The Hindu Case Against "Hinduism": A Reflection on Dharma in the Diaspora

I) The Contemporary Crisis of Hindu American Identity

What does it mean to be a Hindu in America? This question has taken on new urgency as Hindu Americans, after decades of living on the cultural margins, now occupy the highest echelons of politics, tech, and media and find themselves at the center of competing narratives about identity, representation, and belonging. At stake is not just how Hindus are perceived, but how they understand themselves and their traditions. At the time of writing, Indian immigrants are seeing a wave of vitriol, with prominent figures on the left and right accusing them driving down wages for native-born Americans and contaminating the polity with regressive cultural and religious habits. The backlash is reminiscent of the “hindoo peril” of the early 20th century, when Indian immigrants primarily from the Punjab began immigrating to America to work at the lumber mills lining the Pacific Coast. Concurrent with the arrival of these immigrants, the Vedanta Society founded by Swami Vivekananda in the late 19th century saw an immense rise in popularity among elite Americans (particularly women) in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago.

The reaction to the arrival of the “Hindoos” then, as it does now, reflected a confluence of economic anxiety and prejudice: Politicians called for the Hindoo’s expulsion, commentators warned of a “Heathen Invasion”, the Hindoo was referred to as the “scum of the Orient” and newspaper editorials across the country warned that the Hindoo’s unsanitary habits and their practice of caste would pose a threat to the health and safety of the American public and preclude assimilation. The hindoo peril reached a crescendo in 1907 in Bellingham, WA, when a group of 500 white working men violently expelled Indian migrant workers from the city.

Today the backlash against Indian immigrants has been complicated by the electoral ascendance of the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (“BJP”), now the dominant party in Indian politics. Consternation among the anglophone liberal commentariat both in India and the West regarding the rise of the BJP in India has in recent years metastasized, with journalists and activists now warning us of the spread of “Hindu supremacy” in the diaspora. Though accusations of Hindu Nationalist ties are deployed liberally against Hindu American public figures, the precise contours of “Hindu supremacy” are obscure and, as a result, the diaspora is often caught in a tangle of representations that are embedded in broader political and cultural debates animating Indian politics that are divergent from the diaspora’s lived reality. In this context, self-representation is of the utmost importance, and this requires a critical examination of who “we” are and what “we” stand for.

While the contestation over Hindu identity in America has intensified in recent years, we saw a preview of these disputes in 2005, when the California State Board of Education (“CSBE”) conducted its periodic review of the state’s sixth-grade social studies textbook. During the public comment period, two Hindu American advocacy groups, the Vedic Foundation (“VF”) and Hindu Education Foundation (“HEF”), submitted 117 suggested edits to the CSBE which, among other things, rejected the polytheistic characterization of Hinduism in favor of a monotheistic model and characterized caste as a cultural rather than a religious practice. Although the edits were initially accepted by the CBSE, Michael Witzel, the prominent Harvard Sanskritist, soon became aware of the campaign to change the textbooks and rallied a number of scholars and activist groups to push back against VF and HEF’s edits. The CBSE would eventually accept Witzel et. al.’s position and roll back their acceptance. According to an NPR report written at the time, the group of scholars led by Witzel claimed that the groups proposing the changes were Hindu Nationalists and accused them of trying to “white-wash” history. The dispute between the two sides saw emotional testimony delivered in front of school board committees, heated newspaper editorials, and a plethora of academic work on what the fight over textbook representations meant in the broader context of Indian politics.

The efforts of VF and HEF raise important questions. While parent groups no doubt had an interest in ensuring that textbook material would not result in their children feeling marginalized in the classroom, what was the source of VF and HEF’s representation of Hinduism? Did it reflect an institutional or community consensus, or a sectarian preference? If it did not reflect a consensus, what reason would the neutral arbiters have to privilege the Hinduism defined by VF and HEF over that of their opponents? Indeed, during the hearings over the proposed edits, other groups of Hindu Americans took Witzel’s side, giving credence to the argument that VF and HEF’s proposed edits were not an objective, descriptive account of what Hinduism actually is, but a subjective interpretation of how Hinduism ought to be understood. While self-representation is of critical importance for a community finding its footing in American civic culture, our efforts are fundamentally limited by a lack of clarity over how being Hindu is actually defined. But beneath the immediate political stakes lies a deeper question: is the very framework of “Hinduism” still serving the needs of the Hindu American diaspora? The time has come to critically examine not just how we represent ourselves, but whether the conceptual architecture we've inherited is a suitable vehicle for that self-representation at all.

II) The Challenge of Definition: Hindu Inclusivism and Ritual Praxis

Hinduism is not a typical religion. It has no founder, no singular sacred text, no creed, and no church. One Hindu might be a strict theist who regularly goes to temple and participates in Vedic rituals, while another might be a philosophical monist who rejects temple ritual in favor of meditation and contemplation of the all-pervading Brahman. If you talk to some Hindus, they will even argue that everyone is Hindu in one way or another, a reflection of the famous declaration in the Rig Veda— the oldest of the Vedas— that “Truth is one; sages call it by various names.” Then there is a growing segment of the Hindu American population that can be described as “cultural Hindus” who don’t belong to a particular spiritual tradition or lineage, but will participate in various festivals and attend temples on special occasions, etc.

If there’s one thing that unites adherents of Hinduism, it is the strident unwillingness to delineate what is not Hindu, an attitude that can broadly be described as “inclusivism”. The Hindu American Foundation (“HAF”)— the leading Hindu American advocacy organization— echoes the inclusivist ideal, describing Hinduism as “a global religion with adherents representing virtually every racial, ethnic, and national background and living on every continent.” HAF also goes on to state that “despite the absence of an identifiable beginning in history, single founder, central religious establishment, or sole authoritative scripture, many different Hindu sects share certain foundational concepts”, including “oneness of existence and pluralism.” To be sure, inclusivism is not a recent invention of diaspora advocacy organizations. On the contrary, the idea has a rich pedigree in modern Hindu thought, finding a proponent in Swami Vivekananda himself. In 1893 when Vivekananda delivered his famous speech at the World’s Parliament of Religions— an event that for many Hindus marks Hinduism’s entry as a “world religion”— he declared that he was “proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance.” Not only did Hindus believe in “universal toleration” but, according to Vivekananda, they “accept all religions as true.”

While inclusivism might dominate the philosophical outlook of contemporary Hindu Americans, the practices and rituals remain deeply rooted in specific cultural contexts. The contrast between the Hindu temple and the church or mosque with which it’s often grouped as a “place of worship” is illustrative. Temples are traditionally conceived of as tirthas, or crossings, between the world of men and the world of the gods, and a temple’s efficacy as a tirtha is product of an intricate set of ritual and scriptural injunctions that govern everything from the geometric layout of the temple to the kinds of materials used in its construction (Kramrisch 3). And unlike the Protestant church or mosque, which are largely standardized within denominations/sects and designed for the transmission of religion across ethnic and national boundaries, the Hindu temple is a reflection of a particular cultural stream (Eck, “Negotiating Hindu Identities”, 225). Enmeshed in a symbolic language of ritual, iconography, and even geography, the temple in America was not built primarily for the transmission of religious doctrine across national and cultural boundaries, but rather as an act of reverential imitation. This is why Tirupati, India’s wealthiest temple and one that is popular among South Indian Hindus in particular, is a model for so many American temples, including the Venkateswara Temple built in the hills outside of Pittsburgh in 1977, one of America’s first and most prominent Hindu temples.

Temple aesthetics are also parochial, varying based on the region in India from which the temple originates or the form or incarnation of the deity that is being worshipped. Take Shiva for example, who can be variously variously depicted as Nataraja, the Lord of Dance who strikes the drum that births the Universe in one hand, while in the other holding the flame that destroys it, the aniconic Linga, which symbolizes the creative principle in the form of an erect phallus, or as the fierce Bhairava, who decapitated his father Brahma and carries his skull as a begging bowl. In each of these depictions, Siva’s gesticulation, his jewelry, his countenance all reference particular puranic episodes and are chosen to elicit specific emotions from the bhakta, or devotee. Each other Hindu deity is likewise situated within its own variegated tradition. As is the case with a spoken language, the symbolic language that permeates the praxis of popular Hindu ritual can be learned through study, but native fluency ultimately eludes those who do not grow up in its midst.

Like many Hindus who were born and raised in America to immigrant parents, visits to the temple were frequent, but I found myself largely ambivalent to the “religious” elements of the experience, choosing instead to congregate with the other kids in the parking lot or temple basement. The ornately decorated murtis, the shirtless priests reciting Sanskrit mantras while making offerings to the various deities, and of course the devotees like my parents who would effortlessly fall into a familiar routine of circumambulation, prostration, and prayer were part of a world that I was on the periphery of, but could never truly enter. The temple may have been consecrated as a tirtha, but for me it was always more like a window into a world that was no longer mine to inhabit. To quote V.S. Naipaul, I found myself at once too close and too far.

Reconciled to my alienation from the ritual culture of the temple, I sought religious meaning and identity in the philosophical and puranic texts, but here too I was left unsatisfied. There is immense spiritual wisdom in these texts that continue to enrich my life, but it’s not clear to me in what sense they form a basis of a shared religious identity, as there is no one single text from which all Hindus derive their theological or ethical commitments. The Vedas are popularly referred to as the preeminent Hindu sacred text, but reverence for the Vedas is— as the French Indologist Louis Renou remarked— largely a “tipping of the hat”; they don’t provide an ethical basis for one’s life, nor do they elucidate a fixed creed. To make matters more complicated, whatever knowledge I did acquire was filtered through a western cultural and intellectual frame. I learned about the tradition in English, relying entirely on translations and secondary sources, and was also compelled to contort the tradition to make it legible to the society in which I was raised: The epics that are considered Itihasa— a Sanskrit term often rendered as “history”— were transformed into “mythology”, the enigmatic dharma reduced to “religion”, texts like the Bhagavad Gita referred to as “scripture” and so-on.

These adaptations are not just driven by necessity, but also by an expectation of how Hinduism ought to be structured given its status as a “religion”, a label that— by implying a shared conceptual structure— obscures how radically different Hinduism is from the Abrahamic religions. The late Egyptologist Jan Assmann draws a helpful distinction in his work between “primary religion” and “secondary religions” that illuminates the contrast. Primary religions, which include the ancient “religions” of Egypt, Babylonia, and Greco-Roman civilization “evolve historically over hundreds and thousands of years within a single culture, society, and generally also language” (Assmann 2). Rather than forming autonomous systems that can emancipate themselves from particular socio-cultural units, primary religions are “inscribed into the institutional, linguistic, and cultural conditions of a society” (2).

This certainly appears to be the case with Hinduism, where temples are embedded in a widely shared mythological tradition that finds expression in the topography of the land itself, a complex that Diana Eck refers to as India’s “sacred geography.” In the case of Tirupati, legend has it that Lord Vishnu— popularly known to as the preserver god in the Hindu trinity— sought a resting place on earth where he could more readily protect his devotees in the Kali Yuga, the age of darkness we now find ourselves in. The sage Narada recommended that Vishnu find his abode on the banks of the Svarnamukhi River in South India, where the primordial serpentine demigod Shesha had descended from heaven to the river banks and transformed into the hills now known as Tirumala. These hills now provide a resting spot for Lord Vishnu in the form of Venkateshwara. Can this complex of myth, geography, and divinity be transplanted from the hills of Tirumala to the hills of Pittsburgh?

Secondary religions, in contrast, “owe their existence to an act of revelation and foundation” and define themselves in opposition to the primary religions from which they emerged, “denouncing them as paganism, idolatry, and superstition” (2). Based on a revelatory sacred text, secondary religions transcend “all political and ethnic borders” and can more easily transplant themselves in different societies and cultures. The failure to appreciate this distinction gives rise to the expectation that “Hinduism” should behave just like a secondary religion. As a result, when engaging in the act of translation or adaptation referenced above, we tend to focus on superficial theological concepts, while ignoring the socio-cultural and cosmological firmament— the symbolic language— that gives life to those concepts in the first place.

III) The Colonial Origins of “Hinduism”

If we accept the complex of Hindu traditions are of a fundamentally different nature than secondary religions like Christianity and Islam, then the task of adaptation goes far beyond a simple linguistic translation of abstract concepts that cohere into an integrated theological system, and requires a reformulation of those traditions in accordance with our specific socio-cultural conditions. Engaging this process can feel like wandering the wilderness without a map, but we can take solace in the fact that we are not the first to make the journey. In fact, the questions we ask today, namely what it means to be “Hindu”, or how we should define “Hinduism”, go to the heart of the Indian encounter with modernity.

It is telling that neither the word “Hindu” nor “Hinduism” are of Indian origin. The term “Hindu” was originally coined by the Persians to refer to the peoples who lived around the Indus River. The Greeks would subsequently render the Persian “Hindu” as “Indos”, from which we derive the name India. In the 7th century AD, the Chinese traveler Huen Tsang notes that the name “Xin-du”, which is the Chinese equivalent of the Persian Hindu, is unknown in India, despite being used by those outside of the country (Elst 33). The word “Hindu” began to take on a religious connotation in the 11th century AD with the arrival of the Turkic Muslims from Central Asia and Afghanistan, who clearly saw the native Hindus as "kafir” or unbelievers. The great scholar Al-Biruni, who accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni into India in the 11th century AD, recognized that the “Hindus entirely differ from us in every respect” and added a religio-cultural significance the prevailing geographic signifier. Within a few centuries, we see groups of Indians themselves begin to use the term in a similar manner. The Vaishnava author Vidyapati in the early 15th century references “Hindu and Turk dharmas”, a formulation we also see in the Guru Granth Sahib (Lorenzen 29). Indeed, it is said that Guru Nanak’s first words after achieving enlightenment were “Nobody is Hindu, nobody Muslim”. Nevertheless, even at this juncture, “Hindu” was not widely used as term for self-identification. That shift would only occur in the aftermath of British colonization, when officials and Orientalists alike were coming to terms with the Indic spiritual landscape.

The first attested use of the term “Hinduism” was in 1792 in the writings of the British evangelical Charles Grant.¹ Was Grant’s use of the term a simple act of naming a thing that already existed in the world, or did it mark the invention of a new religion? This is a fraught topic, and answers are typically motivated by ideology rather than historical fact.² The secular left, for example, argues that Hinduism is a “construct” to deny contemporary claims of Hindu political agency, and the Hindu right in reaction has taken to anachronistically asserting the existence of “Hinduism” as an ancient and timeless religion. But both of these arguments miss the more subtle point articulated by Professor S. N. Balagangadhara. According to Balagangadhara, “Hinduism” was not invented or constructed as a real entity in the world, but was rather a reflection of the experiential reality of the British, which was in turn shaped by a conceptual web— represented by the term “religion”— that emerged from a specific cultural and intellectual milieu (Balagangadhara, “Orientalism” 138).

The British understanding of “religion” was shaped in large part by two historical events: the Protestant Reformation and global exploration. As denominations blossomed across the Christian world post-Reformation, theologians and scholars transformed “religion” into a general category of which Christianity was just one type. Consistent with the Enlightenment drive towards systemization, this new category of religion was constructed on rationalist lines and conceived of as a sociological entity, a distinct sphere of human life alongside art or economics that could be studied and evaluated (Smith 49). And although “religion” as a category was abstracted from any particular religion, Protestant Christianity was axiomatically accepted as the evolutionary zenith of religion and provided the framework against which all other religions were systemized and judged. For example, post-Reformation Christianity emphasized the centrality of scripture in religious understanding and the individual’s relationship with the divine unmediated by the Church, and both of these attributes became key aspects of normative “religion”, reflecting a long-standing anti-clerical prejudice.

When the British came to India and saw the worship of gods and goddesses in temples, Brahmin priests engaging in ritual and scriptural exegesis, philosophical speculation among ascetics and monks, and the social dynamics of different endogamous kinship groups referred to as jatis, popularly known today as “castes”, they experienced all of these traditions or behaviors as part of an integrated, scripturally-oriented system which reflected an Enlightenment understanding of how religions work. Though this did not reflect the lived reality of the Indians themselves, it formed the basis for subsequent study of India and its spiritual traditions, by lending “coherence to their cultural experience of India” (137-138). Over time, what emerged from this complex of representations was not just “Hinduism”, but also Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism as mental models that shaped European understanding of Indian spiritual traditions.

Eager to engage in the newly introduced discourse of religion and defend their own tradition against missionary critiques, native Indians would appropriate this understanding of their spiritual traditions for their own ends, and in turn implicitly accepted the Enlightenment model of religion as normative. Indians then (like we do now) adopted European terminology and started analogizing elements of Hindu spiritual tradition to Christian concepts. The ritual puja was translated as “worship” and the murtis of the Hindu temple transformed into “idols”, etc. While this equipped Indians to defend their traditions on terms the colonial authorities would understand, it also distorted the meaning and relation of those concepts.

In the long process that followed of reinterpreting their tradition in terms that reflected the Orientalist’s experiential reality, the conceptual framework appropriated by the Hindus became integral to their own self-understanding. But the adoption of this framework— which Balagangadhara refers to as a “colonial consciousness”— did not result in “Hinduism” manifesting as a real entity in the world. What it did do is provide a conceptual toolkit for Hindus to both reinterpret and transform their tradition, and in this sense, the appropriation was not passive, but a strategic and adaptive response to the colonial encounter. In asking what it meant to represent the “Hindu community”, or whether it was feasible to present a “Hindu” point of view, Hindu elites who sought influence as intermediaries between the Hindu masses and the colonial apparatus shaped “Hinduism” in accordance with their own political and social objectives.

The Hinduism we have inherited today— far from representing an ancient and timeless religion— is a product of this historical process of appropriation and negotiation. Our current struggles with representation and identity mirror, in striking ways, the challenges faced by Hindu intellectuals during the colonial encounter. Then, as now, questions of how to define and represent “Hinduism” were inextricable from broader political and social transformations. Understanding this history is crucial not just for historical insight, but because the conceptual framework we've inherited — and the limitations we struggle with today — were forged in this period.

We can see these limitations in the California textbook controversy, where organizations like VF and HEF found themselves caught in what we might call the representational trap: to participate in American public discourse about religion, they, like the Hindu elites during the colonial period, had to present Hinduism in terms legible to incumbent institutions - as a unified faith with clear doctrinal positions on issues like monotheism and caste. Yet this very act of translation inevitably distorted the complex reality of Hindu traditions and practices. More pertinently, it reproduced the same pattern of colonial-era debates, where Hindu elites claimed to speak for a supposedly unified Hindu community while actually representing a particular interpretation shaped by modern, Western concepts of religion. This is not to say that their particular vision of what Hinduism was somehow “wrong”, but it does project a structural and theological coherence that simply does not exist. The emergence of concepts like Hinduphobia further illustrates this dynamic. While the term serves an important political function in identifying systemic biases in how Hinduism is popularly imagined, it also implicitly reinforces the notion of Hinduism as a unified religious identity analogous to Christianity or Islam.

IV) Reform vs. Orthodoxy: The Historical Debate

The emergence of “Hinduism” as a category during the colonial period didn't just reshape how Hindus were understood by others - it fundamentally altered how Hindu elites conceived of their own traditions and their role in modernizing society. As Hindu intellectuals grappled with this new conceptual framework, two distinct approaches emerged: one that sought to actively reform and reinterpret Hindu traditions in light of modern ideals, and another that emphasized preservation and continuity by preserving an equilibrium among castes, each with its own traditions. This tension between reform and orthodoxy wasn't merely theological — it represented competing visions for how Hindu society could navigate the challenges of modernity while maintaining authentic connections to tradition. Both the reformist and orthodox movements emerged from the same middle class milieu in colonial India in response to the pressures of representative politics, but they proposed radically different solutions to the dilemma of Hindu self-definition.

The Brahmo Samaj, founded by Rammohan Roy in 1828, sought to fundamentally restructure Hindu society through a systematic reformulation of Hindu tradition in a modernist frame. Roy's project went beyond mere adaptation — he attempted something far more radical: a complete reconceptualization of what it meant to be Hindu in the modern world. Roy located Hinduism's essence in the philosophical monism of the Upanishads, rejecting much of contemporary Hindu practice as corruption and superstition. While this view partly reflected internalized colonial critiques, it also represented a genuine attempt to distinguish eternal principles from temporal forms. The Brahmo Samaj's approach was revolutionary in two key aspects: First, it explicitly prioritized individual spiritual seeking over inherited tradition, establishing formal membership based on shared beliefs rather than birth. Second, it attempted to integrate spiritual knowledge with worldly engagement, breaking from the traditional separation between moksha (liberation) and dharma (worldly duty) (Halbfass 209).

The orthodox reaction, embodied in organizations like the Calcutta Dharma Sabha, which was formed shortly after the Brahmo Samaj in 1830, took shape not primarily as theological opposition but as a social reaction to perceived attacks on tradition by the British authorities and reformists alike. Rather than attempt Roy's radical reformation, orthodox leaders advocated the idea that Hinduism could accommodate all perspectives and practices without requiring fundamental change. This approach had immediate political advantages: it allowed Hindu elites to claim representative authority while avoiding divisive reforms. But it came at a deep conceptual cost: by refusing to define what was or wasn't constitutive of “Hinduism”, it made meaningful adaptation impossible.

Sri Aurobindo bears witness to this dialectic between reform and orthodox movements in The Renaissance in India, which he published in 1918. He notes that although the English-educated reformists were “intensely patriotic in motive, they were yet denationalized in their mental attitude” and that they “admitted practically, if not in set opinion, the occidental view of our past culture as only a half-civilisation” (Aurobindo 19), in reference to their acceptance of the Orientalist narrative of the decline of Hindu religion from the pristine monotheism of the Vedas to the superstition-ridden polytheism of the modern day.

There is truth to Aurobindo’s criticism, and the intense Anglophilia of the Brahmo Samaj ultimately precluded mass adoption. Debendranath Tagore— Roy’s successor as leader of the Brahmo Samaj and father of Rabindranath Tagore— betrays an awareness of this tension, warning his fellow Samajists in his autobiography that in their mission to “purify our heritage of customs, usages, rites, and ceremonies… we must beware of proceeding too fast in matters of social change, lest we be separated from the greater body whom we would guide and uplift” (Tagore 153). In this context, Sri Aurobindo was ambivalent about the orthodox reaction— which he described as an “integral reaction, a vindication and reacceptance of everything Indian as it stood and because it was Indian” (Aurobindo 21)—recognizing on the one hand that it represented a welcome assertion of native culture and mores against the Anglophilic reformists, while acknowledging on the other hand that its value lay in its synthesis with a forward-looking vision.

This tension came to a head in the 1920s, as rising Hindu-Muslim communal tensions strengthened the orthodox position. Organizations like the Hindu Mahasabha³ emphasized Hindu unity above all else, effectively ending serious attempts at reform. Even reform-minded leaders like Swami Shraddhanand (an Arya Samajist and ideological successor to Dayananda Saraswati, an ardent reformist and founder of the Arya Samaj⁴) found their efforts subordinated to the imperative of sangathan (organization). The triumph of this 'unity above all' approach had profound consequences: it established a pattern of responding to challenges through appeals to Hindu inclusiveness rather than genuine engagement with the need for change. There is no greater testament to this triumph than the work of Vinayak Savarkar, considered the ideological godfather of the modern Hindu Nationalist, or Hindutva, movement. While Savarkar certainly had a reformist impulse particularly with regard to social and cultural issues (he was an ardent opponent of the practice of untouchability and caste discrimination in general), he avoided the question of religion altogether, instead arguing that all Hindus— regardless of their caste or sampradaya— were linked culturally, historically, and racially by their membership in the Hindu nation. Hindutva, then, represented a “radical extension” of idea that Hinduism was an “organic whole”, leveraging the concept of the nation to symbolically expand the size of the Hindu community (Zavos 178).

By the end of the decade, any hope of a grand synthesis of the kind Aurobindo predicted a little more than a decade earlier had faded, with the reformist zeal supplanted by a overriding desire for symbolic unity. The triumph of the orthodox vision over reformist impulses in the 1920s marked a decisive turning point, one whose implications still shape the discourse around Hinduism today, whether in India or the diaspora. But to fully understand this shift, we need to examine not just what happened, but what was lost. The reformist movements, for all their flaws, were attempting something remarkable: a fundamental rethinking of Hindu traditions in light of modernity. They asked essential questions that remain relevant: How should ancient wisdom be interpreted for contemporary circumstances? What aspects of tradition are essential versus contingent? How can spiritual truth be preserved while social forms evolve? The orthodox response to these questions was expedient but ultimately devastating: by emphasizing inclusivism and unity in diversity, they appeared to transcend the reform-tradition divide while actually preserving existing societal structures intact. This maneuver was politically successful but philosophically hollow. It replaced genuine engagement with tradition with a stance that could accommodate anything while committing to nothing.

The implications were far-reaching. Consider how this pattern repeats in contemporary Hindu American discourse. When faced with criticism about caste discrimination, as an example, Hindu organizations typically respond that “caste is not essential to Hinduism”, but such an argument rests on the false assumption that such an “essence” can be articulated in the first place. And in the California textbook case, the commitment to inclusivism and the lack of an institutional mechanism to delineate what is or what is not “Hindu” fundamentally limited the ability of organizations like VF and HEF to represent an official perspective on what constitutes Hindu doctrine.

This is not coincidental - it's the direct inheritance of the orthodox strategy of using inclusivism to sidestep fundamental questions of reform and adaptation. What makes this particularly tragic is that the reformist movements, despite their limitations, had begun developing intellectual tools for genuine cultural translation. Roy's engagement with Christian missionaries, while often criticized as too accommodating, demonstrated how Hindu concepts could be reinterpreted without being diluted. Dayananda's creative reading of the Vedas, while philologically questionable, showed how tradition could be reimagined to address contemporary challenges. Even Vivekananda, though he later emphasized Hindu unity, began by radically reinterpreting traditional concepts for modern audiences. The orthodox triumph didn't just suppress these specific reform movements - it effectively ended the larger project of critically engaging with tradition that they represented. In its place arose a defensive traditionalism: a stance that preserves traditional forms while emptying them of vital content. This approach might have made sense in the context of anti-colonial struggle, where unity was paramount. But for Hindu Americans today, it has become a dead end, preventing exactly the kind of creative engagement with tradition that our circumstances require.

V) Beyond “Hinduism”: A New Framework

The victory of orthodox inclusivism over reformist efforts in colonial India continues to shape how Hindus conceptualize and defend their traditions today. While this strategy of emphasizing unity through ambiguity may have served immediate political needs during the independence movement, it has become increasingly counterproductive for Hindu Americans seeking authentic engagement with their traditions. The orthodox vision emerged from and was suited to a Hindu society organized along the caste-sampradya nexus⁵, in which each sub-group operated like a self-governing community with its own norms, traditions, and enforcement mechanisms. But the diasporic social reality is fundamentally different. The locus of identity has shifted away from caste and family and towards the individual, and the grip of tradition has weakened significantly, giving way to the individual's search for spiritual truth. This transformation demands that we not simply reproduce the failed strategies of the past, but rather critically examine whether our contemporary social reality requires more radical action.

Reformists understood the implications of this paradigm shift, which at the time was still in a nascent stage. For example, in establishing the structure of the Brahmo Samaj, Debendranath Tagore— Roy’s successor as head of the Samaj— sought to supplant tradition with a shared creed voluntarily accepted by the followers of the Samaj (Tagore 6). And in a remarkable lecture titled “The Future Church”, Keshub Chunder Sen, a fiery orator and successor to Debendranath Tagore as leader of the Brahmo Samaj observes that “the love of freedom is the chief characteristic of the present age”. Sen continues, declaring that, “this love of freedom manifests itself in all departments of speculation and practice” and, in politics, “men aspire to that form of government in which every section of the community may be fairly and fully represented.” In matters of religion, Sen observes that “there is an earnest struggle to break through the fetters of tradition, custom, and conventionalism” and that the love of freedom had “unsettled men’s faith in old doctrines and dogmas, and shaken their respect for authority” (Sen 128). In Sen’s words we see an intuitive grasp of the all-encompassing impact of the Enlightenment worldview that had arrived in India via the British. Concepts like “religion” and “freedom” were not isolated ideas that could fit piecemeal into preexisting structures, but forerunners of a fundamentally new mode of thinking and understanding that had to be accepted fully and integrated into a new societal paradigm.

The Brahmo Samaj's ultimate failure to achieve mass adoption is often cited as evidence that reformist movements are doomed to remain marginal. But this reading misses a crucial distinction between their historical context and ours. The Brahmo Samaj was attempting to reform Hindu society as a whole, while maintaining its character as a unified religious community.⁶ In contrast, the Hindu American diaspora is already fragmented and individualized. We are not trying to reform a unified religious community, but rather to create new forms of engagement with Hindu traditions that reflect our contemporary reality. This distinction is crucial because it suggests that the reformist impulse might find more fertile ground in the diaspora than it did in colonial India then, or modern India today, which is still largely rural and tradition-bound. When Keshub Chunder Sen spoke of the “love of freedom” as the chief characteristic of his age, he was describing an aspirational reality for most Indians. For Hindu Americans today, this individualistic orientation is not an alien imposition but our lived reality. We are already operating in a context where traditional structures of authority have weakened and individuals must consciously choose their relationship to tradition.

The argument that we should reject “Hinduism” as a framework is undoubtedly counterintuitive, particularly at a time when Hindu Americans feel their identity under attack. To be clear: this is not an argument for rejecting Hindu traditions, practices, or spiritual insights. Nor is it aligned with the reductive claim, often made by critics, that “Hinduism” should be rejected as inherently oppressive. Rather, I am suggesting something more specific: that the very concept of “Hinduism” - as a unified, systematic religion comparable to Christianity or Islam - has become an obstacle to authentic engagement with Hindu traditions in the diaspora. Consider how this framework shapes our understanding: When a Hindu American visits a temple, studies the Upanishads, or participates in festivals, these experiences must be filtered through the lens of “Hinduism” as a coherent religious system. This framing distorts the specific meanings and contexts of these practices. A Vaishnava bhakta's devotional relationship with Krishna, a Vedantin's contemplation of Brahman, and a family's celebration of Diwali are forced into an artificial unity that serves neither understanding nor preservation. More critically, this framework traps Hindu Americans in a defensive posture. When faced with questions about caste, gender roles, or religious pluralism, we find ourselves trying to defend or explain “Hinduism's position” - as if such a unified position existed. This leads to oversimplified appeals to Hindu inclusiveness or universality that dodge rather than address real challenges of adaptation and reform. Moving beyond “Hinduism” as a framework would not mean abandoning these traditions. Instead, it would allow us to engage with them more honestly and dynamically, acknowledging their specificity while exploring commonalities between traditions that could form the basis of shared political goals. This shift might seem radical, but it reflects a deeper fidelity to these traditions than attempting to force them into an alien conceptual structure.

This is not to imply that this “alien conceptual structure” should be rejected outright, but rather that we should seek what the philosopher K.C. Bhattacharya calls a “vital assimilation” in a lecture titled “Svaraj in Ideas” delivered at Hooghly College in 1928, exactly a decade after Aurobindo’s Renaissance in India. Faced with the imposition of western modernity— which represents “an entire system of ideas and sentiments”— the Indian mind, Bhattacharya laments, “has simply lapsed in most cases for our educated men, and has subsided below the conscious level of culture.” As a result, while the Indian mind still operates “in the persisting routine of their family life and in some of their social and religious practices”, it lacks “vital meaning” (Bhattacharya 104). The result, according to Bhattacharya, is a a kind of intellectual stasis that precludes “genuine creativeness.” In the field of politics, due to the Indian failure to understand “the inwardness of our traditional social structure”, there was no assimilation of the social and political principles imposed by the west, and as a result, Bhattacharya observes, “we have contented ourselves either with an unthinking conservatism or with an imaginary progressiveness merely imitative of the west” (104-5). Bhattcharya’s words were prescient, for what is inclusivism but an “imaginary progressiveness” plastered on top of the “unthinking conservatism” that seeks the preservation of tradition for its own sake? This tension is encoded in Hinduism itself, which was not shaped via a vital assimilation of modern ideas, but through political necessity.

VI) Practical Implications for Hindu Americans

What might this rejection look like in practice? It means moving beyond both defensive apologetics and uncritical celebration of “Hinduism” in favor of more specific engagements with particular traditions, texts, and practices. It means being willing to acknowledge that different Hindu traditions may have fundamentally different metaphysical and ethical commitments, rather than papering over these differences in the name of unity. Most importantly, it means embracing the creative tension between tradition and modernity, rather than trying to resolve it through oversimplified appeals to Hindu inclusivism or universalism.

This argument will no doubt face resistance from multiple directions. Traditional conservatives might argue that rejecting “Hinduism” as a framework would accelerate the very spiritual and cultural dissolution we seek to address. If Hindu Americans can't even unite under the banner of Hinduism, how can we preserve any connection to our traditions? Meanwhile, progressive reformers might contend that the problem isn't the concept of “Hinduism” itself, but rather its conservative interpretation — that we should work to redefine Hinduism in more liberal, universal terms. Both these objections, however, miss the fundamental point. The conservative position assumes that “Hinduism” as a unified framework is necessary for preserving tradition, when historical evidence suggests the opposite — that this framework has actually impeded genuine engagement with Hindu traditions by forcing them into an alien conceptual structure. The progressive position, meanwhile, reproduces the very problem it seeks to solve: by trying to redefine “Hinduism” in universal terms, it perpetuates the fiction that there is a single entity called “Hinduism” that can be so redefined.

The practical implications of moving beyond “Hinduism” as a framework would be significant. Rather than Hindu American organizations claiming to represent a unified religious community, we might see the emergence of more specific forms of organization based on particular traditions, practices, or philosophical orientations. Educational materials could move beyond simplistic descriptions of “Hindu beliefs” to explore the rich diversity of Hindu philosophical schools and their different approaches to fundamental questions. Interfaith dialogue could become more authentic as we openly acknowledge the specificity of different Hindu traditions rather than presenting a artificially unified front.

Most importantly, this shift would free Hindu Americans to engage more deeply with specific aspects of their heritage without feeling obligated to defend or represent “Hinduism” as a whole. A Vaishnava devotee could fully embrace their tradition's theistic orientation without needing to reconcile it with the philosophical monism of Advaita Vedanta, for example. This specificity would not mean fragmentation, but rather a more honest acknowledgment of the actual diversity of Hindu traditions. Paradoxically, moving beyond “Hinduism” as a framework might actually strengthen Hindu Americans' ability to respond to political challenges. Rather than being caught in endless debates about what “Hinduism” really teaches about various issues, we could engage more productively from our specific traditions while acknowledging others. This would allow for more nuanced and authentic forms of self-representation, replacing the defensive posture of Hindu advocacy organizations with a confident pluralism that better reflects the actual nature of Hindu traditions.

VII) Conclusion: Defining Dharma on the Frontier

For years I struggled with my inability to connect with my culture and tradition in an “authentic” way. The loss of language, attenuated connections with extended family, and physical distance from India itself all compounded what I felt was a growing alienation from my spiritual tradition. What shifted my thinking in this regard was my understanding of tradition itself. In The Hindu View of Life, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan— the philosopher and ideological doyen of so-called “Neo-Hinduism”— describes tradition as “something which is for ever being worked out anew and recreated by the free activity of its followers” and observes that “if a tradition does not grow, it only means that its followers have become spiritually dead.” And how does tradition grow? For Radhakrishnan, growth is a product of a dialectic between “tradition, logic and life” (Radhakrishnan 10). Our engagement with tradition begins with our lived reality, rising to thought, only to return to life in “a progressive enrichment” (11).

Radhakrishnan’s view is echoed by the philosopher and Heidegger scholar J.L. Mehta, who urges us “to strive to recapture, from the perspective of our own station in time and place, the truth revealed and yet hidden in our religious tradition and express it for our time, for ourselves” (Mehta 127). For both Radhakrishnan and Mehta, “tradition” is not hermetically sealed, but is only given life through understanding, which is necessarily a product of one’s perspective. The diasporic alienation which I once saw as impediment to connecting with the religion of “Hinduism” is precisely what equips us to reinvigorate tradition “in the world of today, fragmented, secularized and ‘modern’, and in its language” (Mehta 126).

I began this essay by asking a simple question of who “we” are and what “we” stand for. There is an immediate and rather parochial political reason for answering such a question, but, as I hope the reader can glean from this essay, the question has much deeper implications. Indeed, in seeking an answer to this question, we are forced to confront not just who we are or what our values are as individuals, but how we can rejuvenate our tradition in the context we find ourselves. Hindus go to great lengths to boast of the antiquity of their tradition, but for a tradition to be sanatana, or eternal, we must go beyond rote reproduction of cultural form and seek a deeper synthesis with the present. In rejecting “Hinduism”, we are not rejecting tradition, but seeking to revivify it in the spirit of the reformist movement that, despite moments of brilliance, found itself largely snuffed out in the early 20th century. Nonetheless, the embers of this movement still burn and, in freeing ourselves from artificial conceptual constraints, we are free to stoke the flames of revival.

Today we stand on the frontier which promises both challenge and opportunity. Faced with an abyss of cultural unmooring endemic to modern life, it can be tempting to grasp on to ossified cultural symbols as a last-ditch effort to preserve some semblance of connection with what came before. But in doing so we risk transforming tradition “into a lifeless burden, a deadening deposit which hides and chokes up the very wellsprings which bestow the dimension of the Holy and the quality of piety upon our experience” (Mehta 129). What is needed instead is what Mehta refers to as a “spirit of joyous adventure,” a willingness to leave ourselves behind and dive into the unknown, for by doing so we’ll not only be able to more clearly access the revelatory power of our tradition in our own lives, but will also discover new horizons for a Hindu future.

_________________________

Altman, Michael. Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Assmann, Jan. The Price of Monotheism. Translated by Robert Savage, Stanford University Press, 2010.

Balagangadhara, S. N. All Roads Lead to Jerusalem: The Impact of Western Scholarship on the Study of Indian Religions. Brill, 2005.

Balagangadhara, S. N. "Orientalism, Postcolonialism, and the 'Construction' of Religion." Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism, edited by Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens, and Rajaram Hegde, Routledge, 2013, pp. 127-141.

Basu, Rajnarayan. Brahmic Questions of the Day Answered by an Old Brahmo. Calcutta, 1878.

Bhattacharyya, K.C. "Svaraj in Ideas." Indian Philosophy in English: From Renaissance to Independence, edited by Nalini Bhushan and Jay L. Garfield, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 101-112.

De Roover, Jakob, and Claerhout, Sarah. "The Colonial Construction of What?" Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism, edited by Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens, and Rajaram Hegde, Routledge, 2013, pp. 164-178.

Eck, Diana L. India: A Sacred Geography. Knopf, 2012.

Eck, Diana L. "Negotiating Hindu Identities in America." The South Asian Religious Diaspora in Britain, Canada, and the United States, edited by Harold Coward, John R. Hinnells, and Raymond Brady Williams, State University of New York Press, 2000, pp. 219-237.

Elst, Koenraad. Who is a Hindu? Voice of India, 2001.

Halbfass, Wilhelm. India and Europe: An Essay in Philosophical Understanding. State University of New York Press, 1988.

Harrison, Peter. “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Keppens, Marianne, and Bloch, Esther, editors. Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism. Routledge, 2013, pp. 1-21.

King, Richard. Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and 'The Mystic East.' Routledge, 1999.

Kramrisch, Stella. The Hindu Temple. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1981.

Lorenzen, David. "Hindus and Others." Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism, edited by Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens, and Rajaram Hegde, Routledge, 2013, pp. 25-40.

Mehta, J.L. India And the West: The Problem of Understanding. Scholars Press, 2001.

Oddie, Gregory. "Hindu Religious Identity with Special Reference to the Origin and Significance of the Term 'Hinduism', c. 1787-1947." Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism, edited by Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens, and Rajaram Hegde, Routledge, 2013, pp. 157-172.

Radakrishnan, S. The Hindu View of Life. HarperCollins, 1999.

Sen, Keshub Chunder. Lectures Delivered in India. Trubner & Co., 1883.

Smith, Jonathan Z. The Meaning and End of Religion. Fortress Press, 1991.

Van Der Veer, Peter. Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain. Princeton University Press, 2001.

Zavos, John. The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India. Oxford University Press, 2000.

1. According to Gregory Oddie, “The evidence so far uncovered shows that Europeans (or rather Britons) used the word ‘Hindooism’ at least 29 years before Ram Mohan Roy (the first well-known modern Indian reformer) used it in 1816.8 Charles Grant, an Evangelical and subsequently a Director of the East India Company, employed the term in a letter written from Calcutta to a friend in England in 1787. He also used it a number of times in his well-known Observations written in 1792. Grant was not only a convert to Evangelical Christianity, but was closely allied with Protestant missionaries, including the Baptist missionaries who settled in Serampore in 1793. Some years after Grant used the term ‘Hindooism’ in both his private and official capacity as a Company employee, William Ward of the Baptist mission employed it in his diary in 1801. Joshua Marshman, another member of the Serampore trio, also used it (as an alternative to ‘the Hindoo system’) in his diary in 1802. Indeed, evidence that Ram Mohan Roy met with William Yates, another Baptist missionary, in 1815 and visited the Baptist mission at Serampore in the following year leaves open the intriguing possibility that he (Ram Mohan Roy) borrowed the term ‘Hindooism’ from the Baptists” (Oddie 9).

2. For a summary of the “constructionist” view of Hinduism, refer to pp. 1-21 in Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism. Routledge, 2013.

3. Originally called the “All-India Hindu Sabha”, it was renamed the Hindu Mahasabha in 1921. The Mahsabha emerged from the Sabha movement that coalesced in the Punjab in the first decade of the 20th century.

4. The Arya Samaj was a prominent reformist group founded by Dayananda Saraswati in 1875. Like the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj saw the missionary threat as primary and sought to fundamentally restructure Hindu society in response. The main tenets of the Arya Samaj were outlined by Saraswati in his book Satyarth Prakash, or “Light of Truth”. The Arya Samaj’s creed included belief in a monotheistic God and Saraswati also elevated the Vedas as the singular sacred text for Hindus, akin to the Bible or Quran.

5. John Zavos in The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India describes how Indian society in the pre-colonial era was defined by the relationship of the structures of caste and sampradya, or the particular spiritual tradition or lineage one is affiliated with. This nexus of caste and sampradaya was highly localized, and different traditions— e.g., Shaivism, Vaishnavism, or Shankara’s non-dualism— had stark theological differences. This structure made Hindu society highly decentralized and ill suited for the arena of colonial governance, which operated on the assumption that Indians were split into distinct religious groups whose interests could be negotiated in the public sphere. An 1881 census report which states with a palpable sense of exasperation that “there were instances where the column in the enumerator’s schedule, in which religion should have been entered, was filled up, not with any designation of any known religion, but with either the same of a caste or the title of a sect” (74). This lack of clarity regarding the contours of Hindu society was not confined to British census takers, either. Spurred on by rapid increases in the Christian population between 1871 and 1901 due to missionary activity and census-related delineations, Hindu elites were similarly forced to ask whether, for example, ”low caste” tribals and animists, or Muslim groups who followed syncretic Hindu traditions were part of the Hindu fold.

6. Rajnarayan Basu— a prominent figure in the Bengali intelligentsia and early convert to Brahmoism— writes that “Brahmoism is both Universal Religion and a form of Hindooism” (Basu 2).