Hinduism and the West

Overview

Recall questions on Hindu communities outside India and how practice, funerals, festivals and varna change there, portrayal and stereotypes in Western culture, responses to Western science, interreligious relationships, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Gandhi, and yoga in the West.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   How did Hindu communities come to be established outside India?

   Model answer

   In several distinct waves. From the 1830s, after slavery was abolished in the British empire, indentured labourers were shipped from India to Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, Fiji, Mauritius, Natal and elsewhere, and their descendants form long-established Hindu populations. Traders and administrators settled in East Africa. After the Second World War, labour shortages drew migrants to Britain, chiefly from Gujarat and Punjab, and many East African Asians arrived after being expelled from Uganda in 1972. Changes to United States immigration law in 1965 brought a largely professional migration to North America. Later movements have included students, technology workers and refugees, so diaspora Hindu communities differ greatly in class, region of origin and language.

2. 2

   What changes about Hindu practice once it is transplanted outside India?

   Model answer

   Worship tends to become congregational and to concentrate on a weekend day, because people work; temples take on functions of community centre, language school and welfare organisation that they rarely have in India; and a single building often houses deities from several traditions and regions, where an Indian temple usually serves one. Priests are recruited from India and may not speak the local language well, while the young may not understand the ritual language, so explanation and translation become part of worship. Domestic shrines and festivals often carry more of the religious life than they would at home. Where the sacred geography of India is unavailable, substitutes develop, such as treating a local river as standing in for the Ganges.

3. 3

   What legal and cultural pressures affect Hindu funeral practice outside India?

   Model answer

   Cremation is essential to Hindu funeral rites, but the traditional open-air pyre lit by the eldest son conflicts with public health and environmental law in most Western countries, so cremation normally takes place in a municipal crematorium where the family's ritual role is greatly reduced. The disposal of ashes is another difficulty where the Ganges is thousands of miles away, and families either arrange for ashes to be flown home or use a local river. In England the question was tested in the courts, and in 2010 an appeal established that an open-air cremation could lawfully take place within a structure, though very few have followed. Funeral practice is therefore a good example of a rite that has been adapted rather than abandoned.

4. 4

   How are Hindu festivals and pilgrimage practised outside India?

   Model answer

   Festivals are shifted to weekends and held in hired halls, community centres and hotels as well as temples, and public celebrations of Diwali have become civic events in cities with large Hindu populations. Their function shifts as well as their timing: away from India they carry much of the work of transmitting language, dance, music and identity to children, so cultural performance becomes a larger part of them. Pilgrimage cannot be replicated, since the sites are fixed in India, so it becomes an occasional and expensive journey home, sometimes made once in a lifetime. Some communities have responded by consecrating major temples abroad as destinations in their own right.

5. 5

   What has happened to varna and ashrama in Hindu communities outside India?

   Model answer

   The occupational meaning of varna disappears almost entirely, because employment is open and no one inherits a trade, and the ritual distinction between the twice-born and others matters only in the temple. Jati nonetheless persists strongly, chiefly through marriage, since many families still expect a partner from the same community, and through caste associations that organise social life, welfare and temple governance. The stages of life fit modern conditions awkwardly: the student stage has no equivalent, and withdrawal and renunciation have almost no social space, though some elderly Hindus travel to India in later life in something like that spirit. Whether caste discrimination in Britain should be covered by equality law has been debated, with a provision passed in 2010 left unimplemented and the government deciding in 2018 to rely on case law instead.

6. 6

   How does Western popular culture portray Hinduism?

   Model answer

   Often through a small number of images repeated: exotic mysticism, gurus and ashrams, a bewildering number of gods, the sacred cow, and caste presented as the whole of Hindu society. Popular film has supplied outright caricature, and the association of Hinduism with drugs and countercultural travel in the 1960s left a residue. Yoga is the most widespread element, but it circulates as fitness and stress relief detached from the philosophy and the goal of liberation, which some Hindu organisations have campaigned about. Devotional movements that arrived in the West, most visibly the Krishna movement founded in 1966, are highly visible and are often mistaken for Hinduism in general when they represent one devotional tradition.

Other ways to work this

The same content, four other ways.

What is inside Levo

Six ways to work the same material.