The Hindus (109 page)

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

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.
^7
la
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.

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.