How 'go with the flow' Hinduism of our generation will survive 'by the book' Hinduphobia of our time

In my previous article, I outlined the limits of horizontal “mass society” thinking when it comes to Hindus and Hinduism, and suggested we conceive of our cultures as “vertical” or ancestral traditions. I ended with the following observation: “Hindu parents can’t package children’s attention in the small time they have together as parents and children into “Secular-Career” story-paths (do engineering/medicine, avoid liberal arts, trust meritocracy to reward you with lot of money) and “religion/heritage” stories (remember how Rama was a good manager when you walk into your destined C-suite, beta). We need stories that will inspire our descendants to remember our names with love still centuries from now when it is Pitru-Paksha. That is survival.” In this article, I will explore the need for such better “stories” (and better “story-telling” art and practice too) among today’s Hindus, especially teachers, parents, young adults, older siblings, social media influencers, and also business and political leaders, if they are so inclined to learn about such mundane “liberal arts” concerns. I believe that we need to focus on three things broadly about our stories: One: What are the stories that Hindus today seem to be telling themselves when we look at our Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, TV shows, friends and family conversations, and so on? By “stories”, I will clarify that I don’t mean “fiction” or movies or novels, or even what are typically called “Hindu stories” from the Bhagavatam and the puranas and so on, but just virtually any and all narratives that we produce and consume in our daily lives. There is a growing body of interdisciplinary research drawing on literature, psychology, neuroscience, and other fields on how stories work, and at a basic level, we could define a story as anything we tell ourselves about who we are, who others are, why something is happening to us, what we should do about it, and so on. Two: What are the social and historical conditions in which modern Hindus live that might be leading to the creation and circulation of certain stories and not some other stories instead? For instance, the majority of online Hindu Americans seem to attribute recent incidents of perceived anti-Hindu words and actions in American institutions to economic envy, rather than simple “racism” on the basis of color, nationality, or religion. Can we draw a connection between the social history of Hindu experiences over a few generations as colonial survivors and then as minority immigrants, and their preference for “meritocratic” arguments rather than “anti-racist” arguments when it comes to facing their problems in America today (or, simply put, why the claim that Hindus are above “oppression Olympics” or “victimhood politics”)? Three: What are the consequences, in terms of communicative effectiveness, as well as longer survival and success prospects, for Hindus in the U.S. given the way they are narrating their stories about the world at the present moment? Is the present generation of Hindu parents in America offering “vertical” cultural and spiritual and intellectual guidance to their children in a way that helps them make the very difficult task of negotiating their past and their “horizontally coerced” present any easier? Or are they simply rendering their children helpless and story-disempowered, leaving them no chance but to comply with the gas-lighting that is being done to them at very powerful levels in college and workplace? Go with the flow Hinduism vs. b****y the book Hinduphobia To help us answer some of these questions, I will propose an additional conceptual layer to the basic idea of “vertical” and “horizontal” social-cultural tendencies (over time/ in space). I think that whatever it is we call “Hinduism” or “Sanatana Dharma” these days is basically “Go With the Flow,” while the political, psychological, and other forces that manifest as lies and hatred about our gods, gurus, elders, memories and sacred spaces, are the operations of a “By the Book” society – the “West,” broadly speaking. And “by the book,” I mean not only that the West enforces rules and procedures at a day-to-day level more rigorously (or used to, in some parts), which makes for some decent civic comforts, for sure, but then also has a darker implication – it has a long history of starting with a book, a story, a “belief” as it were, and then forcing everyone and everything to fit into it. It could have been a Holy Book, or Darwin/Social Darwin, or Marx, or Freud, or the American Psychological Association (APA)’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health (DSM), or even a book on Oprah’s book club! Narrative first, reality later, the things you can do when you perfect Horizontal Coercion. Let’s hold that image, and return to the “Hindu rate of flow” now. To understand flow in a vertical sense, let us imagine this example. If you are at a certain life-stage or age in 2023 (college-age, young parent, grandparent), try to picture your parents and one or two more earlier generations of your elders at that same life-stage. What years would that be? For example, I am in my fifties. My father was in his fifties in the 1970s. My grandfathers and great-grandfathers, I know little of, but perhaps they were around my age around 1940, or 1900. Now, compare your environmental, social, and technological setting with theirs, and then, your “Hinduism” and theirs. There is a pretty good chance there has been a bit, if not a lot, of change in each generation’s “practices.” It could be small things, like changes in personal appearance from traditional expectations, or even major ideological changes like atheism, rejection of temples, pujas, festivals, dietary customs, and so on. Now, if you were to compare snapshots of each generation’s life-stage “Hinduism,” it might be safe to conclude that it is only in the last 2-3 generations that we see major concessions and breaks from the generation before. Now this is only one part of the “flow” though. Since there is no overarching central organisation overseeing interpretation of scripture and enforcement of customs for everyone in “Hinduism,” the truth is that each one’s Hinduism today is really only whatever is left from an earlier generation, guided (or maybe policed a bit) by family elders and dynamics, gurus and adviser figures, and so on. That is fine. No one needs to bother about one-size-fits all codes that one finds among the more “horizontal” or group-centric faiths. But the real issue is with how our “going with the flow” is not only about our practices, but also about the whole of our lives and what we value in them. Call it “just-adjust” mentality or what you will, but for a few generations now, we have been told by our elders, or we have told our young, to just do what it takes to succeed, and maybe, at best, “be good people”. Traditions, festivals, gods, most of these are optional, increasingly. It has worked, for a while, I think. I mean, to the extent that people are working, earning, playing, and are still, vaguely, somehow, calling themselves Hindu. A multi-generational present But now, if we take a snapshot of the present, if we look at the three or four different generational cohorts of Hindus in America interacting with each other (the “Gen Z” Hindus, in high school or college, the “Millennial” Hindus who are perhaps in their early careers or family setting-up stages, the “Gen X” Hindus who are now “middle-aged” and “empty-nesters”), we might recognize a whole set of adjustments and compromises we have made with our broader social and historical circumstances, “going with the flow,” as it were. Nothing good or bad necessarily in that, but just a reminder that we were responding to “horizontal” forces accordingly perhaps. Were we in a school once where our vibhuthi was mocked and we never forgot? Or perhaps someone asked us “why” we do some ritual and we had no answer so we stopped doing it? We went with the flow, one life-stage to the next, one generation to the next; work-study-earn mainly, but with one change: I think now, since the Millennials (including the first post-liberalization generation in India, post 1991), it is now work-study-earn-play (consume, party, travel, pose for selfie and so on). So there have been shifts, and we can attribute some of them to broader sociological trends (globalisation, migration, rise of the internet and smartphones, and so on). One might wonder at this point where the problem lies then. Life is going on, the world is changing, but we Hindus “do well” as we like to boast: high education, income, no complaints to anyone about anything. In fact, one might say the majority of the Hindus in America seem to be quiet and “no complaints’’ about most things. At most, there are a few thousand, maybe a few hundred thousand Indians here, who are complaining a bit about Hinduphobia, “wokeism,” and what not, but again, even among them the understanding of the terrain is very different. A few people say just vote for Republicans and teach the left liberals a lesson. Others say stay the course with Democrats because we are actually the original (or “OG” as they say) Liberals. Hinduism just needs to keep reforming more and more, and we shall be Vishwa Guru again. No stories from old men We are entering the territory of “stories” in our analysis once again here. I think that the main crisis in “vertical” Hinduism, which is really the core of all that matters, in intergenerational continuity, is that we have no “stories” to describe our everyday life and changing situations of our own. We don’t notice the changes. We don’t notice that for nearly 30 years now, Hindus in America have been dealing with the same issues again and again, without any tangible achievements beyond filling stadiums for a popular Indian Prime Minister a few times. Thirty years is a whole generation, a whole productive adult career span. No anti-Hinduphobia laws, no programmatic Hinduphobia studies of any serious academic depth and rigour, no support or even respect for the handful of professional academicians examining these issues. Thirty years of weekend gatherings as “Hindus” or “Tamils” or “Telugus” over snacks and tea. I will never forget that the first visit of Prime Minister Modi to New York had school children dancing to Slumdog Millionaire songs, nothing more to tell a story to dwarf that of the critics and cynics. And of course, the Hindus for Trump show. That had crude skits about terrorists. Ours, simply, is a community that has no connection to story-telling, art, and communication any more. We have gone with the flow. Work-study-earn-gather on weekend and enjoy little bit (and of course “enjoy” is also quite awkwardly visible in the few actual live protests our community does after our consulates or temples are attacked; laughing and dancing at a protest does not signal to anyone that we take our human rights seriously, or that others should believe us and not the propagandists of the media lying about who caused the Leicester riots, for instance). Why do we fail to tell the story of reality today? The story of Hinduphobia, as we keep saying these days? I think the deepest cause of this is the fact that we are so much a “go with the flow” community that we fail to notice the waters. Like a fish that can’t know anything outside water, or a frog thinking it’s just a little sauna it’s soaking in and good for its health, Hindus are geniuses for adaptation. But then, if we observed language and stories, social cues, intergenerational memories, everything around us like social scientists, artists, creative people, we would notice some things at least. From wallpaper to doormat to target I drew a cartoon once to help me understand our journey as a community in America. In the 1960s and 1970s, the first generation of Indians who came to the United States for their NASA and doctor jobs were like wallpaper. They came here in incredibly difficult times, without the networks and comforts Indian immigrants have now. They were like wallpaper in the sense that they lived and worked quietly, got a share of racist jibes perhaps, but also got respect from Americans – and not just for their science and tech skills, but equally for their ancestral culture and integrity towards it. Then, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, even though IT and Silicon Valley Indians kept booming, despite big temples and success stories, we slipped from wall-paper to door-mats. “ABCD” kids, some of them at least, alienated by the crudeness of some of their uncles’ weekend temple “history” lessons on “great Hindus versus bad Muslims,” found shelter and spiritual comfort in the small but artistic and thriving “South Asian” or “Desi” scene. However, neither they, nor their opponents, ever realised that the wallpaper was sliding down the walls. By the time Martha Nussbaum wrote her book insisting Forget Al Qaeda, the “Hindutva” are the real danger! the new reality was complete. “Going with the flow” meant taking the dirt for other peoples’ sins. And of course, between that time and now, the doormats are slowly being forced to just-adjust to something even worse, and that is targets. Of course, many more are noticing, and screaming on the internet, but is it enough? The solution: Get the story right about Hinduphobia What is the solution? There are none yet except if we start to understand the causes a little better. One major cause of our ineffectiveness, in my view, is that we (and that is a generous “we”) simply do not see society or understand it beyond mere imitation. We go with the flow, mostly of our own peers in college, visa line, job, weekend culture and shopping. Our children then go with their own flow, maybe a bit of temple and dance and culture at first, and then, confronted by a supposed reality they never got stories from their elders, fold into compliance. That reality is not even “about Hinduism.” They will try to defend Hinduism, maybe, as they watched their parents did here and there; blaming “Leftists,” or colonial distortions, and so on. But it won’t be enough. The reality that will hit them is simply horizontal coercion, full compliance machinery, going rampant on everybody in general, and of course, on Hindus in particular ways that we have to learn to see in Hindu ways, in vertical ways, not as “RW” or “postcolonial” or “decolonial” even (as I once used to think when I was naively hopeful about professional academia’s integrity and capacity for change maybe). Hindus concerned about existential issues need to first learn that we still have much to learn; not so much “about Hinduism” but really about “Hinduphobia.” About racism. About “religion,” in the S.N. Balagangadhara sense (I strongly recommend readings of As Others See Us in senior Bala Vihar and other children’s classes, those are the real “red pills” we need, not the placebos of right-wing rhetoric to explain America that your kids’ future professors and South Asian peers can dismiss with a smirk in college). We have to stop seeing time and life and even “Hinduism” outside of the boxes we take for granted, and recognize everything that is boxing us in too. For earlier generations, perhaps the stark reality of “horizontal coercion” was obvious; you could not join your coloniser’s religion without explicitly, violently, breaking the bonds you had with your own mother, father, grandparents, siblings, cousins, everyone who loved you. The “vertical,” in terms of continuity of ancestral traditions, is virtually inconsequential to a sense of identity or cultural existence.  Maybe, because many Hindus believe we live in a free society, and that America being meritocratic is even freer than India, and therefore no coercions exist, our mere profession of allegiance to said meritocracy will ensure the banishing of our toxic haters and all will be well.   So we go with the flow without noticing that the flow is being directed in profoundly intrusive, efficient and destructive ways. Hindus noticing Hinduphobia today are seeing only a tip of an iceberg that is threatening the intergenerational continuity of not just Hindus but virtually everyone. We will find deeper friends and allies once we learn to see, and to speak, more clearly.   Hinduphobia will fall. Or we will. Not much ambiguity left now. This is the second part of Why Hindus lack a sense of collective harm series. Read part one here The writer 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). Views expressed are personal. Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News, India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.