Western academia, particularly in America and other parts of the Anglosphere, continues to treat Hindu Dharma not as a living, breathing spiritual-religious ecosystem that elevates humanity and deserves to be studied with respect and empathy, but as a fundamentally flawed set of religious traditions that are thinly veiled facades for socio-political control which need to be analysed as clinical lab specimen. To the Western Indologist and their native informants, the insider’s lived reality—the devotion, the epistemology, the practitioner’s perspective—is utterly irrelevant. Instead, every sacred tradition and ritual is ruthlessly amputated to fit into preconceived, sterile frameworks of “hierarchy,” “power dynamics,” “authority,” and “nationalist politics.”

A recent conference titled ‘Rethinking Vernacular Hinduisms of South Asia and Beyond’ organized by Yale University encapsulates this noxious anathema that Western academia carries towards Hindu Dharma.

The terminology they choose and force upon us itself is a potent weapon. The academic pluralization into “Hinduisms” is a deliberate tactic to reject the integral unity of Hindu religion, and to deny us the right to view our Dharma as a unified civilizational umbrella with deep, underlying spiritual and philosophical commonalities and continuities. Furthermore, the very word “Hindu-ism” carries the heavy baggage of a 19th-century colonial construct—reducing a profound, organic way of life into a rigid, ideological “-ism” loaded with political and negative connotations.

The adjective ‘vernacular’ further creates a divide between “Sanskritic/Brahminical tradition versus native/indigenous i.e. ‘vernacular’ traditions”. In fact, the word ‘vernacular’, which is used mostly in Indian English, itself has a negative connotation as it derives from the Latin root word verna, which means a home-born slave – specifically a slave born in a master’s house rather than bought from abroad, and was used as a standardized tool of administrative and educational classification across the entire British Empire. British imperial policy codified “vernacular” to establish a strict linguistic hierarchy. It was used to draw a sharp line between English (the language of the rulers, modernity, and the courts) and the local languages (the rudimentary tongues of the subjects).

In 1878, the British passed the highly controversial Vernacular Press Act to suppress non-English Indian newspapers. This legally permanently cemented the phrase “vernacular press” or “vernacular media” into the Indian consciousness. Post-colonial India retained a massive amount of British administrative infrastructure – government departments, legal systems, and media entities simply kept using the colonial lexicon. English speakers in India adopted “vernacular” as a collective umbrella term to mean “all Indian languages other than English”. In contrast, post-independence African nations largely rejected the term because of its overt colonial paternalism. Instead of “vernaculars,” societies and governments actively transitioned to terms like Indigenous languages, local languages, or national languages (such as Swahili in East Africa).

Hence, the use of the term ‘Vernacular Hinduisms’ by Yale should be seen as an attempt to divide Hindus on multiple axes, and also to subtly demean the regional sampradayas which the conference will analyze as a ‘vernacular’ tradition. Decolonizing our minds means rejecting this hostile, outsider autopsy.

The recent Yale conference builds on a 2020 special issue of the Journal of Hindu Studies, which champions a new “vernacular turn” in religious studies. In it, editors James Samuel Bradbury and James Madaio pat themselves on the back for supposedly correcting past academic sins. They argue that older anthropologists were wrong to separate Hindu Dharma into a rigid “Sanskritic/official” tradition and a “popular/deviant” tradition. Instead, they generously offer the term “Vernacular Hinduisms,” claiming this new lens proves that regional practices aren’t mere dilutions of a central authority, but dynamic traditions in their own right.

Do not be fooled by this academic sleight-of-hand.

What we are witnessing is Western Indology tilting at its own windmills. Decades ago, Western scholars forced an alien, Christian ecclesiastical template onto Hindu Dharma, fabricating a mythical “official vs. popular” binary because they could only understand religion through the lens of a centralized Church policing dogma. Now, a new generation of academics builds its entire reputation by “rebutting” that original false premise. This dialectical theater—creating a false colonial framework just to tear it down and replace it with a new one—allows the Western academy to project an aura of rigorous, democratic debate while keeping its colonial gaze firmly intact.

They may have discarded the words “official” and “popular,” but they have simply smuggled the exact same obsession with power dynamics back in through a new backdoor. Even in this “reformed” vernacular framework, they refuse to see Hindu Dharma as an organic, profoundly flexible spiritual ecosystem. Instead, every regional ritual, sonic practice, and storytelling tradition is ruthlessly dissected as a tool used to navigate “competing networks of power,” contest Brahminical authority, or reproduce caste and gender hierarchies.

Above all, the core arrogance remains untouched: they still confidently slice our religion & civilization into competing “Hinduisms.” The hypocrisy of this academic gaze is obvious. You will never see Western academia study the Baptists, Mormons, and Pentecostals as the ‘myriad Christianisms of America.’ Even when liberal sociologists fiercely critique conservative Christianity, it is always granted the dignity of a unified religious & civilizational umbrella—a serious ideological rival to be debated. Hindu Dharma, however, is afforded no such dignity. It is treated as a clinical lab subject, continuously cut open by researchers trying to prove their own fabricated hypotheses, or endlessly pluralized into ‘Hinduisms’ by an outsider gaze determined to dissect, categorize, and deny the underlying unity of our religion and civilization.

This kind of aggressive sociological autopsy is scrupulously avoided when dealing with the other Abrahamic religions – Islam, Judaism – or even any other colonized, indigenous traditions. For those groups, the Western academy suddenly discovers empathy, extending protective deference and a deep respect for the believer’s voice, a belief in the enlightening and ennobling power of religion, with any faults accruing to practitioners and not the religion itself. For Hindus, only a sneering gaze and the scalpel is reserved – they are seen fundamentally as native subjects who are blindly acting out deeply embedded caste and power hierarchies, devoid of true spiritual agency.

Faced with such critiques, expect Western academia and its Indian apologist army to deploy semantic acrobatics to invert the charge, claiming that rejecting ‘vernacular Hinduisms’ equates to denying Hindu diversity. It is a calculated conflation. Celebrating Dharma’s organic pluralism—the mutual reverence among different spiritual paths to the ultimate truth—does not mean conceding that these paths lack an underlying spiritual and civilizational core. It means firmly rejecting the Western anthropological binaries of ‘Little’ and ‘Great’ traditions, which falsely frame local Hindu practices as crude, fragmented imitations of an imagined, hegemonic central hierarchy. The former honors and strengthens diversity through integral unity; the latter is merely an intellectual divide-and-rule. Affirming this unity is not homogenizing; it is recognizing the protective umbrella under which diverse spiritual expressions co-exist naturally, immune to the actual homogenization of predatory external ideologies.

To summarize, if you strip away the academic veneer, the Yale conference—explicitly anchoring itself in the deconstructive framework of the 2020 Journal of Hindu Studies special issue—reveals a calculated, six-point agenda:

• Fracturing Dharmic Identity: It weaponizes the plural term “Vernacular Hinduisms” to fragment and delegitimize the tradition. While ironically claiming to move past older Indological dialectics, it actively reinvents them—treating local, everyday practices as disjointed phenomena divorced from any central civilizational core, thereby denying the integral unity of Dharma.
• Entrenching the ‘Sanskritic’ Strawman: The organizers manufacture an artificial tension between regional sects and broader traditions. Relying heavily on the anthropological binary of “Little” versus “Great” traditions, they frame local expressions as inherently reacting against—or seeking legitimacy from—what the conference dismissively labels as “imagined Sanskritic and Brahmanical textual traditions.”
• Reducing Dharma to Power Dynamics: Imposing a secular, sociological autopsy, the conference strips sacred practices of their spiritual and metaphysical significance. It clinically reduces textual, oral, and sonic traditions to mere political tools used to navigate “competing networks of power” and “establish authority.”
• Weaponizing Caste and Gender to Desacralize Dharma: It deploys the standard academic essentialization of Hindu Dharma, meticulously dissecting regional sampradayas and ritual systems solely to frame them as engines that reproduce “caste and gender hierarchies.” The objective is to permanently cement the narrative of Dharma as an inherently oppressive, casteist, and misogynist tradition.
• Targeting Contemporary Hindutva: The agenda explicitly targets modern socio-political consolidations, alarmed by how regional traditions are harmonizing into a unified civilizational consciousness. It demonizes Hindutva—the very modernizing force that is strengthening Bharat’s diverse spiritual traditions while weakening the feudal, elitist, status-quoist order that remains fundamentally subservient to Western universalism.
• Manufacturing Fault Lines for “Resistance”: In a direct challenge to a unified Hindu socio-political identity, the conference functions as an intellectual divide-and-rule operation. It actively explores how localized religious spaces can be reverse-engineered to provide “distinctive forms of resistance” and co-opts concepts like ‘Dalit Agency’ to ensure permanent internal friction.

Now, let us examine the names of the scholars of Indian origin who are increasingly taking the lead in conferences designed to deconstruct & dismantle Hindu Dharma. The West has realized that deploying native intermediaries is a highly savvy tactic. It shields them from charges of Western hegemony while allowing them to seamlessly transplant disjointed theories, rooted in colonial-era Indology, into India’s domestic polity.

A brief glance at the participants—Gaurika Mehta (Santa Clara University), Maharshi Vyas (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), Vaidehi Paneri (Syracuse University), Harini Kumar, Shiva Urella, and Esha Meher (Yale University), Aftab Jassal (University of California, San Diego), and Vivek Joseph (Brown University)—reveals the success of this strategy. This is not to say that all these scholars are consciously participating in an ideological takedown; some may even hold opposing viewpoints. Yet, their very presence in such conferences lends a sheen of native authenticity, dramatically increasing the chances that ordinary Hindus will internalize these self-damaging frameworks.

But the epistemic crisis runs deeper than academia: we must look at who is paying for the autopsy. Indian business families and entrepreneurs are actively funding the very departments and study programs within American universities that produce this ‘scholarship’. Yale University’s India Initiative and its various South Asian professorships are heavily sustained by prominent Hindu donors. This includes the Nandan and Rohini Professorship of India and South Asian Studies, Dinakar Singh Professorship of South Asian Studies, Ranjan and Chandrika Tandon Professorship in the Study of Hinduism, and Renu and Anand Dhawan Professorship of South Asian Studies.

As Rajiv Malhotra meticulously outlines in Snakes in the Ganga, successful Hindus are financing the institutional machinery that generates the academic ammunition used against Hindus and Bharat. Today, Hindus stand at a crossroads where our elites—blinded by an outsourced worldview and driven variously by a need for Western validation, a blind philanthropic loyalty to their alma maters devoid of any intellectual due diligence, or the delusion of belonging to a universal globalist order—have become our own worst enemies. Unless there is a sharp and immediate course correction, we run the real risk of achieving a state of complete mental colonization—an epistemic surrender far deeper and more permanent than anything the British managed during the physical phase of colonial control and extraction.

(This article first appeared at – reversethegaze.substack.com . If you believe in breaking away from Western lenses and building an authentic, homegrown understanding of our world, please consider subscribing to Reverse the Gaze)