Dharma in America

A Short History of Hindu-Jain Diaspora

Pankaj Jain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351345262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

America now is home to approximatelyfive million Hindus and Jains. Their contribution to the economic and intellectual growth of the country is unquestionable. Dharma in America aims to explore the role of Hindu and Jain Americans in diverse fields such as:

• education and civic engagements
• medicine and healthcare
• music.

Providing a concise history of Hindus and Jains in the Americas over the last two centuries, Dharma in America also gives some insights into the ongoing issues and challenges these important ethnic and religious groups face in America today.

1    Introduction

On a bright spring morning in 2015, when I was co-hosting a Study Abroad Fair at my university, the University of North Texas, my colleague and I were hoping to sign up students to take them to India in the summer. As a couple of curious students stopped by, we asked them if they would like to go to India, the largest democracy in the world. Although students did not seem too excited to make any comparison between the two democracies of India and the USA, I began wondering if there could be any other connections between the two nations, seemingly poles apart. One of them is the hallmark of the “Eastern” world and the other is that of the “Western” world. As Nico Slate (2019) put it, these are the two most prominent and most diverse democracies, yet to fulfill their dreams of making freedom and democracy genuinely available to all their marginalized and minority communities.

As is widely known, the term “Indian” is already used to refer to the Native Americans living across North America. Perhaps because of this reason, a recent book about Indian Americans was entitled “The Other Indians” (Lal 2008). Following the “other” pronoun, there is another book about Indian Americans that referred to Indian Americas as “the other one percent” (Chakravorty et al. 2017). The population of Indian Americans in America is now a little over 1 percent of the total American population. However, this 1 percent is differentiated from the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans that “owns more of the country’s wealth than at any time in the past 50 years” (Ingraham 2017).

Apart from the way those other authors have tried to write about Indian Americans, can there be some other way to see the connections between India and the USA? Similarly, Indian Americans know that they are a complete digit of 1 percent and no more a footnote in the American population, what have been their contributions to American society? In 2017, I came across another book, Muslims and the Making of America. The author, Amir Hussain (2016) makes a bold statement, “There has never been an America without Muslims.” Beginning from the history of slavery when Muslims were transported from the Old World to America, Hussain brings our attention to the rich contributions made by Muslim Americans in the fields of music, sports, and culture. The present book tries to follow the same approach. We start our journey in Chapter 2, not in the United States but in the Caribbean Islands, where Indians were transported by the British in the form of indentured laborers. We then move on to Indian activism against the British Raj in North America. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 present a survey of Hindu Americans’ contributions to music, healthcare, and education in the K-12 school systems. Chapter 5 focuses on the history of Jains in North America. Chapter 6 highlights Indian Americans’ attempts to participate in civic engagement. Appendices 1–6 spotlight various aspects of Indian Americans’ contributions to American life.

There are already other books that describe various Hindu movements, e.g., Homegrown Gurus: From Hinduism in America to American Hinduism (Gleig and Williamson 2014) and Gurus in America (Forsthoefel and Humes 2005). However, I wanted to survey the aspects of Indian culture that are not sufficiently described when books are written about Hindu Americans or even Indian Americans, although it is widely acknowledged that many Hindu religious ideas overlap or at least influence Indian classical music and Ayurveda. Almost all the titles mentioned above are lacking any reference to Indian classical music or Ayurveda making inroads into the Americas. Amanda Lucia (2014) in her book and Marianne Qvortrup Fibiger and Sammy Bishop (2018) in her interview about Amma, “the hugging guru,” describe the tenuous relationship between Amma’s Euro-American followers and her Indian followers. Hugh Urban (2016) notes a similar tension between the Euro-American and Indian followers of Osho. In my observations on Indian classical music and Ayurvedic practitioners, I discovered identical kinds of debates and discussions among the Euro-American practitioners of Indian music and Ayurveda. This book dedicates one chapter each to Indian classical music (Chapter 4) and Ayurveda and Indian doctors (Chapter 5). Some of the other publications, such as that by Kurien (2007), note how some Hindu Americans have challenged the portrayal of Hinduism in textbooks but none of them have paid any attention to the grassroots activism by Indian Americans attempting to enter the local School Boards across the United States (Chapter 6).

Similarly, the history of Jains is often glossed over or ignored when Hindus in America are described by the various authors mentioned above, although Buddhists and Sikhs are given more attention, the two other religious groups originating from India. Overall, this book is about the Indian cultural elements that are emerging and merging in mainstream America, including Indian classical music and Ayurveda. Also, the book describes one of the most ancient religious communities, the Jains, who are fast becoming Americans with their tens of dozens of temples and other organizations across North America (Chapter 5). Indians are among the most highly educated racial or ethnic groups in America (DeSilver 2014) and they are now also becoming active participants in educational leadership in K-12 School Boards across America, as described in Chapter 6 in this book.

The name of India has been linked with America since its inception due to the confusion of Christopher Columbus about the New World (Morgan 2009). This “nominal” connection is still evident in many place names and even people of the Americas that are still named after India, e.g., the state of Indiana, Indiana University, and many Native American groups who are called Indians. After this earliest name-sake connection with India, the next significant links to India and its philosophy were established, starting in the 1800s by the transcendentalists, most notably, H. D. Thoreau, Ralph W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, and T. S. Eliot (Altman 2016). In Chapter 2, I will trace some of these early developments that brought India and its philosophy to America.

Some significant figures who have helped raise Americans’ awareness about India and its culture have been leaders, such as Dr. Martin Luther King who visited Mahatma Gandhi’s Ashrams in India in 1959 and brought the message of nonviolence back to the Civil Rights Movement in America (Lakshmi 2009). This book does not discuss this topic as there are several other works on this theme, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr: The Power of Nonviolent Action (Cultures of Peace) (King 1999). We will see a few references to Mahatma Gandhi and the Civil Rights Movement’s emphasis on nonviolence in Chapter 5 on the Jains in the Americas.

Other significant figures include George Harrison, the prominent member of the Beatles rock band, who brought Hindu ideas into his music and his life and whose ashes were scattered on Indian sacred rivers, according to the Hindu last rites. Chapter 4 on music presents some more details of his musical contributions to American music, in addition to many other maestros, such as Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Allah Rakha, and Zakir Hussain. Then there are Hollywood celebrities, such as Richard Gere and Julia Roberts who have embraced Buddhist and Hindu ideas, respectively. However, Hollywood is also beyond the scope of this book.

Kotkin’s “Greater India” prophecy (1994) continues to be fulfilled as Indians have now emerged as the largest, most affluent, and most educated diaspora across the world (Sims, 2016). Especially from the 1990s onwards, hundreds of thousands of Indian computer engineers have entered America on H1B visas (Cockrell 2017). Their arrival, en masse, fueled the mushrooming of Indian temples, grocery stores, restaurants, and residential communities across North America (Eck 2001; Lessinger 1995; Levitt 2007), especially in the suburban areas of California, New York, New Jersey, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta, and parts of Florida. Indians have founded more start-ups than the next seven immigrant groups combined, including those from Britain, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Many Indians have been attributed with the development of everyday products and services such as Hotmail, Universal Serial Bus, Intel’s Pentium microchip, and Bose speakers, to name a few. As of 2019, Indian Americans are now heading the global corporate giants, such as Microsoft, Google, Adobe, PepsiCo, and MasterCard. However, this theme has also been covered in the works by Varma (2006) and Chakravorty et al. (2017), so we do not discuss this topic either. Another economic contribution by Indians is their entrepreneurial success in the American hotel industry as explained excellently in Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream (Dhingra 2012). However, the fact that Indians are also the highest number of doctors from a non-US country seems to have gone mostly unnoticed in the books about the Indian diaspora mentioned above. Hence, I devote Chapter 3 to the issues faced by Indian doctors. In that chapter, I also discuss the problems related to the practice of the ancient Indian healthcare system Ayurveda in America, another less-mentioned topic in most Indian diaspora books. Finally, Chapter 6 provides a glimpse into the issues related to the new demographic development in America and how Indian Americans are now emerging as leaders in the K-12 education segment of American society also.

As noted by Warikoo (2011), Indian immigrants differ from prior waves of immigrants from European countries and are included with other racial minorities, such as Chinese immigrants in the United States. In his analysis of Indians in America, R. K. Narayan (1985, cited in Kumar 2003) noted some interesting aspects of Indians as a minority group in America. We get a glimpse of Indians as they lived in America before the 1990s tech boom. Narayan lamented that an Indian in America was “a rather lonely being” who did not “make any attempt to integrate into American cultural or social life.” As the numbers of Indians were low then, Narayan observed that on weekends, they would have to drive for “fifty miles or more towards another Indian family to eat an Indian dinner.” Certainly much has changed in the lives of Indians since Narayan wrote that account of Indians in America. As of 2019, we find many Indians integrating with American society and politics at almost every level and dozens of towns across America; they have to drive just a couple of miles or less to find another Indian family for their social gatherings, not 50 miles! Narayan hopes “that the next generation of Indians (America-grown) will do better by accepting the American climate spontaneously or in the alternative return to India.” While few Indians are forced to return to India due to their visa issues or other urgent reasons, most of the others and their next generations have continued to thrive in America in various ways.

In her article in The New York Times on September 22, 1996, cited in Kumar (2004), Bharati Mukherjee shares the debate that she had with her sister Mira. While Mira prefers to live in America as an expatriate Indian (also known as a “Non-Resident Indian”), Bharati went ahead and put her “roots down, to vote and make the difference that one can” and became an American citizen After the more than two decades since she wrote that, Indians are continuing to put more roots down and contribute to all spheres of American society, as we will see in the next few chapters. We first take a look at the history of the Indians (and the Indian culture) in the Caribbean islands and in the United States where they arrived more than a century ago.

2 Before “coolies,” beyond “cyber coolies”

Indians: the silent minority

Although most contemporary scholarly discussions about the Indian migration seem to focus on the movement of Indians to foreign locations, Indians have been migrating to different regions of South Asia for centuries, as Chinmay Tumbe notes in his book India Moving (2018). He traces the histories of people moving from different parts of India to Myanmar during the British Raj and returning to their native locations after the 1940s. People from Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Kerala, Bihar, and many other states have been moving to more lucrative parts of India for centuries. In his opinion, the scale at which Indians have been moving within India and outside India is unmatched by any other country.

Written before the Indians’ influx of the late 1990s into the United States, Ravindra K. Jain, in his chapter, “Overseas Indian Communities and Relevant Theories” reviews some assimilation theories (1993). The first approaches deal with cultural persistence under the general rubric of acculturation. This kind of research involves the immigrants and how they “retain, reconstitute, and revitalize their culture” in their new host country. The second kind of theory focuses on the adaptation by immigrants in their new host country, the other side of their new life, and a new identity. The third perspective is of studying the intermixing of the host culture and immigrant culture that happened to some extent in Guyana but not in Fiji and elsewhere. Finally, he presents the Indian diaspora as an especially underprivileged sector of the global population as it used to be socio-economically weak until the 1980s. Today, Indians have radically transformed their image and are now often called “the other 1%” with the highest median family income and highest educational qualifications.

America now is home to approximately five million Indian Americans who either were born in continental America or have immigrated from India or other countries. Some of the earliest such arrivals, however, happened in the Caribbean countries, in the nineteenth century, who were termed “coolies,” as shown in the 2002 BBC film, Coolies: How Britain Re-Invented Slavery (Sehgal, 2002). Another recent wave of arrivals happened in and after the 1990s in North America and these Indians were termed “cyber coolies” (Varma 2002), as they worked in IT industries. However, long before the coolies and cyber coolies, India had already established an indelible mark on America that remains carved in stone in various names of American places such as Indiana. Moreover, if we expand our definition of America to include the entire North, South, and Central America, the Caribbean countries are sometimes referred to as “West Indies.” As is now well known, the Caribbean countries were some of the earliest lands to receive the “East Indians” in the nineteenth century when hundreds of thousands of indentured laborers arrived to work in sugar plantations.

America: the India of Columbus

As Nico Slate (2019) notes, both India and America are names given by outsiders to these two countries. The Caribbean region was named the “West Indies” in the fifteenth century when, as is well known, one of the earliest European explorers, Christopher Columbus, landed in the Bahamas and was convinced that his voyage to India had succeeded (Morgan 2009). This “Indies” word is the earliest recorded connection that India had with the New World. It was this fascination with India that urged Columbus to undertake his voyage and that eventually led to various parts of the New World being named after India, e.g., the West Indies, the US state of Indiana, Indiana University, and “American Indians.” The name of the River Sindhu (or the Greek/Roman equivalent “Indus”), once defined the residents of that region who were (and are) called Hindus, thus reached the New World as well. The land of the Hindus was called Hindustan and India. Also, Columbus, unintentionally, brought the River Sindhu (Indus) to the New World. Amir Hussain makes a bold claim in his 2016 monograph: “There has never been an America without Muslims.” Based on Columbus’ connection between America and India, perhaps one can at least say that the very “discovery” of America happened because of India, or as it was known then “the land of the Hindoos.” The desire to find “a passage to India” was so strong that a Missouri Senator, Thomas Hart Brenton, hoped that perhaps a railroad link could be established to India, as mentioned on his statue in Lafayette Park in St. Louis, “There is the East; there is India.”

Valerie Flint (2017) (cited in Prashad 2000) notes the earliest references to India in various texts that Columbus had referred as he prepared for his journeys. Columbus imagined India to be the land of exotica, full of pygmies where “the giants of the Vulgate Genesis 6:4” could be placed (by way of proselytization that is). In one of the maps, India was shown with a monster with eyes in his chest. According to Flint (2017, 95), Columbus imagined India

subdued by Alexander, contained 5,000 towns and nine nations, was filled with great standing armies and huge numbers of elephants and horses and covered one-third of the surface of the habitable earth. It has mountains made of gold. Off its coasts stand the islands of “Patale,” “Chryse,” “Argire,” and “Taprobane,” rich in gold, silver, pearls and precious stones.

Flint goes on to mention that Columbus imagined,

India was also, according to Solinus, the home of a tribe of women founded by the daughter of Hercules who, like Amazons, forswore the rule of men. There were monstrous beasts in these parts also; the man-eating Mantichore (perhaps based upon the cheetah), with a triple row of teeth in his human head, a lion’s body, a hissing voice like that of a serpent, a scorpion’s tail and a tremendous speed of movement; the giant black eel; the huge swimming snakes capable of devouring stags; the bulls with turning horns; and elephant’s feet; the two-armed sea ser...