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A Place at the Multicultural Table  Prelims.Qxd 4/20/07 12:20 PM Page Ii Prelims.Qxd 4/20/07 12:20 PM Page Iii Prelims.qxd 4/20/07 12:20 PM Page i A Place at the Multicultural Table Prelims.qxd 4/20/07 12:20 PM Page ii Prelims.qxd 4/20/07 12:20 PM Page iii A Place at the Multicultural Table The Development of an American Hinduism Prema A. Kurien rutgers university press new brunswick, new jersey, and london Prelims.qxd 4/20/07 12:20 PM Page iv Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kurien, Prema A., 1963– A place at the multicultural table : the development of an American Hinduism / Prema A. Kurien. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8135-4055-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8135-4056-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Hinduism—United States. 2. Hindus—United States. I. Title. BL1168.U532K87 2007 294.50973—dc22 2006027316 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2007 by Prema A. Kurien All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscat- away, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Manufactured in the United States of America Prelims.qxd 4/20/07 12:20 PM Page v For Kofi, in gratitude Prelims.qxd 4/20/07 12:20 PM Page vi Prelims.qxd 4/20/07 12:20 PM Page vii Contents Preface ix 1 The Transformation of Hinduism in the United States 1 PART I Popular Hinduism 2 Hinduism in India 19 3 Transplanting Hinduism in the United States 40 4 “We Are Better Hindus Here”: Local Associations 58 5 The Abode of God: Temples 86 PART II Official Hinduism 6 Forging an Official Hinduism in India: Hindu Umbrella Organizations 119 7 Forging an Official Hinduism in the United States: Hindu American Umbrella Organizations 140 8 Re-visioning Indian History: Internet Hinduism 163 9 Challenging American Pluralism: Hindu Americans in the Public Sphere 184 vii Prelims.qxd 4/20/07 12:20 PM Page viii viii contents PART III The Relationship between Popular and Official Hinduism 10 Being Young, Brown, and Hindu: Student Organizations 213 11 The Development of an American Hinduism 237 Notes 249 Glossary 259 References 263 Index 285 Prelims.qxd 4/20/07 12:20 PM Page ix Preface This book is part of a larger project on ethnicity and religion among Indian immi- grants and their children in the United States. Hindus are the largest religious group among Indian Americans, and the bulk of my work has focused on them, but I have also studied Christians and conducted a short study of Muslims. My interest in the relationships between ethnicity, religion, and migration developed out of my earlier research that looked at the impact of temporary migration to Middle East- ern countries on sending communities in Kerala, south India (Kurien 1993, 2002). Although I had planned on studying rural-urban variations, I ended up focusing on the way in which ethnicity based on religious background organized the migra- tion and was transformed by it, since I discovered that there were striking differences in patterns of out-migration, remittance use, and migration-induced social change between Mappila Muslims, Ezhava Hindus, and Syrian Christians (Kurien 2002). With the exception of some groups of Indian Christians, Indian immigrants from different religious backgrounds do not show major variations in patterns of migra- tion to the United States. But religion is an important factor differentiating patterns of ethnic formation, since religious institutions often come to define and sustain ethnic life in the immigrant context. I have found that Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Sikh Indian Americans have very different constructions of “Indianness” and, correspondingly, different patterns of identity construction and activism. My personal background has affected this study in a variety of ways. I spent the first twenty-three years of my life in India before coming to the United States for graduate study. Although I am an immigrant from India, I am not a Hindu, but hail from a south Indian Christian background. This is obvious from my last name and has been a source of some discomfort for many of the people I talked to during the course of this research. After the centuries of mockery and harassment that Hindus have had to endure from Christians, particularly Western Christian missionaries, and the negative stereotypes that exist in American society regarding Hinduism, many of those I interviewed were understandably wary of my intentions and the purpose of my study. To put people at ease and to “prove” that I did not come from ix Prelims.qxd 4/20/07 12:20 PM Page x x preface a fundamentalist background, on at least two occasions I had to resort to invoking the fact that my brother-in-law is a Hindu. My being a non-Hindu certainly affected many of the statements that people made to me regarding their ideas and feelings about religion. Being aware of this, I used the help of two research assistants, both of Hindu background, for parts of my study (but those who were interviewed still knew that the research was for my proj- ect). My awareness also meant that I often had to be cautious about the questions I asked and how I phrased them. I have felt at a disadvantage many times during the course of my research, since I did not have an insider’s perspective and experience of lived Hinduism, particularly as it related to familial and household practices. But I also came to realize that this experience is extremely diverse and depends on the region, time period, caste, class, and religiosity of the particular family. Because of the difficulty involved in studying the private devotions and rituals practiced within the home, in this book I focus primarily on Hindu associations and organizations. Christians in India are a very small minority (less than 2.5 percent of the popu- lation), so many of my friends, classmates, and neighbors were Hindu when I was growing up, and I have always had an admiration for many aspects of Hinduism. I participated fully in the devotions of the Hindu American groups that I studied, and as my knowledge of Hindu doctrines and practices increased, so did my appre- ciation, something I hope comes through in the pages of this book. However, as I discovered a few years after I had started my research, there was another, more hidden side to the institutionalization of Hinduism in the United States. Even before I started on this project in 1994, I was aware of scholarship showing that some of the financial support for the Hindu nationalist Hindutva (lit- erally,“Hinduness”) movement came from Hindu Indian Americans. But I felt that the behavior of a small group of individuals had little relevance to understanding what Hinduism and Hindu institutions meant for the mass of Hindu Americans. I wanted to focus on the new forms, practices, and interpretations that were devel- oping in the American context and was not interested in Hindu nationalism or pol- itics. But over time I began to realize that in the United States, Hindutva supporters were becoming the central authority and hegemonic voice that Hinduism had so far lacked, defining Hinduism, Indian identity, Indian history and culture, and the obligations of good Hindus. Thus many elements of the Hindutva discourse were manifesting themselves in the self-definitions and explanations of lay Hindu Indian Americans, even those who were uninterested in or opposed to Hindu nationalism. I also began to see how the American context and the functioning of Hindu organ- izations within this environment was indirectly responsible for this development. In this way, I was drawn into studying immigrant politics, much the way that apo- litical Hindu Indian Americans have been drawn into the Hindutva movement. Reading and hearing about the death threats and harassment that scholars (many practicing Hindus themselves) who have been critical of the Hindutva movement or aspects of Hinduism have received has made me pause during the course of my research to ponder whether I should stop and turn to a less controversial project, whether I should write a book and thus risk drawing unwanted negative attention Prelims.qxd 4/20/07 12:20 PM Page xi preface xi to myself and my family or play safe and write articles for scholarly journals (read primarily by other scholars), and whether I should focus on only the more innocu- ous aspects of American Hinduism.1 What convinced me that I could not ignore how profoundly the Hindutva move- ment had penetrated American Hinduism was my study of second-generation Hindu Americans in a Hindu Student Council (HSC) chapter toward the middle of my research on this project. Earnest, passionate, and often wonderfully articulate, these students were wrestling with issues of identity (racial, cultural, and religious) that for the most part their parents and others of the first generation could not even begin to comprehend. Even more interesting, however, was the fact that these struggles seemed to have pushed some members of the group toward the Hindutva platform. Certainly it was a numerical minority of members who expressed Hindu chauvinistic and anti-Muslim sentiments, but they were also the most vocal of the membership. Most of this “hard-core” group (as they were often described by oth- ers in the organization) had not spent much time in India, and none kept in regu- lar touch with Indian news and events.
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