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Saffronizing California’S History Curriculum: Long Distance Hindu Nationalism In The United States, Pei-Hsuan Wu

Doctoral Dissertations

How U.S. public schools teach South Asian history has been a site of contestation since the 2000s. California’s solicitation of community input into its history curriculum has brought ideological clashes to the California Department of Education (CDE); these conflicts over South Asian history are an extension of struggles in India driven by rising Hindu nationalism, a widespread movement for a “Hindus-first” India that brutalizes subaltern groups and dissenters. This violence is often justified through manufactured histories demonizing Indian minorities and glorifying an ancient, Hindu civilization.

This dissertation focused on the 2016-2017 controversy surrounding the CDE’s process to revise its history …