Honoring Two Centuries of Hinduism’s Powerful Influence in America

HI INDIA SPECIAL REPORT
BY AJAI AGNIHOTRI
Hinduism, the world’s oldest religion, has no beginning— it precedes recorded history. It has no human founder. It is a mystical religion, leading the devotee to personally experience the Truth within and reaching the pinnacle of consciousness where man and God are one. Hinduism has four main denominations—Saivism, Shaktism, Vaishnavism and Smartism
City of Lombard near Chicago prepares to host the three-day World Hindu Conference (WHC) 2018 from September 7th through September 9th, 2018. Held every four years, WHC offers the global Hindu community a unique opportunity and platform to exchange ideas over its cultural, philosophical, and entrepreneurial depth across the globe. “WHC also serves as a platform to address critical issues impacting Hindus worldwide, including human rights, discrimination, and cultural assaults,” explains the conference’s official website.
The underlying theme of the conference is the ancient Hindu principle of “Sumantrite Suvikrante” or Think Collectively, Achieve Valiantly. It happens to take place on the eve of the 125th anniversary of Swami Vivekananda’s historic address to the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago on September 11, 1893, which electrified the American audiences for its profound universality.
In many ways, Hinduism is getting Americanized. That makes it surprising that no distinctly American Hindu gods or goddesses have yet emerged. This may reflect the fact that immigrant Hindus still look to India for authority and tradition. The process of ritual adaptation is evident in other ways as well. Hindus in the United States commonly give their rituals a symbolic interpretation. It may have to do with immigration or modernization. Nevertheless, Hindus in the United States give their rituals a metaphorical meaning, more so than their Indian counterparts.
Hinduism came to the United States first in the American imagination and only second with emissaries and immigrants from India. The initial features of Hinduism that captivated North Americans were those that were lauded for their compatibility with Protestant Christianity and those that were derided for their incompatibility with the same. The Hinduism that flourished in the North American context drew heavily from the neo-Vedantic theology of monism, which was propagated by Hindu reform movements in the 19th century.
Immigrant Hindus in the United States contributed knowingly, and unknowingly, to certain trends in the development of American Hinduism. Hindus did not migrate to America in large numbers until after 1965, when changes in U.S. immigration law allowed—even encouraged—the professionally trained among them to do so. American Hindus still did not come to the attention of mainstream Americans until increasing number of Hindus immigrant started building temples and gathering publicly for worship. Hinduism and Hindus were changed as a result of the migrant experience.
These new immigrants were overwhelmingly well-educated and trained in high-paying professions. This fact shaped the Indian Hindu immigrant community in important and unique way,“routes,” as well as “roots” became important for them.
Due to their education and wealth, the experience of Indian doctors, nurses, engineers, and scientists who migrated to the U.S. after 1965 was vastly different than that of previous migrants, many of whom had arrived penniless and without professional skills. Far from being despised, Indian immigrants came to be seen as “model minorities,” their “success” being used to chide other Americans for their perceived lack thereof. The professional nature of Indians who migrated to the U.S. also differentiated them from others, who had initially come to America as sojourning laborers.
Hindu immigrants have assimilated in many ways to American life, and while the nature of their Hinduism itself has changed, they have not changed their religious affiliation or ceased to participate in their Hindu life. This is in contrast to immigrants from other countries who attempted to Americanize as quickly as possible.
Indians on the other hand had a strong interest in maintaining their Indian identity and looking within their own communities for cultural support. Even as the idea of the melting pot and its attendant assimilation began to give way to notions of pluralism and multiculturalism, Indian American immigrants have been able to retain their religious particularity.
Early Hindu immigrants happily substituted religion for race as a marker of group identity so that they could “declare difference without confrontation, diverting the issue of race into one of congenial cultural variation”. Hindu immigrants became more religious for two reasons: because whereas many of them immigrated as students, they had since become householders interested in passing along their traditions to their children, and because in the absence of trained specialists, Hindus have had to work to create and sustain their own religious institutions. Hindu immigrants in America consider themselves more religious than prior to their immigration, even though immigration provides freedom to break religious ties as well as to reformulate them.
Hinduism has changed in many ways as a result of Americanization. Three main concepts of Hinduism being Americanized have: Ecumenization, Congregationalization, and Ritual adaptation.
Sociological pressures encouraged the development of an ecumenical type of Hinduism in the U.S. This ecumenical Hinduism tended towards the use of Sanskrit and English in ritual contexts (rather than regional languages) and united “deities, rituals, sacred texts, and people in temples and programs in ways that would not be found together in India”.
Socio-cultural factors in the U.S. contributed to the development of an ecumenical Hinduism tolerant of regional, linguistic and sectarian differences. In the U.S., Hindus are frequently called upon to explain to others what “Hindus believe”. Hindu yuppies are today fashioning a kind of “generic Hindu” outlook, which involves, among other things, one or more of the following assertions: 1) Hinduism is a philosophy or way of life, not a religion, 2) Hinduism is a tolerant religion, 3) Ultimate reality, though one, manifests itself as a trinity (the trimurti, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva), and 4) Hindu rituals have an inner meaning which frequently has to do with “promoting good health and a safe environment”.
It is important to emphasize, however, that the rationalization and homogenization of Hindu belief has been ongoing for some time in America.
Congregationalization— While some Hindus in the United States retain the more common Indian practice of visiting a temple only sporadically, many find themselves attending more frequently than they would have in India. Moreover, temple attendance in the U.S. is far more communal and concentrated on the weekends (and especially on Sundays) than in India. Busy weekday work schedules are the deciding factor in these developments.
Protestantization— The pressure to conform to other dominant religious ritual norms in America, encourage entire religious communities to gather together regularly on the weekends. Hindus take their children to the local temple nearly every Sunday morning, so they will have an answer to non-Hindus.

Hinduism came to USA in different formats in different eras:
In the 20th century, the population of Indian Hindus immigrating to the United States increased and began to challenge the status quo. These Hindus were not gurus or yogis who were interested in developing followings among white audiences. They were families concerned about maintaining their cultural and religious traditions. They also came from diverse regions of India, and they brought their sectarian and regional practices and devotions with them. After the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, Indian Hindus worked diligently to create community networks by establishing temples and religious organizations. These religious spaces provided the infrastructure to maintain and further ethnic identities as well. In most cases, Hindu temples and organizations continue to be internally focused on providing resources to communities of Indian Hindus, such as language and scripture instruction, social support networks, ethnic food, and pan-Indian and regional festivals and events.
Outside traditional forms of home altars, temple worship, and festivals, there are many ways in which Hinduism has influenced American culture. The guru movements that flourished in the countercultural spiritual experimentation in the 1960s continue to draw followers today. In fact, the guru field in the United States has diversified significantly, and many gurus have established successful ashram communities across the nation. The New Age movement of the 1990s also brought rekindled interest in Hinduism, often re-coded as Indian spirituality, and this has sponsored a new wave of gurus and their teachings and the rampant expansion of postural yoga practice in the United States.

Imaginaries of Hinduism (1790–1893)
The image of Hindus and Hinduism arrived at the shores of North America long before significant populations of Indian Hindus did. As a result, the story of Hinduism in North America begins with white Americans and their imaginings of Hinduism. In addition to commerce, Christians from North America were some of the first missionaries to establish residence in India in 1800-1900.
In the early 19th century, Raja Rammohan Roy, who became the founder of the Brahmo Samaj in 1828, became the first Hindu whose monistic interpretations of Hinduism became popularized in the United States.
Rammohan Roy understood that Hindu customs were viewed alternately with abhorrence and fascination by the American onlookers. In response, he formulated a new Hinduism focused on scriptures, with which he aimed to rebut the scathing critiques of the missionaries. Americans balked at what they viewed to be the bloody, sexualized, cacophonic, ritualized, and superstitious practices of the Hindus. As in the broader field of orientalist discourse, American publications and popular opinions oscillated between disgust and fascination, condemnation and attraction, disavowal and allure. At this time, the majority of North Americans accessed information about Hinduism through books and publications, rather than contact with Hindus.

Hindu Preachers From 1893–1965
The majority of accounts of Hinduism in North America begin with the cataclysmic events of the World’s Parliament of Religions at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. There Swami Vivekananda spoke on behalf of Hinduism. Vivekananda introduced Hinduism, he explained the singular, omnipotent, formless God who resided at the heart of the most ancient Vedic tradition. He declared that there was no polytheism in India, only the misunderstandings of uneducated people. He validated the fundamentality of the Vedas and, drawing from them, explained that “the Hindu believes that he is a spirit” and that his “soul” is not “bound by the conditions of matter” but instead is “free, unbounded, holy and pure and perfect.” He told his American audiences that the doctrine of love in the Vedas teaches us to worship “the pure and formless one,” “the All-mighty and the All-merciful,” through love.
He also championed Hinduism as a religion that has taught the world “toleration” and “universal understanding” and believes all religions to be true. Vivekananda was instrumental in popularizing the neo-Vedantic view that all religions are “the same light coming through different colors, But in the heart of everything the same truth reigns.” He was vastly influential in spreading his reformist vision of Hinduism in the United States, but also he began to develop a following of disciples who were interested in the practical methods behind his philosophical teachings.
In the United States, Vivekananda’s legacy found a home in the Vedanta Societies that he established and that continue to flourish in the present day. The structure in San Francisco that is frequently identified as the first Hindu temple in the United States, established in 1906. Despite restrictive immigration policy and nativist public sentiments, several Hindu emissaries from India entered the North American scene to build on Vivekananda’s legacy.
Owing to restrictive U.S. immigration policy, Hinduism could not enter into mainstream America as anything other than a caricature of its Indian expressions for decades. The Hindu leaders who did enter the United States during this period and the singular institution of the Vedanta Society struggled to extract followers from mainline American religions.
Hindu Communities in USA From 1965 Onward

Factors evolved Hinduism in USA since 1965
1.Temples
After 1965, the Immigration and Naturalization Act caused immigration from India to increase by 2,800 percent. For the first time in U.S. history, Indian Hindus arrived in significant numbers. When these immigrants arrived, they found limited resources for the expression of traditional forms of Hinduism available in the United States. Despite their educational status, they often found themselves bound by stereotypes of their ethnic and religious heritage and sometimes persecuted by expressions of individual and institutionalized racisms.
Whatever the factors, Hindus in the United States gather together in large numbers for common worship experiences, usually on the weekends. Moreover, while temples in India are often privately established and endowed, in the United States, temple development more frequently follows the other religious groups pattern whereby groups of people incorporate, elect executive board members, solicit volunteer labor, and conduct fundraisers. This voluntaristic model is in many ways distinctly American, and certainly not the norm in India. Related to these changes in Hindu American life is the growing importance of the temple community itself. Whereas in India most rituals are conducted in the domestic setting, individually or in small groups, temples are slowly coming in the United States to rival homes as the focus of ritual activity.
Even festivals which are largely observed in the home in India, such as Deepawali, are just as frequently now celebrated at the temple. The important reason for this is that temples in the United States have become centers of cultural celebration and preservation, as well as places for Hindu Americans to find one another, network, and build friendships. In India temples do not need to perform these tasks. “The temple is more than a religious institution, it is a cultural center, a place for dialogue, a place for Indian adults to reaffirm their heritage, for their children to discover who they are”. In USA Life-cycle rituals (samskaras), of which there are traditionally around sixteen, are also difficult to manage. In America, the list of sixteen samskaras often gets pared down to seven or eight; many U.S. Hindus observe only the four or five samskaras, they deem most important. These rituals are also performed in Temples under the religious guidance.
Temple building became one of the primary means by which Indian Hindu communities sought to assert their presence in the American religious landscape and foster centers for the expression of cultural and religious values. Once Hindu communities had found their footing in the American context, one of the first communal dreams was often the establishment of a temple wherein Hindus could worship but also where they might connect with each other and teach their children about Hinduism.
Despite their regional differences, Hindus soon found that they needed to band together in expressions of communal solidarity. Some of the first temples established in the United States hosted a variety of Hindu deities, deities who would have been separated by sectarian or geographic traditions in India but who were hosted together in temple complexes in the United States. The Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago hosts Shaivite, Vaishnavite, and Devi images and figurines.
As Hindu populations increased in strength, diversity, and financial resources, this physical expression of ecumenism decreased. In New York, Texas, and New Jersey, where there were concentrations of Hindu populations, sectarian groups began to raise capital in order to support temples dedicated to specific sectarian traditions.
As of today, there are approximately 450 Hindu temples in the United States.
One of the most important additions to the temple architecture of Hinduism in the United States has been the rapid expansion of BAPS Swaminarayan Hinduism. Significant populations of immigrant Indian Hindus in the United States are from the Indian state of Gujarat, the birthplace of the modern guru Swaminarayan. BAPS Swaminarayan Hinduism began as a guru devotional movement, but it soon became articulated as a branch of traditional Hinduism. It has also strategically focused on building elaborate and ornate temple complexes in major urban centers. As a result, BAPS Swaminarayan temples have become tourist attractions and highly visible representations of traditional Hinduism around the globe.
They have become epicenters for the Hindu community and cultural and religious ambassadors of Hinduism for the general public. Their emphasis on the glories of Vedic culture, traditional gender roles, and conservative (and sometimes political) Hinduism has also influenced Hindu thought in the United States considerably.
The influx of temples in the United States provided expressions for the devotional and ritualistic aspects of Hinduism that had been largely ignored in the U.S. context in institutional arenas. While previous generations of Hindu immigrants had maintained the custom of domestic shrines and altars, now temples became primary sites wherein to host devotional rituals and festival occasions honoring particular Hindu deities. Temples established forums for these devotional and ritual activities, as well as sanctuaries for the performance of life-cycle rituals—marriages, funerals, first feedings, sacred thread rites, and so on.
They also became congregational centers for community networking and development. Often times, temples established curricula for the study of Hindu scriptures and other cultural heritage preservation activities, such as language classes, cooking classes, workshops providing immigration information, and community development. Spaces is used as hosting congregational gatherings on Sundays that involve preaching and hymns. Temples often host priests (pujari) from India to live in residence, which fosters transnational relationships between Hindu communities in India and in the United States.
2.Organizations
The 1980s and 1990s signified a major milestone in the “institutionalization of Hinduism” in the United States. 27 Hindu immigrant communities in the United States became particularly motivated to establish Hindu resources, such as educational materials, student networks, and defense organizations in response to their children’s exposure to negative stereotyping. Religious and cultural allegiances are a critical influence on identity formation in the dislocated context of the immigrant experience. The hybrid or hyphenated identity that emerges (Indian American/Hindu American) from the adoption and valorization of native culture and religiosity confirms the appropriate ethnic status on immigrants now positioned in culturally recognizable intellectual spaces.
After 1965, Hindus established organizations that aimed to unite Hindus in North America and to connect diaspora Hindus with Hindus in India. In efforts to connect with politics affecting Hindus at home, many organizations were formed modeled after contemporary Indian organizations. These organizations are an integral branch of the nationalist Hindutva ideological project; they also work to unite, represent, and advocate for all American Hindus. These umbrella Hindu organizations are one of the most vital arenas for the construction of Hinduism in North America, because they are explicitly engaged in knowledge-building projects, from elementary curricula to monitoring the production of Hinduism through academic publications and university-level instruction. Encyclopedia of Hinduism is one example.
This emphasis on controlling the educational instruction about Hinduism largely derives from a fear of misrepresentation. In the United States, many Indian Hindus continue to be dismayed and offended at the manner in which their religion and culture have been presented in elementary, secondary, and university publications in the United States. Sometimes school textbooks contain factual errors and racist stereotypes. They argued that the representation of Hinduism is a caricature comprising no more than “caste, cows, and curry.”
Hindu centrism and Hindu nationalism, which are steadily gaining influence among diaspora populations, are products of American multiculturalism.

3.Gurus (1965–Present)
After 1965, the USA opened borders to a wide assortment of gurus who arrived from India to advocate for Hinduism. Many Gurus– A.C. Bhakti Vedanta Swami Prabhupada (ISKON), Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Bhagwan Rajneesh (OSHO), Swami Muktananda, Swami Satchidananda, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (Art of Living), Mata Amritanadamayi and many others. Each of these gurus brought particular theologies and methods to bear on Hindu traditions. Each of them attracted both Indian Hindus and non-Indian Hindus to their followings. Gurus had derived their teachings from Hinduism
Contemporary gurus have multifaceted and varied relationships to their parent tradition of Hinduism. They espouse their distinct theologies and practices but flavor them with ecumenism, fostered by the ideal that all religions are ultimately one. In many of these cases, the gurus have even gone so far as to eschew the term Hinduism, if not the Hindu roots that inform their ideologies and methods. Instead, in efforts to attract non-Hindu followers, many have chosen to identify their movements as spiritual, or even as secular and scientific. The result has been the proliferation of guru-led movements and organizations in the United States that are best referred to as Hindu-derived or Hindu-inspired.
Unlike the majority of Hindus around the world, Gurus, their devotees and their organizations focused their attention on spreading their religious views to strangers. Several of these guru-led communities established significant ashrams (religious hermitages) that housed temples, dormitories for devotees, schools, classes, and retreats. Some of them were open and welcoming toward the general public, while others were protectionist and exclusive to devotees only. The most historically significant were the Vedanta Societies, Hollywood, CA; Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship, Encinitas, CA; Bhagwan Rajneesh (Osho)’s ashram complex, Rajneeshpuram, in Oregon; ISKCON’s New Vrindaban in West Virginia; Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Maharishi University in Fairfield, IA; and Kripalu’s ashram in MA, Mata Amritanandamayi’s large ashram in San Francisco, CA as well as dozens of others across the country. Shree Ma, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Shirdi Sai Baba, Sathya Sai Baba, Muktananda, Nithyananda, and many other gurus have established centers across USA, which have contributed to the increasing institutionalization of Hindu-inspired, guru-led religions in the United States.

4.Yoga
Many of the gurus drew their practices in some fashion from the Indic teachings of yoga. Yoga is a multifaceted term that is used in many different contexts and draws on Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. In Hindu scriptures, such as the Bhagavad Gita, there are several paths to liberation. In these cases, the paths themselves are referred to as Yoga: Bhakti Yoga is the path of devotion, Karma Yoga is the path of action, and Jnana Yoga is the path of knowledge. Some gurus have advocated for the path of Kriya Yoga, the path of contemplation.
In popular USA parlance the term Yoga has begun to signify modern Postural Yoga. The postural yoga draws from multiple Indic religious traditions, not only Hinduism, and that the yoga curricula implemented in the Encinitas public schools were largely secularized and not Hindu in content. In order for Hindu ideas to become accepted into mainstream American culture, many of their non-Indian Hindu proponents have erased term Hinduism in favor of terms like spirituality, yoga, and meditation. The result is that many ideas derived from Hinduism are not attributed to Hinduism, and this continues to foster debates about religious misrepresentation and erasure in the public sphere.
5.Literature
The literature regarding Hinduism in the United States is still developing as a distinct subfield to the study of Hinduism, gurus, and yoga more generally. As a result, much of the literature that addresses forms of Hindu-derived religiosity in the United States is located within research studies that may include sections on the United States but are focused on India or globally. Literature on Hinduism focused on 20th-century and contemporary Indian Hindu communities in the United States have contributed broadly to the sociological understanding of Hinduism within the analytical frame of immigration and religion.

6.Social Pressure and Acceptance
First generation Indian immigrants rarely discuss issues of racism publicly. As beneficiaries of the law of 1965, the upper middle class, well-educated Indian immigrants who came to the United States mostly accepted the “model minority” label placed on them and other minority groups whose educational and economic achievements outpaced those of the white, American born majority. Race is often only addressed in terms of ethnicity, national origin, or some generalized experience of “foreignness” or marginality. Thus, experiences that may otherwise appear to have involved racism are interpreted to be about “accents” and “pungent food”. The American society, who had been exposed to the Hindu religion through American and their sensationalized accounts of the putatively “Hindoo” practices of sati, child marriage, and the Jagganath festival. Americans were clearly suspicious of the people associated with this religion, conflated all Indians with Hindoos, and imagined the “Hindoo race” as unassimilable in American society.
Those of the first generation may not always recognize or admit to recognizing racism in the American context, their children, who have very much grown up in an American society that reproduces racialized social structures, are better equipped to identify it when they see it, and are more likely to name it as racism when they experience it. The second generation still bears the weight of the “model minority” label and isn’t always ready to admit experiencing racism in the context of its religious experiences, but is certainly more likely to do so than the immigrant generation. The first generation, in contrast, either ignores experiences of racism or reacts to them, by embracing the ideas of Hindu nationalists.
The Development of an American Hinduism provides perhaps the most extensive treatment of the relationship between Hindutva and Hindu Americans of Indian origin. The majority of Hindus of Indian origin participate in religious practices and are involved in religious communities that do not publicly accept the ideology of Hindutva.
In this age of economic globalization and instant communication, it is far more accurate to assume that there are stronger ties- social, cultural, and religious connections across national borders. Providing American communities with access to seminars and conferences would explain and answer to the myths and mystery surrounding the Hindu religion.