Can Hinduism Survive in America?

[Prashant Parikh]

CAN HINDUISM SURVIVE IN AMERICA? - Aditi Banerjee

When I first seriously thought and wrote about the Hindu-American identity more than twenty years ago, I was more perhaps more naive with the brashness of youth when I thought the answer was an obvious yes.

With all the developments of the recent past, it was a question I needed to ask myself again.

It's a different world now. That was a time when multiculturalism and pluralism were valued; not that there wasn't racism and bigotry but people were learning to at least disguise those thoughts in their behavior and words. Now you have the Vice President of America publicly expressing his wish that his Hindu wife would convert to Catholicism.

But Vance is not the problem and Christians in America are not the problem. Muslims have no problem being devoutly Islamic in this country. Yes, they face prejudice and obstacles but that has not meaningfully stopped them. America is not an environment where it is difficult to be what you are and to express your self-identity; in fact, I can think of no other place in the world, even today, where individual self-expression and freedom to pursue one's path is more encouraged and facilitated. Most Americans, including Christians, are open-minded and gracious and have a mature worldview that allows for the co-existence of other worldviews-- the vitriolic hate mongers on social media are not a representative sample.

That being said, the political reality is and always has been that a non-Protestant near the keys of power will always be suspect. Look at what JFK had to go through to become President, because a large part of the population believed he would be beholden to the Vatican over the national interests of America. So, this is not new. It is just a new fact pattern as Hindus are becoming more successful and more powerful, in an individual capacity, that these fissures (that were always there) are becoming more obvious and explicit.  
The real issue is one that I do not think we want to face. The real issue is our own apathy and passivity in embracing our identity as Hindus. It is easier to outrage shrilly about real prejudice and bigotry and to use that as a fig leaf to disguise our own inadequacies and failings.

Usha Vance made a conscious decision some number of years ago to subordinate her Hindu identity for the sake of her marriage and in a sequence of steps along the way, marrying outside the faith, agreeing to raise her children in accordance with another faith, etc., that led to this place. I am not judging her, for she is not unique in this. We have hundreds of thousands of examples of the same thing in our lives, within our community, from Abrahamicizing our names to calling ourselves generically spiritual or agnostic or saying 'my grandparents and parents' believed in this' as a way of distancing ourselves from our own traditions and practices to not bothering to research or explore our identity to cheapening our most sacred auspicious occasions to nothing more than 'festivals' for hosting parties and eating catered food.

We have chosen to do that. In every day, we make hundreds of micro decisions that continue to perpetuate the abdication of our identity as Hindus. And 95% of that comes from our own psychology vs. true oppression or obstacles from external forces or society.

If that wasn't the case, then what you would see is a strong Hindu identity in the first generation of immigrants that then gets successively diluted down. But that is simply not the case. When temples are built, they are built as fiefdoms for a cabal of old uncles (and sometimes aunties) within an ethnolinguistic insular community to showcase their power and wealth. If I as a Bengali go to a Bengali temple, I will feel incredibly unwelcome because I am not one of the Bengali clique that will talk Bengali, eat Bengali food, and gossip with each other. In other words, the temples are not there to disseminate Dharma or be a place of congregation for Hindus. They are there to perpetuate the same ghettoization among Hindus that occurs in Bharat. Notable exceptions are ISKCON and BAPS which have a particular religious mandate and mission behind them.

How is Hinduism to survive in America if it is not even valued by the Hindus who come to America? Most kids growing up her do not even have passing knowledge of the Ramayana or the Mahabharata, and if they do go back to India, their experience is only being chauffeured from one relative's house to another and being stuffed with sweets. When they grow up, they do not want to go back. And, for the most part, so long as they do well in school and find a good job, their parents are fine with it (and as long as they do not marry people of an 'unacceptable' community, which, you can guess what that means). So, to the extent there is an identity out there, it is more about communal hatred of others than a true positive embracing of something within.

So, the challenge is not 'preserving' a Hindu identity, because, frankly, we lack it to begin with. The challenge is, as Swami Chinmayananda so pithily put it, to convert Hindus to Hinduism.
And that is why I am still as buoyantly optimistic, at the end of the day, as I was twenty plus years ago. My faith is not in Hindus but in Hindu Dharma. And the more we connect people with Dharma -- through practices of yoga and meditation and Bhakti and the sacred stories of the Itihaasa and the Puranas and the teachings of the Gita and Vedanta and cultivating relationships with the different forms of the Divine through the pantheon of our Devas and Devis -- then naturally there will be an organic growth of a Hindu-American community. And the content we have is so good, so rich, so alluring, that it need only speak for itself. We just have to put it out there. We are the ones getting in our own way; we are the ones who have not done that to date and we are the ones who can do it now.

I read somewhere today that the Abrahamic faiths are 'suitcase religions' that can be transported beyond the boundaries of their originating homelands while 'folk' religions like Hinduism are bound by the time and place in which they originate and are dependent on staying among the 'folk'. That 'folk' religions are not universal and therefore cannot be transmitted abroad. And that is the real danger, the real risk, of what we face today -- this kind of defeatist thinking that would make us give up and concede that Hindus and Hinduism cannot survive, let alone thrive, in America.
But all we have to do is look to history to see that this is simply not true. Hinduism and Buddhism flourished and spread across Asia, from Cambodia to Vietnam to Bali and Indoesia to Thailand and China and Japan. Dharma flourished and it did so without forcible conversion, without uprooting or threatening or dismantling the local traditions and culture. It was a syncretic coming together of different traditions and practices and cultures, emblematic of the best of the American dream and ideals.

If it worked then and there, it can and will work here and now. We should never ever forget that, and we should never ever give up hope"