The Hinduization of America

[Guest guest]

The Hinduization of America

By Francis C. Assisi

Like so many Americans who like to play "Indian", Indian-Americans

too have been traversing America's sacred landscape without

connecting with the deeply held beliefs of its ancient inhabitants,

the American Indians.

 

But not anymore. They are becoming grounded on American soil. And

from Hindu temples in Juneau, Alaska, to Tallahassee, Florida, and

to Kauai, Hawaii, they are chanting praises such as this: America

vasa jaya govinda or Victory to Govinda who lives in America.

 

That's because there is an ongoing process of Hinduizing the

American sacred space. Hindu Americans have begun to cultivate the

strains within their own religious tradition that foster a sense of

the sacred earth through myth, ritual, ceremonies, and spirit power

that more or less reflects Native American or American Indian

cultures. Indeed, Hindu Americans would not be doing this if they

did not realize the land was sacred in some intrinsic way, something

the Native American Indians knew for thousands of years.

 

Now, Hindu Americans are locating, establishing and embellishing

sacred spaces in America by co-mingling the waters of the Ganga and

the Kaveri with the Mississippi and Rio Grande, and by invoking the

holy Indian rivers into the local waters. Even if this ritual is not

viewed as purifying one of all sins it is a palpable affirmation of

an emerging Hindu cosmology transplanted in America.

 

At the simples level there is a notion of transference – an idea

that the sacredness attached to the India's sacred rivers will

physically attach itself to the local rivers. It's a pattern that

has grown with the earlier diasporas in Malaysia, Singapore,

Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji, Guyana, Trinidad, and the later

migrations to Australia, Britain, Europe, Canada and the United

States. Perhaps the stage was set when Hindu culture spread to

Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia in its earliest phase.

 

SACRED LAND

 

In America itself the phrase "sacred land" is used frequently, but

it's meaning remains elusive to many non-Natives, who relate to land

mostly through property lines or hiking trails. This difference

highlights perhaps the widest gulf between the two cultures – Native

Americans and European Americans. On the one hand is the Judeo-

Christian belief that humans were meant to have dominion over

nature; on the other is the belief in land as a living network, not

as fragments they could purchase. "How can you 'save the Earth' if

you have no spiritual relationship with the Earth?" asks Tonya

Gonnella Frichner of the Onondaga Nation. "There is an intellectual

abstraction about the environment but no visceral participation with

the Earth."

 

Perhaps one of the most pervasive concepts among American Indians is

the belief that land is alive. Every particular form of the land is

the locus of qualitatively different spirit beings. Their presence

gives life to and sanctifies the land in all its details and

contours. Thus, it's when people recognize a shared spiritual

essence in the world around them that their interactions with the

land take on a quality of reverence and respect.

 

Seeing what a specific place means to a specific culture can help

non-Natives understand how land plays not an auxiliary or symbolic

role, but is a central, necessary force in many Native traditions.

The rivers, the mountains, the air, the wind, animals, all living

and non-living things, everything in the ecology - becomes

meaningful because they are interconnected. This is a theme that is

central to India's holistic vision.

 

In his "Afterword" to the volume America in 1492, Vine Deloria, Jr.,

encourages us to reflect on the degree to which non-Native

Americans "have responded to the rhythms of the land--the degree to

which they have become indigenous." In the context of immigrant

Indian Americans, "becoming indigenous" means knowing the land where

they live and showing it respect. One way this is happening is by

placing a relationship to the land in a religious context, as

opposed to just an economic context. It helps Indian Americans

experience the life force of the land, enabling them to see the land

of their adoption as a distinct being deserving of respect.

 

Which is why, in the past twenty five years, the American landscape,

with its rich surfeit of rivers, mountains, forests, animals,

ancestral graves and relics, is becoming sacred space to Indian

Americans as it has been for American Indians through the millennia.

They have enhanced and spiritually empowered America's sacred

landscape with more than 1500 places of worship in North America.

 

DR VASUDHA NARYANAN

 

Professor Vasudha Narayanan, an authority on diasporic Hinduism

claims that Hindu rituals are part of the many ways in which the

local landscape is being transformed to be sacred liturgical space

for immigrant American Hindus. Dr. Narayanan, a former President of

the American Academy of Religions and professor at the University of

Florida's Department of Religion, has looked at how post-1965

immigrant Hindus perceive the land of the Americas and how they

consecrate the ground on which they build their temples. She has

outlined this in a paper presented at the American Academy of

Religion and titled "Victory to Govinda who lives in America: Hindu

Ritual to Sacralize the American Landscape."

 

Narayanan is the author and editor of five books and more than 80

articles, chapters and encyclopedia entries. Her book "The Hindu

Traditions in the United States: Temple Space, Domestic Space, and

Cyberspace" was be published by Columbia University Press in 2004.

She is currently working on Hindu temples and Vaishnava traditions

in Cambodia.

 

The point this distinguished Hindu American has made is that Indians

have made the land of the Americas ritually sacred in at least four

ways: composing songs and pious Sanskrit prayers extolling the

American state where the temples are located; identifying America as

a specific dvipa or island as noted in the Hindu Puranas; physically

consecrating the land with waters from sacred Indian and American

rivers; and literally recreating the physical landscape of certain

holy places in India, as in Pittsburgh or Barsana Dham, Texas. Thus,

Prof. Naryanan discerns "a process by which land or shrines held

sacred by the native inhabitants is coopted by Hindus and the

sacrality is re-articulated with Hindu motifs."

 

For example, devotees at the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Penn Hills,

Pennsylvania, praised Lord Venkateswara, a manifestation of Lord

Vishnu, in song: America vasa jaya govinda, Penn Hills nilaya radhe

govinda, sri guru jaya guru, vithala govinda, which means, "Victory

to Govinda who lives in America; Govinda who with Radha resides in

Penn Hills. Victory to Govinda, Vithala, the sacred Teacher."

Singing about a place expresses its sacredness and makes it a

palpable spot of holiness, explains Prof. Narayanan.

 

Also, a statement put out by the Venkateshwara temple noted:

Pittsburgh, endowed with hills and a multitude of trees as well as

the confluence of the three rivers, namely, the Allegheny, the

Mongahela, and the sub-terrainean river (brought up via the 60 foot

high fountain at downtown) to form the Ohio river is indeed a

perfect choice for building the first and most authentic temple to

house Lord Venkateswara. The evergrowing crowds that have been

coming to the city with the thriveni Sangama of the three rivers to

worship at the Temple with the three vimanas reassure our belief

that the venerable Gods chose this place and the emerald green

hillock to reside in.

 

Dr. J. Sethuraman, professor of statistics at the Florida State

University in Tallahassee, who is now retired, went one step

further. The Madras-born Sanskrit scholar composed an elegant poem

called Sri Venkatesha America Vaibhava Stotram, "Praise of the

Appearance of Lord Venkatesha in America." It is in classical

Sanskrit, in the style of a traditional kavya, or poem, replete with

exquisite literary flourishes and ornate verses: "Such a Venkatesha,

the ocean of nectar of kindness, has come to the hilltop at the well-

known city of Pittsburgh, surrounded by the three rivers, Allegheny,

Monongahela and the Ohio, to remove the miseries of the people." Dr.

Sethuraman then proceeds to glorify Lord Vishnu; in his

manifestation as Venkatesha, as the deity in more than 20 American

towns, and describes with local imagery the different places in the

United States where Venkatesha is enshrined.

 

As Prof. Narayanan explained: "While all temples go through formal

ceremonies of vivification with pitchers of sanctified waters, the

devotees' songs promulgate the sacredness of the land; the terrain

is now internalized in landscape of devotion. Many Hindu devotees

celebrate the lord's accessibility more than his supremacy, and to

make himself accessible, he is said to abide in a local shrine close

to the devotee. Thus, Venkateswara (also known as Venkatesha in

songs) is totally present in Tiru Venkatam, India, and this is

important; but even more important is that this deity is now

perceived as abiding in a local shrine at Penn Hills, Malibu,

Chicago, Dayton, Atlanta, etc. The devotees in Pittsburgh, just as

the many Hindu saints celebrated it, see the lord as being

physically close to them sanctifying the land they live in."

 

Another example of making America a sacred home is evident in

the "declaration of intention," done at the beginning of every

ritual. The land is usually identified with one of the dvipas,

or "islands" from the Puranas.. Thus, Hindus in India begin most

rituals with the line, "in this island of the Rose-Apple

(Jambudvipa), in the fragment of land called Bharata, south of Mount

Meru." In Canada and America there are new parameters. Almost all

temples state that America is located in the Krauncha (Egret or

Heron) island, which is west of Mount Meru. In the intention recited

in Tallahassee, Dr. Sethuraman chanted: "In this island of Krauncha,

in the delightful continent, in the sacred province of the cows that

is east of the Mississippi River, in the sacred land called

Tallahassee."

 

Interestingly, according to the Puranic Encyclopedia of Vettam Mani,

Krauncha is the fifth of seven islands in Indian mythology.

Surrounded by milk, and guarded by the god Varuna, it is also said

to contain a mountain, where a haughty and arrogant asura, also

named Krauncha, was leading a wicked life.

 

SACRED RIVERS

 

Hindus think of rivers as capable of spiritually cleansing all those

who bathe in them. But why should they mingle the sacred waters

brought from India's rivers with the local waters of the Mississippi

and the Suwannee? On the simplest level, the belief is that the

sacredness of the Ganga, the Kaveri and other rivers will physically

attach itself to the local rivers of America. But there is more

going on here than just spiritually or physically invoking the holy

Indian rivers into the local waters. Just as the supreme being makes

itself accessible through an incarnation or manifestation on earth,

the sanctity of the remote site in India is made accessible in this

country to the devotees, claims Prof. Naryanan.

 

Another way Hindus in America enhance the sacredness of their

temples is to try to either recognize and rediscover resemblances

between American physical landscape and distinctive sacred spots in

India, or to recreate that similarity. The earliest attempt was at

the Venkateswara Temple in Pittsburgh. Devotees voiced the

similarity between the sacred place in India where the rivers Ganga,

Yamuna and the underground Saraswati meet, and the confluence of

three local rivers.

 

According to Prof Narayanan, some of the most sustained attempts in

recreating the landscape are in Barsana Dham, Texas, and at the

Iraivan Temple to Siva, in Kauai, Hawaii. Barsana Dham resembles

Barsana in Northern India, said to be the hometown of Radha, the

beloved of Lord Krishna. Here, all the important landmarks of

Krishna and Radha's homeland were recreated. At Iraivan Temple in

Hawaii, not only are the names reminiscent of India, but the similar

environment of tropical India meshes with the local Hawaiian land to

create a unique milieu.

 

As expected, the Pittsburgh temple, the Barsana Dham in Texas, and

the Iraivan Temple in Hawaii have become new pilgrimage destination

for millions of Indians living in North America. Even visitors from

India make it a point to include these temples in their itinerary.

Dr. Sambamurthy Sivachariyar, an important priest of a large temple

in Madras, India, who presided as chief priest for the stone-laying

ceremony of Iraivan Temple in 1995 said, "I am too old to go on

pilgrimage to the holy sites in the Indian Himalayan mountains,

where, according to Hinduism, God Himself resides and gives His

grace to pilgrims. That was a life-long dream of mine. But now that

I have come to the most beautiful place in the world, Kauai, to this

sacred land, I feel my dream has been fulfilled. I have come to the

home of God."

 

Interestingly, the ancient Hawaiians called the temple site, which

is at the foot of Mount Waialeale near the sacred Wailua River,

Pihanakalani, "where heaven touches Earth."

 

Last December, Prof Seetharaman put final touches to his version of

the Sri-Venkatesha-America-Vaibhava-Stotram by including all the

traditional style Hindu temples in North America and concluded with

the following shloka:

 

"It is no wonder that you have many such divine residences; Oh Lord,

Oh kind One; in spite of all this, do shower me with your grace and

please come with Sri Devi and Bhuu Devi and reside in my house. This

resident of Tallahassee, Sethuraman, requests that you give a mind,

calmed of the raging fires of desire, to the devotees who think

again and again of your divine residences, contemplate again and

again on your divine form, and praise you with these slokas."

 

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