 Hello, everyone. Welcome. This is a snowy day for our fourth lecture. What a great time to stay inside and enjoy a terrific speaker. One thing I wanted to mention also is this weekend you should be receiving an email from Glen Roa, which will contain your request for you to fill out a feedback form on the first four lectures. Please take a few moments to do that. We really value your input. So when you see this you'll push reply, then you fill out the questions just answer each question then push send Glenn will get it back and then we can see what you're saying we really appreciate your help. So now I'd like to ask Michael or Lance gave our program committee to please introduce today's speaker. Michael. Thank you so much Carol and hello, everyone. Today it's my special pleasure and honor to introduce a J Brigise assistant professor of political science at Middlebury College. J Brigise did his undergraduate work at Temple University studying political science and French, and earned his PhD in political science at the George Washington University. He held a post doctoral fellowship at Stanford Asia Pacific Research Center, and he taught at the University of South Florida and the University of California Riverside. He also applied to joining Middlebury's Distinguished Political Science Department in 2020. Professor Brigise has teaching and research interests that include Indian politics, ethnicity, political violence, historical legacies, and the interactions between religion and politics. He was the colonial origins of ethnic violence in India, published by Stanford University Press. He has also contributed to leading academic journals on Asian studies, political violence, development and politics and religion. Professor Brigise has a book in progress about secularization in Hinduism, a project which is supported by the Fulbright program and the American Institute of Indian Studies. Also, in his free time, Professor Brigise is an avid tennis fan. Last year, in fact, at a tennis tournament in Washington DC, he met his favorite tennis player, Rafael Nadal of Spain. The title of today's lecture is Hinduism and Political Behavior. Please join me in giving a warm, triple E welcome to Professor Ajay Brigise. Okay, thank you so much, Michael and Carol for for that introduction. It is true I met Nadal over the summer and then he just won the Australian Open. I like to take some credit for that, of course. So I'm so thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with all of you today about a project that I've been working on for a few years and obviously COVID has kind of disrupted my research plans a little bit but I can talk to you about it at a time when I can share a lot of feedback about about my about my work. So the title of my talk will be Hinduism and political behavior. And I wanted to start off with an image that appeared in a lot of Indian newspapers about two years ago. Who is this robed man, you might assume he is Hindu monk or mendicant or some kind of great spiritual teacher in a cave. I'm indicating it is actually the Indian Prime Minister I'm sure a lot of you might recognize him Narendra Modi, who has been the Prime Minister since 2014, and he is the leader of the party which translates to the Indian People's Party. He is the largest political party by membership, and Narendra Modi leads this party which in Western discourse is usually called a Hindu nationalist party, a party that is quite militant about Hinduism and kind of promoting Hinduism and Indian civilization as a similar things is basically the same thing. Narendra Modi is not very camera shy he likes being in front of the cameras and this is the image that he is projecting to people in Indian people around the world that he is a very devout Hindu. So what's interesting is if you actually read some of the academic literature about Hinduism and politics. One of the first questions you might ask yourself is, does this kind of outreach by Narendra Modi doesn't actually work. Does he get Hindus to vote for him and do more pious Hindus, are they more likely to vote for him and to like Narendra Modi. So there are a few scholars who have asked this question. And in order to ask that question you really have to be able to measure what it means to be pious within the Hindu tradition. And so existing scholarship basically has relied on one or two survey questions done by an organization called the Indian National Election Study we have the American National Election Study. It's a voter survey. And so here's the question from the questionnaire and now I will ask you a few, ask you about a few religious activities, you tell me how often you do these daily weekly, only during festivals or never. So prayer, right, which is translated here as Pooja. That's the term in Hindi, which actually means worship worship of the deity and visiting temple. So you can imagine that if you're asking we're trying to figure out if someone is a very pious Christian for example we might ask similar questions do you pray. We might ask the same question for the church, we might ask the same questions of someone who is Muslim right do you do the mosque, and then do you go to mosque. And when you use this question, what existing political science research finds is that the more pious you are the more religious you are as a Hindu that does not make you more likely to vote for the BJP, which is kind of a surprising finding because Narendra Modi spending this time in a cold cave, meditating in front of cameras. So, the two research questions that I'm going to talk about today. Our first how do we actually measure religiosity in the Hindu tradition in order to understand how Hinduism affects politics we first have to understand how we measure Hinduism. And second, once we've done that. What is the effect of Hinduism or Hindu piety on political behavior in India. So, in order to kind of preview some of my main findings. I develop a new survey questionnaire to measure Hindu religiosity. And I find that in line with existing work. Being a more pious Hindu does not predict voting for the BJP. It's an interesting finding and we can talk about, then what is all the outreach for. I'll try to, I'll try to explain that but basically, I don't see a relationship between to be Hindu religiosity and voting for the Hindu Nationalist Party. However, I do find that the more religious you are. This does predict your views on Indian secularism. I do find what that is secularism in the Indian context means something very different than we are accustomed to here in the United States. But being very pious does tend to predict your attitudes about about secularism. So specifically, the more pious you are as a Hindu, the less likely you are to support Indian secularism, the less likely you are to say that the government should be neutral in religious affairs that it should treat all religious groups equally. So some findings that show there is a very clear relationship between religion and political behavior and some other findings that kind of temper that. I'll just give you a brief outline of the talk. So first I'm going to discuss the process by which I went about trying to measure Hindu religiosity. So I'm going to explain a survey that I did in North India in the state of Bihar. That was in early 2018. And in 2020, my plan was to do a larger survey and about another seven to nine states but that work unfortunately still is still on hold. So I'm going to talk about the survey that I did in Bihar and the third thing will then be talking about some of the research findings from that survey. And then I'll end by talking, just kind of concluding with my findings and talking about some of the comparative implications of this project because I think what we learn about in India could potentially give us more of an understanding of the implications in other parts of Asia. For example, Southeast Asia, you have Buddhism, for example, and, and East Asia, you have Shinto in Japan. So let me start by talking about Hindu religiosity. So this is this is a image that you will find all over India, very bright image of lots of different deities, and this is just kind of one corner of a Hindu temple they're really festive colorful places. And it kind of is a is a good image that I often like to show my students because it just shows all the multiplicity of Hinduism all the multiplicity of views of deities of philosophies. It's, it's not an easy religion to understand. What I know exactly is Hinduism different from from the religions that we're used to here in the United States and I'm thinking mainly of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism Christianity and Islam what are also known as kind of the three great monotheistic traditions. Hinduism different. Well, compared to the Abrahamic religions Hinduism has no founder, right there is no Jesus there is no Mohammed there's no Moses. We talk within the Hindu tradition about various sages or wise men but there's no single founder of the religion. So in the Abrahamic religions, Hinduism is polytheistic but I have to say have to include this here, maybe it's it's not actually clear how we would actually categorize religion. There are by by some estimates, 10s of 1000s of gods that are worshipped all over India. At this time, I think many Hindus would say that all of these gods are just manifestations of one God. And so you could say that it is kind of monotheistic because there is one God but many different kind of formations usually academically we would say it's, it's polytheistic but you know, no one has convincingly has has convincingly defined it as as one or the other. So that just kind of adds to the confusion. Unlike the Abrahamic religions there's no central religious text. Sometimes I have students who say well isn't it the Mahabharata or the Ramayana or you know, part of the Mahabharata the Bhagavad Gita Western audiences know some of these texts. Those are of course important texts, but they don't have the same kind of equivalent power of something like the Bible or of the or the Quran. These are texts that are important, but also there are lots of Hindus who are not literate. And for them they learn about their their religion orally they learn it through the recitation of stories or songs. And so religious texts are not as important in this tradition. There's no kind of organization of the Hindu religion there's no hierarchy or priesthood there aren't bishops and there aren't that there's no Pope of course, compared to the Abrahamic religions it's not conversionary. I always like to say Hinduism is a very exclusive club you are born into it or not. There are some people who claim that they have converted to Hinduism but that's a very controversial thing to say and I think most Hindus would say you cannot convert to become a Hindu you can convert from Hinduism to something else but you cannot convert into Hinduism. One of the really big differences is is just the lack of compulsory practices or beliefs, including, excuse me, including belief in God. It's actually not required of you to believe in God and many of the Orthodox philosophical schools of Hinduism were atheistic they didn't really think about a creator God they didn't really discuss God at all. So, as a Hindu you don't really have to believe in God you don't have to go to temple, and you're now seeing why that makes it a bit complicated when we ask these survey questions, because we assume that believing in a temple is important but that's not necessarily true. One of my favorite quotes about Hinduism by the religious studies scholar Axel Michaels he describes it as an impenetrable jungle, and all absorbent sponge a net snaring everything. That's a nice way of putting it. So the word that we use to the word that we use to translate religion is the word or very often in English we just say Dharma. This has been translated as religion but it's also been translated in all these other ways law duty norm social usage right conduct righteousness that which holds the world together it's a very complicated term. So in order to be a pious Hindu, you could be an atheist and someone who never goes to temple. So if we're asking people do you believe in God and do you go to temple might not really tell us anything at all so how can we actually measure religiosity within this tradition So what I did in late 2017 before I did my larger survey in early 2018 was I went to some Indian villages in North India in this in the state of Bihar. And I found two villages that were close to the state capital of Patna, or about 3045 minutes away, and I traveled there with the survey team, and I wanted to kind of do an experiment. There were two villages that were very close to one another they were very very similar you can just imagine kind of two towns in Vermont that are that are close to each other that are pretty similar. And I went into these villages and in both villages I randomly just distributed two versions of a survey. One version. I had closed ended questions about religion. So I would just ask people questions like what kinds of religious activities do you do and I would provide them with a list where I would say what kind of religious things do you believe in and I would provide them with the list. And then the other group of respondents got basically open ended questions. So I said what are your religious activities, I didn't give them a list, I just let them say whatever they wanted and I had my survey numerators recorded. I would ask them what are your religious beliefs and I would just have them record, whatever came up. So I'll show you an example of what this looks like. In one version of the survey I asked Hindus, what are your rituals and I looked at these existing surveys that we have that other scholars have used and I just took responses from those lists. So I asked them, do you perform the following rituals, do you give religious donations, you can see here on the left the closed ended version 96% of people said yes we give religious donations I don't know if the number is actually that high I'm guessing some people are probably lying just to kind of sound good but in any a large number of people at least claim that they are giving donations 90% of people say we do Pooja when they're asked do you do you worship the deity basic they say yes, do you visit a temple 90% of them say yes. Do you perform kathas kathas are is a term that means myth. So it's actually like a recitation of the Mahabharata or the Ramayana, a recitation of these Hindu epic stories. Do you consult the pundit about auspicious timing so the pundit is the priest and auspicious timing so for example if you're thinking about getting married. If you're a Hindu you would probably never ever ever set a wedding date without going and talking to a priest or an astrologer about the date beforehand because if you pick the wrong date. In auspicious date then you'll probably get married or something else bad will happen to you maybe you want to try to conceive a child and you won't have any success right so you have to go and talk to the pundit and say, what is an auspicious day to get married so that my wedding will. My marriage will be happy and successful. So about 88% of people say yes we do these things and one big thing, especially for Hindu women is fasting. During religious festivals especially women will fast, you know, sometimes for 12 hours or sometimes for multiple days it really kind of depends. Now the other version of the survey I asked people what are your rituals, and I didn't give them any responses. And I wanted to see if they mentioned the things in the close and did they mention donations did they mention kathas did they mention fasting that kind of stuff. And as you can see, there are some similarities but there are also a lot of differences. In the open ended version of the survey, really the only similarity was people said, I do Pooja right I worship the deity. People mentioned going to festivals. That was very important. People mentioned what they wear. So if you go to India and you see people with a mark of red powder on their forehead. That is called the telak that is something that Hindus wear and so that is part of their attire women would mention for example wearing anklets little bracelets around their ankles or putting color die on their feet. People mentioned fasting and visiting temple but as you can see by by a much smaller percentage and kind of one of the more interesting things that that kind of confused me a bit was people would say, I respect my parents, and that's a real. My parents would love to hear this right that that's a religious behavior, but you know within Christianity or Islam we might not consider we might say it's good to respect your parents. I have a daughter right I would like her to respect me but that's not a we don't think of that as a religious activity but in Hinduism, you are kind of connected especially because there's this idea of rebirth you are connected to your parents and your ancestors and you're supposed to respect them. So all of this kind of shows us that there's a very very big difference between what academics are thinking about as Hindu religiosity and what Hindus are thinking about in terms of Hindu religiosity. In fact the number one response when I and I was out in the village asking these questions also the number one. When I said what is what what religious rituals do you do the number one question that people immediately respond they said what's a ritual. Right, they, they, the Hindi English dictionary actually had 11 different words that translate as ritual so I had to kind of figure out which which one of these words was correct and very often people said I don't I don't know what a ritual is I know activities that I do that are religious but I might not use that vocabulary of a religious ritual and so clearly there's a big disconnect between the way we think about religion the way they think about religion. I consulted with a number of religious studies scholars I consulted with a number of the people that I surveyed and I came up with a new measure of Hindu religiosity so what I did was I asked people a series of questions, agree disagree and I scaled it from one to four so I would first ask someone do you agree or disagree with the statement, they would say yes or no. And then if they said I agree, I would say do you someone agree or do you strongly agree right and I somewhat agree would be three and a strongly agree would be four. So here are some of the questions that I asked. The first thing in Hinduism is it's an endogamous religion Hindus are supposed to marry Hindus and I think across in the most recent data we have that shows about 95% of Hindus marry someone who is Hindu. So I asked this question, would you marry someone who is not Hindu. So I asked this question, would you marry someone from a lower caste India has a caste system which is a hierarchical system of social organization. So you would have people who are high cast they had they have certain occupations like educators for example people in business. And then there are people who are born to ritually low cast they might be street sweepers or clean clean the streets that kind of stuff. And you really can't change your cast you're tied to that cast for for your entire life. Most people marry within their cast so I asked people, would you marry someone from a lower caste. Is it important for you to teach your children about Hinduism. My assumption is people who say yes, are very religious and people who say no, don't really probably don't care as much about religion. A fourth question I said it does not bother me. The reason why I say it does not bother me is I want to reverse code a question so to make sure that people. Excuse me, to make sure that people are paying attention. So the responses indicate most people were actually paying attention. Some people got offended at this question I said, would it offend you if people made fun of religion they said yes of course I'd be deeply offended I would I would get into a fight with them to defend my religion. I asked about fasting right because a lot of people believe fasting is important to receive God's blessings. I tried to figure out Hinduism has a series of what are called life cycle rituals rituals you perform at various points of your life. So one of the most common life cycle rituals, where I conducted the survey in North India is called the Mundan, or it's a tonsure ceremony so basically what you do is, when your child is about two or three years old. You shave their head, and the idea is by shaving their head you get rid of all the problems from any past lives. So I asked people you know if you have children, is it auspicious for you to do this people who say no no I don't really care about that again, my assumption is that that means you are more secular right you are less religious. Darshan is a term that means site. Sometimes you go into a temple and if your eyes connect with the eyes of a deity that is a very auspicious and a powerful thing that can happen. I asked about the biggest religious festival in the state of Bahar, which is the Chath Festival which is for the sun, it's actually for the sun, for the sun god. So I asked people, the best part of this festival is that you get to buy new clothes again, I assume that if you say yes that means that you are celebrating the festival but for secular reasons right because you get to go out and and party with your friends you're not celebrating it for religious reasons. A big idea within Hinduism is the idea of purity and pollution. There are certain times in your life where you are ritually polluted. So for men I said, you're not supposed to go into a temple which is a holy space when you're polluted so for men I said, if you just lost a family member would you go into a temple. And most people were like no no no I would never do that because I'm polluted. For women if you are menstruating you are not supposed to go into a temple so this is the question that we pose for women. I used a sex balance survey team so women interviewed women and men interviewed men so obviously this is a sensitive question and I made sure only women asked that question. I asked about puja because this is this is obviously important. Another reverse coded question I said, I don't need to consult with the astrologer or pundit for fixing a wedding date so most people when they heard this they said no no no of course I have to consult with the astrologer. Otherwise I'll get in big trouble, you know my wife will will get really angry at me if I if I don't do something like that. So the question about the evil eye. You know we use this term in English but in Hinduism it's a normative part of Hinduism this idea that at certain times, you could, especially, especially babies and especially people who you know can't protect themselves. They could be vulnerable to the evil eye. So the question here, I asked about eating vegetarian food a lot of Hindus say you shouldn't eat any animals. And then lastly, I said, couldn't atheists be a very moral person. Right. So if you put all of these kinds of questions together. I'm basically saying a very pious Hindu is someone who marries another Hindu who marries within their cast who consults with the astrologer who does puja who eats vegetarian food who does all of these things. And if you are a Hindu who doesn't do those things then you are more secular. Right. So I'm trying to come up with a new scale measure for Hindu religiosity. What the religiosity score looks like across all of the people that all the people that I interviewed. It goes from zero to four, as you can see no one is a zero. And most people are kind of in this three to 3.5. I'm sorry, excuse me, three to 3.5 range so most people would say that they are that they are very religious. So that was my way of developing a new survey measure for Hindu religiosity in India. Now, the next thing that I wanted to do is I wanted to field these questions in North India. And who was eventually to expand this to lots of other states so here's the state that I studied it's the state of Bihar as you can see it kind of borders, Nepal. To put this into context, Bihar is about the size of Indiana. Imagine that Indiana had one third of the US population right Indiana has about I think 7 million people. Imagine if Indiana had 100 million people. That's what we're talking about so a tiny state but a massive massive population. So I went to three different districts within the state of Bihar, and I did field work in all of these three areas and I ended up serving about 915 914 exactly Hindus in these areas so about, you know, more than 300 and each one of these places. I randomly pick these districts, just to kind of ensure representation of the whole state. And I also made sure that the survey occurred if I'm happy to discuss more of the technical details in in the Q&A but I went to urban areas but and I also went to rural areas so originally I was working in villages but I also did surveys in in cities. And I also made sure to interview. And women. One, one big problem that we have in studies of India is we do what are called head of household surveys so we go to people's homes and we interview them and we basically only end up interviewing men. And so, you know 50% of the population we don't capture in our surveys so I wanted to try to correct that so about 50% of my sample were women. So keep in mind I'm only interviewing Hindus. So if they randomly went to somebody's door and knocked on the door and it was Muslim. We said sorry this is a survey only for Hindus and so we went to the next next house. So, let me share some of my not now the fun stuff. Let me tell the theory and the conceptualization so now some research findings. This is an image of a. This is actually a Toyota truck that is has been refashioned to look like a chariot. This is a chariot that was used by one of the most famous Hindu gods in North India the god Ram. And here is that this can't tell if you can see in this man here wearing spectacles was the leader of the BJP at the time this is 1992. And he that there was a mosque in North India that the Hindu nationalist party said this is a mosque that was built on the site of a destroyed Hindu temple and so we want to go there and we want to liberate the temple. And so he got in the Toyota truck and he traveled all over the country and basically almost everywhere he went. There are immediately communal disturbances between Hindus and Muslims riots broke out all over the place. And so eventually he ended up in the city of the audio where this mosque was, and he said, let's liberate the mosque. And about 100,000 a mob of 100,000 extremists for the BJP descended on the mosque. And with sledgehammers and other instruments that destroyed it smashed to the ground, and triggered massive Hindu Muslim rights all over India it was one of the, the biggest religious conflicts in in post independence, India. And this was also one of the things that basically put the BJP on to the map. And so now we're trying to take all of these ideas about Hinduism and and ask the question of, how does that relate to politics are people who are more religious than the Hinduism tradition, are they more likely to like images like this right like images of the Toyota truck traveling all over India like images of the Prime Minister, meditating in a cave, right. So, I'm going to show you some slightly technical charts here but I will try to explain everything maybe you, some of you have, have seen these kinds of tables before. So, dependent variables those means the outlet that these are the outcomes that I'm interested in. So I asked people. First of all, in terms of political behavior did you vote for the BJP, right. I asked that question in response to the 2014 national election that's when no other movie first became Prime Minister. So I interviewed about 914 people as you can see, OBS means observations so only about 629 people answered the question. Some people were too young to have voted at that point. But some people also said to me that they didn't want to give me a response or some people kind of said, I don't remember, because I explained to them I'm an, I'm an academic from America, I don't really care who you voted for but some people didn't want to answer the question. Then I asked them did you vote for the BJP in 2015 which is a state election. So I wanted to see are there differences when movie is on the ballot or not on the on the ballot. And then three important questions about Indian secularism. So Indian secularism is quite different than American secularism as I kind of mentioned at the beginning of my talk. In America we say, our main concern is keeping religion out of politics, right. In India it's the opposite it's keeping politicians out of religion. The way we think of Indian secularism is the word that they actually uses is the picture that which translates as religious neutrality, the idea that the state will keep a distance from religion and treat all religious groups the same. Okay, it doesn't matter if one religious group has 90% of the population and the other religious group has 2% right the idea is that they should all be treated exactly the same. So I asked people a very basic question I say do you believe in religious neutrality or or how, how much do you support religious neutrality. The min and max here means the, the, the, the, the way I code the responses so one means not at all, right don't support neutrality at all. Two means I somewhat support neutrality I'm kind of in the middle and three means yes I very strongly support religious neutrality. Okay, so the mean here's the average you can seize 2.52 out of three so most most people say, overwhelmingly about 70% of people say we do support religious neutrality. I asked people do you support that should the government support Hindu temples. If they ask what that means I say, imagine a Hindu temple is falling down it needs to be repaired. Should the government spend money to rebuild this temple. One would be no not at all two would mean somewhat and three would mean, yes, you know I'm very much in support of that. So again, you can see a lot of people say yes. We see you know 2.75 out of three is the average people say yes the government should support Hindu temples then I asked the exact same question about mosques. And if you really are secular, and you believe the government should help to rebuild temples then you should also believe the same thing for non Hindu religious structures like mosque, for example. Here you can see it's a little bit lower, but it's still 2.5 out of three it's still about 60% of Hindus still say. Yes, we should, we should support mosques if they're falling down. The main thing that I'm interested in is this variable of Hindu religiosity like I here you can see it's about a 3.24 out of maximum score of four. So most people are very religious so I'm going to look at the interaction between these variables, and some things that I want to control for so age, the youngest person in the survey was 18, the oldest person was 93 who I actually got to meet an interview someone who had lived through partition who had lived through all of this turmoil in post independence. India. I wanted to, you know I asked people obviously are you a man or a woman and as you can see, very proud of the fact that we got almost almost exact perfect gender or sex balance here so 51% of the of the sample is what was men. The caste system which I referenced earlier so the BJP is often called an elite party it's a party of elite casts right people who are businessmen it's a kind of very pro business party. So a lot of people say one thing that predicts voting for the BJP will be will be being from a high cast. So I rank everyone's cast according to the rankings of the Indian government. And one is, if you are a scheduled cast which is the term for the former untouchables some, some casts that are considered so ritually degraded that you are not supposed to touch them. Okay, that would be a one. Two would be just all general cast and three would be. They are called kind of the dominant cast or the, the, the most elite casts. And then I asked questions about education and income, because obviously that could also affect who people vote for. As you can see the minimum value here is zero. Some people have no education. A lot of women, for example, are not allowed to you know their fathers or mothers say you don't need an education you should only be a housewife for a lot of them would have no education and they would have technically no income because they rely on their, their, their household income. So let me show you just think of this as a matrix right so you're looking at how the variables on the left interact with the variables on the right. If there's a blank space in the cell that means there's no relationship between the variables. If there's a plus sign that means there's a positive relationship. If there's a negative sign it means there's a negative relationship and more positives or more negatives means a stronger association between the two variables so if you're confused let me try to explain what this means so let's look at this first column voted for the BJP in 2014. Almost, it really surprised me to initially see this. Look at Hindu religiosity, the cell is blank. There's no statistical relationship between being a very devout Hindu and voting for the BJP. That's true for the 2014 election. Like I said I was, I was somewhat surprised because I thought existing research also said there's not a very strong relationship. I thought if we measure things differently will find a different outcome but it turns out Hindu religiosity doesn't seem to be correlated with voting for the BJP. Now if you go down the column age is highly correlated that means the older you are the more likely you are to vote for the BJP. Being a man makes you less likely to vote for the BJP they have made amazing outreach in the past few elections with women, trying to get more women to support this party. As we as we might predict being higher caste means that you are more likely to vote for the BJP and because they're three plus science it means it's a strong relationship. So this is a party of, of elites and so being high caste means you are more likely to vote for them. If you're a high caste you probably are also more educated, you also probably have more income. So the main thing we're interested in here is really Hindu religiosity so it's not related with voting for the BJP in 2014. It's not related for 2015 in the state election but here's where we start to see is some interesting findings. The more pious you are, the less likely you are to say that you support religious neutrality. This means if you are very religious Hindu and you're asked this question, should the government treat all religions equally your response would be no, I don't agree with that statement at all. Now, when because I was doing the survey with people I interacted with them and sometimes when watching these interviews I would suddenly interject and I would say wait wait hold on let me let me try to figure out why you feel that way. It's not that Hindus said openly Islamophobic things you know they didn't say things like I don't like Muslims very often they had neighbors who were Muslim. They didn't say things like that some of the BJP some of the more extreme politicians will say things like Muslim should go to Pakistan they're not welcome here that kind of thing. What they would usually say to me was listen Muslims are 15% of the population in India we're 80%. So why should the government treat us equally. Right, they would say this is a Hindu state because the majority of people who live here are Hindu now that's not what the Constitution says the Constitution says we don't care about population size everyone is treated the same. It doesn't matter if you have 99% and the other group has one in the law is secular and everyone should be treated equally. More pious Hindus don't agree with that, and they say I don't support that idea of neutrality. As you can probably predict when I asked them the question about temples should we rebuild temples that are falling down they say yes absolutely we should. But suddenly they changed their mind when asked about mosques and again, they don't say things like I don't like Muslim, you know they would say, most of you know if the mosque is falling down that's unfortunate but Muslim should pay for that themselves. This is a Hindu state this is a Hindu country. This is a Hindu civilization. We really don't. We really don't think that the government should be obligated to pay for this. So they're not saying openly bigoted things but they are saying things that are majoritarian is the term we would use whoever is the majority gets to basically run rough shot over the minority and many BJP politicians kind of make this argument, either explicitly or implicitly they say Muslims and other groups Christians and Jews and six and you know other religious India is is home to basically every religion in the world. They basically say that you know you you might have to accept being a second class citizen. This is a country where Hindus are first among equals. And so we don't find the religiosity effect for voting for the BJP, but it does mean we do find the effect in terms of neutrality so to go back to that original image of neutrality. Why is he going into the cave to try to get this image projected of himself as a, as a, as a, as a Hindu holy man who became a politician. It's not necessarily to get more votes right that that doesn't necessarily help him. It's maybe to undermine this idea of religious neutrality if more Hindus become pious, maybe they can continue to kind of erode this idea that India is a country that belongs to all religious traditions. They can start to inculcate this idea that India is a land for Hindus and everyone else who lives here has to accept being a second class citizen. So let me conclude just by kind of summarizing some of my main points and then thinking about how India could maybe be a branching off point to other other religions or other parts of the world. So I would argue that our existing research on Hinduism has measurement problems we can't just ask, do you believe in God do you pray do you go to temple we need more more complicated more sophisticated ways of measuring Hindu religiosity Hinduism is just not the same as Christianity or Islam or Judaism we have to think more broadly about how, how to measure it and I hope to do that in, in, in my ultimate goal is to try to do 10 states and 10,000. I've done about, you know, close to 1000 so far I hope to do 10,000 in total and give us really new detailed data about about Hindus in India. The main research finding from my survey is that Hindu religiosity is inversely related to support for secularism so the more religious you are the less support you have for secularism and really Indian secularism historically has been one of the country's success stories and so if that changes that would be very bleak and a very dark path for the country. Lastly, I would say, we should think about sometimes Hinduism is grouped with Buddhism Confucianism Shinto under the under the label of the Asian religions. So we need to think about new ways of measuring religiosity or or measuring religion and political behavior in these Asian traditions. I would argue that we still are looking at a lot of these countries and just thinking about using as our reference point Christianity and just assuming that these countries can be measured in the same way and that's that's always going to give us very deceptive and potentially incorrect research findings so I hope that maybe scholars working on these other traditions will be able to use some of this work as a as a branching off point to study other Asian traditions so much for your attentiveness I hope it wasn't too technical and I really look forward to to the Q&A. Thanks very much. Jay, we do have some some questions coming in. One has to do with women and fasting. Why is it that women in Hinduism tend to be more likely to be those that fast and any other gender differences that are particularly salient. Can you tell us about that please. Yeah, so I would say that there is this general idea and keep in mind India is a very patriarchal country right it's a country where 70% of people still live in villages and and still very patriarchal norms and in those places. Women are expected to be carriers of religion for the family. There were a lot of young people who I asked you do Pooja and they would say no my mom does it for the whole family or sometimes not not necessarily the mother but the grandmother or you know that the father's eldest sister who. This is not the nuclear family this is extended family. Actually in my survey the average number of people in a household was over 10. This is not you know mom and dad and two kids right this is grandma and maybe uncles and aunts and so women are supposed to be the people that kind of keep the flame they're the ones who always take religion. And so when it's a when it's the festival time and it's and someone in the family has to fast everyone understands, it's going to be the mother of the grandmother who does that and they do that for everybody that is part of their. That is that that is part of their role in the in the in the family in terms of other gender differences. And this is not just true in India but really surveys done in almost every country in the world show that women tend to be more religious than men tend to score higher on these metrics. So I think in lots of other countries women are expected to be more religious. One question that I asked everyone in the survey was I said who is the most religious person in your household, and the number one answer that people gave was my mother, the number two answer was my grandmother. So, there's there's a very strong sense that women are supposed to be the most religious person and and one last thing I'll say here is, you know I tell my students that even it's a even though it's a very patriarchal Mohandas Gandhi who led the Indian independence movement. He said in his autobiography he said the only reason I learned about Hinduism everything I know about Hinduism was was something I learned from my mother. She would recite stories to me she would sing songs to me, and I learned about being buried about from her so it can have a really big influence in politics more broadly. Yeah that's a great question. Another question. Is there a correlation between Hinduism not having any set beliefs and their religion not predicting how they will vote. Yes, absolutely I think so I think. You know, the BJP. The BJP more and more is trying to say, if you are a good Hindu if you are devout Hindu you should vote for us. But I think that because you can believe so many different things that argument doesn't necessarily work with voters because Hindu voters are so accustomed to thinking that I can believe this or I cannot believe this. If anyone tells me I have to vote for this party or that party. They live in a in a universe that that is very fluid and you're allowed to change your beliefs and it's not a very doctrinaire or a very credo religion. And so I definitely think there's a relationship there between between those two things as one person put it to me in an interview he said, there's no Hindu brigade that goes around and tells us who to vote for if I like someone I will vote for them but if they tell me I should do it because of Hinduism. That's that's not something that I'm going to do so I did meet people who are Hindu atheists that said, you know people try to tell me all the time I need to believe in God. There are so many thousands of gods and Hinduism why wouldn't you believe in one of them, and they often respond because I don't have to. That's the beauty of my religion is that I have a lot more scope to believe what I want to believe so I think that it absolutely does affect politics. Question in our democracy. Excuse me in our democracy there's a separation between church or religion and state in India are both religion and political affiliations merged. Yeah, so what's interesting is, according to the Supreme Court of India. Hinduism is is not a religion. They said in a very famous ruling that Hinduism because it doesn't have a strong set of beliefs because there aren't compulsory practices they said Hinduism is and they use this term that some Hindus prefer to use rather than religion. It's a way of life. It affects everything you do from the moment you get up to the moment you go to sleep. And that's not a religion. So, I don't agree with that I think, you know what the court said was, if you look at Christianity and Islam Hinduism is very different and so it's not a religion, and my response would be it's just a very different kind of religion. According to the Constitution in the in the 70s they added the term secular. And so India is technically is according to the Constitution is secular country. Census forms and other kinds of government forms will ask what is your religion. They don't give the option usually of no religion or atheist or anything like that. And so those identities on the one hand are not supposed to be super important but I think everyone understands that they are very important so you will get asked in India all the time you know what is your religion. What sect do you belong to. It's a very open common for you know sometimes here in the US we treat it as a private act but in India everything is kind of is very public so those identities can be very much intertwined. Okay, our questioner wants to explore how Hinduism correlates to cast, and maybe relatedly is cast still legal in India, and what's the, whether it's legal or not and how widely practiced. Yeah, so the, the, when they wrote the Constitution they technically abolish the caste system which had zero effect whatsoever it's it's kind of a big joke. It would be like you know if President Biden passed an executive order that said I abolish racism, right it wouldn't get rid of racism overnight, you can't get rid of the caste system overnight so. No, I think cast is still extremely important to almost all, not just Hindus but also people from other religions so people who are Muslim have cast people who are Christian can have cast. There are lots of different cast across religions. And so it is still very important. Most people like I said marry within their cast most people marry within their religion and so there's a lot of segregation between communities. I think that cast is a is usually tied to an occupation. And so you know you might be born like I said for example, they're educator cast so you might be born into a cast like I'm a college professor right so you might be born into a specific occupation like that. One interesting thing that's happening maybe maybe one area where you start to see the caste system breakdown is in in cities. There are lots of new jobs that are hard to categorize as being high cast or low cast. It's not it's not really clear so I was once at a talk where somebody said every day in India. In the pandemic, at least, there are about 5 million dominoes pizzas that are delivered dominoes pizza is really really big in India. And if you are someone who works for dominoes and you're a delivery boy, here in the US we would say, this is a job usually done by teenagers or you know it's it's not a job that requires a lot of education right you just have to have a car or a bike and you can deliver pizza. So if you're a caste occupation. I don't know you know, in order to work for dominoes you probably have to speak English. So that's an indicator that you're, you're not just educated but you're kind of Western educated. You're working for a large multinational corporation. Is that potentially a high, you know, it's hard to say if that's a low cast or a high cast occupation. So the caste system is still very important but I think more and more scholars are trying to figure out in the in the new economy. How do we, how do we peg some of these jobs as being high cast or low cast. In terms of relation to Hinduism. It is still hugely important in Hinduism, but again, it's important in other religions too so you can have people who are low cast who are Muslim or low cast who are who are Christian. So the caste system is not, it's not just Hindu it's kind of a pan Indian social system. A follow up question on cast, is it possible to change one's cast what happens if you want to upgrade your cast and not to be a laborer for example. You cannot change your cast no. You know, in the in the old days, the idea was maybe you could travel far away from from where you live if you're a laborer and you could go to another state you know 1000 miles away and kind of restart your life as a high cast but first of all most laborers couldn't afford to do that and second of all you wouldn't have the social connections and you know people can tell a lot about you just on the basis of the way you look or your last name so anyone who sees my last name in India would immediately know my religion, my cast what state I'm from, what language I speak that kind of thing and so it would be very hard to change your cast. So if you are low cast probably the only thing you could do is maybe you could marry someone from a higher cast. So that's not going to change that could change your, your economic situation not going to change your social status it might change the social status of your children, but whatever cast you are born into is, is basically your cast for life. We have a question or two touching on the diaspora of Hindus from India and elsewhere in the United States. For example, do most American Hindus continue with the same beliefs and traditions, or do these often become diluted after they've lived in the US for a while. And I was also thinking about intermarriage, many of us have been to weddings or know of couples where one partner is of a Hindu background and the other from a different faith tradition, Christian Judaism and so on. Please comment on the religiosity in the diaspora, if you could. Yeah, that's it's a good question and I sometimes think in the future maybe, especially during the pandemic I was thinking maybe it would be easier to do online surveys here in the meantime with with American Hindus, I think, you know, I'll be honest I'm not super knowledgeable about American Hindus, but what I understand is that sometimes there's this generational effect where the parents come here and, you know, try their best to get the kids to, you know, kind of uphold the traditions and usually at some point just kind of give up, and then the next generation, very often they try to kind of reconnect with India or reconnect with their traditions that kind of thing so I think one thing that is is noteworthy about the Hindu diaspora is that there are many members of the diaspora here in the United States who have funded, you know, especially those who have gotten quite rich in Silicon Valley or in, you know, in other kinds of fields, stem fields. They have funded organizations that that have tried to kind of spread awareness of Hinduism or kind of cultural organizations teach people about Hinduism to band together American Hindus. And I think a lot of people say that that American Hindus on average might be slightly more conservative than than other diasporic groups so I think there's a lot more research to be done to be done there but it's definitely a fascinating question. Um, can you point to any significant ways in which the media and particularly thinking of the internet and film movies in India, how has that shaped how is the media shape people's attitudes towards religion, politics and democracy for example. Yeah, how has media shaped American thoughts about Hinduism. Thinking in India, for example Indian film, wide availability of social media, and so on. Yeah, what one of the things that I really noticed. The last time I was in India is in 2019 was when I would talk to people and interview Hindus, you know very often. I'd give them my card or I'd say you know if you if you have any problems you have any issues with the survey, you can give me, you can give me a call. And I would notice that if you know if you know what this app, what's app, which is owned by Facebook. It's probably the most common messaging software in India, and more and more and more. Now hundreds of millions of people there have have cell phones and a large number have smartphones. I would start to get all these what's that messages every morning when I woke up and it would be an image of Ganesh that elephant headed Hindu God or Hanuman the monkey God and so you know it would say something like good morning or I hope you have a blessed day or these kinds of things and so all of that yes to doing the Namaste image all of that became really really common and I think has has definitely helped to spread Hinduism, especially among a younger generation of of Hindus. Thank you so much, Jay, our professor, our time is up, but I want to thank you very much for sharing these insights and your research findings with us and. Yes, thank you so much that was so interesting. And I'm with you on Rafael Nadal by the way. Thanks so much. And we'll see all you next week. Don't forget that survey is coming. See you soon. Thank you so much.