Hinduism is primitive.
To enforce conformity, “Hindutva” has been weaponised beyond recognition. In RISA and related spaces, diaspora Hindus questioning methodology or double standards were smeared as “saffronists,” “fanatics,” even “Muslim killers” and “nun rapists.”
Around this sits what Rajiv Malhotra names the “academic-missionary-foreign policy” nexus: American universities, mission networks, and policy think-tanks sharing data, personnel, and frameworks. They slice Indian society into neat boxes—Dalits, tribals, women—construct narratives of victimhood centred on Hinduism, and feed these to policymaking and fundraising ecosystems. The 2021 “Dismantling Global Hindutva” conference, co-sponsored by over 40 universities, made this logic explicit: papers branded Hindutva “fascist,” blurred boundaries between Hindutva and Hindu identity, and promised an “anti-Hindutva pedagogy” for global classrooms.
All this is underwritten by structures of power. Funding flows more readily to projects depicting Hinduism as oppressive than to those exploring its philosophical contributions. Peer review becomes a closed loop of like-minded reviewers guarding the gates; work challenging foundational assumptions is rejected as “insufficiently theorised”—code for “you didn’t worship our gods.” Malhotra’s Academic Hinduphobia was met not with engagement, but coordinated dismissal.
Yet beneath the theoretical acrobatics and institutional bullying lies a simpler anxiety: India is not behaving as scripted. A civilisation Macaulay and Mill declared stagnant has re-emerged as one of the world’s largest economies, after being dragged from a quarter of global output to 4% under foreign rule. With material strength comes cultural self-assertion. When India insists yoga is indigenous, that the Pashupati seal reflects its own yogic grammar, that its philosophies of consciousness are not primitive superstition but rigorous thought, it is not pleading for validation; it is reclaiming authorship.
The architecture of anti-Hindu narratives is not a conspiracy theory; it is an observable structure: wrong categories, imported theories, biased methods, compromised networks, and a funding-driven incentive system rewarding contempt. What has changed is that this structure now collides with an India that remembers its role as an economic and intellectual powerhouse and refuses to keep apologising for existing. For a civilisation that gave the world zero, the decimal system, and profound explorations of consciousness—while commanding a quarter of global GDP when free—to be told it must prove its “seriousness” using categories designed to exclude it is not merely unfair… It is absurd.
*Brijesh Singh is a senior IPS officer and an author (@brijeshbsingh on X). His latest book on ancient India, “The Cloud Chariot” (Penguin) is out on stands. Views are personal.
