The Truschke Purana: A saga in Hinduphobia March 16, 2021, 3:50 PM IST Avatans Kumar is a linguist who writes frequently on the topics of Indic Knowledge Tradition, language, culture, and current affairs. Avatans is a JNU and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumnus. LESS... MORE A few days ago, The Rutgers University in Newark, NJ, put out a statement. It was a pledge of support for one of its faculty’s “academic freedom.” The statement also denounced “vile” attacks on her faculty. The faculty in question was Audrey Truschke, an Associate Professor of South Asian History. One cannot overstate enough the importance of Rutgers’s statement. We are witnessing an unprecedented era of ‘cancel culture.’ Scores of teachers, journalists, authors, and other professionals are losing their jobs. Their books are being withdrawn from the shelf and publication. They are being subjected to threats and abuse for even the most trivial ideological differences and the slightest of provocations. Many American institutions, including institutions of higher learning, are going through a turbulent period. The situation is grim now that the incubation and flirtations of the past few decades with totalitarian and intolerant Leftist ideology have finally started to show fruition. Such a climate of illiberalism led some high-profile intellectuals (Noam Chomsky et al.) to pen an open letter (Harper’s Letter). The letter denounced the “intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” Even more troubling, they write, is the fact that “institutional leaders, in the spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.”