18. In 1900, seven years after Vivekananda set foot in America, there were only about 1,700 Hindus. After that, the number of Hindus going to the USA and settling there increased tremendously. The guru movements that flourished in the countercultural spiritual experimentation of the long decade of the 1960s continue to draw followers today. Founded in 2003, HAF's work impacts a range of issues — from the portrayal of Hinduism in K-12 textbooks to civil and human rights to addressing contemporary problems, such as environmental protection and inter-religious conflict, by applying Hindu philosophy. Between the years 1965 and 1972, immigration from India increased 2,800 percent. Krishna Kirtan Dance in USAHare Krishna Kirtan in New York, US They also adopted Hindu conventions with regard to dress and food (vegetarianism). These Hindus were not gurus or yogis who were interested in developing followings among white audiences. 42. Even established Hindu American institutions like the Vedanta Societies struggled to survive economically. A rich geography, many languages and dialects, lots of different creeds, racial diversity, all these elements have shaped Hinduism and made it so heterogenic. 34. The image and, more importantly, the imaginary of the Hindu and Hinduism arrived at the shores of North America long before significant populations of Indian Hindus did. Some of them were open and welcoming toward the general public, while others were protectionist and exclusive to devotees only. There were, however, fascinating developments in the field of yoga. 11. Antiestablishment religious fervor distinguished this historical moment, which is often termed the Second Great Awakening. Nevertheless, despite restrictive immigration policy and nativist public sentiments, several Hindu emissaries from India entered the North American scene to build on Vivekananda’s legacy. Another Hindu organization, the California Parents for Equalization of Educational Materials (CAPEEM), also filed a lawsuit and reached a settlement with the Attorney General of California wherein CAPEEM received a $175K settlement from the State Board of Education in 2009. This emphasis on controlling the educational instruction about Hinduism largely derives from a fear of misrepresentation. They looked to the diaspora Hindu community, in particular, because it was dislocated from local religious complexities and politics in India. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.”18 With regard to practice, he also began instructing his followers in the daily breathing and meditation exercises of yoga.19 In general, however, Vivekananda distained the postural practices of Hatha yoga as inferior and did not advocate for them in his discourses. Studies 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. 1. Many devotees had detached from their families and communities to follow their gurus, and the gurus operated with ultimate power over their followers. It has also strategically focused on building elaborate and ornate temple complexes in major urban centers. Instead, their movements and messages were relegated to the fringes of society, furthered by the countercultural critiques of American Christian nativism. In Hindu scriptures, such as the Bhagavad Gītā, there are several paths to liberation. Unlike the other guru movements active in the United States, ISKCON advised devotees to adopt Hindu religious conventions, often with a focus on traditional ascetic practices. 43. Follow the RSS feed for this page: The Global God Divide. 4. These contemporary yogis drew on ancient Indic systems of philosophy and meditation that also included some minor references to physical postures. 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. Evidence of Hinduism’s early antecedents is derived from archaeology, comparative philology, and comparative religion. 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. 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. Unlike the majority of Hindus around the world, ISKCON devotees focused their attention on spreading their religious views to strangers, with the aim of conversion. Today, there are about 2.4 million Hindus who have made America their home today. Apart from the 1906 Vedanta Society temple in San Francisco, the oldest traditional Hindu temple in the United States is the Shiva Murugan Temple in Concord, California, which was established in 1957. 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. Once there, many of them allied with Mexican farmers and married into Mexican families, creating entire generations of Punjabi-Mexicans in a fascinating moment of American ethnic history.21 In 1923, Bhagat Singh Thind’s appeal to be considered as a U.S. citizen was denied on the basis of his race. With the massive influx of various types of Indian Hindus, the diversity of Hinduism radically increased. 24. Elizabeth de Mechilis, A History of Modern Yoga: Patañjali and Western Esotericism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005); Singleton, Yoga Body; and Jain, Selling Yoga. Adrienne Moore, Rammohun Roy and America (Calcutta: Brahmo Mission Press, 1942), 155. In 1817, excerpts of Roy’s Translation of an Abridgment of the Vedant were reprinted in the United States in both the Trinitarian Boston Recorder and the Unitarian Christian Disciple. The outward conviction that all gods are one provides an ecumenical veneer that enables the veneration of multiple sectarian and regional forms of the divine. Conversely, Baptist journals, such as the Christian Watchman, issued scathing polemics against him.7 While the Unitarians lauded his contribution, Trinitarian Christians balked at the “heathen” who presumed to “meddle” in the Christian religion.8 The Brahmo Samaj was at the epicenter of the Hindu reform movement that sought to defend Hinduism from the onslaught of missionary attacks. Cultural and religious specificity occurs because of the unique characteristics of cultures, religions, and geographies on the earth but also within the cosmic realm, wherein all specificities dissolve and only the singular ultimate realty of the divine essence exists. As such Brahman can be realized through multiple paths and worshipped in various aspects according to one’s personal spiritual proclivities. In addition,the PEW survey estimated that the number of Hindus rose from 0.3 percent of the population in 2007 to 0.7 percent in 2014. Skip to main content.sg. There, the ornate Shree Raseshwari Radha Rani Temple is one of the largest Hindu temples in the United States. In the early years of ISKCON, many devotees were encouraged to adopt the lives of celibate renouncers, but over time the organization has accommodated devotees who wish to pursue the life of the Hindu householder, with marriage and children. E. Allen Richardson, Seeing Krishna in America: The Hindu Bhakti Tradition of Vallabhacharya in India and Its Movement to the West (New York: McFarland, 2014); and Iswari Pandey, South Asian in the Mid-South (Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press, 2015). In 1917, the U.S. government expanded the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 by passing the Asian Exclusion Act, which effectively barred all immigration from Asian countries. While the British controlled the colonial agenda on the subcontinent, North Americans were also eager to reap the spoils of the British Empire and worked with the British to develop trade networks at the beginning of the 19th century. See Karen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 40. Vivekananda, Raja Yoga, commentary on Yoga Sutras II.25: 201. See David Gordon White, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 103–115. Contemporary gurus have multifaceted and varied relationships to their parent tradition of Hinduism. Swami Satchidananda Saraswati, the guru who gave the invocation at the Woodstock music festival in 1969, proposed his own form of yogic teachings and practices but invited Americans of all faiths to participate in the spiritual activities of his organization and ashram. 19. Yoga is a multifaceted term that is used in many different contexts and draws on Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. That is to say that in high-density Hindu states, one is much more likely to find a temple dedicated to Krishna, another to Durga, and another to Shiva, rather than all of the Hindu deities worshipped together in one temple. Gurus who derive their teachings from Hinduism have drawn Americans to their feet ever since they arrived in the United States. Hindus prefer to leave in peace with the native people in whichever country they go to. For example, 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. The gurus of the 1960s and 1970s often fell prey to sexual and financial scandals. Through these connections, he was invited to become the chair of a position in metaphysics at Harvard University, which he declined, and he established himself among the elites and literati of New England society. In 1940, he published his most famous writing, Autobiography of a Yogi, which combined the personal account of his own yogic path blended with an account of the most extraordinary and miraculous yogis of India. At this same time, the RSS and the VHP were implementing similar curricular modifications in Indian educational curricular materials. It continues to espouse a theology that resembles Vivekananda’s teachings, namely, the neo-Vedantic teachings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, drawing on Upaniṣadic theological premises. Significant populations of immigrant Indian Hindus in the United States are from the Indian state of Gujarat, the birthplace of the modern guru Swaminarayan (1781–1830 ce). 9. Ralph Rusk, ed., The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 179. Vinay Lal, 122–149 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). Critics chastised Thoreau for his “pantheism” and balked at the juxtaposition of Christian religious ideals with their Buddhist and Hindu counterparts, seemingly portrayed as equals.12 Thoreau quickly learned that while his American audiences may have shared his romantic dabbling in the literatures of the Orient, they were not yet ready to accept wholesale its people or customs and certainly not its deities. Mata Amritanandamayi also has a large ashram in the exurbs of San Francisco, as well as dozens of others across the country. Trapped within frames of social isolation and unquestioning devotion, members experienced cycles of abuse that continued in prolonged and severe ways in many cases. Still, he was lauded in the United States for his reformist theology and championed at home for his ability to confront the West with an anticolonial message that bolstered the Indian nationalist cause. Like their European contemporaries, North Americans balked at what they viewed to be the bloody, sexualized, cacophonic, ritualized, and superstitious practices of the Hindus. 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.”16 The Brahmo-Samajists at the World’s Parliament of Religions also told their American audiences of a theistic monism at the core of Hinduism. 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 (upanayana) rites, and so on. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in Walden and Other Writings By Henry David Thoreau, ed. While most temples are open to non-Indian Hindus, traditional Hinduism is not a proselytizing religion, and few non-Indians convert to Hinduism formally. When these immigrants arrived, they found limited resources for the expression of traditional forms of Hinduism available in the United States. 2. This sentiment was also inextricable from racist North American policies of the time that were threatened by nonwhite immigrants and concerned to retain white, European, Christian dominance in both the United States and Canada. After the World’s Parliament of Religions, Vivekananda embarked on an approximately three-year-long lecture tour during which he was invited to speak by various liberal Protestant organizations. Ultimately, the California State Board of Education voted to approve the initially agreed-upon edits and to reject the disputed edits. When you think about Hinduism, what comes to mind? Oftentimes, 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. Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Andrea Jain, Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Most of the Hindus migrating to India are professionals such as doctors, software engineers, or businessmen. In the United States, despite their regional differences, Hindus soon found that they needed to band together in expressions of communal solidarity. They also came from diverse regions of India, and they brought their sectarian and regional practices and devotions with them. 48% of Hindus have post-graduate degrees. Still, it was often positioned in early-20th-century American circulation as a Hindu practice, but often iterated with the language of spirituality because of the negative connotations that white Americans associated with the term Hinduism. Devotees revered their gurus not only as charismatic leaders but often as infallible divine persons, which meant that when accusations of misconduct were levied, they were rarely believed initially by fellow community members. 35. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Hello Select your address All Hello, Sign in. Despite this unconditional acceptance of a plurality of methods to reach the divine, the Vedanta Society theology emphasizes the three paths highlighted in the Bhagavad Gītā: jñāna yoga, the path of knowledge; karma yoga, the path of action; and bhakti yoga, the path of devotion, as well as rājā yoga, the path of concentration. In fact, when Vivekananda returned home to India, he received an effulgent welcome, and his rhetoric became much more aggressively nationalist. In 1920, Paramahansa Yogananda arrived in the United States, propagating a unique hybridized theology that blended Hindu and Christian ideas and practices. 14. While this view is ancient to Hinduism, it is also popular in the modern period because it is socially productive in eliding religious differences in diverse and often religiously conflicted societies. 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.

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