Hindu Americans facing growth, challenge
On Saturday afternoon the reporters attending the annual convention of the Religion Newswriters Association boarded a pair of buses from downtown Minneapolis out to Maple Grove, a small community in the northwest corner of greater Minneapolis-St. Paul where, on 80 acres surrounded by farmland, the region’s Hindu community is completing work on what they claim is the largest Hindu temple in the U.S.
The Hindu Temple of Minnesota is quite a sight – a massive boxy structure surrounding an ornate gray tower with a wedding cake top featuring layer upon layer of sculptured lotuses and icons. Inside there are lots of conventional communal spaces – a library, meeting rooms, a cafeteria and an auditorium, and one striking room, lit by a series of skylights, in which 21 shrines ring a large open floor area. This temple is unlike anything you would see in India -- there, temples are typically centered on a single deity, but because this is the U.S., where the Hindu community hails from all over India as well as the Hindu diaspora, the temple opted for a variety of shrines to meet the needs and devotional practices of a diverse group of worshipers. When we visited, there were families and individuals bringing offerings of food and money to various shrines, there were worshipers praying silently, touching their foreheads to the floor or lying fully prostrate for a while, there was a large group praying collectively as a priest performed a ritual at the shrine of Lord Vishnu, and there was a group of adults and children silently circling a group of statues intended to represent the planets.
The temple serves an estimated 40,000 Hindus in Minnesota and the surrounding states; the community had been worshiping in a former church starting in 1978, broke ground for the temple in 2003, and finished most of the work this year. The temple was the site of a horrific incident of vandalism in 2006, when two young men broke in and decapitated, dismembered, and disfigured the icons; remarkably, the Hindu community then reached out to and befriended the vandals, who are now college students, and even included them in a ceremony at which the destroyed icons were buried.
After the tour, I moderated a panel on Hinduism in America featuring three experts on the subject, Anantanand Rambachan, the chairman of the religion department at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, who gave an overview of American Hinduism; Khyati Joshi, an education professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, who talked about her research on second-generation Hindu-Americans, and Suhag Shukla, the managing director of the Hindu American Foundation, who talked about issues facing Hindus in the American public square.
Rambachan is a minority within a minority – he comes from Trinidad, and before the panel we were talking a bit about the relationship between Hindu Americans from India and those from elsewhere (there are sizable Hindu populations in the West Indies, South Africa, Mauritius, and Fiji, among other places). Rambachan told me there are definitely tensions, partly related to class, because many of the Hindu immigrants from the Caribbean are working class, whereas those from South Asia tend are often professionals, but also related to linguistic and cultural differences.
The Hindu population in the U.S. is estimated to be between 1.5 million and 2 million people; Hindus only began to arrive in significant numbers after the immigration act of 1965, and today the vast majority of Hindu-American adults were born outside the U.S. All three speakers talked about challenges facing the community.
The biggest challenge, of course, is transmitting the faith from immigrants, most of whom grew up in a predominantly Hindu society, to their children, who are growing up in a predominantly Christian society. Temples are launching religious education programs, modeled after those in churches and synagogues, but Rambachan said there are other issues – for example, Hindus will have to decide what language to use for worship, and, he asked, “can we visualize English being a liturgical language for Hindus?” He called Hinduism “the least understood among American religious traditions,’’ noting Judaism, Christianity and Islam which “are all suspicious about imaging the divine” and emphasize the oneness of God, whereas Hinduism offers a plethora of iconography and “celebrates a multiplicity of divine names and forms.’’
Both Joshi and Shukla talked about the arrival of large numbers of Hindus on college campuses, the children of the immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s. Joshi said many of those students are flocking to courses on Hinduism and South Asian studies seeking to better understand their own heritage and faith – she said many feel ill-informed about their own family traditions. “Some are reluctant to identify as Hindus,’’ she said, and others feel ill-equipped to explain or even practice their own faith. Shukla also noted challenges for Hindus on college campuses, particularly in the form of aggressive conversion campaigns by various Christian organizations.
A final interesting issue that struck me, as a reporter often called upon to find out how various faith groups feel about public policy issues, was the observation by several of the panelists that Hinduism is often practiced in private, and that the religion doesn’t have a strong tradition of articulating a position on public policy issues. Priests in Hinduism do not really play the same role as Christian or Jewish clergy -- Hindu priests are experts at performing rituals, but are not necessarily scholars or theologians. So now, Hindu leaders in the U.S. are grappling with the question of who speaks for their community, and whether and how the Hindu community becomes, collectively, a players in the nation's public policy debates.
(Photo, by Erica Noonan/Globe staff, shows religion reporters at the entryway to the Hindu Temple in Maple Grove, Minn. on Sept. 12, 2009.)
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I remember after 9/11/2001 some Hindu's were attacked because they were mistaken as Muslums ( not that attacking Muslums is right) . Most people I have met do not know the difference between Muslums and Hindus.
America is a country that is Christian religous concetric and has along ways to go to achieve religous tolerance. The irony is America was founded on the principal of religous freedom but has yet to exhalt those proctices.
That's because most people in Amarica are not religious at all. In years gone by there was a strong Judeo Christian ethic, but now-a-days even people who identify themselves as Christian or Jew don't tend to hold close to the tennants of their religion.
I don't exactly agree with you, allriledup. From the way I see it (I am a Hindu. the child of 2 immigrants), I can see Christian influence everywhere. When you ask someone for advice or something, they assume and say something about church, but never temple or synagogue. And why do they say a prayer in the beginning of Senate meetings? Why during "holiday season" do they play predominantly Christian/Christmas songs? Why when you go to the grocery store in spring are you bombarded with pastel colored eggs and bunnies and chicks and baskets? Even though America doesn't have an official religion, it's obvious that we sway towards Christianity.
Hi GoldenEmbers,
ST: USA is A Country w/o a religion yet with British roots.
First off I agree with your appraisal.
I also like that you used the pronoun "we"
People, and men deny their roots yet haul in the practices and even the holidays of the generations that proceeded them. SO the USA looks Christian yet if you look at our history and see the USA in all it's beauty and confusion it was and never has been a true Christian Nation.
I am sure that you can say the same about India also being a confusing country and nation. So OLD yet ages' old problems persist relentlessley for thousands of years.
Hinduism is a way of life, a sanatana dharma. There are a number of institutes (or oranizations) within and outside India to explain this dharma. I am not quite sure, if people would be looking for any additional "religious establishments" to ride on them.
It is like this - "If you like it or any aspect of this dharma, you take it and follow it". By just enlarging some of the aspects of the Hindu dharma, two religions - Buddhism and Jainism - came into existence. These days there are many others who are running religous infrastructures based some of the YOGIC definitions.
The diaspora Hindu must make the adaptation from a foreign Indian language to the Western English language if they want to survive as Hindus. A new language to express their theology must be part of the challenge, as new generations of Indians will make the language switch themselves before you know it. I struggled to make the switch in worshipping according to Hindu tradition without fully understanding the language, and today I stand tall in discussing Hinduism with my Christian, Jewish and Muslim friends and proselyzing missionalries that knock on my door. I have no regrets in making the new adaptation
This article makes a very inaccurate statement concerning Hindu Temples. There is nothing unusual about Hindu Temples in India including shrines to multiple Goddesses and Gods.
For example, a famous temple dedicated to the God Murugan, named Palani and located in Tamilnadu, includes shrines to Durga, Shiva and other Deities as well as, of course, Murugan:
http://www.templenet.com/Tamilnadu/m001a.html
Temples in Tamilnadu also very often contain shrines to the Sun God, Surya, even though there are very few Temples specifically dedicated to Surya. One of those temples dedicated to Surya is Suryanaar Koyil, which also includes shrines to other Deities, and specifically shrines to the other deified celestial bodies of the Hindu pantheon (moon and planets):
http://www.templenet.com/Tamilnadu/suryanaar.html
It is true that American Hindu Temples typically include multiple shrines to multiple Deities - and this may be somewhat more pronounced than it is in India. But Hinduism is a religion with thousands, perhaps millions, of Goddesses and Gods, and there is absolutely nothing remarkable about s single Temple that honors more than one of those Deities.
What may be unusual about the Maple Grove Hindu Mandir is that the shrines devoted to different forms of God are all located in the same central altar area in a nearly circular arrangement. Entering this space, one does not get the impression that one form is elevated or valued above others, but that each is a unique expression of the one God. Without making the claim that this is the only temple where such an arrangement of icons obtains. the more traditional example is where a temple is dedicated to a particular form of God and other forms occupy peripheral spaces in smaller shrines, usually outside the principal altar and sometimes along the path to this altar.
"The temple was the site of a horrific incident of vandalism in 2006, when two young men broke in and decapitated, dismembered, and disfigured the icons; remarkably, the Hindu community then reached out to and befriended the vandals, who are now college students, and even included them in a ceremony at which the destroyed icons were buried"
That paragraph showed the bigotry/anger from one intolerant creed and acceptance ( beyond tolerance ) by another. Just shows who is more aligned with the future.
In imparting values to the younger generation, I feel that it is important that we recognize that Hinduism is a larger cultural framework around which deeper, more personal expressions of religious experience exist. That is why there are so many names and forms for God in India; one can almost tailor a religious experience to meet individual or family needs.
It is therefore not possible through mere participation in rituals and festivals. The mistake of we first generation Hindu Americans is that we are trying to force fit Hindu sentiments using Abrahamic religious models. What is needed is regular exposure to the cultural and spiritual aspects of Hindu thinking - its stress on tolerance, its respect for life, its strong sense of family and community, and its ethical framework. In this way, our younger generation can develop their own sense of faith, much in the way that their parents have.
Very nice article because it revealed how this brief interaction changed his prior views.
Hinduism formed in India, thousands of years ago, under very different conditions. It is, in a way, very amorphous, compared to other religions. Hindu society has its own unique practices such as caste system. Hinduism is slowly modernising, adopting itself to the present day realities. If Hinduism has to survive and flourish in the west, it has to reinvent itself and adapt itself to the changed settings. The basic Hindu philosophy and approach is robust enough to achieve this.
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