introduction. 25
butions by the editors of this volume. In the first of these, John Hawley reports on
a trip he made to Ayodhya in early 1993, a month after Hindu militants destroyed
the mosque that had been built there by a lieutenant of the Mughal emperor Babar
in 1528. A symbol of Muslim hegemony in India’s past—and perhaps of any foreign
hegemony over Hindu religion—the Babri Mosque had emerged in the 1980s as a
central feature of the rhetoric ofhindutva(“Hindu-ness”) that was spread by
India’s principal right-wing organizations. One of these is the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP: “World Hindu Council”), which has had a particularly strong im-
pact on diasporic Hinduism through its educational activities and its efforts to or-
ganize Hindu students worldwide. Another is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP: “In-
dian People ’s Party”), which until the elections of spring 2004 had led India’s ruling
political coalition with one short break since 1996. The BJP has refrained from mov-
ing ahead too fast—or in open defiance of the judiciary—toward constructing the
massive temple it proposed be built to mark Rama’s birthplace; clearing its way was
the ostensible purpose of destroying Babar’s mosque. On the whole, the need to
build a ruling coalition took precedence over the need to build Rama’s temple. Yet
as events in Gujarat and Maharashtra have shown, anti-Muslim Hindu militancy
backed by the BJP and its associate organizations is far from dead.
But neither is Hindu tolerance or the long tradition of amity and shared worship
that has characterized relations between Hindus and Muslims living in India.^15 Va -
sudha Narayanan introduces this subject with a brief essay on the shrine (dargah)
of Shahul Hamid in Nagore, Tamil Nadu. Shahul Hamid is remembered as the de-
scendant of a noted Sufipir,but his shrine was built with help from Hindu kings, and
more than half of the people who worship there today are Hindus. A law enacted
by the Tamil Nadu state legislature in 2002 forbids religious conversion, but this
shrine makes us ask what conversion as a monolithic idea might mean—and perhaps
why it would be necessary. For that very reason, perhaps, hindutvaleaders have re-
cently taken aim at just this sort of institution.^16
Another kind of targetting has also become prominent recently—in relation not
to the practice of Hinduism, but to its study. Here the critics tend to be Hindus liv-
ing in the Western diaspora, and they criticize non-Hindu academics and media per-
sons who discuss, analyze, and teach Hinduism. An example of this sort of challenge
is provided by Shrinivas Tilak, who calls on the Hindu community to join in the task
of “taking back Hindu studies.” The publication of his article on January 6, 2004,
adds yet another item to the list of inaugural events with which we began. It ap-
peared in a medium that has become increasingly important to the conduct of global
Hindu life—the Internet—and the place of its publication, sulekha.com, guaran-