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Journalism of Courage
Jeffery Long appeared on screen against the backdrop of a towering bookshelf filled with texts showcasing his academic depth. Breaking the mould of a typical scholar, the Elizabethtown College professor wore his long hair in a loose ponytail and a bright red T-shirt from hippie mecca Woodstock. As a white American Hindu, Long is no stranger to defying stereotypes.
Long grew up in Bible Belt Missouri, a small protestant town where even being a Catholic made you a minority. Although his family was religious, religion was not forced upon him. However, when his father suffered a terrible accident, Long began contemplating the meaning of life and death. His father passed away two years later, and Long was left to wrestle with the fact that he died an imperfect man. “I didn’t think he was going to hell, but I didn’t think he was going to heaven either,” he says to indianexpress.com. “Dad still had a lot of work to do.”
As he explored these existential notions, Long studied every religious text he could come across, before eventually finding a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in a church parking lot.
Immediately, he was transfixed by the concept of soul rebirth, and although he remained Catholic for many years after, that is when his lifelong affiliation with Hinduism began.
Today, Long is one of the 2.5 million Hindus in the United States. The spread of Hindu philosophy in America can be attributed to two overarching factors. First, of course, is the Indian diaspora, a growing body of immigrants that arrived in America largely after 1965. The other is its cultural influence, through yoga, gurus, and popular artistes like the Beatles.
Although many of the practices of Hinduism date back millennia, the term itself was only coined in the late 18th century. As an intellectual concept, its introduction to America can be attributed to three men, the transcendentalists of New England, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Beginning in 1820, Emerson demonstrated a keen interest in India, and over the next decade, extensively read texts such as the Upanishads and the Laws of Manu. In 1937, a year after founding the Transcendental Club in Concord, Massachusetts, Emerson delivered a lecture on Hindu theology to a group of Harvard seniors, one of whom was Thoreau.
In time, Thoreau would read every volume of Indian philosophy he could find, leaving behind a vast collection of Oriental literature. Thoreau in turn was followed by Whitman, one of the foremost American poets. Whitman came across Emerson’s essays on theology in 1854 and wholeheartedly embraced the transcendentalist worldview. As the 20th century historian Malcolm Cowly observed in a literary society speech in 1959, “Most of Whitman’s doctrines, though by no means all of them, belong to the mainstream of Indian philosophy.”
According to Philip Goldberg, the author of American Veda (2010), while there were no yoga studios, gurus or even Indians during this time, these men incorporated what they learnt about Hinduism from books into their own writings. The impact was so profound that “all the students in America today will read Emerson and Thoreau and get some Indian philosophy, whether they realise it or not.”
The literary tradition of Hinduism would be accelerated further by America’s next generation of intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell and JD Salinger, all of whom received mentoring from Vedanta Society swamis. However, in between the two cohorts came Swami Vivekananda.
When Vivekananda arrived in Boston in 1893, most Americans had little to no contact with Hinduism or Indians. Therefore, when he spoke at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, clad in a silk tunic and turban, his message of pluralism and tolerance was received with enthusiasm across the country. According to Wendy Doniger, a retired professor of Divinity at the University of Chicago, Vivekananda’s “personal charisma” made headlines and started the study of Indian philosophy in America.
Goldberg states that Vivekananda presented Hindu philosophy in a way that could be adapted to American religious traditions, making it appealing to the broader public.
After Vivekananda introduced Hindu theology to America, Paramahansa Yogananda arrived to extol its practices. Called the ‘Father of Yoga in the West’, Yogananda founded the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) in Los Angeles in 1925. At the time of his death in 1952, Yogananda’s SRF was the most important and extensive Hindu organisation in the United States, partially due to the popularity of his book, An Autobiography of a Yogi (1946).
The reason Hindu teaching proved so popular is because the early gurus never tried to compete with Christianity. As Long states, “The initial teachers presented it as something rational, something scientific, a practice of health more than an organised religion.” However, Hinduism remained on the fringes of American society until the 1960s, when its popularity was supercharged by the mass immigration of Indians and widespread cultural changes.
In the 1910s and 1920s, US populist rhetoric became increasingly nativist in response to rising immigration. This nativism peaked with the 1927 publication of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, which blamed India’s problems on the sexuality of Indian men and argued Indians were unfit for self-governance. Wendell Thomas’s Hinduism Invades America (1930) reinforced this view, echoing long-standing critiques by American Christian missionaries about Hinduism’s shortcomings.
This changed after World War II, when India fought on the side of the allies. Following the war, the American Foreign Department funded the American Institute of Indian Studies which in turn catalysed the formation of Indian Studies departments across academia. Doniger, who was a beneficiary of this funding, says this is when Americans stopped seeing India as some “exotic, weird land full of dark-skinned people speaking a funny language.” As scholars discovered the parallels between Indian and Greek philosophy, Hinduism’s stock was further elevated.
During the 1960s and 1970s, students and professionals from India were attracted to America’s new policies, specifically the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which encouraged the immigration of professionals. These immigrants retained much of their cultural heritage and went to great lengths to pass it along to their children. As Suhag Shukla, co-founder of the Hindu American Foundation said in an interview with indianexpress.com, amongst the diaspora there was a need to explain Hindu traditions, to “take a step back and not take our cultural heritage for granted.” She says that the diaspora has been integral towards creating awareness of Hinduism, not necessarily by preaching the religion but by maintaining its customs. “The people that I come across are not Hindu because they have to be but because they want to be,” she says, “and that has promoted a positive representation of Hinduism in American culture.”
In the years after 1965, Hindu immigrants initially gathered in rented halls and homes for festivals, pujas, and study groups. Over time, they began fundraising to build full-scale temples. The 1980s and 1990s marked a major shift as temple building became a key way for Hindu communities to establish their presence in the US temples which served not only as places of worship but also as centres for cultural connection and teaching Hindu traditions to future generations. Today, there are just under 1500 Hindu temples in America.
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act also opened US borders to a diverse group of Indian gurus who came to engage with the American countercultural movement, drawing followers from both Indian Hindus and non-Hindus alike.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, new forms of Hindu religious life emerged in the US, and the term guru became widely known. One of the first to arrive was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who gained fame as guru to the Beatles. He popularised transcendental meditation, presenting it as a universal, scientific practice that offered a much-needed reprieve for the fast-paced American society of the mid-20th century. By the 1980s, there was Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and the Art of Living Foundation, Mata Amritanandamayi, Karunamayi Amma, Mother Meera, and many others. However, some gurus evoked considerable controversy.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, known as Osho, drew a large and devoted following both at his ashram in Pune and later in the United States. Known in India as the ‘sex guru’ for his unconventional views on sex, marriage, and relationships, and in the US as the ‘Rolls-Royce guru’ for his lavish lifestyle, Rajneesh’s teachings directly challenged traditional values. Additionally, while he lived in extravagant luxury, his followers often lived in stark contrast. Rajneesh’s movement, widely regarded as a cult, generated both fascination and outrage.
Perhaps the most influential of all the gurus was Swami Prabhupada, who arrived penniless in New York in 1965 and began chanting ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Rama’ in Tompkins Square Park. Within a few months, he opened a storefront temple on Second Avenue, which was America’s first Krishna temple of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).
The movement became widely known as ‘Hare Krishna’ due to its public chanting of Krishna’s name. According to Long, while most Hindu teachers refrained from proselytising, ISKCON embraced the concept, handing out pamphlets, chanting in the streets, and encouraging its followers to surrender to Krishna. Rajneesh and ISKCON reinforced the notion of Hinduism being “exotic and strange” amongst some religious Christians, prompting a negative connotation that continues to exist to some extent today. However, Long is keen to emphasise that groups like the Vedanta Society, SRF and purveyors of transcendental meditation, never pushed religious beliefs, and only drew in people who were interested in the tradition.
In addition to gurus from India, there were American-born seekers who themselves became gurus in the 1970s. According to Goldberg, as Americans met Indian teachers, read Indian philosophy, and practiced yoga, they too became representatives of Hinduism in America.
It also helped that the 1960s and 1970s was a time of significant cultural changes. The ambassadors of this change, as it pertained to spirituality, were the Beatles. In February 1968, the Beatles went to India for a 40-day spiritual retreat. The media coverage that followed flooded the American consciousness with images of the Fab Four, with garlands around their necks, meditating on the banks of the Ganga under the watchful gaze of Maharishi Yogi. Goldberg calls them the most influential artistic messengers of Hinduism in America, while Long credits some of his fascination with the religion to the music of the ‘silent Beatle’ George Harrison.
At the same time, Americans were learning about Gandhian ideals from Martin Luther King, were espousing anti-violence in reaction to the Vietnam War, and were experimenting with psychedelics in the counterculture era of free love. As Goldberg writes in American Vedas, “In a flash, more Americans learned about Indian spirituality than in all the previous centuries.”
However, despite masses of Americans being exposed to and influenced by Hindu traditions, only a select few, like Long and Goldberg, actually converted. For most Americans, Hinduism was, and continues to be, more of a cultural than religious phenomenon.
In a 1991 article in the evangelical missions newsletter Pulse, the Hawaii-based Hindu monk Palaniswami wrote, “The West is clearly open to the Hindu message, ready to hear about yoga, meditation, mysticism, healing and the ancient ways. Such ‘products’ were too sophisticated for public consumption 30 years ago, but today they’re the hottest item on the shelf.” Palaniswami understood the appeal of Hinduism, not as a religion but as a way of life.
Although the numbers of Hindus in America are growing, they account for less than 1 per cent of the national population. According to 2020 Pew data, over 90 per cent identify as being Asian of origin and 87 per cent as first generation immigrants.
However, the data also shows that while many Americans might not identify as Hindu, they have adopted deeply spiritual Indian traditions. Conservative estimates from the National Institutes of Health reveal that more than 18 million Americans meditate, while around 21 million adults and 1.7 million children regularly practice yoga. According to Goldberg, “Yoga has facilitated an understanding that spirituality is an individual phenomenon, with the youth especially finding something spiritual in practices from India that they didn’t necessarily find at church.”
Long states that there is a spectrum within the yoga community. On one hand, there are people who are very drawn to Hinduism and have assimilated a lot of practices and beliefs into their life like kirtan, vegetarianism, mantras and karma. On the other hand, there are people who simply practice yoga for stress relief or to cure back problems, without knowing its spiritual background.
Movies have also incorporated Hindu concepts. For instance, the Force in Star Wars parallels the Hindu idea of Brahman, the ultimate reality, while the illusion in The Matrix reflects Maya, the concept of the world’s illusory nature. This influence is no coincidence, as Star Wars creator George Lucas studied under Joseph Campbell, a scholar of Hindu-Vedanta philosophy. The reason Hinduism is so appealing, apart from its teachings, is that it comes across as a way of life, non-threatening to the American, Christian ideal.
However, despite the fairly unobjectionable nature of the religion, Hinduism has come under criticism for its association to the cults of the 1960s, casteism and Hindutva. In the 1960s and 1970s, many gurus became embroiled in sexual and financial scandals, often due to a combination of individual misconduct and systemic abuse. Followers who had distanced themselves from their families and communities were under the absolute authority of their gurus. This social isolation and blind devotion led to cycles of prolonged and severe abuse for many members.
Additionally, Hinduism is often intrinsically linked with Indianism and criticisms of the latter have led to charges against the former. In A Place at the Multicultural Table (2007), sociologist Prema Kurien argues that Hindus in America are particularly attracted to the Hindutva message and that “coalescing to defend a beleaguered Hindu identity has become an important way for Indians from a Hindu background to counter their relative invisibility within American society.”
Doniger, whose book The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009) was withdrawn by its publishers in India, says that many of her students had to lie to their parents about taking her class, as they were afraid to be associated with someone at odds with the government. Journalists Pankaj Mishra and Abhinav Ghosh, along with publications such as the New York Times and Washington Post, have extensively highlighted the link between the Indian diaspora and the Hindutva movement. In 2016, California institution UC Irvine rejected a large grant from and organisations accused of promoting Hindutva ideals.
Additionally, many still associate Hinduism with casteism. In February 2023, Seattle became the first US city to ban caste-based discrimination. Doniger has reported seeing casteism running rampant across educational institutions across the country and professors at those institutions increasingly teach courses linking the plight of Dalits to other American marginalised groups.
However, Shukla argues that this is all a construct, created in part, by Indians themselves. “I view it as internalised colonialism with people educated in English medium schools in India, particularly victims of that propensity,” she says. That being said, Shukla reports experiencing far more “Hindu-philia than Hindu-phobia,” and says that there is a deep interest and curiosity towards its spiritual teachings.
Hinduism is a progressively growing force in American life, championed by a strong Indian diaspora and reinforced by cultural practices such as yoga and meditation. Even if one doesn’t know about Hinduism or, in certain parts of the country, has never even met a Hindu, its influence, conscious or otherwise, cannot be ignored.
American Veda, Phillip Goldberg, 2010, Harmony Publishers
Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, 1946, Yogada Society
Discovering Indian Philosophy, Jeffery Long, 2024, Bloomberg Publishers
A Place at the Multicultural Table, Prena Kurian, 2007, Rutgers University Press
