Infusing Hinduism with the American Dream

[Guest guest]

NEW YORK, N.Y. (September 20, 2006): It took coming to America for

13-year-old Samyuktha Shivraj to understand what it really meant to

her to be Hindu. Since she and her family came here five years ago,

they have been more observant about practicing their faith then they

were in India. They go to their temple in Queens more often, she is

a member of the youth club there, and there are more conversations

about what the prayers she's reciting really are saying.

 

"When I say those prayers now, I actually know what it means,"

Shivraj said. "It's not just a mundane ritual routine that I'm

doing."

 

It is a common refrain for Indians around the United States. The

cultures in India and the US are so vastly different that practising

Hinduism in America sometimes doesn't resemble practising Hinduism

back home. Temples act as a community hub and religious education

centres here. They offer language classes and tutoring. Young Hindus

like Shivraj are attending Indian heritage camps.

 

Back in India, Hindus are so immersed in the religion and surrounded

by fellow Hindus that there is no need for such services. Hindus

pick things up and learn simply by taking part in all the rituals

and traditions.

 

"To be Hindu in America is much more an intentional choice than it

is in India," said Diana Eck, Professor of comparative religion and

Indian studies and director of the pluralism project at Harvard

University. "Even if you're first generation, you have to decide if

you perpetuate it or if you just kind of let it go."

 

With hundreds of millions of followers, and texts dating back

thousands of years, Hinduism is one of the world's largest and most

well-established religions. But estimates put the number of Hindus

in America at only about 1 million, making them a tiny, tiny

minority in a predominantly Judeo-Christian country with nearly 300

million people.

 

That reality has created a challenge for Hindus here - and for their

temples and cultural organisations - as they try to pass the faith

on to a younger generation.

 

At the Ganesh temple in Queens, founded in 1977 and one of the

oldest temples in the country, there's a community centre that

people can use for weddings, performances and other events;

education activities from religious instruction to language lessons

and academic tutoring; and the youth club that Shivraj is part of.

 

Those aren't elements commonly found at temples in India, said Dr

Uma Mysorekar, one of the temple trustees. But in India, she pointed

out, they don't need to be - because Hindus are surrounded by their

religion.

 

"We just observed and followed and never questioned," she said.

 

When Indian immigrants started coming to the United States in larger

numbers, in the years after the 1965 revamping of immigration laws,

they carried their religious traditions on as best they could,

meeting for prayers and worship at one another`s homes, or renting

public spaces, said Anantanand Rambachan, Professor of religion at

St Olaf College in Minnesota.

 

The first temples started being built in the late 1970s, and

construction continues to this day, as Hindu communities continue to

grow. But while those temples are designed like temples in India,

with the deities and even the priests being brought over from the

homeland, the builders realised over the years they would have to do

things differently than how it is done in India, Rambachan said.

 

That realisation came from seeing how religion is done in the United

States. Here, Christian tradition relies heavily on doctrine, on

what people believe, Rambachan said, rather than what they do. In

India, the emphasis goes the opposite way, since Hinduism covers a

wide spectrum of gods and beliefs, and ritual is very important.

 

In America, Hindus "are increasingly being challenged to articulate

the Hindu tradition in a manner that places more emphasis on

doctrine," Rambachan said. "People will ask, 'What do you believe?'"

Rambachan said.

 

Faced with that, temples and cultural organisations that had been

working to make outsiders understand more about the faith realised

they needed to help young Indian Americans know what they believed,

if the religion was going to be passed on.

 

"If we don`t do our part, we will lose these youngsters," Mysorekar

said.

 

"There was a lot of foundation we had to lay even to exist as Hindus

among non-Hindus," she said. "Now it is for us to do the job within

our own community."

 

In addition, some organisations around the country have decided to

use the method of that most American of summer pastimes - camp.

 

Shivraj spent a couple of weeks this summer helping her mother, a

classical Indian singer, run a weeklong camp on Indian heritage,

which included sessions on religion.

 

SOURCE: Zee News, Noida (New Delhi)

URL: http://www.zeenews.com/articles.asp?rep=2&aid=320756&sid=ZNS