Hinduism in America

An Introduction

Michael J. Altman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000577891
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Hinduism in America: An Introduction is a concise introduction to the long history of religion in the encounter between America and India. It is not a book that will tell you what Hinduism is; rather, it is an introduction to the variety of ways in which Hinduism has been represented, constructed, and practiced in the United States. Americans have been interested in the religions of India since the colonial period, and by the late nineteenth century the first Hindu teachers arrived in the United States. Throughout the twentieth century, interest in Hinduism and yoga grew, even as anti-Asian and anti-immigrant politics and policies in America intensified. When the Cold War led to changes in U.S. immigration policy in 1965, new immigrant communities arrived in the United States and built new Hindu institutions.

Hinduism in America is an accessible introduction to these developments of Hinduism in the United States. Each chapter uses a key theoretical term in the study of religion to explore a variety of historical topics including:

• American missionary encounters with India;
• representations of Hindu religions in American literature;
• world religions and Hinduism;
• Vedanta;
• yoga;
• Hinduism in the American counterculture of the 1960s; and
• immigrant Hindu communities in the United States.

Hinduism in America provides an overview of the multifaceted history of Hinduism in America. Ideal for students and scholars approaching the topic for the first time, the book includes sections in each chapter that provide useful theoretical terms for understanding that history.

1 The Other

“Heathens” and “Hindoos” in Early America

DOI: 10.4324/9781003283874-2

On December 29, 1790 Reverend William Bentley, the local minister in Salem, Massachusetts, wrote the following diary entry:

Had the pleasure of seeing for the first time a native of the Indies from Madras. He is of very dark complection [sic], long black hair, soft countenance, tall, & well proportioned. He is said to be darker than Indians in general of his own cast, being much darker than any native Indians of America. I had no opportunity to judge of his abilities, but his countenance was not expressive. He came to Salem with Capt. J. Gibaut, and has been in Europe.¹

That is all that the good reverend had to say about this particular visitor. The diary went on to detail a break-in at Widow Neal’s house and the continued snowy weather. The sighting of the stranger from Madras was unique enough to note in one’s journal, but it was no more important than local news and weather.

In 1790, Salem was a bustling New England port town. Ships routinely left its harbor bound for Africa and Asia and returned carrying a variety of goods from the other side of the world. Rarely, however, did the ships return with people, like the man William Bentley observed. Bentley himself was more than a local minister; he functioned as a local civic leader, friendly with the important families that owned and ran the shipping companies. His diary offers a daily summary of life in a post-Revolutionary port town, and his description of the man from Madras presents one small example of how early Americans encountered difference from other parts of the world.

Notice what Bentley noticed about the man from Madras. He paid attention to skin color, hair, “countenance,” and the shape and size of his body. William Bentley saw something different that day in Salem, and he had to write about it. Bentley marked the native from Madras as different from himself and the people of Salem. The diary entry is an implicit comparison between the native of Madras and the people of Salem. Bentley noted that this is the first time he had seen “a native of the Indies,” marking the man as different and novel, as opposed to the similar and everyday people of Salem. These physical traits were immediate markers of the difference between Bentley and the native from Madras. There was also an open question about whether the native of Madras had unseen interior differences from Bentley. Bentley was unsure about his “abilities,” though his “countenance” seemed to leave Bentley unimpressed. Bentley also nuanced the difference between himself and the native of Madras by comparing him to “native Indians of America.” The native of Madras was darker than “any native of Indians of America.” Thus, there were two levels of difference at work in the entry, the further difference of the native of Madras and the closer difference of the natives of America, whom Bentley had seen enough times to not find novel.

In the brief diary entry, Bentley sketches out a working set of categories for constructing the difference between himself (and the people of Salem) and the man from Madras. The man from Madras is different from the people of Salem, is similar to Indigenous people in America, but also still different from both Euro-Americans in Salem and Indigenous Americans. Bentley triangulates between the Euro-Americans of Salem, Indigenous Americans, and the man from Madras. Across all these comparisons, the Euro-Americans, the group that includes Bentley himself, goes unmarked and unmentioned. The “us,”—that is, Bentley’s own sort of people— is a kind of default against which all other difference, the “them,” is marked.

Constructing Difference and Inventing “the Other”

None of the difference Bentley observed between himself and the native of Madras was natural. Rather, like all difference, the difference between Bentley and the native of Madras was constructed through a system of difference that marked the native of Madras as someone who does not belong in Salem, and thus was worth mentioning in the diary. As historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith has noted, “‘difference’ is an active term—ultimately a verbal form, differre, to ‘carry apart’—suggesting the separating out of what, from another vantage point, might be seen as the ‘same.’”² Following Smith, difference is not inherent but has to be marked and labeled different. Through the marking of difference, people and groups construct models of IN/OUT or US/THEM. We are similar. They are different. These systems of difference also construct “the other,” that is, the people that are “not us” or “not me.” Through his diary entry and the differences he marked, Bentley made the man from Madras different. The man from Madras became an “other,” a “them,” categorically separated from the “us” in Salem.

Drawing on a survey of historical examples, Smith has identified three models for how “the other” can be constructed. First, Smith identified what he called “the metonymical model.” This model often appears through naming.

One group distinguishes itself from another by lifting up some cultural feature, expressed as the lack of some familiar cultural trait, the use of some unfamiliar cultural object (e.g. “fish-eaters,” “garlic-eaters”), the presence of some marked physical feature (e.g. “whites,” “blacks”), or the characterization by naming the other as a nonhuman species.³

This metonymical model is common across a variety of cultures. For example, in Alabama, where I live, fans of the University of Alabama football team will often refer to their rivals at Auburn University as “barners” because Auburn is known for its agricultural programs. They have a lot of barns, so “we” (I’ll count myself as a fan here) call “them” “barners.”⁴ In the metonymical model, a group only needs to mark a single difference and lift it up to the level of a defining characteristic in order to construct “the other” as altogether different.

Second, Smith identified a “model of center and periphery” that defines difference spatially. The most basic examples of this model construct “a contrast between the inhabitants of cities and the hinterlands.” More simply, they construct a difference between “us” and “those people over there.” A friend of mine once mentioned their father referred to outsiders as people who are “from yonder.” By positing difference as being “over there,” the other can become monstrous. For example, Smith explained how from the third century to the thirteenth century, European texts described “monstrous and alien peoples” in India and Asia:

In these texts one encounters the full range of imagined monstrous peoples … such as the beings with one large foot or peoples with ears so large as to cover their back and arms … Others represent reversals characteristic of never-never lands: people with no anuses, people with no nostrils, people with no mouths who live on odors, people whose heels are in front and whose toes point backward, people with head and feet reversed, people born with gray hair that turns black as they age.⁵

In this model, the further one gets from the place where “we” live, the more different “they” become. Beyond the boundaries of “our” territory, the differences stretch the imagination.

Finally, in the third model “the ‘other’ is represented linguistically and/or intellectually in terms of intelligibility … Here, the ‘other’ remains obdurately ‘other’ in a most basic sense: the ‘other’ is unintelligible and will remain so.”⁶ Here Smith means that this third model labels “the other” as different because they are impossible to understand, either because of linguistic difference or because intellectually they just do not make sense to “us.” For a contemporary example, some English-speaking Americans have labeled Spanish-speaking Latinx Americans as “other” because they cannot understand Spanish and wish for the United States to remain an English-only society. The linguistic difference, which renders Latinx Americans unintelligible, constructs them as an “other” for these English speakers. Or, for another example, nineteenth-century studies of so-called “primitive” or “savage” people by anthropologists rendered them different because they possessed an irrational “primitive mentality.” For these anthropologists, the behavior and culture of the “primitive” could not be understood directly. In their research, they do not let the “primitives” they study speak for themselves. Because they construct these “others” as unintelligible, they also must speak for “them.” The “primitive” cannot explain themselves, so the anthropologists argued, and the anthropologist (“we”) must speak for them. As Smith summed it up, “the focus on the ‘other’ as unintelligible has led, necessarily, to ‘their’ silence and ‘our’ speech.” The other cannot be understood, and so we must speak for them.

The three models Smith has outlined are useful for thinking through the ways Americans constructed difference between themselves and “others” in their encounters with people in India. Some Americans constructed difference through the first model, raising the possession of some sort of “religion” as a defining characteristic. Those without religion were “heathens,” an other defined by their lack of religion. Other Americans represented “the other” in ways that match Smith’s second model. For them, India was part of the “Orient,” a land across the ocean full of mystery, riches, goods, and mysticism. These Americans imagined a fabulous Orient fundamentally different from their home. Finally, many Americans constructed difference between themselves and “Hindoos” or “Hindus” according to Smith’s third model of intelligibility. For these Americans, “Hindoo” religion and “Hindoos” themselves were irrational and unintelligible. Rather than allow people in India to represent themselves, these writers and observers spoke for the “Hindoos” that they found to be irrational and unintelligible. Smith’s models, then, can guide us through the early history of American encounters with India and the way Americans imagined and constructed the “other” in those encounters.

Heathens: The Other with No Religion

William Bentley was interested in the native of the Indies from Madras because so few people from South Asia came to America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What did come to early America were descriptions, images, materials, artifacts, ideas, and texts from India and about India. These earliest American descriptions of religion in India did not use the word “Hinduism.” For example, the puritan New England minister Cotton Mather took an interest in India and in the Christian missionary work happening there. Because he was interested in converting the Indigenous people near him in New England to Christianity, he hoped to learn something from missionaries in India. So, he started exchanging letters with the missionaries there. In his 1721 book India Christiana, Mather includes a sermon titled “The Joyful Sound reaching to both the Indias,” which he gave to a local New England missionary society for missionizing native Americans.⁷ In the sermon, Mather sees no difference between the natives of the “East Indies” and the natives of the Americas. For Mather, all of these non-Christian and non-European people are “heathens” in need of Christianization and civilization. All of these “other” people are “heathens” because they do not have a religion. This lack of religion makes them “heathens” and makes them different. In that same book, Mather includes a letter he received from a Dutch Protestant missionary working in India. The missionary Johann Ernest Grundler describes the “Malabarians” as “deluded Heathen people.”⁸ Likewise, Mather always refers to the people in Malabar as “Malabarians” or “heathens.” In 1721, at least as far as Cotton Mather knew, there were no “Hindus” or “Hinduism” in India, just “heathens.”

For Cotton Mather, the people in India were heathens, meaning they had no religion, at least no real religion. Like Mather, many Europeans and Euro-Americans in this period denied the people of India the category “religion.” In his study of the production of comparative religion in colonial South Africa, religious studies scholar David Chidester argued that European colonial officials, travelers, and merchants initially denied the existence of religion in places outside of Europe. As he wrote, “the initial comparative maneuver under intercultural conditions was most often denial, the assertion that people had been found who lacked any religion.”⁹ This began with the first European explorations of the seventeenth century but conti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: The Pronunciation of Om
• 1. The Other: “Heathens” and “Hindoos” in Early America
• 2. Orientalism: East and West in Nineteenth-Century America
• 3. World Religions: The Construction of “Hinduism” in America
• 4. Metaphysical Religion: Vedanta and Yoga
• 5. Spirituality: The Hippies and the Seekers Find India
• 6. Diaspora: The Hindu Diaspora in the United States
• Bibliography
• Index