Multiculturalism and "American" Religion: The Case of Hindu Indian Americans

Abstract

How non-Christian religious groups should be politically recognized within Western multicultural societies has proved to be a pressing contemporary issue. This article examines some ways in which American policies regarding religion and multiculturalism have shaped Hindu Indian American organizations, forms of public expression and activism. Specifically, I look at three examples of the impact of such policies on Hindu Indian Americans representing strategic arenas in the socio-political recognition of ethnic groups, and also crucial moments in the institutionalization of an American Hinduism. I also show how the activism of Hindu Americans is reshaping the contours of religion, society and politics in the United States.

Immigration, places of worship and the politics of citizenship in the US South

“…However, by equating citizenship with civic virtue, these studies tend to sideline struggles over the meaning of citizenship that take place within and beyond places of worship. More helpful in uncovering these struggles is Kurien’s (2001 2006) work, which explores how Hindu activists have tried to define Indianness for the broader American public (for instance, by intervening in the writing of high‐school World Civilisation textbooks) and to attribute to Hinduism various ‘Western’ values, including gender equity and non‐violence. In undertaking such efforts, Kurien notes, Hindus in the US frequently pit themselves against Muslim Indian Americans, who, in turn, have used alliances with multiethnic Muslim American associations to counter stereotypes of Islam in the US and Hindu nationalist politics in India.…”

Religion in the Everyday Lives of Second-Generation Jains in Britain and the USA: Resources Offered by a Dharma-Based South Asian Religion for the Construction of Religious Biographies, and Negotiating Risk and Uncertainty in Late Modern Societies

“…A few respondents were members of families who had arrived in the 1990s as part of the family re-unification programme or the Immigration Act of 1990, which raised the annual number of professional immigrants allowed entry to 140,000. These migrants had to meet new selection criteria, particularly the possession of high skills in demand in the USA such as in medicine, scientific research, engineering and information technologies (Purkayastha, 2005).Though there are no official figures, like other Indian Americans (Kurien, 2006), Jains in my study are among the wealthiest and most educated foreign-born group. In the United States Jains are dispersed throughout ten states dominated by New Jersey, California and New York, with significant representations in Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas (Gaustad and Barlow, 2000).…”

Divine Development: Transnational Indian Religious Organizations in the United States and India

“…Although these works have highlighted how immigrants’ religious identities (at the individual and community levels) shape ideologies across countries, they have not engaged the recent literature on how immigrant organizations shape sending country development. Additionally, many scholars have recently argued that immigrants’ transnational religious identities have fundamentalist tendencies, which are shaped by political factors in sending and receiving countries (Bhatt ; Mathew and Prashad ; Rajagopal ; Prakash ; Bermanis, Canetti‐Nisim, and Pedahzur ; Biswas ; Fair ; Falcone ; Kurien ; Levitt ; Taub ). Questions remain, however, on the impact that collective religious identities have on shaping (sometimes seemingly) non‐fundamentalist development ideologies in sending countries.…”