The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  In our day, the advantages of what Hindus call reservation (and we call affirmative action), such as the 1980 Mandal Commission, which reserved nearly half of all government and educational places for the underprivileged castes (whom they called Scheduled Castes), has stood Sanskritization on its head, leading to what we might even call Dalitification. Some Brahmins burned themselves to death in protest over the Mandal recommendations, but the conflict between the so-called Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and (other) Scheduled Castes is sometimes greater than the one between Dalits and Brahmins, as castes not particularly disadvantaged in any way often manage to get themselves reclassified as Scheduled so as to win a share of the new opportunities.64 In Rajasthan, the Gujars (or Gujjars), an Other Backward Caste, clashed with the Meenas (Dalits), because the Gujars wanted a lower, Scheduled status. This was precisely the outcome that Gandhi had feared when he insisted that Harijans decline the chance of being a separate electorate. As Gary Tartakov has put it, “It was evil enough that such racializing degradation was claimed by caste Hindus; it was worse that that is what the members of the Schedule Castes and Tribes accepted themselves to be, if they remained Hindus.”65

  The idea that the solution to the problem of the Dalits was precisely not to remain Hindu was one of the strategies adopted by Ambedkar.

  UNTOUCHABLES AND DALITS, BUDDHISTS AND AMBEDKAR

  Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a Dalit who was one of the group who drafted the Constitution, agreed with Gandhi that Untouchability had to be stopped, but Gandhi thought you could still keep caste, and Ambedkar said you could not. At first, Ambedkar tried to reform Hinduism; he resisted movements that attempted to convert Dalits to Islam or Christianity. Then he reasoned that since the Hindus viewed their tradition as eternal, they regarded basic elements of that tradition, such as class injustice and Untouchability, as eternal too and impossible to eradicate.66 “Gandhiji,” he said, “I have no homeland. How can I call this land my own homeland and this religion my own wherein we are treated worse than cats and dogs, wherein we cannot get water to drink?”67 In the end he converted to Buddhism, translating the Buddhist concept of individual suffering (dukka) into his own awareness of social suffering, discarding a great deal of Buddhism and inserting in its place his own doctrine of social activism. Though he had the good sense to keep a number of Buddhist stories in his platform, one that he did not keep was the story, so basic to the Buddhist tradition, that the future Buddha was confined within a luxurious palace until one day when he had grown up, he went outside and happened to see a sick man, an old man, a dead man, and a renouncer.68 Ambedkar objected to this story because it “does not appeal to reason” that a twenty-nine-year-old man would not have been exposed to death by then.69

  Fast-forward: In 1956 five million Dalits, led by Ambedkar, converted to Buddhism. Ambedkar was concerned that they would still be labeled Untouchables if they demanded places reserved for affirmative action, and we have seen that this has continued to be a problem. On the other hand, he insisted that even when they became Buddhists they should retain the rights that he had fought so hard to win for Dalits.70 One of his converts said: “My father became a Buddhist in honor of Ambedkar but could not say so openly. I became a Buddhist too, but only orally, because on the forms you have to write down Scheduled Caste. If you are a Buddhist, you can’t get the scholarship. But I am proud to follow Ambedkar. Being Scheduled Caste causes inferiority in our minds. To be Buddhist, it makes me feel free!”71 It is an irony of history that some Dalits nowadays favor the Aryan invasion theory, but add that they, the Dalits, were the original Adivasis there in India before the Aryans rode in, making the Adivasis older in India and therefore, by the Law of Origins, more honorable than the Aryans.

  On November 4, 2001, more than fifty thousand Dalits converted to Buddhism in New Delhi. Some converted only as a protest against the mistreatment of Dalits, but others wholeheartedly became practicing Buddhists. On October 14, 2006, the fiftieth anniversary of the conversion of Ambedkar, Dalits again began to convert in large numbers. As a result, the Hindu Nationalist Party reclassified Buddhism and Jainism as branches of the Hindu religion, to prevent the mass conversions of the Dalits from eroding the political fabric, and several states, including Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, introduced laws requiring anyone wishing to convert to obtain official permission first. In separate rallies, not connected to the conversion ceremonies, thousands of Dalits attempted to burn the new laws.72 In November 2006 the government banned a mass conversion rally in Nagpur that aimed at converting one million Dalits to Buddhism; the authorities were said to be under pressure from Hindu nationalists who called the rally a “Christian conspiracy.” Defying the ban and the barricades, thousands of Dalits from across India gathered at the Ambedkar Bhawan. But Dalits continue to be oppressed, and to protest their oppression, in India.

  CHAPTER 23

  HINDUS IN AMERICA

  1900 -

  CHRONOLOGY

  1863-1902 Swami Vivekananda lives

  1875 Helena Blavatsky founds the Theosophical Society

  1893 Vivekananda attends the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago

  1897 Vivekananda founds the Vedanta movement in America

  1896-1977 A. C. Bhaktivedanta, Swami Prabhupada (founder of ISKCON), lives

  1918-2008 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (founder of Transcendental Meditation) lives

  1931-1990 Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) lives

  1970- Hindus in Europe, United States, and Canada start building temples

  During the Chicago riots in 1968, Allen Ginsberg chanted “om” for seven hours to calm everyone down. At a certain moment, an Indian gentleman had passed him a note telling him his pronunciation was all wrong.1

  Deborah Baker, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India

  The question of the degree to which other Americans too have gotten a lot more than the pronunciation of “om” all wrong, and who is the best judge of that, is what drives this chapter.

  REVERSE COLONIZATION

  There are many ramifications of American imperialism in India—the devising of beefless Big Macs, the outsourcing that guarantees an Indian accent on the line when you call to complain about your Visa bill—but here we will concentrate on the reverse flow, the process by which Hindus, and various forms of Hinduism, came to America and colonized it. This was colonization not in the negative and material sense of economic and political exploitation (the old sense, in which the British colonized India), but in a new positive and intellectual sense of making major contributions to American culture. We might call this reverse colonization, reversed in both direction (from rather than to India) and will (voluntary rather than coerced). At the same time, we must consider the more problematic ways in which Americans have appropriated aspects of Hinduism, new ways that retain the bad odor of the old Raj colonization.

  POSH AND PUKKA AMERICAN HINDUS

  American Hindus constitute yet another of the many alternative voices of Hindus. They are an important presence in America, where, in 2004, there were 1,478,670 Hindus (0.5 percent of the total population); and in a land where over a quarter of the population has left the religion of its birth, some of them to take on forms of Hinduism, Hindus convert from their religion less than any other religious group and are the best educated and among the richest religious groups (according to one survey).2 There are more than two hundred Hindu temples in America, three-quarters of them built in the past three decades. In Lilburn, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, one of the fastest-growing South Asian communities in the United States raised more than nineteen million dollars to build one of the largest Hindu temples in the world, where about six thousand worshipers come on festival days. Called the Swaminarayan Mandir (the New York Times article about the temple defined mandir, the Sanskrit word for “temple,” as “a Sanskrit word for the place where the mind becomes still and the soul floats freely”), it was modeled on a temple not in India but in London, Raj inspired and already one remove from the mother country
.3

  Long before they came to our shores in large numbers, Hindus contributed many things to American culture, beginning with the very words we speak, some of them transmitted to us through Anglo-Indian words that entered the English dictionary in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An alphabetical list of just a few of such words conjures up a vivid scene: bungalow, calico, candy, cash, catamaran, cheroot, curry, gymkhana, jodhpur, juggernaut, loot, madras, mango, mogul, moola (British slang for “money,” ultimately from the Sanskrit mula, “root,” as in “root of all evil”), mosquito, mulligatawny, pajama, Pariah, posh,ky pukka,kz punch,‡ pundit, thug, tourmaline, veranda—why, any writer worth her salt could turn that list into a film script in an hour (“After he lights his cheroot on the veranda of the bungalow, and changes from pukka jodhpurs to posh pajamas . . .”). More recently, words about religion rather than “loot” and “moola” have entered through American rather than British sources, such as dharma from Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (more Buddhist than Hindu) as well as yoga and tantra, guru and ashram, and above all, karma.

  INTERRELIGIOUS INTERACTIONS IN CHICAGO

  We can trace the path of Hindu religious movements more precisely than that of the words; the movements entered through Chicago.

  In 1890 an amateur magician published, in the Chicago Daily Tribune, a story that put a new twist on the sort of magic trick that had been practiced in India, and reported by gullible visitors to India, for many centuries.4 Two men, one named Fred S. Ellmore, claimed to have witnessed this scene:

  A fakir drew from under his knee a ball of gray twine. Taking the loose end between his teeth he, with a quick upward motion, tossed the ball into the air. Instead of coming back to him it kept on going up and up until out of sight and there remained only the long swaying end. . . . [A] boy about six years old . . . walked over to the twine and began climbing it. . . . The boy disappeared when he had reached a point thirty or forty feet from the ground. . . . A moment later the twine disappeared.5

  The two witnesses sketched it (there was the boy on the rope), photographed it (no boy, no rope), and exposed the trick: “Mr. Fakir had simply hypnotized the entire crowd, but he couldn’t hypnotize the camera.” The story was much retold until, four months later, the newspaper admitted that it had all been a hoax; the author (John Elbert Wilkie) had made up everything, including the telltale name of Fred Sell-more (get it?). And that was the origin of the Indian rope trick—which turns out to have been not Indian, or a rope (twine), or a trick (since it didn’t happen).

  Then, in 1893, the World’s Parliament of Religions brought Vedanta to Chicago. Among the people who attended the event was Swami Vivekananda (1862-1902), a disciple of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1834-1886). Ramakrishna, a devotee of Kali at the Temple of Dakshineshvar, north of Kolkata (Calcutta), was a member of neither the Brahmo Samaj (which was represented by B. B. Nagarkar at the World’s Parliament) nor the Arya Samaj but attracted a different sort of educated lay follower. His studies and visions had led him to conclude that “all religions are true” but that the religion of each person’s own time and place was the best expression of the truth for that person. And his respect for ordinary religious rituals gave educated Hindus a basis on which they could justify the less philosophical aspects of their religion to an Indian consciousness increasingly influenced by Western values.6

  Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s disciple, was the first in a long line of proselytizing gurus who exported the ideals of reformed Hinduism to foreign soil and, in turn, brought back American ideas that they infused into Indian Vedanta. Influenced by progressive Western political ideas, Vivekananda set himself firmly against all forms of caste distinction and advised people to eat beef.7la He made a powerful impression at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago and returned to India in 1897 with a small band of Western disciples. There he founded the Ramakrishna Mission, whose branches proclaimed its version of Hinduism in many parts of the world. Other Hindu or quasi-Hindu movements also began to thrive in America. Before Vivekananda, Helena Blavatsky, a Russian, had founded the Theosophical Society in New York City in 1875; after she had journeyed to India in 1879, she set up her headquarters at Adyar, near Madras, and from there she and her followers, incorporating aspects of Hinduism into their doctrines, established branches in many cities of India. But the activities of the now Vedanticized Theosophical Society in the United States began only after Vivekananda had paved the way, and it prospered under the leadership of Annie Besant (1847-1933), who founded Theosophical lodges in Europe and the United States.

  A second wave of Hindu imports began in the second half of the twentieth century, the age of the Hindu Hippie Heaven. In 1965, in Los Angeles, A. C. Bhaktivedanta (Prabhupada) founded the Hare Krishna movement, officially known as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) and tracing its lineage back to Chaitanya. In 1974 followers of Swami Muktananda established the Siddha Yoga Dharma Associates (SYDA) Foundation, teaching their version of Kashmir Shaivism. In 1981, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later Osho) moved his headquarters from Poona (later Pune) to Oregon. Shri Shri Ravishankar, Mother Meera, Amritanandamayi Ma, Shri Karunamayi Ma, Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj, Shri Ma—all these (and many more) have routinely visited the United States, many of them since the eighties, and several of them women. Amritanandamayi Ma, known to her followers as Amma (“Mother”), came from Kerala to the world (arriving in the United States in 1987) and specialized in Vedanta and hugs; from fifteen hundred to nine thousand people attend her programs in the United States (closer to thirty thousand or forty thousand in India).8 Amma was one of the speakers at the 1993 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago.

  In 1999, a century and a bit after the first World’s Parliament of Religions, Chicago city officials placed 340 life-size cow statues along city streets. The cows, which had nothing to do with Hinduism (their referents were the [bullish] stock market and the stockyards), were a huge success. They brought Chicago $200 million in additional tourist revenue and $3.5 million for local charities from the auction of the cows when the exhibition ended. Other cities jumped on the animal bandwagon. New York copied the cow idea, working with a Connecticut company, CowParade, which imported the concept from Zurich, where it had originated. Cincinnati commissioned pigs, and Lexington, Kentucky (home of the Derby), went for horses.9 But during that summer, Chicago was like Calcutta, in this regard at least; everywhere you turned, you met a cow.

  A VIRTUAL INDIA IN AMERICA

  America often becomes India in other ways too. Sometimes Hindus in America rework local topography, so that the three rivers in Pittsburgh become the Ganges, Yamuna, and Sarasvati, just as South Indian kings had declared that the Kaveri River was the Ganges. Now some have devised a practice of religious outsourcing that lets them bypass American Hinduism entirely, by conducting their worship lives (virtually) in India. The Internet enables them to be in two places at once, a technique that Hindus perfected centuries ago (recall Krishna present to each of the Gopis at the same time, in different places). If you are a Hindu in America, it is now possible for you to make an offering on the banks of the Ganges without leaving Atlanta or wherever you are; you pay someone else in India to do it for you. (This too is an old Indian trick, a form of transferred merit or karma; recall the Hindu satire on the “Buddhist” satire on the Hindu argument that “if the oblation to the ancestors that is eaten by one man satisfies another, then people traveling abroad need not take the trouble to carry food.”) One Web site that offers this service is shrikashivishwanath.org; another is www.webdunia.com/kumbhuinfo (written in Hindi and run by the government of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh); yet another, bangalinet com/epuja.htm, bills itself as “a home away from home.” Eprathana.com will send someone to any temples you choose, and most of them are small local temples, suggesting that people far from home miss the little shrine at the end of the street as much as they miss the big pilgrimage temples.

  When you log on to some of these Web
sites, you can view various puja options, for which you can register online and pay. For instance, you can perform a “virtual puja,” a cartoon puja in which you burn electronic incense and crack open a virtual coconut. If you are unable to make it to the Ganges River for the great festival of the Kumbh Mela or just for the daily absolution of cumulative misdeeds, you log on, fill out a questionnaire (caste, gender, color, body type—slim or portly—and choice of auspicious days), and attach a passport-size photo. On the selected date, you can go to the Web site to see virtual representations of yourself (your photo superimposed on a body chosen to match what you described in the questionnaire) being cleansed in an animated image of the Ganges River. At the same time, someone who is actually (nonvirtually) there at the river dips your actual photo in the actual (nonvirtual) river, which is what makes the ritual work; it can’t all be done by mirrors.10 Recall the Chola and Rashtrakuta kings who brought real Ganges water south to their temples. Here the worshiper is transported, photographically and electronically, to India in order to make contact with the real river.

  Thus American Hindus, despite building grandiose temples here, need not replace the traditional sacred places of Hindu ritual practice with new ones in America. “The reach of the local” is extended by new media that allow ritual observance to center on those locales even at a distance. You can have prasad (the leftovers from the gods’ meal in the temple) delivered to you, in America, from an Indian temple, by courtesy of the Indian postal services. You can hire a Brahmin priest to perform a special sacrifice for you in Varanasi (see www.bhawnayagya.org). You can even have access to the real goddess Kali, the Indian Kali, at Kali Ghat in Kolkata, virtually.