Hinduism

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Hinduism

Of all the religions originating in Asia, Hinduism has the longest history in the United States. The Hindu tradition initially came to the country by way of books. Orientalists translated Hindu scriptures into English in the late eighteen century, long before they turned their attentions to Buddhist translations. So when Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau mused about Asian religions in the 1830s and 1840s, they were for the most part musing about Hindu thought. Thoreau praised the "vast and cosmogonal philosophy" of the Bhagavad-Gita and fancied himself a yogi. Many of Emerson's essays and poems, including "Illusion," "Compensation," and "Brahma," were inspired by Hindu ideas. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, Buddhism had replaced Hinduism as the Asian religion of choice for American intellectuals. Theosophists Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott formally converted to Buddhism in 1880, and the Boston Brahmins of the late nineteenth century were far more interested in Buddhist than in Hindu scriptures.

Hinduism's U.S. history changed dramatically when people, not just books, began to give voice to the tradition. Swami Vivekananda became the first Hindu missionary to the United States when he accepted an invitation to attend the World's Parliament of Religions, an interreligious congress held in Chicago in 1893 as part of the World's Columbian Exposition (World's Fair). By most accounts, Swami Vivekananda, a teacher of Advaita Vedanta, a monistic form of Hinduism that preaches religious tolerance and views Brahman (God) as equivalent to Atman (Self), was the most celebrated figure at the Parliament. His splendid British English and sharp intellect captured the imagination of the crowds and gave the lie to stereotypes about heathens from Asia. After the Parliament, Vivekananda lectured widely across the United States. In 1894 in New York City, he established the first of many Vedanta societies. He also paved the way for generations of Hindu gurus to come.

Like Vivekananda, Swami Paramahansa Yogananda came to the United States to attend an interreligious conference, in his case the International Congress of Religious Liberals, held in Boston in 1920 under the auspices of Unitarians, who since the nineteenth century had demonstrated a keen interest in monotheistic forms of Hinduism. Swami Yogananda also traveled across the United States, supporting himself as a lecturer. Unlike his predecessor, however, Yogananda did not return to his homeland. And instead of teaching Vivekananda's Advaita Vedanta philosophy, Yogananda spread the practice of "Kriya Yoga," which he promoted as the "airplane route" to God-realization. Yogananda established the Self-Realization Fellowship (incorporated in 1935), which swiftly replaced the Vedanta Society as America's largest Hindu organization.

Hinduism emerged on the public scene in the 1960s, when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi replaced Swami Yogananda as the most prominent guru in the United States. The Maharishi taught Transcendental Meditation (TM), a mantra-chanting practice that he and his followers insisted was secular rather than religious. Although the Maharishi arrived in the United States from India in 1959, he soon came to personify a wide array of Hindu teachers who immigrated after 1965. Sharing the Maharishi's spotlight was A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, whose International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) and its Hare Krishnas brought a new style of Hindu practice—popular devotionalism—to the U.S. scene.

Hinduism was also represented by U.S.-born teachers, such as Be Here Now (1971) author Ram Dass and by Indian-born gurus such as Satya Sai Baba, who managed to obtain American followers without ever leaving India. After capturing the imagination of the rock group the Beatles in the 1960s, Hinduism achieved star status again in the 1990s through the well-publicized flirtations of pop stars Madonna and Sting with Yoga. As the century drew to a close, however, Buddhism (now in its Tibetan form) had once again replaced Hinduism as the Asian religion of choice among trendsetting Americans.

One reason for Hinduism's low profile was the relatively small size of the Indian immigrant community. Immigration from Asia to the United States was initiated by the Chinese, who first came following the discovery of gold in California in 1848. The Japanese came next, and they were followed by Asian Indians, who came in far fewer numbers and did not begin to arrive until the first decade of the twentieth century. All these pioneering Indian immigrants were called "Hindoos," but few actually practiced what we now call Hinduism. Most were Sikhs (practitioners of a distinct religious tradition that creatively combines elements of Islam and Hinduism), and roughly one-third were Muslims.

Like the Chinese and the Japanese who preceded them, Asian Indians were objects of racial and religious hatred. A series of anti-Indian riots broke out on the West Coast in 1907. In 1917 the U.S. Congress responded to popular complaints about the "Hindoo invasion" by including India in restrictive legislation that effectively cut off immigration from India and other "barred zones" until 1965. Hinduism itself came under attack in Katherine Mayo's Mother India (1927), which denounced the religion as both inhumane and sexist. In the 1970s, "anticult" activists focused their energies on "deprogramming" family members from ISKCON, and American feminist theologian Mary Daly revived the hostile spirit of Mayo's Mother India when she reduced the Hindu tradition to widow-burning in Gyn/Ecology (1978).

After the passage of less restrictive immigration legislation in 1965, immigration from Asia in general and India in particular boomed. The 1990 U.S. census counted 815,447 Asian Indians in the United States. Indians who arrived in the United States after 1965 differed significantly from the earlier immigrant cohort. In the early twentieth century, Indian immigrants came from rural areas and worked in the United States as agricultural laborers. Almost all were men, and many came from the Punjab region in northern India. In religion, Sikhism and Islam predominated. In the later period, nearly all were Hindus. Men and women came together with their families. They hailed from a wide variety of Indian regions, settled in urban rather than rural areas, and worked disproportionately in professional occupations. In studies conducted in the 1990s, these Indian Americans ranked exceptionally high in both education and income. Perhaps more than any other group of Asian immigrants, they lent plausibility to the now-contested "model minority" stereotype.

But they belied stereotypes about immigrants losing their distinctive religious beliefs and practices to meld into Judeo-Christian America. In fact, post-1965 immigrants from India appear, in many cases, to have become more rather than less religious after immigrating to the United States. In a country that was coming to value multiculturalism as much as it had once valued assimilation, being Hindu was becoming a way of crafting an American identity.

Thanks to this trend, combined with the social and economic successes of Indian Americans, the period from the mid-1970s to the end of the century was a bricks-and-mortar era characterized by temple building. In 1977, Hindus consecrated the country's first major Indian-style Hindu temples: the Sri Ganesha Temple (now called the Maha Vallabha Ganapati Devasthanam) in Flushing, New York; and the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1999, roughly 150 Hindu temples had been consecrated in the United States, and there was at least one in virtually every major U.S. city.

While these temples preserved many elements of Indian temple architecture, they added some American twists. Because Hindu families could initially afford to build only one temple in each urban area, U.S. temples tended to accommodate a wide variety of regional, linguistic, and sectarian differences. While in India even a small village could often accommodate separate shrines to key divinities such as Shiva, Vishnu, and Mahadevi, in U.S. temples those deities learned to get along. At Flushing's Sri Ganesha Temple, a model of this new ecumenism, at least thirty-two deities coexisted amiably, and members could be heard speaking Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, and Bengali. American temples also distinguished themselves from their Indian forebears by carving out space for an array of social activities that in India would have taken place elsewhere. Hindu temples in the United States typically included sanctuaries for congregational worship (rare in India) as well as kitchens and meeting rooms for social functions and the education of children. Because many of these activities took place in temple basements, one scholar has referred to this development as "split-level Hinduism."

At the end of the century, American Hinduism remained an ongoing experiment. Like members of other immigrant communities, American Hindus grappled with how to live in a diaspora as transnationals with loyalties to two countries. Student members of the vibrant Hindu Students Council (established in 1990) wrestled with how closely they should align themselves with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), India's Hindu nationalist party. And parents struggled to inculcate in their children values that will help them succeed in a country whose business was business without jettisoning the spiritual and ethical values handed down to them by ancestors and in books.