By Raymond Brady Williams
Early research on the creation of religious organisations by Hindu immigrants to the US resulted in the development of a typology of strategies of adaptation that included ‘ecumenical’ as a type (Williams, 1988: 41f). An ecumenical strategy of adaptation involved bringing multiple Hindu deities and concepts into one organisation in configurations that would not be common among Hindus in India. It generally involved gatherings that included diverse ethnic, sectarian and linguistic groups in which such distinctions were muted and the common discourse was in English. This strategy was in evidence in early gatherings in homes, apartment community rooms and park district halls. When temples were planned, devotees of several deities and traditions, including Jains, were invited to place their objects of worship in shrines and join in supporting the temples.
The ecumenical strategy of adaptation was distinguished from other strategies used by early immigrants: individual, ethnic, national and hieratic (Williams, 1996: 231ff). The earliest immigrants were isolated, and those who preserved their religious identity did so by maintaining private rituals and home shrines. Those who followed national strategies of adaptation attracted the newly identified Asian Indian immigrants into all-India organisations. Groups formed along ethnic and linguistic lines and celebrated regional forms of ritual, language, cuisine and mores. The hierarchical or hieratic strategy of adaptation involved allegiance to a guru or a line of gurus to whom loyalty was given. This typology was an attempt to chart the chaotic scene at early stages of immigration. An ecumenical Hinduism developed in the US that unites deities, rituals, sacred texts and people in temples and programmes in ways that were not common in India. American temples became meeting places of the deities that immigrants brought with them from India.
The negotiation of adaptive strategies is a long, involved process in which the religious groups function differently in the sacralisation of personal and group identity. The differences are due to elements of theology, peculiar group histories and the social and political contexts in new settings. Differences among strategies are evident in the characteristics of religious leadership, creation of sacred spaces, observance of sacred times and use of language and arts in the transmission of tradition, which have been plotted on new territory along these trajectories according to length of residence, population density of Hindu immigrants, transition of generations and majority–minority status. These five adaptive strategies—individual, ethnic, national, hieratic and ecumenical—are ideal types that rarely exist in pure form. Moreover, strategies of adaptation are malleable because immigrants, and others as well, are able to stress several overlapping identities, depending upon the context.
In the past two decades, the institutions established by immigrants in the West and those developing in India have become much more diverse and complex. The numbers of Hindus and Hindu institutions have grown dramatically in the UK, Canada and the US. Families and institutions have become transnational and rapid mobility and communication results in exchange of funds, ideas, people and religions across networks that reach through several countries and cultures. A reverse impact of non-resident Indians and Hindus living abroad affects adaptation to elements of modernity by Hindu institutions and communities in India. Hence, strategies of adaptation and their interaction are on a much larger scale and are more complex.
Ecumenical representations of Hinduism continue to result from ecumenical strategies of adaptation. Such representations meet the need of immigrants and their children for personal and group identities in new locations and for the rituals, gestures and customary modes of behaviour to shape their self-understanding. They are also necessary and effective in representing to the wider society their identities and in negotiating a secure place in new social and cultural contexts. In the past decade, the ecumenical and national strategies have come closer together in the US, even merged in some cases, and Hindu nationalism and ecumenical Hinduism attract supporters in the diaspora. It is more difficult to conceptualise ecumenism in India.
The four chapters in this section on ecumenical constructions treat more recent developments in the ways Hinduism is being represented in different national contexts. Umbrella Hindu organisations have formed, adding another level of ecumenical representations of Hinduism, and parallel developments in India led to movements often associated with Hindu nationalism and Hindutva. In Western countries, Hindu minority organisations have banded together so that they will have a stronger identity and presence in civic affairs. Governments develop interests in identifying representatives and spokespersons for religious and ethnic groups and in manipulating those representatives for a variety of perceived social goods.
John Zavos’ chapter titled ‘Hindu Organisation and the Negotiation of Public Space in Contemporary Britain’ adopts a model from Jurgen Habermas to argue that Hindu umbrella organisations have come to operate as ‘translation institutions’, mediating the representation of Hindu-ness across a network of interrelated public spaces. The focus is on development of the National Council for Hindu Temples, the Hindu Council UK and the Hindu Forum of Britain to recount different ways in which Hinduism and Hindus as a community have developed a public profile in the UK over the past three decades. These umbrella organisations relate to multiculturalism in Britain by pointing to religion as a marker of ethnic identity, asserting that religious identities are politically significant and showing that religions can propagate common public values in a multicultural Britain. The organisations have been successful in opening up new social and political spaces for the articulation of religious identities.
Prema Kurien’s chapter, ‘What Is American about American Hinduism? Hindu Umbrella Organisations in the United States in Comparative Perspective’, focuses on the unique features of the US context and its relationship to the development and articulations of public Hinduism. She argues that the development of public Hinduism in the US is different from that in multicultural Canada and Britain. The relative invisibility and marginalisation of Hindus in the US, together with the traditions of activism of Jews and other religious groups, and the emergence of the US as the focus of Islamic terrorism explain the differences between activism patterns and strategies of Hindus groups in the US when compared with other countries. Research on the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Hindu Student Council, the Hindu American Foundation, the Hindu Council against Defamation and the Infinity Foundation provides the basis for her conclusions regarding educating Americans about the meaning and content of American Hindu identity, seeking acknowledgement of Hinduism as an American religion, distinguishing Hinduism from Abrahamic religions, especially regarding proselytisation, and challenging scholars of Hinduism in the American academy. The public activism of American Hindus is shaped by the American religio-cultural context, its history and official policies and the specific patterns of migration.
Pralay Kanungo’s chapter, ‘Fusing the Ideals of the Math with the Ideology of the Sangh? Vivekananda Kendra, Ecumenical Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism’, focuses on India. He examines the evolution, organisation and working of the Vivekananda Kendra to show how its innovative positioning facilitates the construction of ecumenical Hinduism while simultaneously cultivating Hindu nationalism. The Vivekananda Kendra expanded Hindu ecumenism by bringing all Hindus to a common platform of practical Vedanta and social service and simultaneously disseminated a less strident Hindutva. Kanungo traces the conflicted history of establishing the Vivekananda Rock Memorial to show how Vivekananda became a powerful symbol of cultural nationalism and how the organisation combined service with spiritual orientation aimed at ‘man-making’ and ‘nation-building’. He traces the work of the Vivekananda Kendra in Arunachal Pradesh in countering the work of Christian missionaries and supporting indigenous cultures and the ‘Hinduisation’ of these communities. The institution combines ecumenical ideals of spiritualisation and social service with the ideology of Hindu nationalism.
Chad Bauman’s chapter, ‘Sathya Sai Baba: At Home Abroad in Midwestern America’, presents the Indianapolis Sai Baba Center as a kind of intra- and inter-religiously ecumenical Hinduism. Such ecumenical representation of a Hindu form of spirituality that preserves much of Indian tradition while providing a representation viable in the modern West results from what Bauman calls ‘Sai’s semiotic flexibility’. Such flexibility permits immigrants to preserve Hindu traditions that make sense to them in their new cultural context. Guru-based groups can be ecumenical through emphasis on rituals, mores and concepts that are more universal in Hinduism or, as in the case of the Indianapolis Sai Baba Center, by emphasising aspects of spirituality and values thought to be common to many religions. Such ecumenicity combines the values from India with the ethical monotheism common in America’s civil religion.
This section presents information about several ecumenical strategies of adaptation that evolved over the past two decades in India, the US and the UK. A small group meeting in the America Midwest, a widespread organisation in India and several umbrella organisations in the Indian diaspora attract allegiance of Hindus from many regions and many religious organisations to translation organisations that represent an ecumenical form of Hinduism. The ecumenical strategy is effective in projecting a larger constituency and in representing Hinduism in civic discourse and negotiations.
Williams, Raymond Brady. 1988. Religions of Immigrants from India and Pakistan: New Threads in the American Tapestry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——— (ed.). 1996. A Sacred Thread: Modern Transmission of Hindu Traditions in India and Abroad. New York: Columbia University Press.