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Maia Ramnath on Resisting Hindutva

Maia Ramnath on Resisting Hindutva

book covers of "Decolonizing Anarchism" & "Art For Life" and the text "TFSR 2-19-23 | Maia Ramnath on Resisting Hindutva"
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This week, we spoke with Maia Ramnath about her essay contribution to ¡No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches From a World in Crisis. The essay was entitled “The Other Aryan Supremacy: Fighting Hindu Fascism in the South Asia Diaspora”.

 

For the hour, we talk about about Hindutva, a brand of Indian ethno-religious-nationalism some have called fascism, the organizations that carry it in India and in the sub-continental or Desi diaspora around the world, some of the ideas and actions attributed to it, Islamophobia, Hindutva’s connections with the project of Israel, also it’s overlaps with far right, Nazi-inspired ideologies and how non-Desi anti-fascists can stand in solidarity against it.

Some publications by or including Maia Ramnath:

Other interviews on related topics:

Bursts also recommends Azadi by Arundhati Roy, which includes lots of thoughts on these topics. And you can hear our 2020 interview with Pranav Jeevan P. in Karela state in India which covers many of these same topics, which is also transcribed.

Phone Zap for #StopCopCity Arrestee, Emily Murphy

#StopCopCity protestor Emily Murphy has been in jail for almost a month since being arrested 1/22 following the protest against the police killing of Tortuguita. Emily has been vegan for many years, but the Atlanta City Dentention Center has not been giving them food they can eat. They describe being emaciated and having physical problems after a month of starvation. We are asking that you listen to Emily’s statement, participate in our call in campaign, and show up at Atlanta City Dentention Center at 7pm this Friday (2/24/23) to voice your discontent. We present Emily in their own words

You can find info on this in Blue Ridge ABC’s mastodon post on the subject.

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The monthly, English-language podcast from the international A-Radio network is now available at a-radio-network.org for streaming or downloading. You’ll hear updates from antifascist struggle in Bulgaria, news from comrades in Greece as well as info about how the organizing of the 2023 St-Imier anti-authoritarian and anarchist gathering is going in Switzerland recorded by A-Radio Berlin.

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Transcription

TFSR: I’m speaking with Maia Ramnath. Maia is a writer, historian, teacher, performing artist, and activist living in Lenapehoking, also known as New York City. She’s the author of the books Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle, as well as Art for Life: Conversations with the Progressive Writers’ Movement on Pens, Swords and Internationalism, from Anti-Fascism to Afro-Asian Solidarity, and has contributed numerous essays to a bunch of different compilations. Thank you so much for having this chat.

Maia Ramnath: Thanks so much for having me on. I’m looking forward to talking with you.

TFSR: I’ve recently read your contribution to the AK Press collection ¡No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches From a World in Crisis., edited by Shane Burley. The essay was called “The Other Aryan supremacy: Fighting Hindu Fascism in the South Asia Diaspora”. Your essay starts off by pointing out how racial religious nationalist ideologues are working to spread Hindutva through cultural and policy organizations internationally, and have their hands on the helm of national power in India. To start off, could you give us a working definition of Hindutva and how you’ve witnessed its ideology manifest in the South Asian or Desi diaspora?

MR: The word Hindutva literally could be translated as Hindu-ness. But what it is? It’s a far-right religious ethno-nationalism based on the idea of Hindu supremacy. It’s a political ideology that defines Indian as synonymous with Hindu and treats Hinduism not as merely a religion, but as a form of racial or ethnic identity. Furthermore, as a culture, which is very militaristic, patriarchal, purity-obsessed, and this term really got popularized in the 1920s. There was a nationalist revolutionary named V. D. Savarkar who wrote a book in 1923. It’s called Essentials of Hindutva, or Hindutva – Who is a Hindu?. And then it took organizational form a couple years later, with the founding of an organization called Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It means “The National Volunteer Organization”. It’s a vast paramilitary organization. It became the mothership for a whole collection of different specialized front groups. They’re collectively called the Sangh Parivar, which means “The Family of Organizations”, and by this point, almost a century later, it has massive reach throughout Indian society, including one of its front groups, the political arm, which is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which took control of the Indian state in 2014. In a nutshell, it’s quite accurate to describe it as clearly a form of fascism, starting from their explicit homage that they paid to Hitler and Mussolini back in the 1920s. It’s a form of fascism that people in the West don’t necessarily know enough about, given that it is very powerful right now. It holds sway over about a sixth of the world’s population. Anyone who’s an antifascist anywhere in the world needs to be paying attention to what Hindutva is and what it’s doing.

You asked also how it manifests in the diaspora. First, I want to acknowledge, when we talk about diaspora, what that means. I have a specific vantage point, which has a certain amount of limitations. I’m talking here from the United States. My view of the diaspora is mainly in the US over the past few decades. That’s a very particular part of the diaspora that goes all over the world, it goes back a couple hundreds of years, and the character of the South Asian diaspora in the United States affects how it manifests.

Let me back up a little bit. The RSS and Hindutva forces have been expanding into diaspora. For as long as in the past century, as long as Indians have been going overseas, it’s traveled with them, it’s founded branches in all of the countries where Indians went. It goes back as early as 1940, when the first overseas branch [was founded]. But in the United States, you don’t really start to see a significant population of people from the subcontinent until 1965, which is when the immigration laws changed and started to open up to people from that region for the first time in 40 years. It was selective and it was starting to, at that time, select for highly educated professionals, doctors, engineers. So that stamped the stereotypical profile of the Indian diaspora in this country for a while. It’s no longer true, it’s much more diverse now in terms of regional, religious, socio-economic – all factors. It’s a very diverse diaspora. But the fact that it started with that character and that it has been the caste, class, ethnic profile of the people really promoting Hindutva, gives it a lot of influence in this country.

How the India-based organization depends on the diaspora? For one thing, it’s a major source of funding. It has a lot of front groups here, too. It has groups here that correspond to all of its groups inside India. And it has plausible deniability, because people don’t know that these groups are affiliated with a global Sangh. So it does a lot of fundraising through them. It does a lot of reputation laundering, it uses its groups here in this country as a source of legitimacy. It has a huge online presence, uses social media and is omnipresent in the global social media sphere. It’s very active in academic spaces, media spaces, trying to control the narrative that Americans receive and are taught about Hinduism, about Indian history and culture. They do lobbying in Washington, DC, they viciously harass any scholar who dares to criticize them. Between using the diaspora as a space for money generating and for global reputation and discourse, that’s where they show up here.

TFSR: To branch off that question, since the Sangh organizing is started, as you point out in your article, as a cultural hegemonic project, almost with opposition to some degree to trying to grab state power… And it tries to insert itself into many elements of culture and of representation in diasporic communities, where second, third, fourth generations of folks have the experience of identity shaped by their family and their local community that they’re a part of, if they’re lucky enough to be a part of one. That leads to the possibility of very directed attempts by organizations to say, “here’s this part of you, we’re connected to it, here’s how you should feel about it, and here’s how it looks in the world.” It’s going to be a little bit different than someone who is living in India, for instance, and is seeing the multiplicity of the ways that people are, the identities, religions, languages that are spoken. I wonder if – and correct me if I’m expressing that wrong, or if I’m expressing that confusedly because I’m kind of just thinking on my feet right now, but–

MR: I think you’re right on. That’s really important. They’re really insidious about that, in their attempt to control, claim the authoritative version of what is Indian culture, what should you be identifying with which is massively contested and massively more complex and diverse than they represented that.

A couple of thoughts on that. There’s this phrase, t”he idea of India” that sometimes gets thrown around by scholars or historians or political analysts – . There’s a couple of different contestants for what that actually means. Their idea of India is what I’ve described, it’s this very militaristic, Hindu purist, Hindu chauvinist idea of what is the true Indian culture and civilization. But there’s many ideas of India. Another idea of India that was really influential during the whole independence movement, the mainstream independence movement was holding up this ideal of India as a composite civilization, was as a syncretic civilization, as a secular social democratic republic of many faiths, many languages. I’m looking back to construct of a history in which the best points cultural flourishing that give it its character are those which blend together all these influences, all of the different religions that have been part of the culture, the many languages and regional variants that are part of the culture. There’s a reason they call it a subcontinent. It is a country, of course, but it’s broken into multiple countries. What I’m saying is there’s another idea of India, which holds up this ideal of composite, of syncretism, of the richness of the multiple ingredients. And that’s completely antithetical to the idea of India, that Hindutva is trying to put forward. That’s one thing.

And they were very marginalized to the mainstream independence movement. They were opposed to the mainstream independence leaders, they didn’t play a big role in that. In the background, like you mentioned, they weren’t really aiming at taking the state yet – they couldn’t. They were not a major force in society at that time. They took a really smart, long term strategy, which is that “we’re not going to worry about taking state power, we are going to change the culture from the bottom up, we’re going to saturate it over decades, we’re going to build up such a presence, we’re going to shift the entire mindset of the culture and when the time comes, the state is going to fall into our lap”. And that’s exactly what happened. It’s chilling how their strategy of biding their time over building such strong social and cultural power in many ways eventually paid off for them.

It’s a tactic that they’re really smart about using. It’s quite insidious to pull on the things which are not inherently bad. Second generation children of Indian immigrants who may feel alienated in mainstream American society, who want a sense of heritage, who want a sense of feeling, and who may want to be in racial solidarity with other immigrant minority groups who sense that, who have good intentions, but they’re looking for a sense of roots. They’re looking for a sense of belonging. If someone comes to you and offers you some cultural programming, and offers you a place to fit in, and tells you some stories, and you should feel proud, then they start to feed you this ideology. And there are other alternatives. There’s a whole other history to be proud of – people who fought against oppression in the subcontinent, the freedom fighters who were not right-wing. There’s a whole other heritage you could be identifying with. But they are really smart about taking advantage of people’s needs, vulnerabilities, interests, and then turning it toward their direction.

TFSR: You cover a whole lot in 47 pages. I really appreciate how you laid out how exchange between the British colonial racialist management and the German indologists and the local interlocutors of the Brahminical caste produced these homogenizing concepts of India, Hindu and traditional internal caste hierarchies that ended up shaping what is today modern Hindutva.

I wonder if you could talk a bit about that production of these visions of Indians, Hindu and India and how they manifest in Hindutva, and what that erases?

MR: Absolutely. The vision that emerged as 20th-century Hindutva, its roots come from a co-production, there’s this kind of circularity between Western scholars and South Asian scholars or interlocutors. It is produced by the dialogue between them. European and Indian ideologues, I guess is a way to say it. That happens in a couple of ways, going back to the 18th and 19th century. One of those streams is through the German field of Indology. In the 17th and 18th century, you get these German scholars that are fascinated by Sanskrit and they start translating all of these philosophical works. It’s driven by this sense of romanticism and this quest for the transcendent.

There’s this philosophy, interest, and there’s philology interest, they’re fascinated by tracing back the roots of language. They’re looking for this proto-Indo-European language. They’re looking for the origins, which one branch went east and became Sanskrit and all the languages that derived from Sanskrit, another branch went west, and became Greek and Latin, and then Greek and Latin derived European languages. They’re looking for understanding the roots of language. Their scholarship is looking into huge, vast body of Sanskrit philosophy. It’s not yet sinister or toxic, but it sets the groundwork to become so, when it starts to equate language to race. We’re not just looking for Indo-European language, you are looking for this myth of the primordial Aryan, and it really gets into German nationalism and looking for mystical, ancestor figure and where is the root of the Aryan.

The word Aryan is in the Sanskrit texts originally, and it comes from Vedic philosophy. It didn’t have a racial connotation, originally it meant “noble”. And we can get into a whole another discussion of its different uses and those texts and how it fed into the caste system. These were the German indologists that started to pull things from Sanskrit philosophy and translate them in a racialized way that eventually evolved into German racial ideology, Nazism.

Then we have British Orientalism and British imperial colonial policies. Now they’re getting into literally pseudo scientific eugenic, very rationalist, utilitarian political philosophies that were directly applied, they call it a “laboratory” in the British Empire. Let’s put all these new ideas to work. How do we manage this vast population of alien people? One of the things that they’re doing a lot is categorizing people, trying to identify this whole big catalog of different kinds of people. They’re ranking them in this pseudo-scientific way of not as individuals, but as types. Initially, there’s nothing wrong with scholars coming out and saying, “wow, there’s all this amazing, translatable philosophy, which is blowing my mind. I’ve never heard anything like this, I want to learn more, who can I talk to? Who’s going to help me decode these texts?” Who has control of the Sanskrit texts – it’s Brahmins, which were, according to the traditional caste system, the elite caste. They’re talking to people who have a very vested interest in saying, “Oh, yes, and by the way, we are the exalted ones. These people are on the bottom”. It compliments and feeds into this idea of “Oh, yes, there’s all of these different types of people that you can identify”. The British identified what they called “criminal castes and tribes” that would have lists of the people, who were filed under “criminal castes and tribes” and considered hereditary criminals. They’re hereditarily ungovernable, they’re insurgent, they’re wild and barbaric. Basically, it means people that don’t accept British control or who resist. The ones that are more warlike, but are willing to ally with you, they become called the “martial races”, and those are the groups that are going to be heavily recruited to serve in the British Army. There’s different groups of people who are like “oh, these people are weak, but very smart”, or “these people are strong and warlike, but not that smart. They’re very obedient”, and “these people are just naturally criminal and insurgent.” They have this whole way of categorizing people. It complements the way that these Brahmins had institutionalized the caste system anyway.

Both of these constructions of Brahmanism, Arianism, interpreted through these lenses of colonial thought, colonial practice, fascist thought, fascist practice, and being re-received with pride. It is very twisted colonial-meant psychology. In the 20th century, you have people who are nationalists, who are resentful of British rule, and they’re like, “wow, look at all these philosophies and ideologies that portray us as supreme. Yes, yes, we are. We are like that”. I’m oversimplifying here, folks should go and read the piece where I go into this in a lot more detail. They start to be very admiring of German and Italian fascism in the 1920s. The leaders, the founders of the RSS were like, “look at the wonderful ways they’re mobilizing society, they’re militarizing the youth. They’re asserting their strength. We’ve been subordinated by British rule and Muslim rule.” Hindutva people don’t even see British arrival as the beginning of the colonialism that they resent. They see it as Muslim rule, which goes back to the Mughal empire, to the Sultanate period, it goes back 1000 years to the arrival of Islamic cultures and forces into the subcontinent. They’re admiring of the ways in which German and Italian fascist movements are motivating and militarizing and unifying and purifying, and they’re like “we we want to aspire to be like that, too. And look, we can, because they were originally inspired by us”. They’re very explicit in admiring the kind of militarization that’s happening in Italy and in Germany. They’re very admiring of, “oh, look what Germany is doing with their Jewish population. Look at that, so effective, we could do that with our Muslim population. Look, we can learn a lot from what they’re doing”. It’s full circle.

What it erases… It erases a ton, it is very reductive. We talked about this before. They’re claiming the right to define what is the truest or the purest or the most authentic Indian culture. They construct the history that way. But their definition of Hindu-ness, of Indian-ness is a tiny, tiny fraction of what is actually an incredibly complex, incredibly heterogenous culture, society and history of the subcontinent. It covers up the whole counter tradition of philosophies that have criticized and opposed Brahmanism. Buddhism, for example, as a radically egalitarian challenge to Brahmin caste hierarchy, the Bhakti movement, the Sufi movement, Sikhism as an egalitarian Social Justice Force, all of the Dalit, Bahujan intellectual movements, which are critical of the caste system, critical of the hierarchy and patriarchy of Brahmanism. There’s a whole counter tradition that goes against those kinds of oppressive ideas and structures, going back just as long as they do. Adivasi cultures and spiritualities. I mentioned before, they’re like “oh no, Islam poisoned us.” No, that’s been a positive, generative influence of a South Asian Islam. All of these aspects of the culture and history are rejected or erased. So they’re reducing the culture down to this very singular thread.

TFSR: And choosing that language of the “us” in there, they’re defining who is included in that. And then, what is the nature of people… If people are like, “Oh, you’re actually a Hindu, even though you’ve converted to Islam,” because maybe your family has been avoiding the imposition of a Dalit status by the caste structure or whatever it happens to be, maybe the faith just speaks to you. “No, you actually are a Hindu, you should come back into the fold.”

MR: One of their tactics is called Gharvapasi, it means “homecoming.” They’ll try to both re-indoctrinate people who have strayed from the correct ideology. But they’ll try to reconvert Muslims, Sikhs, anyone who’s not Hindu, because a lot of people hundreds of years back didn’t convert to other religions. Precisely because they were offering an ideal of egalitarianism versus “here you are in this hierarchical structure. And guess what, you’re on the bottom.” They’re now trying to convince people, “you’ve been led astray, you need to come back home.” Are they going to offer people a status? No, they’re gonna say “you can come back in, shouldn’t you be proud to be part of this integral body where we need the feet as well as the head?”

TFSR: I want to come back to the connections between the Hindutva movement and ideologues and then the outside ethno-nationalist groups, fascist movements, and such. Because of the interplay in the back and forth especially for understanding the whole Aryan myth, as it is shaped by Nazis. And then Sevitri Devi… You could just go down rabbit holes which I want to ask about later – unless you want to say something else immediately.

MR: The myth of the Aryan that’s been at the core of Nazi ideology, as well as Hindutva ideology, that’s an example of this interplay, this co-production. Because it originates through German studies of their interpretation of what they think they’re hearing from the Indian side. Then the Indian side is a co-facilitator of the Aryan myth, as well as a happy, eager consumer and adapter of the Aryan myth in ways beneficial to themselves. That has been dialogic.

And one more thing I wanted to say, that you brought to my mind and talking about this interplay. One debate that tends to come up and I touched on this in what I wrote too: “does this come from inside or outside?” Their version of that is that anything that comes from inside is good, anything comes from outside is bad. But where do you draw the lines of inside and outside isn’t always so clear. But I don’t think it’s so much a matter of the origin point. What happens especially whether you’re looking to other parallel, far-right nationalisms in the world right now, they’re all looking to each other and egging each other on and supporting each other. But the history of leftist international solidarity, too, on the other side, – sometimes people who want to be in solidarity in a given part of the world, it’s easy for a government in power to de-legitimize saying, “Oh, these are just outside instigators. This isn’t an organic movement.” And of course it is, it’s people recognizing their affinities across borders. That happens on both the left and the right. And the question is, the left and right forces, and even, sorry, that I’ve been simplifying that much, just for shorthand– The left and right elements in any part of the world recognize their counterparts in other parts of the world and help each other. They recognize the kinship of what they’re doing, even when they’re in their own specific context. And that happens on all sides. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I don’t think it’s necessarily a foreign influence. It’s a recognition that we have stuff in common, we have a vision in common, even If we’re located in different parts of a colonial structure or different parts of a global structure.

Inside and outside, I don’t think is the most pertinent categorization. I think it’s more about are you an authoritarian or an anti-authoritarian? Are you looking for emancipatory visions or repressive visions? Those things occur in a lot of different parts of the world.

TFSR: Listeners may be familiar with Hindutva because Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi belongs to the BJP, as you mentioned, which is a political party that’s tied to that ideology. Modi himself is a “pracharak”, or long- and full-time activist in the RSS, an organization that belongs to this family of Hindutva organizations known as the Sangh Parivar. Or possibly they would know because of the assassin of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was also an angry RSS pracharak who saw collaboration with Muslims and challenges to the caste system as undermining Indian nationalism. Can you talk about the cultural and political activism of Sanghi organizations currently in India and assess the success of Hindutva hegemony inside of India?

MR: I’m not sure how exactly to accurately measure how much is hegemony and how much is dominance, which is to say what percentage of people are truly buying into this kind of ideology. It’s growing a lot. To me, it’s frightening how much it’s growing in terms of people who buy into it, but so is their aggression, their muscle, their terrorism, and so, therefore, is the fear among minority communities to speak up and the self-censorship of people who don’t support them. Both their hegemony and their dominance without hegemony are growing.

When they first got started, to kind of show a little bit of how it’s grown, the “shaka” was the name for a branch. They had this model of “we’re going to form branches, and the branch is going to be basically a group of guys that gets together and it starts out as this, “we’re just building community here. We’re these boy scouts, and we get together and we chant and do patriotic songs, we’re doing martial arts training together, and weapons training together,” and then they start ideological indoctrination. And then, like I said before, the strategy first was to grow, build membership, saturate the culture, not necessarily to contest politically. They grew, now I think there’s about 1000s of shakas. There’s 100,000s of shaka members. But aside from all of the RSS shakas, as they have a student wing, which has a growing presence on college campuses, and a lot of the political parties in India use their student wings to use as a feeder for the new generation of leadership. On college campuses there is the Hindu Students Council (ABVP) and they are ready to violently denounce as traitors anyone in a rival student group who speaks up against what the sanghis are doing. They have a women’s group, they have a trade union group.

They’ve been in the last few years moving to take over leadership of academic and research institutions, rewrite curricula, take more control of media, try to silence independent journalists, they have a religious and cultural wing, which is the the VHP, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. They were really instrumental in mobilizing the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992. That was a mosque that was in ruins by that point, it was built in the 16th century by the founder of the Mughal Empire. They built this entire huge mythology around that being the birthplace of the god Rom. They staged this national procession leading to this mob destruction pulling down this 16th century mosque. And that demolition was a turning point in their presence in the center stage of the culture and their move towards power. That was part of, “Oh, we’re just a religious and cultural group that’s very wholesome.” They are capable of mobilizing violent mobs. Talking about is it hegemony or dominance– They might indicate that “if you show this film which we don’t like how it portrays us– Cinema hall owner, if you show this film, it might be very sad if your movie theater got burned down, that would be a shame”, or for filmmakers and actors too. They can exert a lot of pressure to the point where sometimes media outlets will self-censor, rather than face the violence that they could unleash.

TFSR: There was recent instance where the Indian government, I think in January, suppressed the showing of a two-part BBC documentary exploring the events called “India, the Modi question” that was being shown by student groups in parts of the country. To contextualize that – Modi experiences various levels of international pariah status since the 2002 race riots/ pogroms in Gujarat, the state that Modi had at the time and the Chief Minister of and they took place in atmosphere of increased violence against Muslims and Islamic religious sites, related to what you refer to. These pogroms resulted in 2000 dead among the population, plus uncounted sexual assaults, beatings, and other hate-motivated attacks, attacking infrastructure, attacking businesses, because they’re owned by someone in this community. The assumption is that it helps people stay in this territory by having a business there. The vast majority of the dead were members of the Muslim minority. When I say Muslim minority, that means that Muslims tend to be a minority within larger India, at least. The Indian Supreme Court cleared Modi of charges of support for racial violence. However, independent investigations have argued that there are clear signs of government collusion, including one by the US State Department. There were things like police handing mobs and sanghi groups the names and addresses of non-Hindu residents, were brought up by some of these studies.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the role that organizations like the RSS play in extra-parliamentary violence against Muslims, Christians and others viewed as undermining the Hindutva visions of caste purity, gender and sexual order?

MR: Before I talk about that, too, you kind of glossed the term “minority.” I want to note that the Muslim population as a percentage of the Indian population, according to the census averages, I believe, around 15%. But by numbers of people, that’s one of the largest populations, one of the largest Muslim communities of any country in the world, I believe it’s the second largest of any country in the world. Keep in mind that millions of Muslims also fled out of the newly formed borders of India into Pakistan in 1947 and later to Bangladesh, when partition and independence came. We call it a minority and it is, in comparison to the total population. But in terms of numbers of people, we’re talking about a huge number of people.

To talk about the paramilitary elements of Hindutva and Sangh activity, it’s a huge role. I was describing how the shakas began as its foundational organizational unit, and they were based on paramilitary training, they were groups of people who were training in weapons practice together and prepared to act together. Later on other groups, such as the Bajung Dol that was founded in 1984. it’s a youth wing. But they have a reputation as being the street fighters. They’re the ones that get put out as foot soldiers to brawl. The parent organization gets to outsource the actual physical violence to various front groups, so they can still look clean themselves, but it’s always been based on violence.

Now that they do have a lot of state power, these groups sometimes would face sanction, like when there’d be outbursts of violence, they might be temporarily banned. But now that the BJP is in power, they’re not just tolerating but celebrating this kind of vigilante violence and mob violence that they’re stoking. You might have instances of, for example, lynchings. Muslims are murdered. Dalits are murdered, lynched, sometimes tortured in really gruesome ways, and women may be raped in gruesome ways and murdered. But these lynchings, they had to apologize for or try to pursue in court or whatever, but the people that carry out these crimes, now there’s cases where they will appear on like public platforms being garlanded by politicians praising them for defending the motherland and their heroic work defending Hindutva and the motherland. These people who have carried out horrendous acts of violence. Or politicians like Yogi Adityanath is the Chief Minister of U.P. (Uttar Pradesh) which is the one of the biggest and most populous states in India and one of the centers of strength of Hindutva. He is making genocidal statements on public platforms, he is talking about sending people to go out and kill as many Muslims as they can. He’s very explicitly promoting violence from the state platform. They’ve always depended on extra-state violence. Now, the state is actually upholding, supporting, and advocating it.

One more thing I should add, because you had mentioned the idea of how does this fit into upholding caste purity and gender and the sexual order. These lynchings that I’ve mentioned, this kind of rash of violence, sometimes the pretext is Muslim men were seen transporting beef. Or there was a case of a man who had beef in his refrigerator. This can be used as a pretext because, of course, cow protection is sacred to this form of Hinduism, this interpretation [of the religion]. Which means that you can use that as a pretext to unleash violence on someone from another faith who is involved in the leather industry or the beef industry. But often where cast comes into play, lynching and especially sexual violence towards women has to do with this idea of purity, sexual and caste purity, and this obsession with protecting the boundaries of that purity.

Another aspect of that is something that they would call “love jihad.” They’re always looking to demonize Muslims who are carrying out some kind of jihad against the wonderful, pure Hindu nation. Love jihad is this idea that Muslim men will be seducing pure Hindu maidens and forcing them to marry and produce Muslim babies, and then eventually, there will be a great replacement of Hindus by Muslims. That’s another pretext for lynching of Muslim men and sexual violence towards women as well. So it’s very much intertangled.

TFSR: I very much appreciate the point about the framing of minority status while pointing that it erases the active drawing of borders, as well as expulsion of populations. It fits into the framing of like “the stasis of Indian society – that we do have these impure elements, but the majority of us are this one thing and even the capital H Hindu,” as you said, one definition of Hindu. I thank you very much for saying that. And a lot of what you’re describing here, the idea of politicians garlanding someone who has been accused of these atrocities or killings, or assaults or whatever-

MR: And not just accused, but it’s on video!

TFSR: Yes, or maybe who claimed the thing. I’m not a fan of the Democrats, but it makes me think of Kyle Rittenhouse, getting like paraded around by politicians in the Republican Party.

MR: I think that’s a good comparison.

TFSR: Listeners who are paying attention to the far right inside of the US at least will have lots of analogues that they can bring up in their head.

You make a comparison between the international network of organizations promoting Hindutva and The Vision of Indian religious and cultural value in a way that acts to shore up Islamophobia internationally and pogroms against Muslim communities inside of India. You compare that framework to the Israeli Zionists state’s project of the idea of an Ethnic Democracy, as the Jewish state is in the occupied Palestine in Israel, which is founded on the displacement, and internment of non-Jewish and often Muslim communities. Another line of comparison could be international Sanghi lobbying efforts to promote the idea of “Hinduphobia”, as a central impetus to incidents of violence, or prejudice as parallels to the promotion of limited definitions of anti-semitism that are brought against those who challenge the Israeli settler state. So that’s a complicated way of saying that. In fact, the Israeli and Indian states have a strong arms and intelligence relationship between each other and they have similarities and commonalities in their national strategies.

Dialing it back a little bit, to give an example of this, because it’s a complicated thing. There was a really interesting discussion that happened that I listened to on “Yeah Nah Pasaran!” – this Australian Anti Fascist podcast – with someone from the Humanism Project talking about the construction of the concept of Hinduphobia, and wielding this as not only a way of creating a blanket for attacks on anyone that’s perceived to be Desi, saying that it’s because of their Hinduness as opposed to any number of other reasons. Somebody may be assuming that they’re Muslim, or may be just generally xenophobic, or any number of other presumptions, but by framing it as an attack on Hinduness, as an example of Hinduphobia, it re-frames the debate around an essential definition of Desi folks. And I wonder if you could unpack this concept, talk about some of the Sanghi organizations in the diaspora that engage in this..

MR: For one thing, it’s very true that India and Israel have a very strong security relationship. Israel is, as of recently, India’s second largest weapons supplier. Traditionally, Russia has been their top weapons supplier, and then India is Israel’s largest weapons purchaser. They also have a strong relationship in terms of surveillance equipment, spyware, research and analysis wing in India. Their intelligence service has had a relationship with Mossad since the 1960s. It’s also corresponded to the ascendancy of the right versus a more secular and/or more progressive, or more social, democratic, political strengths inside India. Because ever since independence until the early 1990s, India was traditionally throughout the non-aligned movement, Afro-Asian solidarity movements, very much more aligned with supporting Palestinian struggle. [Maia wanted to note that Indian political voices since the 1940s during the time i was describing clearly distinguished between the Jewish people viewed as an oppressed group with whom they were in sympathy, and the Israeli state which they viewed as an oppressive structure – editor].

As the right wing has grown in India, so has support for Israel. And it has a lot to do with their admiration for, and it may sound ironic, and I can talk about this a little bit, too, but just as they admired the Nazis, how can it be that they are so admiring of Israel? I think it’s because what they admire is not who is playing the role in these structures, but they admire the structures themselves. The structure being this aggressive ethno-nationalism. And they aspire to be that, too. So, they’re like, “Okay, what are they doing in terms of the occupation? Yes, we could do that in Kashmir. What are they doing as far as mobilizing support for their program from the American government and the American population? Yes, we should be doing that, too.” There’s cognates for each of these things. There’s the Friends of the BJP in the United States. A lot of the policies that they see in terms of what is Israel doing in the West Bank and Gaza, they’ve directly tried to model the takeover of Kashmir since 2019 on those methods.

The other part of your question had to do with organizations. These aren’t all directly related to that side of it. But I can name a bunch of different organizations that are active in the United States that work as front groups or fundraising, but they have enough separation that people don’t know that they’re connected to the Sangh organizations, but it’s part of this global Sangh or the counterparts of the Sangh organizations inside India. So, things like the Hindu American Foundation, the Hindu Education Foundation, the Dharma Civilization Foundation, the Hindu Students Council, which is the American form of the ABVP, and they’re active in all kinds of different university settings. The Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, which is what you call the RSS when it’s international, because then it can’t be national, which is Rashtriya, now it’s global Hinduism. The India Development and Relief Fund which promotes the motto “we’re doing relief work, we’re doing development”, while they’re raising money for Sangh projects. Infinity Foundation, the Overseas Friends of the BJP, Sewa International, again, it looks like a nice kind of nonprofit that does good human rights work, but it’s very strings attached. It’s part of the cognate of the Sewa Bharati movement. Patanjali Yoga that’s run by this Guru figure with close ties to Modi and the BJP government. Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America which is the American VHP. Uberoi Foundation for religious studies. The Chinmayi Mission, the Vedic Foundation…

There’s all kinds of different organizations that people who don’t know what they’re connected to might think “Oh, wonderful. It’s about Ayurvedic medicine and yoga. This is wonderful to support and open up our Western multicultural minds.” But just to watch out for a lot of these things, and I can share ways to find these with you later, if people want to know what to watch out for.

TFSR: As an ethno-nationalist ideology, Hindutva has connections to fascist groups around the world. As the name of your essay plays with the idea of racial purity, natural hierarchies and the superiority of a mythic Aryan people, shows degree of compatibility with other anti-Black, anti-Muslim, patriarchal movements. Despite those connections to Israel, there’s a long-standing engagement with Italian Fascism, Nazism and their descendants, as well as antisemitism. How does Hindutva mesh with other authoritarian, ethno-nationalist and anti-communist street and social movements?

MR: We already talked a little bit about how they aspire to do what the increasingly far-right-wing Zionist government does as well. They also plug pretty well into the rising right in terms of US racial politics.

This goes back, too. This has a history, too. One way I look at it… This is gonna sound like a tangent, but hopefully, it’ll get back to making sense. When these politics were emerging, and they were a little bit estranged from much of the national liberation struggle in India, the anti-colonial struggle, I think there are two ways to look at how do you oppose a colonial regime. The more progressive anti-colonial struggle – one which I would consider actually anti-colonial or decolonial, is seeing colonization as wrong, “this racial structure and racial ideology is wrong, we want to abolish it, we want a different kind of imagining of something that’s radically emancipatory, egalitarian. This structure is wrong.” But this far-right-wing nationalist approach to why they object to that structure is not because they think it’s wrong, it’s because they think “no, this structure is good, this structure that puts someone on the top and in this very dominant, overarching position – there’s nothing wrong with that structure. The problem is that we’re supposed to be on the top of it, we’ve been wrongly placed on the bottom of it, and we cannot abide that we want that structure. We just want to be on the top of it.”

One approach to entering into the United States racial landscape, say, people coming from the south, that South Asian subcontinent. Where do they fit into the US racial structure? One tactic that people tried to use even going back to the 1920s, one of the first big legal cases, an immigration case, there was a guy named Bhagat Singh – not to be confused with one of my heroes, Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary who was part of the liberation struggle, – This guy was trying to seek US citizenship in the 1920s. And he was being denied that on racial grounds, and he tried to make the argument in court that he did qualify for US citizenship as a Caucasian because he’s using this argument: “But look, I’m a high caste Hindu, I can claim Aryan status, I am originally Aryan and I should qualify by the racist terms of the United States immigration policy.” And they didn’t agree. The judge said, “Okay, there’s a logic to that. But look, everybody knows it really means light-skinned people. Sorry.” That that approach of “There’s nothing wrong with the structure, it’s where you’ve placed me in relationship to that structure” is a very different approach than “This structure is wrong, we must fight against it, we must join in solidarity with all those others who are fighting against it, from whatever position in relationship to it. That’s my tangent.

How does this fit into the United States now? I alluded before to how diverse the South Asian diaspora is, how big of a class difference, religious, caste, national origin – differences that are all of the people coming from the subcontinent. They don’t all have the same ideology or a relationship to United States racial politics where they want to fit into it, or where they’re slotted into it, regardless of how they feel about it. In terms of the history of any immigrant group coming into the United States, how do they become white? How do they become part of the in-group? How do they get permission to enter into the dominant category? You have to perform certain things, you have to indicate certain kind of economic success, class markers, you have to do certain things to be allowed to get into the in-group. Which is why, of course, all of these histories of different groups will show “Yes, you were the demonized outsider a generation ago. Now you’re demonizing the newly arriving people.” The two of the things today that you need to do to to get admission into the dominant group, into the in-group, you have to perform anti-Blackness, and you have to perform Islamophobia. This is my own observation of this, my own take on things. For Indian immigrants who subscribe to Hindutva in the ideology and who want to be considered superior, not inferior, but do not have a problem with the idea that someone will be considered superior, it’s really easy for them to mesh into U.S. right-wing movements and US racial politics. They are already very Islamophobic, so that’s not even a stretch for them. That’s part of their core identity to be Islamophobic, which is also why they match up so well with not only the American right but the Israeli right. anti-Blackness fits in very well with their attitude to caste. It’s very compatible with the ways they think in terms of the caste structure inside India.

The right-wing part of the South Asian diaspora tries to make themselves as much a part of American right-wing and white supremacist politics as possible, in my observation. Meanwhile, those who are more progressive or left within the diaspora trying to fit where do they fit into racial politics, the racial landscape, the political landscape. That’s where you’re going to see, [people saying] “we need to be in solidarity with racialized, minoritized groups, we need to be in solidarity against white supremacy, against anti-Blackness,” recognizing that within our own communities as well, how they’ve taken part in anti-Blackness, we need to fight against all of these structures of oppression that try to get in on them. Again, I veered far away from your original question, but that’s where I see it meshing in at least with American authoritarian, ethno-nationalist types of politics.

TFSR: I think that’s a super helpful response. And the construction of whiteness, I’m really glad that you brought that in, because you can talk about shared symbology through that, like a boomerang effect, or that sharing that was happening in the late 1800s. The use, among the German Nazi Party, of the swastika as the symbol tying back… or the Sonnenrad…

MR: That’s another great literal example of how the ideology and the symbolism got developed by being passed back and forth. Because the swastika originated in the Sanskrit philosophical texts. It’s a symbol of the sun and health, it’s placed square on rather than turning on its corner as it is in the Nazi symbol. But they took the German indologist, got the swastika from that, and then it becomes the symbol of Nazism. That’s yet another example of how these things came. They each one took something from the other, built on it, handed it back, built some more on it. It’s continually coming out that way. There’s sort of mutual reinforcement.

TFSR: Would you mind saying anything in relation to the back-and-forth between those different movements? You point to three major interpretations of the spread of Indo-European language. That being linked to the concept that a lot of these groups are playing with about racial ideology.

MR: You’re talking about that question of, what is the origin point of both of the proto-Indo-European language and then what is the true origin point of the mythical primordial Aryan? I don’t know that there’s any way to definitively answer what the actual archaeological scientific truth of that question is, as far as where the language originated, where different groups of people migrated [from]. Because the study is so politicized and depending on who embraces what theory, at what time, has had a lot to do with their political agenda.

The three versions of it were that there is – and I think this is actually the one that’s most supported by research – is that somewhere in Central Asia, in the Caucasian region, the steppe, there was a group of people speaking this language that was the origin point of many of the Indo-European languages, and that some of them branched East and some of them branched West. That spread and evolved to become a lot of the different language groups and moved with people traveling. But neither language nor religion– They tried to track literal genetics, as synonymous with people embracing different languages and religions as well, that spread isn’t synonymous either. But at least to the language, they’re saying – it seems most supported by research – that there was a proto-Indo-European language in the Caucasian region, and it had Eastern and Western branchings out. But the other two rival theories, one was that it originated in South Asia and then went from there to the West, and the other is that it originated somewhere in the far north, and then spread down southward and eastward. Depending on what the political agenda was for given people at a given time, which theory they were promoting, it tended to shift.

TFSR: Because the far right’s approach in the West – and it sounds like in the example of Hindutva – is so focused on originality, essence, purity and the idea of the decay or decadence, these concepts whether Nazis looked to India as being the source of “what we need to look to, to get back to our purity.” Or whether they’re saying, “but there’s a lot of brown people there, but where’s white? It’s white up north,” and they probably were like “we came from the Arctic / that’s where Plato’s Atlantis was.” Stuff gets really wing-nutty.

MR: That’s why I say it’s hard to separate from doing some actual empirical research versus the promotion of these various theories about it. The original people that started to study Sanskrit philosophy were not fascists, they were actually interested. They’re like, “Oh, wow, this is really cool. It looks like we’re discovering these origins and connections that we didn’t even realize in this language that is opening up. All of this vast literature and philosophy that’s really new to us. Oh, my God, cool. Look at these cognate words. That’s amazing.” That was originally on, but then later on, they would have to justify, – “Well, then how can we still maintain supremacy over these clearly darker people, these clearly colonized people? We have to establish that we’re superior to them. Isn’t it sad that they have degenerated from their original peer point? They must have intermarried with those other inferior people, or gone into those inferior parts of the world, which will have a deleterious effect on you. They’ve degenerated from the pure form, we need to get back to that original pure form.”

And then on the Indian side, they’re going to want to switch it over to be like “we’re trying to claim indigeneity, we’re trying to claim that we are the only true and authentic owners of this land here.” Even though the Sanskritic philosophy, the Vedic culture came in later than Dravidian culture, which was already there, the Adivasi populations that were already there. But for their own legitimacy, they need to claim that they were the first and the original, authentic and indigenous to the subcontinent. Of course, then to prove that you have to adopt the out-of-India theory, which is that was the origin point, not the north. It’s so ideological.

TFSR: You can say that, to a certain point in science, there’s some interesting scientific discussions that happen there, and historical, archaeological things. But what is accepted as truth more reflects what feels good to a lot of these ideologies, as opposed to something that could undermine it – if suddenly science was to prove, was to point in a direction that they didn’t like, it didn’t fit the story that they’re telling. Thanks for engaging me with that.

What are some groups and projects that you’re aware of that are doing good organizing and reporting about Hindutva? And if you have ideas about stuff that’s in the wider diaspora? Or stuff that’s particular to the US, where both of us are based? Or stuff or groups in India, that would be super helpful. As a corollary, if you could describe how you think non-Desi folk can stand in solidarity in the struggle against caste-ism and Hindutva, since that was a central part of the beginning and the end of your essay?

MR: Again, I have to confess my limitations and the US-centrism of my own knowledge. The groups that I’m going to mention are US-based. All the ones I’m going to mention have a lot of resources for you. Go to their websites, there’s a ton of resources that you can track down and follow further and link to more different kinds of organizations inside the subcontinent and possibly around the world as well.

But a couple that I’d like to mention that are active here… One is Equality Labs. This is a Dalit feminist civil rights organization that does a lot of really important work – researching, giving statistics and facts about revealing how caste is operating in the diaspora. They do a lot with online security, because that’s a risk for anyone doing this work, too. They they’re really good for doing this reporting and organizing.

Another place is South Asia Scholar Activist Collective. A lot of this, as I mentioned, happens in the space of universities, academic institutions. South Asia Scholar Activist Collective has a lot of resources, articles, reporting, they have a Hindutva Harassment Field Guide Manual to how to oppose that if you’re facing it, or how to help someone that is facing it.

Ambedkar International Mission, Indian American Muslim Council, Stand with Kashmir, DRUM-NYC (which is Desis Rising Up and Moving). Then one more I’d like to mention is a group that I had been active with for many years, hadn’t been so much since COVID. I’m not sure what their operational status is right now – South Asia Solidarity Initiative has been doing this work for a very long time and has still a really good research page on a WordPress account. These are all places where folks can find out a lot more information and how to access people working on this.

How to stand in solidarity – I think it can be tricky sometimes because it does feel very remote, very distant from the US context, in a lot of ways, even though… There was a huge battle in California a few years ago about rewriting the textbooks of how Hinduism was going to be taught about. It’s very present in academic work. The physical side of it can seem very distant. – How do folks help out with something that’s primarily being carried out on the other side of the world? Except sometimes there’s someone like a BJP leader or a Hindutva figure comes and visits the United States, and then often there will be big demonstrations against that by Desis who are opposed to Hindutva. You had asked me a question before about how can you avoid the accusation of “Oh, you’re just being racist, you’re being anti-Hindu, if you criticize what the Hindutva organizations are doing.” One really good way – and that, too, is directly coming from the Zionist playbook – the one way to do that is like “how can I support demonstrations of Desi South Asians, Indians who are mobilizing against Hindutva.” There are plenty and there are a lot. If one of those leaders is coming to town, there’s going to be counter-protests, there’s going to be demonstrations. Show up and offer physical and moral support through numbers, which can be very meaningful, because Hindutva supporters can be really nasty and aggressive. That’s one way, physically, but I think it’s the most accessible and important way is just speak up, use words, unmask the groups who are trying to appeal to Americans who want to be good, multicultural, liberal, progressive people.

They’re able to take advantage of people’s good intentions in that way because of people’s lack of information about this. They’re really good at co-opting language, manipulating language about decolonization, indigeneity, being a marginalized immigrant community – all the things that US progressives want to support. Speak up, you got to deprive them of the their legitimacy they’re trying to claim by appropriating that language, trying to get access and influence by it. If you speak up about what they really are, who they really are, what they’re really doing, I think a lot of their power gets diffused. If anyone were to say “Oh, you’re being anti-Hindu about this,” there is plenty of the resources I’ve mentioned. These are a lot of places to find where you can point to lots of Desi activists, intellectuals and community members who are saying just this, who are criticizing that program, or saying “that does not represent us, that does not represent our history, our politics, our culture, our religion.”

TFSR: An interesting thing you point to and it shows when you are writing the article, is Tulsi Gabbard. There was a really interesting two-parter interview on QAnon Anonymous podcast with one of the hosts of Eyes Left [podcast] who had been researching Tulsi as a former military person, as someone who had gone into the military to get this thing that they could check mark as a part of their political career. Tulsi Gabbard is not of Desi background, but is affiliated with Science of Identity Foundation, which was an offshoot of Krishnaism. Gabbard has – and I don’t want to make this all about Gabbard – posed as a Democrat, like been in solidarity with trans folks, for instance, at various points. The Science of Identity Foundation’s guru is very homophobic, very gender-essentialist and Tulsi has pivoted more recently on points around abortion access, gender identity and sexuality as she has turned and joined the Republican Party, or at least joined along with, maybe gone Independent, but it’s definitely standing alongside cultural reactionaries in U.S. politics.

It’s not even people that are engaging with this,because it’s ideological. It’s not necessarily even people that are directly from the diaspora themselves, who are oftentimes promoting some of these institutions and also have a terrible perspective. Tulsi Gabbard is one person to pay attention to in terms of, if she goes and talks to Modi, if she was promoting a specific youth / student or faith organization or lifestyle group here that’s based in the diaspora, check the background on their politics.

MR: Absolutely. She’s a pretty fascinating and horrifying figure. She did make her reputation as being progressive but very hard to categorize, being this “Oh, you can’t just slap me into the conventional left-right range,” being a maverick, being independent was part of her persona. I’m not up on my latest “Tulsi facts.” Definitely we should keep an eye on her. We were – meaning, people who are from the Desi diaspora, who are trying to oppose Hindutva – keeping a lot more of an eye on her back when it looked like she was seriously being considered as a serious presidential candidate, and then has receded a little bit in terms of her influence and power apparently since then. But I wouldn’t put it past her to make some moves to become more of a central and influential figure again. And yet she is someone that the Hindu right wing loves and really loves to support and put forward – I think because she has this appeal to people in a whole variety of parts of the American political spectrum. That’s been another tactic they’ve tried to use – they’ve tried to identify different candidates, as well have lobbyists and stuff, that might put forward or support their agenda. Sometimes they’ve moved towards actually trying to field candidates as more South Asians have been running for office. Tulsi Gabbard is one to watch. And to be very wary of, for sure.

Actually, I just read this morning that Nikki Haley is thinking about running as a Republican presidential candidate. People might not even know she’s of South Asian background, because she changed her name and doesn’t play it up. But she is another one to be a little bit careful about seeing what she’s up to.

TFSR: There’s a pretty strong commonality between these two figures around a focus on equating adherence to Islam with extremism and terrorism.

The last book that I referenced in the introduction was Art for Life. I wonder if you tell us a bit about the Progressive Writers Association and Afro-Asian solidarity, and where people can find the book, and what they can expect to find in it.

MR: Thanks for asking about that. This is a book that I had been researching and working on for years. It’s been a labor of love, I spent a lot of effort. I made this weird move and self-published it during quarantine. It’s a guerrilla publication. Let me say a little bit about what it is and what it’s about and why it relates to the rest of the work that I’ve been talking about today.

The Progressive Writers Organization were leftist intellectuals, artists, activists. They were Indians prior to partition – so they became both Indian and Pakistani later on. They formed this organization in 1936, which was part of the cultural left wing of the anti-colonial struggle, and I tracked them across World War II, their activism during World War II and colonial activism across independence and partition, and then into the Cold War and their role in the Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement during the decolonization period, during the Cold War. The lens that they’re often looked at through is by literary scholars in a national context– I was looking at them in a different way. I was looking at as a historian in the international context. The reason I was interested in them is because as was mentioned in my bio, I am a historian, I’m a writer, I’m also a performing artist and an activist. I felt in kinship with them. As with all the people I’ve written about in my previous books, I felt like they are part of the same genealogy or intellectual or ideological genealogy. I don’t share their ideology, but I felt like I was part of their lineage as well. And I was like, “You guys are asking so many of the same questions as I am, you have a lot of the same concerns as I am, I want to know more. Who are you? What are you doing?”. That was the next point in time that I began to follow through in my previous books.

I was looking at the ways in which their participation in the left or progressive wing of the anti-colonial liberation struggles in South Asia, for them was very much connected with global anti-fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. Then after independence, that there was a lot of continuity with the way they understood the relationships between colonialism and fascism, led into their solidarity with other decolonizing struggles in the Third Worldist Project. I traced them to– It’s very much a Cold War thing. They do have other manifestations now. It makes explicit the connections between fascism and colonialism and how they operate through a racial logic and through structures of violence. That does in a weird way connect to what I’m trying to say in this piece, too, about present-day Hindu fascism, and how people in North America who are antifascist and anti-racist, but don’t necessarily always have a full way to articulate how closely tied together colonialism is with fascism, and how fighting them has to be connected together, and broadening out the view of what it is that you’re fighting and how you’re fighting against it.

There’s a lot in it, I would really love for people to read it. But I have to apologize – at the moment, it is not easy to find. Like I said, it was kind of a guerrilla move. And part of my guerrilla move was “Fuck you Amazon!” I published it on a Barnes and Noble platform, which is where you can find it, if you go to Barnes and Noble platform, it’s in print form. It’s in e-book form. I hope that people read it. At the moment, I’m trying to make access to it better. But at the moment, it’s not the easiest to find.

Nor is the rest of my stuff you were gonna ask about. I’m not really a social media person. But people can always contact me through AK Press in relation to this piece. Or they usually are able to find me in other ways too. I’m no longer, but had for a long time been, on the editorial collective of Perspectives, which is the Institute for Anarchists Studies journal. Those folks also know how to get in touch with me. I have an aspiration to put a lot of my writings up in more accessible form. But as of now, I’m gonna be this mysterious cult figure whose writings are heard of but not actually read.

TFSR: That’s great. Then I can totally brag about, “Oh, you haven’t found that essay yet? Oh, it’s glorious. Simmer in that feeling.” I’m happy to put links in the show notes. Besides stuff that you sent me, I’ll do a little research and link to the articles that you’ve talked about.

Thank you so much, Maia, for having this conversation and for doing all the work that you’re doing. I look forward to checking out some of your other writings. I especially want to start off with the IAS book, the anti-authoritarian voices during the decolonization period, excited for that.

MR: Thanks so much.