Three recent incidents have sparked debates, even acrimonious ones, in the Hindu community abroad and among vociferous internet Hindus on social media in India.
First, a few days ago, US Vice-President JD Vance shocked the Hindu community in both his country and in India by expressing the hope that his Hindu wife, Usha, will ultimately embrace Christianity. While some accused Vance of throwing his wife’s religious rights under the bus, others talked about the US Constitution’s First Amendment, which prevents the state from entering the religious domain.
Second, on 31 October, Jemimah Rodrigues, whose brilliant batting helped India chase a huge Australian total and enter the final of the Women’s Cricket World Cup, attributed her stellar performance to Jesus, and not her own efforts. Some Hindus on social media, despite lauding her cricketing efforts, brought up an incident at the Khar Gymkhana in Mumbai, where she lost her membership because her father allegedly used the premises to proselytise.
Third, around the same time, the move by some Tamil Hindus to build a 155-foot statue of Sri Murugan in Carolina drew sharp, bigoted responses from White Christians on social media. Others put up pictures of Maa Kali and called her a version of the devil. Another section criticised a Hanuman statue, claiming that such a move is unwelcome in Christian America. Even standard political good wishes sent by US politicians to the Hindu community for Diwali have been criticised.
Meanwhile, some Hindu Americans have been questioning whether Hinduism in their soil needs to follow the norms set by Hindus in India, or whether they must adapt to American reality and build their religion the American way. “The American way” was established by the Protestant groups who first settled in America after defeating the local tribes. They built civic values around religious faith and institutions. Well before the state became a big reality, these communities of faith established self-governing communities.
Vishal Ganesan is one Hindu American who believes that American Hinduism cannot be what Hindus in India want it to be. You can listen to his views here. You can also read a detailed expansion of Ganesan’s views, with some background on American Protestant history, by Anang Mittal here.
I am no authority on American Protestantism or American history, but I am clear that America’s idea of religious freedom is not the same as India’s, where the state is supposedly equidistant from all religions, but is never clear on the exact relationship between state and religious institutions.
America’s First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion, among other things, has this to say:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Indian secularism is a sham
While the European secular approach was about separating the spiritual from the temporal (ie, the church and state were sovereign in their separate spheres), the American brand of secularism is best interpreted as the freedom of every denomination to pursue its goals, and especially proselytisation, without state interference. So when American Christians say they are worried about freedom of religion in India, they mean they are being thwarted by the state from converting Indians to Christianity. It is not about whether Christians can practice their religion or not. It is about the curbs placed on their missionary activity. They spice it up with usual tales about Christian persecution.
Indian secularism is neither fish nor fowl. It neither guarantees freedom to convert (Supreme Court, Stainislaus Vs State of Madhya Pradesh), nor non-interference in religious activities. In fact, the state feels impelled to repeatedly intervene to preserve the peace between communities, and, more egregiously, it runs over 1,00,000 Hindu temples in five southern states.
Freedom to run religious institutions is largely available only to Christians and Muslims, which means Indian secularism is a sham. Even the courts are confused, for some hold that they can intervene to protect the interests of Hindus excluded from temples and priesthood based on caste, or to set right misgovernance in the “secular” aspect of religious institutions. In other words, courts get to say which part of a religious institution is secular and which part religious, even when both may be joined at the hip.
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Hindus aren’t non-proselytising faith
The problem is internal to Hindus, since they have declared themselves to be a non-proselytising faith. This can’t be true, for in its past it has encountered several challenges from other ideas, including Buddhism and Jainism, and has learnt both to adapt, borrow and grow to remain dominant in India. So why pretend that we are not, and will never be, a proselytising religion? There is no way Hinduism will survive even in India without at least some of its sampradayas (denominations) becoming expansionist.
Notably, both the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj had adopted the idea of reforming Hinduism and making it more open to expansion and change, but somewhere along the line, they too contracted and shrank to become close to irrelevant in post-independence India.
To state my responses to Hindus in India obsessing about Hindus in America, I do believe that for Hinduism to thrive there, it has to adapt and change in every geography where it operates. It is not very different in India, too. To grow, Hindus have to be open to building long-term conversion strategies and essentialise parts of their religious heritage so that it is easy to define who is a Hindu and who is not. As Rajiv Malhotra notes in several books on Hinduism, Hindu Dharma and various schools of thought offer an “open architecture” on which new Hindu ideas and communities can be built. Hinduism is not a closed idea.
Jeffrey Armstrong, an American Hindu, also known as Kavindra Rishi, has often said that Hindus are not “people of a book”. They have many books, and they can thus be called “people of a library”.
On the other hand, successful Indian exports like Isha Foundation and Sri Sri’s Art of Living, Iskcon or BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha are examples of basically Hindu organisations adapting to American Protestant expectations from religious bodies. They may not be liked or loved, but they are accepted. You can even build large Hanuman statues in America, but while Christian Hinduphobes may rant and rave, you can thrive by building a community of believers and an ecosystem for its growth. A Hanuman sect that does not seek American devotees will remain an internally-focused kirana shop in that country. It will fail to evolve and grow its footprint.
BAPS has institutionalised its brand of Hinduism, and ISKCON has practically reinvented Hinduism to mimic an Abrahamic system with one god (Sri Krishna) and one book, with the Gita being central to its message. Even Sikhism, which was much more diverse in its early phases, took an Abrahamic approach when the 10th Guru declared himself to be the last one, leaving the Guru Granth Sahib as the final word of God for the sect. When it was in its growth phase, the Arya Samaj, under its founder Swami Dayananda Saraswati, declared all Hindu scriptures, barring the Vedas, as later impositions that need not be given importance.
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Hindu practices can vary from sect to sect
The point I would like to emphasise is that to expand and proselytise, you have to essentialise your fundamentals so that ordinary people can easily understand them. While you can own a library, for proselytisation, it is the summary of essentials that matters. Proselytisers are essentially people who can convert scriptural confusion into simple (even simplistic) beliefs that can make sense to the ordinary believer. The same applies to Hindu sacred literature and Dharmic practices, which can vary from sect to sect.
To be sure, there is a loss in terms of intellectual nuance when a proselytising group seeks to essentialise scripture to expand. But intellectual nuance is for intellectuals, not people who want to act on their beliefs.
I will sum up my views below, and hope to expand on each one of them over the next few months.
First, American Hinduism can follow its own trajectory even while maintaining fraternal relations with Indian Hindu sampradayas.
Second, even Indian sampradayas have to institutionalise their knowledge and boil it down to essentials for transmission and proselytisation if they are to compete with the major Abrahamic sects.
Third, there is no need for one type of Hinduism for the whole of India. Even for Veer Savarkar, Hindutva was Hinduness, not religion per se. Religion was a subset of Hindutva for him. Tamil Hinduism can be different from Hindi-belt Hinduism, and both can learn and adapt to grow in both geographies. I would love to see more southern temples in the north, and more northern ones in the south.
Fourth, Hindus should not be scared of adopting new organisational structures for their religious activities, and the goal must be to expand the options available for potential and future devotees. For example, I see no reason why women cannot create their own religious and temple orders based on their own ideas about Hinduism. Why should we not have more women Hindu priests, both of the celibate kind and as married ones? While saying this, I am not against temples being run by some traditional castes, provided they can manage them professionally without scandal and misgovernance.
Fifth, I believe that the state will never let go of the temples under its control unless it is forced to do so either by the courts or an impending crisis. This is because the big temples control hundreds of crores of cash flows, and nothing excites a state politician more than being able to control both the faith and the cash flows of the devotee.
The best way to make the state cede control is to build competition for their temples in the private sector, and once they are seen to be better run and more devotee-friendly than state-run temples, some states will see the need to privatise them, at least the loss-making temples. Air India would not have been privatised before competition made it a loss-maker and rendered it unviable. So, my advice to Hindus in India is not just to move the courts to free temples, but to provide them with solid competition so that the state no longer uses them as cash cows. I have dealt with some of these ideas in articles published by Swarajya. You may read them here and here.
The state-run Tirumala-Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), India’s richest temple, or the various state-run temple boards in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Telangana, should face the heat of competition from other claimants to the devotee’s heart and wallet.
Like American temples, Indian temples must also be open to new ideas and experimentation to let the most successful ones thrive and grow.
R Jagannathan is the former editorial director, Swarajya magazine. He tweets @TheJaggi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)