Reverberating Disquietude: A response to Shalini Masih’s “A Sustained Note of Disquiet”

The lasting impact of colonial trauma in India: Links to Hindu nationalism

“…The widely reported “Howdy Modi” event held in Texas in September 2019 was attended by approximately 50,000 people, the largest‐ever gathering with a foreign political leader in the United States (Kapur, 2019), attesting to support for the far‐right Indian government among some Indian immigrants of Hindu background in the United States. Elsewhere (Rao, 2020), I suggest that this financing of the Hindu supremacist Indian government by members of the Hindu‐identified Indian diaspora is an especially pernicious form of neo‐colonialism, an economically fueled psychological exploitation and emotional mining of the Indian body politic for the vicariously experienced pleasures of domination outlined by Gay (2016).…”

“…6 6 The sacred cow in India is primarily a political animal, not a religious one (Rao, 2020). See Jha (2009) for exhaustive scholarly evidence that “the cow was not sacred” (p. 37) and “[t]he killing of cattle and eating of meat were fairly common” (p. 41) in ancient India, possibly continuing until the early 1900s.…”