Creating a new ‘Mamdania’: Without their narrative, Hindu Americans have no future

A group of second-generation Hindu Americans and Canadians recently had a number of debates about the overlaps and tensions between first-generation (“Fob”) Hindu immigrants and those born and raised here. Ironically, this debate started off with a dig on X by a second-generation Hindu social media commentator at a first-generation Hindu author and mother – whose own daughter, presumably second-generation, is also now a popular Hindu voice on social media herself.

While this successful example of intergenerational continuity is commendable and should have been celebrated, unfortunately, the sensationalist use of the “Fob” label opened up a can of angst among second-generation Hindus about how parents, traditions, and the Fobs’ India attachments were responsible for “ABCD” cultural deracination, inability to become fully American and Hindu, fighting Hinduphobia, and so on.

Even discounting the bandwagon effect of social media storms, it was evident that there were some serious gaps in perception in this debate. While the self-serving, one-sided and onerous influences that have started coming from Indian political and service organisations on diaspora Hindus in recent years are something that diaspora Hindus should rightly learn to resist for the sake of truth and decency, the fact that some second-generation Hindus were associating “tradition” with crass Bollywood-style Diwali fairs and deciding that tradition was to blame suggests that a lot of homework somehow wasn’t done along the way.

One tendency that seems to exist among Hindu Americans (of all generations) is a peculiar failure to develop a strong collective “ask” of the society they are a part of, while being ever-ready to profess or demand more and more collective “concessions” from their fellow Hindus. At its crudest level, this manifests as complaints about how “if only Hindus did or said X or did Y”, then somehow magically Hinduphobia would stop or younger Hindus would magically stop drifting away from Hinduism.

This plays out not only in social media but sometimes, more concerningly, in what is arguably the most common site for intergenerational cultural reproduction among diaspora Hindus – the weekend Hindu cultural classes run by Chinmaya and other modern missions. While some volunteer teachers are good at what they do, the lack of professional, scholarly understanding or curiosity about where children’s questions about caste, Hinduism, sati, and so on come from is leading to abject and self-destructive platitudes and lies.

“Good Hindus” vs. “Bad Brahmins”

For example, in a recent high school weekend class, a volunteer teacher told the students that the caste system was originally about gunas but became corrupted by “greedy Brahmins”, and if Hindus just became “good”, then the textbook writers and others would respond and stop blaming Hinduism for social evils. This view also seems to be enshrined in some of the mission’s publications.

Little books handed out or sold at weekend gatherings try to answer questions from Hindu children about Hinduism without stopping to consider if their answers are even factual. For example, a small book about controversies in Hindu culture published by the mission talks about caste and untouchability in relation to the Nazi Holocaust and American slavery and invokes the “greedy Brahmin” trope as well.

Naturally, the same mission’s well-meaning Sunday classes are smeared year after year in peer-reviewed publications and college courses by professors as “Hindutva extremism”. Parents, volunteers, and sadhus of the mission can pretend these professors, their readings, or classrooms don’t exist – but their children will have to confront all of these in college, and often they have no answers at all on how to push back.

Products of this weekend school system who come back after college to teach newer cohorts of children appear to have settled on importing South Asian studies propaganda into a new “Good Hindus/Bad Brahmins” coating as the way to survive.

While many better-informed Hindus in America are now aware of the work of Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee (the trope of the Brahmin, or greedy priest, as a “caricature of a rabbi drawn in brown chalk”, for instance), S N Balagangadhara, Prakash Shah, D Venkat Rao and other humanities and social science scholars in professional academia, and know that many things modern Hindu gurus and politicians and parents and volunteer teachers parrot are actually flawed, untruthful propaganda tropes, the damage continues to be done, weekend and after weekend.

A Hindu student activist recently commented that many of the South Asian student activist groups on their campus who frequently rally against Hindutva, Modi, Israel, and so on, happen to have been dutiful weekend Bal Vihar/Bal Vikas-type children themselves.

A few years ago, some Hindu American parents used to lament that their devout BV Hindu children turned against their heritage in college and blamed their “liberal arts” professors for it. The reality today is that no Hindu student in college actually needs to do something so dramatic or psychologically taxing. If you have grown up learning in your weekend Hindu classes that Hinduism just means being “good” and being good means accepting that your ancestors, elders, rishis, acharyas, gurus and all were greedy and cruel on par with Nazis and slave traders, then you have no problem in the future at all: you can be a Hindu; a Hindu for Mamdani’s Missing Ten Million Gujarati Muslims, a Hindu for Gaza, a Hindu for human rights for everybody – except Hindus!

“South Asia” Rules Because It Has Sociology; Hindus in America Don’t

The core issue, obvious to a social scientist or humanities researcher, is with the nature of Hindu association in seemingly challenging and alien situations like foreign suburbs, schools, temples, and colleges. Category 1 Indian Americans (as described at the start of this essay) have no problem. They interact at the most basic levels of entertainment, socialising and so on in Diwali fairs, Bollywood concerts, stand-up shows and so on. Category 3 South Asians have no problem. Their platforms for engagement are often the most prestigious and institutionally legitimised ones: Ivy League universities, artsy theatres, conferences, and so on. Category 2 Hindu Americans have a problem. They hope to achieve more than Category 1 because they see the problems they face from American (Maga, Left, and “imported”) racism as Hinduphobic ones, and not just generic “Brown” ones.

Yet, they have failed to build anything like effective messaging into the non-Indian cultural mainstreams of American society (in which their children are growing up) or even get a firm grip on the minds of Category 1 Indians. The bottom line is that South Asianists have a cultural monopoly now over Indian children here, and Hindu Americans have failed to invest where investment is needed – education in social sciences, arts, media, culture, and so on.

Hindu Americans view Hinduism as simply a religious or cosmetically cultural activity, without understanding that without a historical tradition of Hindu church, book or clergy, you, as parents, have to at least equip your children with the tools to see where they are in time and in space today. And those tools are not only about the experiential joys of festivals and pujas and yatras and kshetras but also of modern critical sociology turned not inward but outward.

The questions that high school-age children ask in weekend Hindu classes are coming not from spiritual or religious curiosity but from survival pressures in a society their parents and ancestral culture haven’t given them any explanations for. From class six up, their textbooks, peers, and teachers all operate on the assumption that “caste” is “race” in India and Brahmins are Nazis of India. It has never occurred to Hindu parents, teachers or children to stand up and say “that’s wrong”, let alone “that’s racist”.

Nor has it occurred to them that the longer they avoid critiquing inequalities of class, of capitalism, of consumerism, and of all the rest, the stronger simps they are seen as being for the oppressive global status quo of today.

Conservative and progressive Muslims like Mamdani are offering a global alternative to the world’s youth. Hindus, meanwhile, are begging each other to throw out their own gods, traditions, temples and truths in the hope they can get acceptance. The stakes are high.

Be a “Good” Hindu, But for Truth

All of this is not a condemnation but only a reality check. The reality is that South Asianist parents and children have enormous experience in reading, discussing, and speaking about social and political issues. They are at ease with mainstream white progressive talking points as well as far-right Jihadist ideologies, which they fervently believe align with the former. Bending the truth comes with practice, and so does standing up against lies.

Hindu Americans unfortunately have only practice in bending before lies. They accept whatever lies are flung about gods, elders, and temples and then cover up the discomfort with more lies to themselves about how they are actually very successful, peaceful, ready to reform, and so on. They have lost sight of the fact that being “good” might also mean being brave enough to stand up for the truth or at least questioning the lies that are being told by either non-Hindus, anti-Hindus, or even supposedly well-meaning “good” teaching Hindus.

Being ‘good’ means noticing the social world around us. The South Asianist community has been at the forefront of engaging with the poor, homeless, and other groups in America and offering a sense of home to many Hindu and Indian children who feel unwelcome in their own communities or undervalued by their Stem and MBA parents (like the main character’s father in the movie Tare Zameen Par).

They may or may not be “useful idiots” for far-right megalomaniacs or pro-terrorist lobbies. But Hindus who have failed to engage with the mainstream frankly deserve to be called “useless idiots” by that token. Hindu Americans, from Chinmaya, Sathya Sai, Iskcon, Swaminarayan, and many other traditions old and new, are of course generous and charitable and serve their local communities as much as anyone else. But somehow, they never manage to bridge an enormous, widening gap between generations and between reality and their own minds.

Propaganda has replaced inner freedom and critical thinking.

Meanwhile, a matter of hope. Mamdani might be riding a triumphant wave now, but even his young, progressive fans know, after many disappointments, that youth icons aren’t always what they appear to be. Watching the Dhoom song again that was played in his victory speech, the core issue becomes apparent. Three stars in that song are star-kids.

Mamdani is himself a child of some privilege. Ishan Tharoor, an ardent young diasporic supporter of Mandani, is also a child of some global repute and privilege. Given this cluster of association and admiration, it was little surprise that even American college students of non-Indian origin seem to get the phrase “nepo kids” in this context.

Intergenerational continuity is the core issue for everybody: Indian, Hindu, South Asian, and the rest. The most privileged seem to be good at passing it on, best at the material level, while ensuring ideological and political protections through diversion and scapegoating. The Indian American crowd is diverted. The Hindu American crowd is scapegoated (and self-deluded).

The South Asia crowd is winning with the timeless combination of super-rich and super-poor big-tent alliance promising some sort of utopia for all. The Maga vision of utopia for all law-abiding Americans seems to have shattered and scattered into a fearful, short-sighted retreat from global reimagination to an Alamo-like last stand where they chase out the meeker “Browns” and grudgingly cohabit with the stronger ones.

The Mamdani vision of utopia is rising. Like the inspiring ideal of “Medina” described in Venkat Dhulipala’s acclaimed study of the creation of Pakistan in the 1940s, Mamdani’s socialist-multiculturalist-Bollywoodish-utopia is currently the face of hope for America’s young (and some old folks elsewhere too).

Capitalism, socialism, Magaism, Mamdani-ism, and everything big and ambitious are posturing fast and hard right now. But in the scheme of nature, all of this too will fall, for whoever is still standing with the vision, heart, and hands to take it all.

The United States will be the Talikota of tomorrow.

Not just for Hindus, but for everybody.

This is the last part of a two-part series exploring the evolving experiences and challenges of Hindus in America. To read part-I click here .

(Vamsee Juluri is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. He has authored several books, including ‘Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence’ (Westland, 2015). C Raghothama Rao is a writer, podcaster and YouTuber. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)