A Hindu renaissance

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From: evansfamily@mindspring.com

Subject: [3/19/99] A Hindu renaissance

Rick Evans (evansfamily@mindspring.com) sent you the following article from the News & Observer

on the Web (http://www.news-observer.com).

This article is protected by copyright and should not be printed or distributed for anything except

personal use.

Comments from evansfamily@mindspring.com:

I was going to mail this to you then I remembered that the local paper had a web site so here it is. I actually used the emailer supplied with the web site to see if it worked.

 [3/19/99] A Hindu renaissance

http://www.news-observer.com/daily/1999/03/19/faith01.html

COPPELL, Texas — A few years ago, Manmadhan and Radha Nair enclosed the patio off their trim suburban ranch house and turned it into a Hindu oasis.

The white-tiled room is a tranquil place for lighting candles, draping deities — Vishnu, Shiva, Ganapathi and others — with garlands and offering rose water and grapes.

They wouldn’t have considered such a room 20 years ago.

“Honestly, we were kind of embarrassed,” said Manmadhan Nair, 45, who likes to be called Mike. “We were a little worried whether we could expose this kind of thing to other people.”

Then their born-and-reared-in-America teenage kids came along.

For more than a generation, most of the nation’s approximately 1.5 million Hindus — the vast majority of them Indian immigrants – have paid little attention to their ancient faith. Busy building careers and families, they’ve tried to blend into America. But now the first generation of American-born Indians is coming of age. They are forcing their baby-boomer parents to reckon with a long-neglected faith.

Prayer rooms like the Nairs’ are appearing in subdivisions everywhere.  Nationwide, a wave of Hindu temple construction is going on; perhaps 1,000 communities are in various stages of planning or construction, according to observers. About 200 temples have already been built.  Devotees are starting the Hindu version of Bible studies and Sunday schools, unheard of in India.

There is a Web site — http://www.hindunet.org/ — aimed at the young.  And there is a glossy monthly called Hinduism Today that bills itself as a leader in the Hindu “renaissance.” On campuses, Hindu awareness groups are popping up. There is even a small organization called the American Hindu Anti-Defamation Council.

What is going on?

“Religion is becoming very important for the second generation because that is the way immigrants maintain ethnic identity,” said Prema Kurien, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California who studies Indian immigration. “They first tried to be just American, and they weren’t accepted as just American. This is a reaction to that.”  But older Hindus are also in the midst of an intense struggle over

how to make the religion attractive to their youth. Young Hindus want to know why they should practice the faith, but their parents often don’t know the answer. Most baby-boomer Hindus learned only the rituals,

not the theology, when they were growing up in India.

The Gen-Xers want more. And they, too, are struggling. Those who’ve learned the faith from their parents want to keep it. But every day they battle against two opposing forces: American culture and their parents’ Indian ways.

Some Hindus believe that if they can rejuvenate their faith, it can become an important new American force, like Islam. Everyone agrees, however, that the path will be difficult.

Culture vs. faith

Manish Nair, 16, plopped in a chair in his living room on a Saturday afternoon. He wore shorts and a T-shirt but said when he goes to the temple, he wears a “juba” — loose-fitting pants and a shirt.

“Religiously, I’m settled,” he said. “I’d like to follow Hinduism.  But culturally, it’s hard. What we do in the home is completely different from what I do out there.”

He eats meat outside his house — a practice that goes against Hindu teaching. On the other hand, he doesn’t expect to date; it is simply not done in India. And he intends to marry an Indian woman.

His father sat next to him, smiling his approval.

“Mike” Nair came to the United States from India in 1980. After graduating from the University of North Texas in 1989, he went to work for J.C. Penney as a systems analyst.

He and his wife, Radha, who is 42 and owns a home health care business, also have a daughter, Asha, 13.

In the early years, the Nairs found it difficult to keep up the daily prayers; they were busy coping with jobs, a young family and the overwhelming American culture. So for a while, they let the rituals slide.

Then the children got older.

“They have pushed us a lot,” Nair said. “We picked up all our knowledge of Hinduism from our parents, and we felt if we were not giving it to our children, a great culture would be lost. It’s our moral duty to show them.”

Asha has become heavily involved in Hindu classical dance and practices in the prayer room. Before school and work each day, the Nairs bathe; then they pray in their special room. At the end of the day they repeat

the process.

“It’s a very sacred place in this home,” Nair said.

Still, the disconnect between the two cultures is sometimes wearying.  “I bring my friends home and they ask, ‘Why do you worship elephants?’” Manish said, referring to the god Ganapathi, with his elephant face.

Manish hopes Hinduism lasts into the next generation in America –but he isn’t sure it will.

“It’s hard to keep up the traditions and values,” he said. “You’re being pulled between two societies.”

Rituals vs. beliefs

That is the anxiety for Hindus. Even though some Hindu families like the Nairs are working to create a vibrant faith in America, many Hindu leaders worry that their numbers are small.

“What good things we have, I don’t know if we’ll preserve them,” says Dr. Asmukh Shah, 73, a cardiovascular surgeon who came to the United States 40 years ago.

Nearly 20 years ago, Shah organized a local group that got together to read the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture. Today, Shah leads weekly religion classes at the Dallas/Fort Worth Hindu Temple in Irving. But

out of an estimated local Hindu population of 20,000, only 150 people come, he said. On festival days, perhaps 2,000 people show up.

Perhaps that is because understanding Hinduism is so difficult. It is a complex 5,000-year-old village tradition with various beliefs across India. Most Indians learn the faith from their families during rituals passed down through generations. As a result, most Hindus don’t understand their faith as a system of ideas.

That leads to another of Hinduism’s unique challenges: It isn’t demanding or rule-bound. One of the few ideas around which Hindus rally is that “You can have what you want.” Hindus are taught to lead moderate, generous lives, but they are not given a list of do’s and don’ts. That is one reason Hinduism has historically been tolerant of other religions.  But in the West, this causes a problem because Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all faiths with more rigid boundaries — and thus a lack of understanding of a looser set of beliefs.

Hindu observers worry the faith won’t adapt to American culture.

Most Hindu priests are trained only in leading rituals — which don’t interest the vast majority of American Hindus, observers say. Most Hindu leaders have no training in teaching, counseling or programming, according to Arumugaswami, managing editor of Hinduism Today. He  and others believe an American-style menu of services like classes and activities will draw Hindus.

“We need to adapt our religion to another country,” he said. “That’s what other religions did.  But we’re not even in a good position to convert our own people.”

Hinduism Today recently published an article about the organizing efforts of American Muslims, and added an editor’s note suggesting Hindus could learn from those efforts. In many ways Islam, which claims about 6 million American adherents, was in Hinduism’s situation a decade ago.  But the road ahead will be harder for Hindus, experts say.

“The Hindu community is not anywhere near as well- organized as Muslims,” says Diana Eck, director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University and an expert on Hinduism. “The Islamic community has a very large national infrastructure, and also they’ve prioritized Islamic education over and above building  religious institutions like mosques. And there is also a core teaching to Islam that makes it a bit easier for young Muslims to get hold of.

“I don’t know that you’ll ever see American Hindus with the same kind of assertiveness,” she said.

Two worlds

Mallika Rao

When Mallika Rao was small, she dreamed of painting herself white and having white children.

“I wanted to fit in,” said Mallika, 15, a sophomore at Ursuline Academy in Dallas.

That feeling has disappeared. But Mallika and her brother, Siddartha, a 17-year-old junior at St. Mark’s School in Dallas, still struggle.  They talk to their parents about Hinduism occasionally, but they get

frustrated because their parents don’t understand what it’s like to be a questioning American teenager.

Mallika eats meat, although her brother does not. They both plan to date, and they both go to parties — and feel a little guilty about it.

Sometimes they make fun of their elders’ Indian accents, and that makes them feel guilty, too. They’re embarrassed when their mother wears saris to school functions but they’re not sure why.

Still, they sense an emergence of Hindu pride.

“All of a sudden there is this big rush of people liking Indian stuff,” said Mallika.

One of her friends sports a bindi, the brown dot many Indian women wear to represent the third eye of Shiva, the protective goddess. She notices popular musicians also wearing bindis.

Mallika’s mother, Dallas neurologist Dr. Kalpana Rao, said she ran into a white American middle-schooler at an Indian restaurant recently.  The boy pointed to a bronze statue and said, “That’s Shiva, right?” He was correct.

For Rao, 47, the emergence of pop Hinduism isn’t surprising. The world is getting smaller, after all, she said.  Rao believes that while American Hindus are struggling to keep the faith, so are Indians.

Rao remembered  her grandmother’s rigid Hindu practices: She forced everyone to bathe before they entered the kitchen, where she wore a special sari. But  her parents  didn’t practice such rituals, and she

doesn’t either.

“India is changing and so are we,” she said. “If there is going to be a Hindu renaissance, it’s going to be more in a practical sense.”

Sangita Harish performs a traditional dance at the Dallas-Fort Worth Hindu Temple. An estimated 1.5 million Hindus live in the United States.

But how?

In small pockets around America, change is happening.

According to Kurien of the University of Southern California, temples are beginning to hold rituals and special celebrations on Sundays, when most people aren’t working. Many American temples, including the

one in Irving, practice a kind of “ecumenical Hinduism.” They display deities popular in various parts of India to satisfy their diverse congregations. The Irving temple has three priests, each from a different Indian region.

And some communities, including the Irving temple, have started offering American-style celebrations, such as Graduation Day or Mother’s Day — all unheard of in India.

But more needs to happen, said Gurumurthy Kalyanaram, 42, a Dallas marketing consultant.

“How are these temples going to survive?” he said, gesturing as he ate lunch at India Palace restaurant in North Dallas. “We are not telling the next generation what we’re about.”

Kalyanaram wants to see more programs at the temple and more discussion groups to help Hindus understand their tradition.

“I’m hopeful about the younger generation,” he said. “The great joy of being born in this country and not being constrained is that you rediscover Hindu thought in a meaningful way. But the anxiety is this: Between that generation and the older generation there is a gap of about 20 years — the baby boomers who immigrated here. That generation is anchored neither in the joy of Hindu thought nor in the rituals.” And that leaves the difficult question.

“Who,” he asked, “is going to bridge this gap?”

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