Category: Religion

Vivek Ramaswamy Leans Into His Hindu Faith to Court Christian Voters:

Swami Vivekananda, who represented Hinduism at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893, took pains to depict his faith as monotheistic, in contrast to the stereotypes of its followers as “heathen” polytheists. Although the faith has many deities, they are generally subordinate to one ultimate “reality.” Many Hindus and scholars say its theology is too complex to be described as either wholly monotheistic or wholly polytheistic.

“The polytheism hurdle is the first thing that has to be addressed” for many American Christian audiences, Mr. Altman said. He sees Mr. Ramaswamy’s pitch against “wokeism” as a way to counter stereotypes associating Hinduism with hippies, yoga and vegetarianism.

Sometimes in these comments or on social media, I see Hindus bemoan the passivity and weakness of their religion in the face of faiths with greater vigor and asabiyyah. This is such a common occurrence that I don’t often comment on it. But I have to say ironically that these sorts of comments exhibit a narrowness of perception, and a broader cultural involution, that typifies so many Hindus and is why they are often caught flatfooted against the partisans of other religions, usually Christianity and Islam.

First, there are 1.2 billion Hindus in the world. There is no near-term future where Hinduism will go extinct. And this number of Hindus is the very source of the religion’s likely rebirth: evolution operates upon heritable variation to drive adaptation and change. In a cultural sense, Hinduism has a great deal of variation, whether it be obscure ethnicities like the Cham Hindus of Vietnam, or the expansion of ISKCON around the world.

ISKCON itself is interesting because its reactions illustrate the weakness and likely end of some forms of Hinduism in the Diaspora, and likely ultimately in India itself. Though from what I can tell ISKCON does exhibit a level of unpalatable cultishness, some of its orthodox Indian Hindu critics exhibit a literal reactionary mindset that illustrates why many forms of this religion are not long for this world. After the hammer blow of Islam in the Indian subcontinent around 1200 AD Indian religious traditions, what we call Hinduism, nevertheless preserved and survived. This very fact illustrates a robustness that was lacking in Near Eastern Christianity and Zoroastrianism. But that survival likely depended upon particular Indian institutions, like jati-varna, that were decentralized and flexible in a manner that allowed Hinduism not to be decapitated in the same manner that Persian Christianity and Zoroastrianism were in the centuries after the Islamic conquest.

The centuries of dhimmitude transformed Hinduism into a far more Indian religion than it was in 500 AD. This may sound strange, but the genetic and cultural evidence are clear that a massive cultural extension of Hindu Indian civilization existed in Southeast Asia during this period. If Islam had not interposed itself, and India itself become part of the Dar-ul-Islam during the medieval period, it is quite plausible that a Hindu-Buddhism dharmic condominium may have emerged from the Indus to the Gulf of Tonkin over the last few thousand years.

But that is not what happened. At the same time as the Turco-Muslims invaded India maritime Southeast Asia began to realign itself with the Islamic international, a trade network that was beginning to dominate the Indian ocean. After 1500 most of the Hindu kingdoms collapsed and turned to Islam (with Bali and Champa being the exceptions). The geographic purview of the religions that ultimately drew from the Vedic traditions became constrained, and within India cultural adaptations emerged that allowed the religion to resist the stress tests of Islam.

The centuries after the fall of the Mughals the rise of the British, and now the rise to political domination by Hindutva, are creating new cultural configurations. Many Hindus retain the cultural mindset of the past, denying that Hinduism proselytizes when the very faces of the Balinese illustrate that this was not so in the past. These traditionalists assert jati-varna in a time when even within India inter-caste marriage is eroding the power of this communalism gradually but inevitably. They also deny that non-Indians can ever be genuinely authentically Hindu, even when those non-Indians oftentimes show a vigor of belief and practice that put Indians to the same.

Those who value purity above all else will slowly fade and diminish as they look back to the past. A new future comes, and we don’t know what it will be, but cultures are resilient.

In one section of the Washington Post piece Cal State banned caste discrimination. Two Hindu professors sued an activist professor states:

Sundaram, who supports making caste a protected characteristic, said critiquing Hinduism — even in a country where Hindus are a minority — is not akin to promoting Hinduphobia. She said most discrimination against Hindus is based on the fact that many are South Asian, rather than on their religion, and that Hinduphobia is not a widespread problem.

There are two issues I have with this assertion.

As a person of non-Hindu background and upbringing, I can tell you that prejudice against the Hindu religion is tightly coupled with “anti-South Asian” bigotry. The number of times people made fun of me for “worshipping cows” or “elephants” and “monkeys” was frequent. I actually learned about Ganesh and Hanuman due to this mockery as I had to look up what people were making fun of.

If someone screams “go back to Mecca” at a bunch of Hindu Indian Americans is that not Islamophobia because they’re not Muslim and they are being targeted for being vaguely brown? Similarly, non-Hindu brown people are bracketed into the same category and subject to discrimination because of widespread prejudices against Hinduism. In fact, despite my clear Bengali non-ashraf appearance online Indian Leftists now call me an “upper caste Muslim” to insult me. Bangladesh, unlike Pakistan, does not have caste-like stratification (look at my genetics, my ancestors were clearly from many castes), so that’s wrong, and I’m not a Muslim by belief or frankly even much upbringing (I’ve always been an atheist or agnostic and was not raised in a Musim community). But even these secular online Indian Leftists deploy tropes and insults that draw on our South Asian ancestral culture, which is broadly Hindu, even if not always orthodox Brahmanically sanctioned Hinduism.

Second, it’s pretty apparent there is an anti-Hindu streak in American society simply because of its Christian (and Abrahamic)  cultural basis. Sometimes it is hateful, sometimes it is mean. Many conservative Christians, including some Hindu converts to Christianity, believe that Hindu gods do exist, but that they’re devils and demons. I once asked a friend who is from a Hindu background but converted to Christianity in college if he believed his ancestors worshipped the devil, and he pretty much admitted he believed this to be the case. Some of the same apply to Islam, but most Christians outside of the fundamentalist fringe generally concede that Allah (Arab Christians use this word for God) is the same God that they worship.

This Hinduphobia is broad, but shallow. It doesn’t effect most peoples’ lives deeply, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Many, though not all, Indian American Hindus are clearly embarrassed by their religion because of the mockery. This is obvious when I hear young Indian Americans emphasize that “actually our religion is monotheistic just like yours.” This is the Hindu version of Muslims saying “actually Jesus is a prophet.” Both of these assertions might be true, but the impulse behind them is to mitigate marginalization and pull themselves back to the center and normalcy.

Note: I dislike terms like “Hindophobia” and “Islamophobia,” and the stance of becoming a victim to win an argument. But this is how the game is played in America now.