The ever-compelling Pass the Roti has published an interesting Letter to a Young American Hindu by Professor Vijay Prashad of Trinity College, in Connecticut. The letter is addressed to a member of the Hindu Students Council (HSC), a body recently accused of having ties to the family of organizations who forward the Hindu Nationalist ideology in India, also known as the Sangh Parivar, by a group calling itself the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (CSFH). In the letter, meant in part to draw the student away from HSC, Prashad touches upon a variety of issues regarding identity and representation that are roiling in the Hindu-American and greater South Asian American community today. I’d like to mull on a couple of points in this letter which will undoubtedly be read for a very long time.
On the origins of morality
Prashad reflects on his own dissatisfaction with relgion growing up in Calcutta:
My morality came from elsewhere than religion, from recognition of the pain in the world. Religious teachers whom I encountered sometimes talked about this suffering, but they didn’t seem to have more than charity to offer to those who suffered. It struck me that while religious festivals were beautiful, religions themselves were not adequate as a solution to modern crises.
My take is just the opposite: my sense of equality and justice, my belief in the universal availability of spiritual insight, comes from the traditions I learned from my parents growing up, and from the Upanishads, the Gita and the Dhammapada. The texts are problematic in many ways, but wrestling with them is sadhana, spiritual discipline, and from my ongoing, internal dialectic emerges heuristics for engaging with the world. I cannot imagine "morality" divorced from these traditions. While I do not consider their authority unassailable, I do not see them as mere "experiments with truth."
On the origin of HSC
According to the CSFH report, which I’ll accept at face value, the HSC link to Hindutva organizations is incontestable. The question remains whether HSC is actually breeding red-eyed Hindutvans. One commenter had this to say:
Really, you have no clue! HSC is the only reason I still identify myself as a hindu. With a hindu mother and an athiest father, I had no identity growing up. I grew up being ashamed of hinduism and now you are encouraging people to be ashamed of being in HSC and learning about hinduism. … The “fascist leaders of HSC” we never knew, if they ever existed. And I have attended the camps, the conferences, meetings, etc for three years. Only once a VHP head, just one dude, came to the annual camp and spoke about Babri masjid and how it was a temple once and how hindus need to build a ram temple there. No, he didn’t ask us to rise up against the muslims. Everyone was quiet and uncomfortable. When he left, everyone agreed he was a nut! It actually helped us identify the trouble within hinduism.
There are some commenters who are arguing otherwise–one, who "grew up in the VHP," expressed astonishment that his own friends and family cheerfully donated to the yet-constructed Ram Mandir in the early 1990s. The bloggers have also unearthed some eerily chauvinistic statements on the national website. But no one, as far as I can tell, is claiming that the leaders of HSC chapters are preaching divisiveness or hate. So questions arise: Do we throw out what is obviously a meaningful religious and cultural space because of the provenance of the national organization? Can it be reformed, or is it so de-centralized (each chapter enjoying a sort of autonomy, with its own dynamics, according to the CSFH report and several comments) that pan-organizational reform wouldn’t make much of a difference? I suggest everyone think about the implications before taking a position.
On the Hindu-American identity
Given his very obvious commitment to social justice (Prashad self-identifies as a Marxist), he proposes that students forsake HSC for another, more inclusive organization:
If I were you, I’d abandon the Hindu Students Council and create a new organization called Sarvodaya (Compassion for All), a word Gandhi coined for his variety of social justice. You can still have intellectual and spiritual investigations of the Gita, you can still hold inter-faith discussions, you can still educate your fellows about the rich and diverse tradition of Hinduism, and you can also promote egalitarianism and social justice as values derived from your tradition.
This seems like a fine suggestion. But is Prashad asking Hindu-Americans to elide their religious identity in the name of religious inclusiveness? Does Sarvodaya imply a Gandhian framework where adherents of all religions must be welcomed? If so, this is an unfair burden to place upon Hindus, a micro-minority among America’s many religious communities, struggling to retain its distinctiveness, and whose "pagan" traditions are completely alien in the hegemonic Judeo-Christian environment.
On racism and religious oppression
Prashad acknowledges that many people are drawn to HSC because it serves as shelter from "anti-Indian" racism. But there is another issue tied in with racism: religious oppression. Hindu-Americans are subjected to harassment and marginalization on account of their religious affiliation. Dominant American Christian narratives, and not just those of the Christian Right, malign characteristic Hindu practices as "idolatry" and "heathenism." Professor Khyati Joshi, in her book on second generation Indian-American religious life, New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground, persuasively argues that religious oppression of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims is a tangible phenomenon in the United States:
Religious oppression manifests the majority’s belief in the superiority of Christianity and the inferiority of Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism and the oppressor’s desire for a homogenous nation. Because these other religions are made visible by Indian American’s racial minority status, the issue of homogeneity illustrates the indistinct and sometimes permeable line between racial and religious oppression.
It is imperative to organize against such oppression, and this is where large pan-campus Hindu organizations could serve an important purpose. Muslim student groups are valiantly organizing against threats that community faces. While Hindus and Muslims share many concerns, Hindus come from a religious tradition far removed from Abrahamic understandings of God and faith. Whereas Indian syncretism, born out of a history of religious diversity, enabled the formation of fluid religious identities, American pluralism has little experience with non-Abrahamic traditions. As such, Hinduism is marginalized in markedly different ways than Islam. This is why a one-size-fits-all approach to combating religious oppression would not always work. Organizations that serve to educate students, offer a safe cultural space, and provide an atmosphere of religious solidarity are not always "communal," and could help foster the awareness and confidence necessary to navigate and critique the biased structures and institutions in the majority culture. They would not in any way obviate the absolutely necessary place of secular groups committed to inter-faith soldiarity. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Indian Christians must certainly come together to combat profiling, for instance.
Oppression abroad or oppression at home?
Prashad is rightly critical of Hindu extremism in India, and of some Indian-American immigrants who preach anti-Muslim hate, and caste-supremacy, and anti-Dalit vitriol … but regardless of the validity of his critique, how relevant is it for second-generation Hindu-Americans, the great majority of whom are unconcerned or uniformed about Indian politics? I am troubled by a growing trend to view Hindu-Americans as potential kar sevaks, rather than as another minority with both common and unique dilemmas regarding identity and assimilation. Let’s move from oppression abroad, which second generation Hindu-Americans are clearly not responsible for, to oppression at home, which they are often the victims of. Let the locus of discussion about this community shift to the cities of New Jersey and the suburbs of Los Angeles, away from the rice paddies of Bengal and the provincial towns of Gujarat!
Pass the Roti is doing an outstanding job moderating the discussion, and is fairly allowing all viewpoints to be heard, even those extremely critical of Prashad’s stance. Bravo for bringing such an important issue to our attention!
