ABSTRACT
This chapter engages in an act of concerned scholarship under three headings. The fi rst, ‘Intellectual Kshatriyas and a Hinduism That Can Just Say “No”’, provides an overview of the rise of Hindu American public intellectuals — self-described ‘intellectual kshatriyas’ — proponents of an assertive form of diasporic nationalism. The second (in two parts), ‘India’s American “Education Wars”’ (I and II), explores the attempted erasure of Dalits from South Asian Religious Studies curricula by specifi c cohorts of the diaspora living in the United States (US). And the third, ‘Selfhood, Agency, Indianness’, rectifi es certain caricatures of Dalit Christianity prevalent in those same cohorts of the diaspora. First, though, we provide a dispatch from ‘the front’ (as it were) about an incident that initially aroused our apprehensions.
