For better or worse, the study of religion harbors one of the last great bastions of Orientalism: the academic study of Asia (and especially, of Asia's past). Despite numerous excavations of the imperial inheritance of religious studies, reflection on the afterlives of Orientalism in contemporary religious studies curricula has rarely been undertaken. Using the example of Hindu studies, this presentation describes religious studies pedagogy within the multicultural university as an assimilating project continuous with earlier Orientalist tendencies. I ask what it would mean to return the religious pasts of "Asia," not only to those selected by model minority discourse, but to the BIPOC erstwhile "primitives" effectively excluded by Orientalism.
