Heinz Werner Wessler is a professor of Indology at Uppsala University in Sweden. He focuses on Hindi and Urdu languages, cultural history, as well as religion and society in India and Pakistan.

This edition of ReligionLink provides background on what Hindu nationalism is, stories that show how it is influencing politics across the globe and experts to help you better understand its heady mix of ideological politics and national identity.

Azad Essa is a senior reporter for Middle East Eye based in New York City and author of Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel (2023).

Suraj Yengde is a research fellow at Harvard University and author of Caste Matters.

Ajantha Subramanian is an anthropology and South Asian studies professor at Harvard University whose research interests include colonialism and postcoloniality, South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Her book Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India chronicles the struggles for resource rights by Catholic fishers on India’s southwestern coast, with a focus on how they have used […]

Vasundhara Sirnate is a political scientist and journalist whose research includes counterinsurgency in South Asia, insurgent group dynamics in India, gender justice and societal violence. She was formerly the chief coordinator of research at the Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy and a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C.

Thomas Blom Hansen is a professor in South Asian studies and anthropology at Stanford University. His fieldwork was done during the 1990s when conflicts between Hindu militants and Muslims defined national agendas and produced frequent violent clashes in the streets. Out of this work came two books: The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in […]

Vinayak Chaturvedi is a history professor at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Hindutva and Violence and Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India.

Ananya Chakravarti is a professor at Georgetown University whose work focuses on early modern South Asia, the Portuguese empire, colonial Brazil, Brahmanism and the abuses of history. She is the author of The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodation and the Imagination of Empire in Early Modern Brazil and India.