In Mid-Western America, where Audrey Truschke grew up, she was taught the history of the Holocaust. Her high school had invited a holocaust survivor to come and talk to the students. “I remember seeing the Auschwitz tattoo on their arm. It made a big impression on me.” At that age, Truschke would not have expected to wake up to a tweet directed at her, reading, “I hope another Hitler comes back and finishes off your people.” This is not only because it is unconscionable and crass but also because Truschke is not Jewish. As she struggles to articulate the feeling it left her with, she wonders why she receives vitriol rooted in “arguably the most hateful rhetoric the world has ever come up with.” Unsurprisingly, it comes from the caustic hate politics eating at one of the most diverse countries in the world – India.
Audrey Truschke is a Professor of South Asian Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. A self-identifying modern woman, Truschke loves working with pre-modern India. At lunch, she’s dressed in all black with a blue scarf. A paisley-shaped earring peeks out, a tiny trinket embodying her interest. Looking back at her life, Truschke recalls she was a student of religious studies at the University of Chicago. At 18, she took a class on Hinduism only because she thought it was one of the biggest religions in the world and she should know about it. The way she saw it then, it wasn’t supposed to be her whole life. After all, she knew “zilch” about it. At present, Truschke is one of the most vociferous voices against Hindu nationalism in the United States. “I don’t think I went in search of Hindu nationalism, I think it came to me”, she says, frustrated.
Ever since the current ruling party of India – the Bharatiya Janata Party held the reins of power in India – the country has seen gruesome attacks on religious minorities. Particularly the Muslims. In 2015, just a year after the BJP had come into power, Truschke gave an interview to a credible national newspaper based in India. Her comments from her first book caught the attention of right-wing religious zealots. It was her first brush with this force – “I remember it as an avalanche. I don’t even remember what the hate mail said back then; I did not even keep track.” At present, Truschke spends a lot of time on the screen. She reads through all of the hate she receives – “I regularly report anything that seems like a credible threat. I have three children, and I am responsible for my family.” Even though she has never had to face a violent attack in person, she regularly deals with men yelling at her whenever she delivers a talk. Most events where Truschke speaks are guarded by armed security. She is very uncomfortable with it – “ I think it makes the whole prospect of violence so much more visceral and real to me.”
Where we are right now, violence seems far removed. It is a bright day in New Jersey. Truschke is biting on a salad and taking sips from her glass of water with tips of floating ice cubes. She is open to conversation. At another time, in 2017, Truschke published a biography of Aurangzeb – India's most controversial Mughal ruler. “You know, when my colleagues read that book, they were like, “Yeah yeah, we already knew that Audrey!” she laughs. She aimed to make the biography less academic and more accessible. Within it, she just added her reading. Instead of arguing that Aurangzeb was a religious patriot, she argued that he was just another Mughal ruler. “He didn’t give a damn about religion. He killed whoever resisted Mughal authority,” Truschke asserts. With this claim, the Hindu right in India, a group most concerned with villainising Muslims and victimising the Hindus, took it upon itself to troll Truschke. “I don’t think they’ve engaged with my scholarship. I approach Aurangzeb as a historian. I think what they have a problem with is the absence of hate.” However, the trolling has translated into some very real consequences for the scholar. In March this year, Truschke received about one hate tweet a minute. In May 2022, the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), a Hindu nationalist group based in the United States, sued Truschke for defamation. In an article she wrote for Al Jazeera, Truschke said the HAF was responsible for the attacks on her in March. “And they were. They have a whole press release on their website about it.”
White in her lineage, the HAF’s most substantial criticism against Truschke is that she is an outsider to India. She is often asked what does she know about India? What does she know about Hinduism? Truschke’s first visit to India was in the fall of 2002 with a study abroad program. She was only 20 years old, and had studied Sanskrit for barely two years. And she recognises who she went in as. She acknowledges her fascination with perception – “I had studied no modern Indian language. I didn’t know much about modern India. And the knowledge of Ramayana only gets you so far, right?” It was on this trip that Truschke saw sites such as the temple in Hampi “in situ”, she says, it just “brought it alive. My journey into South Asian literature up until that point had just like scratched the surface of what South Asia had to offer.” As time went on, Truschke kept coming back to India, with a finer comb each time – “Obviously, I am an outsider,” she acknowledges. Her tone is a delicate balance of seriousness and flimsy, peculiar to academics. “Everyone in history is an outsider right? Being born in modern-day Delhi doesn’t give any insight into 60th-century Delhi”, she says. With a laugh, she complicates the insider-outsider dynamic and asks, “If I read Persian and Sanskrit and you don’t, who is really closer to being an insider to history?”
Truthfully, though, Truschke’s engagement with the Hindu right's politics is more a matter of circumstance than of interest. Truschke claims she can no longer travel to India because of security concerns. She can no longer access the sites or the libraries – the present that makes the past accessible. Consequently, Truschke thought if she was going to spend a large amount of her time reading hate mail from the Hindu nationalists, she might as well turn it into data. “I now have a secondary area of research in Hindu nationalism. I have published on them. It comes directly out of their attacks on me”, Truschke says. If it were up to Truschke, though, she would much rather read Sanskrit manuscripts. “Just think about the general personality type of somebody who wants to become a scholar.” Up until the age of 30, when Truschke got her PhD, she spent most of her time reading old Sanskrit and Persian texts. She didn't engage in modern politics – “I really thought very few people would ever read what I produced. And I was fine with that. If you're looking for infamy and stuff, you probably didn't become a Sanskritist.”
This Sanskrit-ist’s footing in Indian history comes from shades of multiplicities. In her first class on Hinduism, Truschke picked up the Mahabharata – making the grand epic her point of entry into South Asia. “I was just completely blown away, I had never read anything like that,” Truschke says, still looking a little smitten with the grandiose threads running through Mahabharata. She admits that at first, she found it confusing. Recalling her initial reaction to the text, Truschke, with a hint of her twenty-year-old’s innocent ignorance, says, “I remember specifically thinking about Krishna and like he does bad stuff. How do you have a God who is unethical at times but yet remains God? And then he also gets cursed by a woman at the end, and then his whole tribe dies in like a drunken brawl, which is just like, like really?” Now, decades later, Truschke’s relationship with the Mahabharata has ripened, “It is also the multiplicity. There didn't have to be one story. There didn't have to be one way. People just come along and keep changing it and adding to it, and you can continually retell it, and this can be a way of criticising the story and honouring it.”
In 2022, the Indian government in power proudly associated itself with a religious organisation whose ideals are centred on purity and singularity – the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh. It’s an organisation that believes in violence and borrows its principles from Hitler himself. Its dream? To turn parts of the Indian subcontinent into a Hindu nation state. It’s sister branch in the United States is called the Hindu Swayamsewak Sangh or the HSS. Often, they partner with Zionist groups. They have a shared target. Truschke refers to them as the American Sangh. Truschke says the role of the Sangh in the United States is also to “whitewash” – “because a big part of what the American Sangh is supposed to do is to like make it all seem okay over here.” She thinks that the Hindu nationalist groups in the US are stepping up their efforts, partly out of feeling bold, but also partly out of necessity – “It gets harder to gloss over the BJP every day, right? Because the atrocities just keep growing.”
It is on Twitter that Truschke is at the receiving end of this violence. On the bird site, Truschke is structured and has strong boundaries. She is vociferous and articulate in her criticism of the Hindu right. Her words are authoritative, like her scholarship. In person, she is just as much a cynic but also the mortal professor. Reflectively, Truschke says, “I will say I am very different in the classroom than I am on Twitter.” Contrary to what the Hindu right might think, Truschke says she hardly ever gets into trouble with her students. A class Truschke teaches begins with Nazi Germany and ends with Narendra Modi in India. She confesses she often speaks to students who come from families where they grew up supporting the BJP. Usually, these students send her long emails – inquiring, struggling to grapple with the information they were raised with and the new knowledge they acquire daily. Even with her strong opinions, Truschke is a gentle teacher –“I'm not there to tell my students what to do. I'm there to give them information and options and knowledge and what they want to do is up to them. So we talk through the options. I rarely hear back honestly, about what happens in those situations.”
Stepping out of the classroom, away from the scream of the burning world, Truschke loves spending time with her family in her motherly pursuits. In the latest wave of attacks on her, Truschke was confined to home in the pandemic. Usually, though, she managed to keep the hate away from her children. This time, with the lawsuit from the HAF and a barrage of hate tweets, Truschke was on the phone with the Police. Her oldest, now eight years old, had a lot of questions – “That has led more recently to a series of conversations. Partly to make sure that she understands who is upset at me, partially to make her feel okay and safe.” For Truschke, the hardest part of the experience was translating it into a language an eight-year-old understands – “You know, like, people hate you, people bully you on the playground. Like to some extent, you tell the grownups, but like sometimes it's just going to happen. What you can control is how you react, right? And so emphasising –I do not hate people who hate me. I do not wish Ill on those who wish on me. I do not troll back. This is a one-sided hate issue.”
P.S.: This interview was conducted in November 2022. In December 2022, a U.S. court dismissed the defamation lawsuit filed by The Hindu American Foundation against Truschke and several activists. The trolling, however, continues.