Teaching About Hindus in America

In 1965, the US government passed an Immigration and Nationality Act (aka the Hart–Celler Act) which eliminated the limits on the numbers of individuals from any given nation who could immigrate to the United States. The new immigration standards were focused on family reunification, refugee status, and most of all, professional skills, encouraging the immigration of much larger numbers of highly qualified professionals and students from India. In response, many Indians did immigrate, forming much larger, and more ethnically Indian, Hindu communities than had ever before existed in the United States. Importantly, before this time women were mostly only able to immigrate as wives of working men. Hereon, more women began coming as professionals and students in their own right, balancing the gender dynamics of Hindu American society. It is also important to note that many of the Indians who were able to immigrate were educated in Christian-run English language schools in India, which has led to many such Hindus’ understanding of Hindu traditions to be shaped through an Abrahamic lens of thinking about religion.

At first, many of the immigrants gathered primarily with others of the same Indian region, language, or culture. Collaborations between different regional communities came later, over time. Today some of them remain highly regionally specific given their unique ancestral traditions, while others have become more pan-Hindu. Most of these immigrants performed their main spiritual practices at home. For communal gatherings, they initially often visited ISKCON temples and Vedanta Society centers as the only available options, though these were from different Hindu traditions than most of these new immigrants and many of them saw them as sacred venues but retained their own Hindu traditions. By the mid-1970s, many of these Hindu immigrants now had children to whom they wanted to impart their Hindu heritage. This created a rising demand for new and more diverse temples and other Hindu cultural centers, and much grander communal celebrations of Hindu festivals like Dīpāvali/Diwali, Ganeśa Caturthī, Navarātrī, etc. in major cities across America, initially in rented halls and former churches.

Many Hindu immigrants in America desired full-scale temples like those in India, but most of the Hindu communities and regional associations individually lacked the resources to build and operate them. To this end, they began to collaborate with each other to construct shared temples in their cities, often (though not always) representing a plurality of multiple regional styles and traditions to serve multiple Hindu communities. The first non-ISKCON, non-Vedanta Society Hindu temple to be built in the US was actually the Palaniswami Sivan Temple in San Francisco as early as 1957, but more began to follow from 1977 on. There are now hundreds of Hindu temples in the US. Hindu temples are integral for many Hindu communities in America, often even more so than in India, as they provide centers of Hindu culture and tradition in a broader societal context where Hindus are a micro-minority.

The anti-Hindu sentiment that underwrote the discriminatory practices prior to the Immigration Act of 1965 did not disappear. Instead, it proliferated past California to other areas where Indians settled and sometimes manifested in violence. From 1975 into the early 1990s, a violent anti-Hindu hate group was active in Jersey City, New Jersey. Calling themselves the Dotbusters, they placed threat ads in the local newspaper, “We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out of Jersey City. If I’m walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will hit him or her.” In 1987 they murdered an Indian man, Navroze Mody, by brutally beating him to death on the street. The murderers were never apprehended despite there being a direct witness. Many dozens of other anti-Hindu and anti-Indian hate crimes were committed, including another assault which left Dr. Kaushal Saran in a coma and inflicted lasting brain damage. The Dotbusters searched phone books to find the home addresses of Indian families, and broke their windows and crashed parties, seeking to harass them until they moved away. The Dotbusters went free and were never brought to justice.

From 1980 to 2013, the population of Indian immigrants in the US roughly doubled each decade, going from 206,000 to well over 2 million. The 1990 Immigration Act raised the number of permanent work visas. According to Pew Research Center’s 2012 survey based on a 35,000 sample size, an estimated 1% of the US population is Hindu, equating to ~3.3 million American Hindus. ~2.5 million US Hindus are of Indian origin, but 800,000 are from other countries. Hindu communities are spreading throughout the US. While they have long existed in California, New York, and New Jersey, more recently large Hindu communities have formed in Texas, Minnesota, Georgia, and North Carolina, among other places. The CEOs of Microsoft, Adobe, Starbucks, and FedEx are all Hindu Americans. Hindus make up only 1% of the US population, but contribute closer to 4% of federal tax revenue, plus spending several hundred billion dollars per year, a major contribution of Hindus to the prosperity of America. Since 2022, young Hindu Americans have secured Forbes 30 Under 30 awards at almost ten times the average rate for their population size, most of all in healthcare, consumer technology, education, and energy. Their massively outsized rate of contribution is similar in new patents and publishing in scientific journals. Hindu Americans own more than a third of all hotels in the US, and an only slightly smaller share of all convenience stores. The first female CEO of a major US biotech company is a Hindu.

Some Hindu communities in America came as refugees due to expulsion, violence, or anti-Hindu policies, primarily from Bhutan, Afghanistan, and the Sindh and Balochistan provinces of Pakistan. Other Hindu communities in America are second- and third-level diasporas, their ancestors having spent two or three generations in places like Fiji, the Caribbean, Mauritius, Uganda, Kenya, or Tanzania. Their particular histories have often produced unique modulations or reframings of the Hindu traditions that passed through those places. Although 91% of Hindus in the US are of Asian descent, 4% are white, 2% are black, 1% are Latino, and 2% are mixed or from other backgrounds. Similar demographics are reflected at most major temples, while smaller temples may be more community-specific. There have been black Hindu communities in the US since at least the 1970s. For example, at that time Alice Coltrane, a black jazz musician, was sharing Vedanta teachings, writing her own jazz-style Bhajans, and popularizing Hindu traditions in her predominantly black spiritual community in California. She founded and directed a Vedanta center. There are also Afro-Caribbean Hindu communities descended from intermixtures of African and Indian indentured laborers on plantations.

With Hindu Americans having come from a wide variety of different countries, and a substantial portion of Hindus in the US having grown up here in this country, Hindu traditions have now become maturely established as America; not inherently closely tied to India or any other particular country. Major, widely influential Hindu organizations like ISKCON, the Vedanta Society, and Kauai Aadheenam were originally founded in the United States, and are as much or more American than Indian.