The American Hindu community has to make some vital decisions soon on what it holds important, if not sacred, for its children and grandchildren. There is at the moment a fundamental challenge to the existential validity of Hinduism that many Hindus have not fully comprehended. Surrounded as we are by the trappings of our own seeming success as a community in America, proud of our culture and temples, we don’t quite grasp that we have left ourselves incredibly vulnerable to a problem that can easily erase whatever we cherish in two generations.
Imagine the following scenarios:
By the time your children grow up, it becomes virtually impossible for them to get jobs because they are Hindu, or the only way they can gain professional and social acceptance is if they completely hide their Hinduness from others. This might appear far-fetched, but consider what happened recently with a student in India whose internship was cancelled by a professor in Europe because she thought his culture would make him a risk to women in her lab
By the time their children grow up, it becomes a matter of shame to celebrate Hindu festivals and observe Hindu customs because they have been taught all their lives, in school, college, and by the media, that these customs are innately brutal, sexist, racist, and just barbaric
By that time, whatever welcome and support we have received in the US as a community vanish because no one is able to defend us from legal, intellectual, and even criminal attacks. Our sacred temple customs are defined as oppressive, and even abusive. No matter what priests, devotees, and community leaders say, it won’t matter- because they are not considered academic experts on Hinduism.
And the academic experts on Hinduism will not be on the side of the Hindu community. They will only say what their field has taught them: that praying to the Shiva Lingam is an act of phallus-worship, that Hinduism is innately sexually obsessed, that Hindu history is no more than the oppression of women and lower castes. And most of all, that anyone in the Hindu community who questions their claims is a dangerous Hindu fundamentalist.
It is not my intention to paint a doomsday scenario. But the harsh truth is that much of what I have described here has already happened. There are some academicians who understand and sympathize with the everyday Hindu practitioners’ views, but they do not have the support they need from the community as of now to help change the old and flawed mindsets among many of their colleagues. Many members of the Hindu community in America have started to notice and challenge the academic dogmas about Hinduism, but they have done so only on the peripheries of the academia until now. Internet campaigns and temple-talks raise awareness, but they do not change anything without direct engagement with academia. It is therefore crucial that the community comes of age in its approach to the problem, and goes to the source of the problem, and the only feasible solution.
Despite its many achievements, the Hindu American community has been dismally poor in engaging academia. We have many successful academicians from our community no doubt, but most of them are not in positions to change the current discourse about Hinduism or about India. A professor of engineering, medicine, or management who happens to be Hindu will not be called on CNN or CSpan to counter those “experts” who insist that Hinduism is responsible for rapes and violence in India. Neither can our temple priests step up to this role. Contrast this situation with that of other major religious communities in the US: usually an expert on a religion steps up to offer positive, or at least sympathetic views of that religion, when it is under fire for real or perceived ills. We are perhaps the only major community that does not have that simple privilege.
The problem needs to be understood clearly now. Academia is an extremely influential institution in American society. Both public policy (such as immigration laws) and popular perception are shaped by academic discourse far more than is the case perhaps in India. The humanities and social sciences are in particular even more influential than we often recognize. Many immigrants from India do not see American higher education for more than a couple of years; coming for Graduate studies in engineering/sciences and then going on to work. American undergraduate education is very different. Millions of young Americans take courses in their first two years of college on a range of humanities and social science topics, even if those will not be their majors. Many of them take courses that teach outdated, and even bizarre theories about Hinduism that have nothing to do with the living values and philosophies most Hindus might recognize. The current academic consensus on Hinduism is essentially this: a) Hinduism doesn’t really exist, because it was just a term invented by the British to describe a bunch of very different sects and b) Hinduism is coterminous with caste and gender oppression. It is a contradiction, but not an easy one to challenge from outside the academy.
Still, the problem today is not that academia is opposed to Hinduism as such. On the contrary, American higher education is eager to welcome Hindu thought in serious ways given how influential our culture has been informally, with yoga, meditation, and the like. Unfortunately, the academic consensus as it exists today about Hinduism is at least several decades old; we are the only major community that did not step up in academia when others did to gain a voice for itself. Until about forty years ago most minority and immigrant communities were marginalized in the academia, and the social sciences and humanities used to be highly Eurocentric. Today, most other communities speak for themselves in academia. It is only in the study of Hinduism that Eurocentrism has remained largely unaddressed.
The challenge is that many current Hinduism experts do not even realize that what they are advocating is Eurocentric, racist, and deeply disturbing; working in a hall of mirrors, as I show in my new book, they believe that their fantasy about Hinduism is actually the truth, and that all those who believe, say, that the Lingam is not phallus-worship, are intolerant Hindu fundamentalists. It is an absurdity. And the community has a duty to address it in the way that is appropriate: which is to fund Hinduism studies in a sustained and systematic way. For the first generation of Hindus in America who grew up in the last few decades, temples and Sunday classes might have sufficed. For the future, we will need PhD’s and professors in Hinduism, and in the spectrum of humanities and social sciences. I urge Hindu American families to encourage their children who are so inclined to study in these areas, and to recognize that universities should be the new temples as far as our community is concerned. It is only our successful engagement as a community with higher education that can ensure that the accomplishments of the first few generations of immigrants to America, and more importantly, the timeless wisdom of our ancestors, will all be preserved.