‘he thinks krishna is his friend’: domestic space and temple sociality in the socialisation...

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‘He thinks Krishna is his friend’:Domestic space and templesociality in the socialisationbeliefs of immigrant IndianHindu parentsHemalatha Ganapathy-Colemana

a Department of Communication Disorders andCounseling, School and Educational Psychology,Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN 47809, USAPublished online: 31 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Hemalatha Ganapathy-Coleman (2014) ‘He thinks Krishna is hisfriend’: Domestic space and temple sociality in the socialisation beliefs of immigrantIndian Hindu parents, Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 15:1, 118-146,DOI: 10.1080/14755610.2014.884010

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‘He thinks Krishna is his friend’: Domestic space andtemple sociality in the socialisation beliefs of immigrant

Indian Hindu parents

Hemalatha Ganapathy-Coleman*

Department of Communication Disorders and Counseling, School and EducationalPsychology, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN 47809, USA

This paper reports results from a study of the cultural belief systems, orethnotheories, of Asian Indian Hindu parents in the city of Baltimore,Maryland, in the USA. I adopted a cultural, developmental psychologicalapproach and, over a one-year period, used caregiver diaries, ecologicalinventories, repeated in-depth interviews and participant observations to gainaccess to the ethnotheories of the parents. These immigrant parentsemphasised family ties, unprompted adherence to the daily routine,knowledge of cultural origins and religiously inflected moral values.Exploring the nuances of their emphasis on cultural origins and moral andreligious values, particularly as those relate to Hinduism and its transnationalrearticulation, I show how the parents utilised domestic spaces and thetemple as dual venues to systematically socialise their children into a newform of Hindu religious and ‘Indian’ ethnic identity in the USA.

Keywords: Asian Indian parents; Hindu; immigration; beliefs; socialisation;cultural psychology

‘He thinks Krishna is his friend’

He knows his story, he knows especially I have been telling him the stories about hisname, so he thinks Krishna is his friend. So sometimes he plays around, makesbelieve like he has the Krishna statue. So he will talk to Krishna. He does that . . .

These were the words of Lakshmi, a South Indian mother and mathematician,

as she animatedly offered her view of the purpose of prayer, religion and faith in

her son’s life. Lakshmi was one of 10 parents1 who participated in this year-long

cultural psychological study2 of parental belief systems or ethnotheories

(Harkness and Super 1996; Super and Harkness 1986). Like other participants,

she often mentioned socialisation goals in the morals/values domain, sometimes

directly referencing Hindu deities and at other times summoning broader

humanistic values (Ganapathy-Coleman 2004). For her son, she brokered a

personal connection with the divine by explicitly articulating the link between his

name and that of his historical namegiver, who enjoyed a privileged friendship

with Krishna, the blue-skinned Hindu God.

q 2014 Taylor & Francis

*Email: [email protected]

Culture and Religion, 2014

Vol. 15, No. 1, 118–146, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2014.884010

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mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2014.884010

In Hindu devotionalism, Krishna (an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, the God who

preserves creation) is undoubtedly the most popular of all the Gods, seen as

possessing enchanting beauty and portrayed variously as a mischievous prankster,

a loving son, a flute-playing cowherd, a fierce but just king, a God and a counsellor

(Kakar 1981). Lakshmi’s son is named after Arjuna, a historical character from a

Hindu epic who was Krishna’s close friend. As Arjuna’s charioteer during

the Mahabharata War, Krishna served as his mentor and spiritual advisor. The

Bhagavad Gita, one of the most sacred texts of Hinduism, is a dialogue between

Krishna andArjuna before thewar begins, inwhichKrishna instructsArjuna on the

principle of duty orDharmawhen Arjuna is hesitant to wage war with his cousins.

When Lakshmi’s son was younger, she told him many stories about the

special relationship between Arjuna and Krishna. Since then, he has regarded

Krishna as special. Demonstrating the transnational dimensions of contemporary

religious practice, when he visited India, he carried with him a small statue, or

murti,3 of Krishna. Like Meera, the sixteenth-century Rajasthani princess who

was a Hindu mystic, a saint and a Krishna devotee,4 he played with the murti,

pretending to feed it before eating his own meals and lovingly laying it to sleep

beside him. Whether his conception of God was modelled after his relationship

with his physical father, as Freud (1918) famously proposed, or his relationship

with his mother (Nelson 1971), there is little doubt that for Lakshmi’s son,

Krishna was an imaginary companion of his early childhood (Ginsburg and

Opper 1988) and an attachment figure (Bowlby 1973; Kirkpatrick 2005). Krishna

is still his friend: ‘So sometimes he plays around, makes believe like he has the

Krishna statue. So he will talk to Krishna’. In connecting her son with Krishna,

Lakshmi enables an inculcation not just of a religious belief, but also of

socialisation into his cultural identity as an Asian Indian Hindu:

He should know that he will get God’s help if he needs it . . . he thinks . . . God isgoing to help him out when he needs him . . . Prayer, he is doing it. I feel that rightnow he doesn’t understand what it is, actually. But because Mom is saying that, he isdoing. So my older son, he is 12, he is going to be 13. He knows the value. Like hethinks you get some extra help . . . in the sense [of] getting some confidence,basically. Right now this guy, he thinks he is doing it because it’s going to help him.I don’t know exactly what he does. But he will do it every day . . . I just think [hethinks] this is some other power, so, superpower. I want him to think that he is goingto get some help eventually when he needs, but he has to depend upon himself also,it has to happen – confidence in himself.

In Lakshmi’s account, being ‘God-fearing’ or ‘believing in God’ (a religious

quality) is secondary to the amount of individual hard work that has gone into

anything (work ethic) and the self-assurance a person has. Prayer serves only to

provide a final boost of self-confidence. Prayer as a regular, concrete religious

practice takes on a quasi-instrumental function, even though for now, her son

(like most children transculturally) prays only to comply with the wishes of his

mother, whose authority he respects. Prayer itself is emotionally neutral for

him (Long, Elkind, and Spilka 1967). In that sense, faith and religion are

Culture and Religion 119

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undifferentiated for him, and he unquestioningly accepts religious ideas as hand-

me-downs from authority figures (Allport 1950). For Lakshmi’s seven-year-old

son, God is a man5 with magical qualities and, crucially, one who fulfils wishes

when people tell him their desires through prayer (Allport 1950; Goldman 1964,

1970). His understanding will likely develop into a more mature religion of ‘first-

hand fittings’ during adolescence (as it is beginning to for his older brother),

becoming an integral part of his personality (Allport 1950, 36).

In this study of the interaction between parenting, child development and

culture, I conceptualise context as an incorporating system of social activity

(Bronfenbrenner 1979; Vygotsky 1978) informed by a system of cultural

meanings (D’Andrade 1984; Hutchins 1995; Shweder 1996). I also incorporate

the notion of the developmental niche (Super and Harkness 1986), integrating

ideas of context as external stimulation, social activity and cultural meaning.

Super and Harkness’ conceptualisation of the developmental niche includes three

coordinated structural components: physical and social settings, customs of

childcare and the psychology of caretaking. I discuss here the third dimension

of the niche, caretaking psychology, specifically the implicit cultural models of

child development and socialisation, or ethnotheories, held by those responsible

for childrearing, attending especially to the beliefs around socialisation for

cultural and religious goals.

The participants6 in this study were first-generation immigrant parents who

self-identified as ‘Indians’ and had a US-born second child around the age of

seven. A total of 12 parents were originally invited to participate. Two were

unable to continue because of their schedules and the intensity of involvement

that this study demanded.7 All the parents were Indian, Hindu and at least

moderately proficient in English. Having moved to the USA between 1986 and

1995, they had been in the USA for an average of 11.5 years in 2002–2003 when

the study took place.8 The participants’ educational levels ranged from high

school to doctoral degrees. Their occupations varied from homemaker, store

cashier, bus driver, assistant priest at a small temple and salesperson to doctor,

equity analyst and university instructor. Their regions of origin represented

included Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and

Jammu and Kashmir, while the Indian languages represented included Hindi,

Gujarati, Marathi and Tamil.9

Although there was no deliberate attempt in this study to find participants

who self-identified as ‘Hindus’,10 when I contacted the local Indian Association,

they pointed me to the temple that operated in close communication with the

Indian Association of the area. I visited the temple for the first time during the

Sharad Poornima11 celebrations. I walked into a multi-hued throng of men,

women and children, dressed in all their traditional Indian finery. Many were

dancing. Those who were not were friendly and eager to chat. This temple offered

the wider pool needed to identify parents who fit into the sampling criteria for this

study, although participants were also identified through informal contacts and

snowballing.

H. Ganapathy-Coleman120

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During 2002–2003, when I conducted this study, the Hindu nationalist

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, the Indian People’s Party) was in power in India,

having won the national elections in 1998. Through the 1980s and 1990s,

Hindutva, or nationalist Hinduism, had been enjoying a resurgence in India,

peaking with the BJP’s destruction in 1992 of the Babri Masjid mosque in the city

of Ayodhya, which they believed was built on the remains of the original

birthplace of Lord Rama. Throughout those two decades, the BJP, sometimes

with the patronage of non-resident Indians, had invested heavily in organisations

in India and the USA that would work for the revival of strong versions of

Hinduism. The activities of groups subscribing to a Hindu nationalist ideology,

such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad12 and the Hindu Students’ Council, testify to

such activity (Mathew and Prashad 2000; Prashad 2012; Rajagopal 2000). The

deep engagement in Hinduism of the families who participated in my study could

perhaps be traced to a heightened sense of being Hindu deriving from that

moment in Indian history. However, in 2004 the Congress Party, which is secular

at least in principle, returned to power in India. Nevertheless, the Hindu

nationalist movement remains strong both in India and abroad, as shown by the

proliferation of related organisations, websites and programmes, and the

increasing communalisation of ‘Indian’ cultural and political life. Evidence for

such communalisation comes through most clearly in the contemporary anointing

of several overtly Hindu and anti-Muslim politicians for the highest public

offices. Thus, even though 10 years have passed since the collection of data for

this project, there has been considerable contextual continuity. It must be

simultaneously observed that most of the individuals who identify as Hindus have

little to do with the Hindu right. Often they are oblivious to the fact that the right

invests heavily in organising among them. For the families who participated in

my study, religion offered an avenue for cultural socialisation, cultural

reproduction (Joshi 2006a) and community building (Brettell and Reed-Danahay

2012) for their children.

Although some recent work has focused on the separation of religion from

ethnicity among second-generation Indian Americans (Kurien 2012a), the

intersection between religion and ethnicity has been documented (e.g. Fenton

1988; Narayanan 1992; Sarhadi Raj 2000; Williams 1992), with religion

frequently viewed as the most authentic form and manifestation of ethnicity.

The maintenance of religious beliefs and practices among immigrants is often

considered an indicator of the extent of their assimilation. But contrary to such

simplistic conceptualisations, ethnicity, religion and national identity are

sometimes separate and at other times intertwined, and immigrants continually

reconfigure them. For instance, Levitt (2007) discussed how Indian Gujaratis of

the Hindu Swaminarayan sect in the USA live the American dream of the

suburban dual-income household and home ownership while simultaneously

maintaining close ties with India through religious leaders, whose counsel they

seek on important life decisions, and through their economic support of their

extended families in India. In her study of religion, race and ethnicity in Indian


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America, Joshi (2006a; see also Rajagopal 2000) noted that participation in

prayer and religious rituals – including attending special culture, language and

religion classes (Bal Vihar); cultural shows; and festival celebrations – offers an

opportunity not only to enact religion but also, and primarily, to enact ethnicity

symbolically through cultural practice and social networking with other Indians.

The Hindu participants in this research study ‘either conflated Indian culture and

Hinduism, saw Hinduism as an inseparable component of Indian culture, or

intellectually understood the distinctions but nevertheless considered Hinduism

and Indian culture to be irreducibly related’ (Joshi 2006a, 48). In this paper,

I examine the nature of this conflation (Geertz 1973) among immigrant Hindu

parents, using a cultural psychological approach (Cole 1996; D’Andrade 1984,

1995; Hutchins 1995; Shotter 1993; Shweder 1996) and a qualitative

methodology. I explore how the parents socialise their children into religion

and culture in both the domestic setting and the temple, two spaces that serve as

‘models for the future selves of their inhabitants’ (Hummon 1989, 225).

Research methodology

This study employed a constructivist paradigm and embraced multiple

constructions of truth based on the participants’ perspectives. Accordingly,

it adopted a hermeneutical and dialectical methodology that aimed to understand

participants’ subjective, lived experiences. Data collection and analysis occurred

concurrently in three steps (Ganapathy-Coleman 2004; Serpell, Baker, and

Sonnenschein 2005). First, recurrent activities in the child’s life were identified

through a diary maintained by his or her primary caregiver. This diary provided

information about the framing activities and settings (Goffman 1974) that create a

focus for guided learning of the values and skills central to a culture (Valsiner

2007; Valsiner and Litvinovich 1996). Second, I used the diary to create an

ecological inventory, recording objective, contextual information on the resources

available to the child, such as games, toys and co-participants in activities and

routines. The parents’ responses to questions – such as ‘What does this mean to

you? What do you think it means to your child?’ – allowed me to explore the

subjective, personal meanings that they attached (Bruner 1990) to particular

routines and recurrent activities. Third, based on the themes and implicit ideas that

parents appeared to value, as inferred from the first two steps, several other aspects

of parental belief systems were covered in four interviews, including socialisation

goals, factors impacting the attainment of stated goals, parents’ perceptions of their

children’s strengths and needs, the attributions they offered for these and the

strategies they used in addressing needs. In sum, the interview method involved a

series of steps through which each child’s parents were engaged in conversations

that were grounded in the recurrent activities of the child’s everyday life as

identified from the diary and ecological inventory (Serpell, Baker, and

Sonnenschein 2005). The parents were interviewed in depth multiple times,

yielding 40 interviews. Together with the rich, informal conversations that


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bracketed the formal interviews, I collected roughly 120 hours of data over a one-

year period. The caregiver diary and ecological inventory not only formed the

foundation for the interviews but also served as a check for the trustworthiness of

parents’ responses when they spoke about their childrearing practices.

Through iterative readings of the verbatim transcripts and meaning

condensation, I found that the ethnotheories of child socialisation and parenting

articulated by these parents coalesced around four core themes: ‘Have good

morals and values’, ‘You understand yourself only when you know your origins’,

‘Stand on your own [two] feet’ and ‘Family closeness comes from doing things

together’. Here I examine the meshed religious/spiritual, moral, ethical and

cultural values that were important to these parents, including wanting their child

to grow up to ‘be God-fearing’, ‘be a good human being’, ‘learn good things’,

‘not learn bad habits’ and ‘know [her or his] culture and background’.

Prayer: preached and practiced

As I sat in her living room, with its pictures of Krishna and a large illustration of

Gitopadesham (Krishna serving as Arjuna’s charioteer and spiritual counsellor

before the Mahabharata War), Hetal, a Gujarati mother of two, expressed the

importance of moral/religious values within the framework of everyday routines:

Every day they pray in the morning as soon as they wake up and take a shower, thengo to the temple. It’s in the basement, we have the temple. So every day, 10 minutes,both kids sit in front of the God and pray – and then when we take a dinner at theevening, everybody do the family prayer and then . . . we start the dinner.

Taking a bath and then praying at the Mandir, as the temple and even the sacred

space (Eliade 1959) of a domestic altar or shrine is known, before going to school

or work is a common ritual in India. Shopkeepers and tradespeople commonly

light a lamp and incense at an altar in their place of business before commencing

their workday. In fact, religious deities from Hinduism are a ubiquitous part of

the landscape in India, with images of Gods and Goddesses decorating everything

from shops, doorways, homes and schools to buses and the walls of public

buildings (Eck 2006; Jain 2007; Pinney 2004). The act of bathing itself is an

important daily self-cleansing ritual (Srinivas 2002), referenced in detail in many

sacred Hindu texts. The performance of worship only after a bath signifies that

the transcendent may be reverentially approached only after one has been

physically cleansed. Prayer/worship, or puja, then cleanses the individual

mentally. Hetal’s family also engages in family prayer at dinner time. In pre-meal

prayers in some Hindu traditions, the food is first offered to the Gods, and then

thanks are given for the meal before it is consumed. Through the ritualised

custom of twice-a-day prayer, Hetal formalises religious practice, investing it

with a special seriousness for her children (Erikson 1977). In intentionally

continuing this practice on another continent, she exemplifies the persistence of

religious practice in the face of a mutable external context. Another mother,

Naina, a homemaker who is originally from the state of Rajasthan, said:


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We have prayer before meal and . . . I taught certain things to them. During the day,I may not be in that part, you know, I forget myself [I myself forget]. I put a maaSaraswati’s photo in their room so they look at her, see it with a shlok13 [religiousverse], and they look at their hand with a shlok for that. In the morning we alwaysmiss our prayers . . . but evening we say that, and before going to bed they have . . .four shloks that they say . . . Aum bhoorbhuva swaha, Ay vasudevaaya, Karacharana kritam and Twameva maata. So they say all four of them before they go tobed. Yaa kundendo, Aadha Saraswati . . . then Karagrey vasatey Lakshmi . . . thereare others that we have learnt, but there is no time for the others . . . what we havestarted is whenever I do puja in the evening, [he sings] the Ramchandraji ki aarti.

Here Naina speaks about the various shlokas (also commonly called shloks) she

has taught her children to use every day, even in her absence. Among them are two

dedicated to Saraswati, the Hindu Goddess of knowledge, who is widely

worshipped by students in India; the revered Vedic Gayatri Mantra (Aum bhoor

bhuvah swaha), which asks for an illuminated intellect to lead a righteous life; and

a daily morning prayer (Karagrey vasatey) that contemplates the significance of

one’s hands in accomplishing life’s goals and offers up the day’s actions to God.

Similarly, another mother, Pallavi, referred to her son’s daily recitation of the

Brahmaarpanam, a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, before meals. Prarthana, a

Sanskrit word signifying prayer in Hinduism, refers to the act of seeking with

reverence, which the parents want their children to do, but the children attach

various meanings to prayer and belief in God. For Lakshmi’s son, who prays only

because his mother asks him to, it is an avenue for him to get his wishes granted.

For Hetal’s son, it is part of the daily routine enforced by his parents.When I asked

Hetal why she considers it important for her son to believe in God, she said:

If they believe in God, kids, when they do something wrong, they will do it and feelfear. I tell them this – if you do something wrong, God will punish you. So he [thechild] is afraid. No, I don’t want to do this because God is watching me. If I do orsay something bad, or do this or that, which is bad, at least he will fear about God.

For Hetal, it is important for her son to believe that God is omnipresent because it

helps him to be mindful of his conduct. It forces him to monitor the rightness and

wrongness of his own actions, not out of some sense of justice but because of a

fear of authority. Whenever he is tempted to say or do something wrong, his

belief in a vigilant and vengeful God generates fear of restitutive punishment

(Shariff and Norenzayan 2011). His mother has not threatened him personally

with expiatory punishment; instead, she leaves the act of punishing up to divine

wrath. His mother hopes that he will fear such retribution enough to do what is

right. Over time, this ethic of authority (Fromm 1947) matures, developing into a

superego or a conscience, autonomous morality and moral constraint (Piaget

1932). For Hetal, belief in God and fearing God are two sides of the same coin.

To my question of how a child learns to fear God, her cryptic and forceful

response was, ‘Parents put it into their heads – that if you do that, this will

happen’. In saying this, Hetal makes a stark statement about parental power in the

socialisation of children. Children’s potential rejection of parental directives

rarely figures into their parents’ thinking. Although she elaborated on it in the


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context of her conception of belief in God, the element of fear that Hetal

discussed is not unique to her. Komal’s husband, who occasionally supplemented

his wife’s contributions, talked about fear as a necessary part of what children

must feel towards their teachers and parents. The position of authority accorded

to God, parents and teachers, with parents and teachers frequently being equated

with God, is at the core of the social hierarchy that defines Hinduism.

By referencing fear and obedience, the parents brought to the fore the vertical

dimension of religion (Krause 2012), which is completely at odds with the non-

hierarchical bond that Lakshmi’s son claimed with Krishna.

Merely teaching children how to pray or to believe in God is not sufficient.

For religious commitment to be transmitted, children may need to perceive their

parents as religiously committed, which can happen only when their parents

engage in overt religious behaviour (Vermeer, Janssen, and Scheepers 2012).

During my first visit to Shailesh’s house, he proudly drew aside a curtain behind

which was a religious altar remarkable in its scale, grandeur and formality. On the

steps leading up to the elaborately decorated statuettes of Lord Krishna and

Radha (Krishna’s childhood friend, devotee and lover) were articles of worship –

lamps, incense, kumkum (vermilion powder) and baskets for flowers. When

I bowed to the Gods, as is customary, the mother hastened to bring me prashad of

sweetened coconut balls. (Prashad is an offering, usually food, that is typically

offered first to the Gods, sacralised by prayer, and then partaken by people, as the

deity’s blessings are said to be residing in it.) The curtain that separated the altar

from the living space was kept drawn except during the daily worship or ‘Bhajan-

Keertan’, which Shailesh led through prayer, chants and songs. It might be

tempting to attribute the scale of the domestic altar and the intensity of Shailesh’s

daily worship to his part-time occupation as an assistant priest at a local temple.

But the other parents were also fervent practitioners of the Hindu traditions of

their upbringing at home. For example, Naina did puja in the evening at their

Mandir by lighting the lamp and singing Ramchandraji ki aarti, a devotional

song praising Rama (another incarnation of Vishnu), along with her sons. All but

one of the parents in this study visited the temple every fortnight; Lakshmi went

only occasionally. This was most likely because temple attendance is not

mandatory for Hindus. Symbolically appropriated domestic spaces, especially

home altars imbued with religious value, act as significant psychic anchors in

Hindu tradition, enabling household members to preserve and privately practice

their religious beliefs (Mazumdar and Mazumdar 1993).

The examples offered above demonstrate the role that ritualised daily life

events play in shaping a quality that the parent values. The implicit message in

Hetal’s mention of the 10-minute prayer and in Naina’s reference to the lack of

time is that praying is important even if it is only for a short period of time.

In creating a designated altar and insisting on adherence to an established daily

routine, the parent dons an authoritative mantle, concretising and formalising the

activity of meditative prayer, investing it with significance and fundamentally

transforming it. The parents’ engagement in overt religious practice makes it


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even more emotionally compelling for the child. These children were seven years

old, regarded as the ‘age of reason’, when they try to draw connections between

things with respect to time, space and causality (Elkind 1970b, 39). In trying to

relate to the transcendent, the child discovers, with the help of systematic

instruction from the parents (Erikson 1950), that when the sacrament of worship

is embedded in daily life, he or she is able to lay claim to an individualised, one-

on-one relationship with God (Elkind 1970a). In providing graded training for the

methodical performance of prayer ‘in the economy of the personal life’ (Allport

1950, 9) and ensuring a habitual and intentional focus on it, these parents adopt a

‘faith is attained as it is enacted’ perspective (Geertz 1973) and lay the

psychosocial foundations for religious sentiment in their children (Allport 1950;

Erikson 1977). The Indian parents in this study authoritatively asked their

children to pray daily – something that they themselves may not have done while

growing up in India, but they now see it as a sign of their authenticity as ‘ideal’

Indians as they recast their identities (Kurien 2006). Thus, facilitated by shlokas

and devotional songs directed at a variety of Hindu deities, daily prayer also

provides ritualised affirmation for the child as a Hindu.

Jalpa, Hetal, Lakshmi and Shailesh said that they regularly narrate stories

about Hindu Gods and Goddesses (‘About the, all the Ram and Sita, and

everything’, said Hetal) to their children, who enjoy listening to them. ‘He likes

stories, he is interested in it. Children love stories’, said Jalpa. Pallavi said that on

weekends her sons watch the religious television series Krishanaavatar on an

Indian channel that they receive through their cable provider. While Lakshmi’s

son connects with God in a tangible manner by playing with a Krishna murti,

listening to or watching stories about Gods and Goddesses provides another way

for a child to relate to the transcendent in personal and direct ways (Elkind

1970a). In a culture where ‘the mythic imagination is very generative’ (Eck 2006,

42), prayer and storytelling as rituals enshrine religion as a way of life (Hood

et al. 1996), linking an individual to his or her community and lineage (Clothey

1992). Such socialisation by the parents during childhood no doubt lays the

groundwork for adolescence, when children use their enhanced ability for

abstract thought and draw on religious myth, legend and history to comprehend

the various aspects of God and religion (Elkind 1970b).

Belief in God

Although all the parents noted the centrality of prayer and belief in God, they

expressed the latter concept in various ways. While Hetal saw belief in God as

synonymous with fear of God, Pallavi, who sent her children to fortnightly Bal

Vihar classes for a blended religious and cultural education, expounded on ‘have

faith in God’ as a goal she held dear for her son:

To teach a child what is God is to be in practical terms, right? Like love everyone, inthat sense. You’re understanding? . . . [If] we define God in practical . . . the wayyou live, then it will be ranked number 1 – right? If it is just a concept, I mean, what


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God is, . . . then it will be ranked, you know, number 5. God is the most important,but depends on how God is portrayed.

Pallavi has a doctorate in a branch of medical science. Even as she served as the

costume designer for a theatrical adaptation of the Hindu epic Ramayana that

the children attending Bal Vihar were rehearsing for, she was dissatisfied with the

portrayal of God as a ritual-based, empty concept devoid of real-life

ramifications. In this excerpt, she recursively shifted frames, alternating between

articulating her conceptualisation of belief in God and checking on my

comprehension. She delinked ‘belief in God’ from prayer and located it in a way

of life that has the potential to make an individual a better human being. This is

similar to Lakshmi’s idea of prayer as coming only after dedicated work and

providing self-confidence. Also in Pallavi’s view, religiosity, or depth of

devotion, is enacted. A person who believes in God will behave in a certain way,

Pallavi explains, and how the child expresses his or her own religious beliefs

depends on how the parent represents the deity. Belief in God is situated in the

integrity with which life is lived. Pallavi illustrated this by relating an incident in

which Swamiji, her child’s teacher at Bal Vihar, had refused something, saying

he did not like it. Because he had been teaching the children that everything is

God’s prashad, to be uncomplainingly accepted, this inconsistency between his

words and his actions was jarring for Pallavi’s son. Pallavi used this example to

demonstrate that questioning and discussion and religious belief are not

anomalous. Hers is a performative interpretation of theism that interrogates the

sometimes-empty ritualism of prayer.

Yet another mother, Neeta, whose son’s and spouse’s names are both

synonyms for Krishna, summed it up by saying:

I think being a good human being is real important – you know, if you are a goodhuman being, then you are bonding with family, having good interpersonal skills,having the wisdom, learning good things – I guess it’s sort of – all tied in.

Neeta andPallavi’s viewof religiosity and faith inGodunderscores the ‘pathofwork’

or ‘path of action’ perspective, in which positive social and relational behaviours and

learninggood thingscount as ‘works’orKarma. Thepath ofwork,which is described

in theBhagavadGita, is adoptednot to seek somesort ofmetaphysicalwisdom,but to

set an example for others (Chinmayananda 2001; Radhakrishnan 1948, 1970).

According to Karma Yoga, when good works or activities in all areas of life are

pursued for a sufficiently long period of time, they purify the heart, steady the mind,

keep the individual in touch with reality and integrate the personality.

For Indians who have grown up in India, the versions of Hinduism that

immigrant Indian parents in the USA have expressed in this study might appear

familiar, yet at the same time strange. Ramanujan (1989) proposed that cultures

have an overall tendency to think in terms of either context-free or context-

sensitive rules. In India, context-sensitive rules are preferred, with Indians

drawing from a toolbox of ideas, using those that best fit the context (Dalal and

Misra 2010). When Indians leave India, like other immigrants, they are severed


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from their cultural and religious moorings. As they rework their religious and

ethnocultural identities in the USA, an imagined Hinduism and an idealised

concept of ‘being Indian’ begin to take root (Bhatt 2000; Narayanan 1992). In this

ecumenically adapted variant of Hinduism (Williams 1988, 1992), the lines of

caste, region and language, which are pronounced in India, are blurred14 into a

mythic Hinduism. Festivals are celebrated to coincide with weekends. In the

suburban USA, where my participants lived, the entire community celebrates all

domestic rituals (e.g. prenatal rites) and family festivals (e.g. Deepavali) as social

events in a temple, church or gym, whereas in India most celebrations are home-

based, with some community-centric and a few temple rituals (Kurien 2007;

Narayanan 1992, 2006). Socialisation into Hinduism occurs mostly at home and

in informal social settings in the predominantly Hindu religious context of India.

The domestic setting loses none of its significance as the locus for religious

socialisation in the USA. In fact, I would argue that the domestic space gains

strength as a deeply private sacred space in a Western ethos, a sanctuary where

religion is inculcated through routine, ritual and direct teaching. But now

deliberate and systematic socialisation into a religious and cultural identity also

occurs in the context of the temple or other similar institution.

To become ‘Indian’ is to become Hindu

Naina: We ourselves have come out of our country, and we look at the things in abroader spectrum versus if I was in India, I would not be looking at these kind of things. . . but like teaching Indian values would be a second nature over there, you know,it would be a part of our life, but here we have to go out of the way, make an effort.

As she talks about living in India and viewing things from within, and then being

forced to see India from the fringes of US society, Naina, without realising it,

is expressing the distinction between emic and etic. Looking to me for

understanding and common ground through her use of ‘you know’, Naina alludes

here to the fact that in India, Hinduism permeates everyday life.15 In the USA,

where Hinduism is a minority religion, parents must become self-conscious about

the process and project of cultural preservation, making special efforts to

inculcate it in a variety of ways. For instance, to enter the homes of the middle-

and upper-middle-class parents who participated in this study was as if to enter

another continent. The hospitable offers of tea and snacks or a meal, smells of

Indian food, stainless steel vessels stacked in the kitchens, displays of sacred

symbols such as Om, statuettes of deities from the Hindu pantheon, the large

pictures of Gitopadesham or Shrinathji,16 the occasional fragrance of incense and

the calendar art and other wall hangings – everything was ‘Indian’ and Hindu.

Lakshmi spoke of how she and her husband cultivated in their children an

enjoyment of Indian classical music. They celebrated the Indian festivals in a

time-honoured way by cooking traditional special foods associated with

particular festivals, and explaining to the children the significance of each

festival. They talked with their children in Tamil, their native language. Jalpa and


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her children continue to use the standard Gujarati Vaishnava goodbye, ‘Jai Shree

Krishna’ (Hail Lord Krishna). Pallavi always prompted her son to greet me with

‘Hari Om’.17 Overall, the ethos that was recreated within the homes of all the

parents purposefully fashioned a tangible sense of cultural and religious

continuity between ‘there’ (India) and ‘here’ (the USA) (Williams 2009).

‘Home’, to appropriate one of Geertz’s formulations from another context, was a

‘synoptic formulation’ for India (1973, 95).

During weekends, aside from ‘American’ extra-curricular activities such as

ballet, piano and soccer, these children also attended Bal Vihar at the local temple

or at the Chinmaya Mission or Bal Vikas run by followers of Asaram Bapu,

a well-known Gujarati spiritual Guru.18 There, in adult-led groups, they were

taught Indian culture, philosophy, language and the basic tenets of Hinduism and/

or Jainism. The curriculum served children from pre-K to grade 12. Children

were taught identification of Hindu Gods and Goddesses; the Ramayana,

Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita; the lives of saints; classical music and dance;

Hindu culture and spiritual self-development.

Perhaps religion is important to so many individuals because of the

meaningful social relationships it helps people to form (Krause 2012) and the

opportunities for civic engagement and community building it affords (Brettell

and Reed-Danahay 2012). Wood, Hill, and Spilka (2009) use the term ‘sociality’

to evoke both connectedness and a sense of belonging to the group. Such sociality

is markedly more significant for immigrant communities or ethnic collectivities,

which must organise social life and collective action for their members in a

foreign country (Kibria 2002; Levitt 2007; Trouillet 2012). Even if the individual

is only loosely engaged with the collectivity, membership offers participation in a

dense community with clearly marked cultural traditions and feelings of

belonging, support, distinction and pride (Kibria 2002).

The Hindu temple offered just such a dense personal, extramural religious

community to the first-generation immigrant parents19 who participated in my

study. In contrast to India, where hierarchical social structures and Hindu

hegemony are taken for granted, ensuring that a child learns about Hinduism by

osmosis, as it were, in the USA, a putatively pluralist country marked by

Christian hegemony, where religion is a widely accepted marker of individual

identity (Mohammad-Arif 2007), the social structures that characterise Hinduism

are found in community-oriented programmes such as Bal Vihar (Shinn in

Gelberg 1983). These programmes transcend denominational or sectarian

identification, uniting Hindu deities, rituals, sacred texts and people in temples

and programmes in ways not found in India, forming what is called American

Hinduism (Kurien 2012b; Williams 1992). In American Hinduism, classes are

taught by cadres of dedicated volunteer parents and religious leaders to groups of

children, who thereby get to know each other in a temple, rendering religious and

cultural teaching meaningful and emotional (Goldman 1964). The commitment

of these parents to the cultural and religious literacy of the children of the Indian

diaspora cannot be overstated – in 2013, 10 years after this study was conducted,


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two of the parents, Pallavi and Raj, continue to be heavily involved in Bal Vihar

as volunteers even though their children had transitioned out of the classes and

left for college:

I: What do you think the Bal Vihar classes mean to Rahul?

Raj: Rahul is [going there] to learn Hindi and to know little bit of religion.

Neeta: And Indian culture.

Neeta: To him it means going and playing with his friends.

Raj: But he knows why we take him.

Neeta: . . . and the fun part for him is that he is getting to meet his friends. And youknow what . . . this year he is enjoying it. He will tell me, oh, can you practice myHindi letters . . . and he is also getting into the religion one also because it’s theshlokas they are learning now, so he wants to learn some of these . . . It is notbecause I am telling him, he wants to do it now, wants to learn this, so before it wasfriends only, which is still there, but I think he is taking interest in other things thathe is learning at the same time.

While Raj cast Bal Vihar in terms of religion, Neeta invoked culture, in an

interesting act of conflating the two that recurred among the parents in this study.

Both parents were aware that the draw for Rahul was the social aspect of the

outing. However, they also credited him with a growing understanding of the

primary purpose of this fortnightly ritual and recognised, with pleasure, that he

has developed a real interest in learning Hindi, his mother tongue, and in

memorising Shlokas. Komal similarly celebrated her son’s use of Hindi in their

conversations together, while Hetal lamented that many Indian children speak

English even at home and with one another. Although she described how

important it was for her children to learn to speak Gujarati, she also recognised,

uncharacteristically for her, the limits of parental control. She summed up her

perspective by saying, ‘Do whatever you like. But at least when elders come to

our house, and if they do not know English, then you have to speak the Indian

language, that’s it’. The parents recognised that only if their children learned their

mother tongue would they have a chance to receive the cultural messages their

parents and the wider Indian community were sending (Hughes et al. 2006).

As noted by Prashad (2000, 2012), despite being economically successful

and well-acculturated in the US society, the parents were keenly aware of

the experience of immigration; they were, in the words of Shankar and

Srikanth, ‘a part yet still condemned to be apart’ (1998, 12). This could be seen

from the contrasts they repeatedly drew between ‘how we grew up’ and ‘how our

children are growing up’, worries over the inculcation of ‘Indianness’ in a foreign

land, fears over the potential consequences of not instilling such values, the

pressure they felt to assimilate and become ‘American’ and the simultaneous

internal pressure to be ‘ethnic’, and their articulations of the difficulties and

contradictions of parenting in the USA. When I asked Naina why she considered

it so important for her children to learn ‘Indian’ values, she explained:


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To know who they are and . . . so they feel comfortable with their own background.I mean, it’s not just them – they do see, put themselves in relation with us wheretheir friends’ parents cannot compare with us. We don’t behave just like everybodyelse’s. When I say everybody else’s, it is more from – uh – American people . . . Soonce they understand where they come from and feel comfortable with that – that’swho we are, then it’s good for them. For their own personality.

Here Naina observes that her children are uneasy about the fact that not only are

their parents different from their friends’ parents, but they themselves are also

different from their friends. Her children’s friends are initially baffled by this

difference, too, which has its roots in ethnocultural and religious, not just

individual, variation. Forestalling the potential formation of a cultural fault line

(Dayal 1998, who borrows the term ‘fault lines’ from postcolonial writer Meena

Alexander) between themselves and their children, the parents strategically cast

this difference as a desirable quality (‘We don’t behave just like everybody else’s

[parents]’). Portraying alterity as a source of pride, they help their children to

situate themselves alongside their parents on the same side of the divide, or at

least closer to their side of it. For these children, their Indian origins and the

ethnic and religious affiliation of their parents are the reasons for an initially

bewildering divergence from ‘American people’, a category to which they

themselves belong in terms of citizenship. But from Naina’s perspective, once

they understand and embrace the cultural and religious roots of their otherness,

they become comfortable with their origins, and that enhances their personality.

As she spoke of cultural pride, one of the mothers, Pooja, talked about the

need for Indians to go back to the Vedas, the Upanishads and other sacred Hindu

texts. She said passionately, ‘We need to unfold these to the world, our sages

knew everything’, observing that ‘Indian people become too American. Some are

such snobs that they don’t even smile when they see a fellow Indian’. She had

simple versions of ancient Indian texts that she shared with her children. She

concluded, ‘We are very proud of our culture’. For Pooja, pride in one’s

ethnocultural identity as an Indian and familiarity with epic Hindu texts are

related.

When I asked Neeta what it meant to her that her son attended Bal Vihar, she

responded:

Given opportunities to know . . . his background, where his roots are . . . where wecome from, you know, have an identity as an Indian . . . I have seen some otherIndian kids 10 or 15 years ago who were not very proud they were Indians, and theyhave very low opinion of India, Indians. It’s not the same with Sarika [Rahul’s oldersister] and Rahul. They are proud of where they come from, and . . . they are notashamed to say that they are from India because they, they can identify . . .

Like Naina, Neeta emphasises the importance for identity development of

knowing about one’s ethnocultural roots. She sees that her son has developed a

sense of pride in being an Indian, although for now he is unaware of it. However,

Neeta’s characterisation of ‘ashamed Indians’ is different from Pooja’s portrayal

of ‘snobbish Indians’. For Pooja, when Indians assimilate completely,


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disavowing their cultural roots, they become ‘American’ – a term that has

pejorative cultural and behavioural connotations rather than connotations of

national belonging – and snobbish. Internalising the racist hatred they have

experienced from the US society as self-hatred (Kurien 2007), they no longer

want to have anything to do with Indians, for they no longer view themselves as

Indians – they are ‘Americans’. For Pooja, the solution to the problem lies in

cultural and religious education, which she conflates. Neeta takes a different

approach. She uses the language of cultural and national shame: that is, some

Indians are ashamed of being Indian. For her, the remedy is to instil cultural and

religious pride through overt measures such as sending her children to Bal Vihar,

and through more subtle, everyday means like relishing the time spent practicing

writing the Devanagarı script at the kitchen table.

All the parents described how knowledge of their cultural origins had been a

strong constructive influence in their child’s life. Komal reflected on how her

son, Rohit, wanted to be ‘all-American’ earlier; he used to claim that he was

‘dark white’. But now, as he attends Bal Vihar classes, meets other children of

Indian origin and receives compliments about his looks, he has grown secure

with his Indian ethnicity. Rohit’s use of the term ‘dark white’ is worth

considering. Rohit’s family hails from North India, where fairness is valued (Jha

and Adelman 2009; Parameswaran and Cardoza 2009) even more highly than it

is in South India, where people tend to be darker-skinned. The Hindi word Gori

literally means ‘light-skinned’, but it is used synonymously with ‘beautiful’ in

India. For example, during the interviews, I overheard Rohit’s four-year-old

sister scornfully tell an Indian friend that her skin was a few shades darker than

the sister’s own. Rohit worries about the darkness of his skin compared to that

of white people. Strikingly, the point that the colour issue simply dates to an

earlier intercultural contact seems to be lost. The ‘dark is beautiful’ sentiment

that is present in preserving language and religion, and in sophisticated

questioning of cultural assimilation, is absent here. So for Rohit, who attends

Bal Vihar, which teaches him cultural pride, and whose father’s name is a

synonym for Lord Vishnu/Krishna, it is irrelevant that Krishna’s name literally

translates as ‘black’ or ‘dark’, or that Krishna, Hinduism’s most beloved God, is

also called ‘Shyam’, the black one, or that he is poetically described as being as

dark blue as a rain cloud (meghavarnam). Rohit would rather be ‘dark white’ –

not dark blue, black, dark brown, light brown or light black, but ‘dark white’

(emphasis added). Rohit’s choice of words indicates how he positions himself in

a social field structured by racial and religious preferences that mark him as

other. He is attempting to negotiate that terrain in a way that neither negates

who he is (to become an ‘American’ in the ethnic and nationalist sense of

the word) nor negates the society in which he finds himself, and which ascribes

to him a status of being inferior because he is different. Although Asian

Indians are stereotyped as a ‘model minority’, there is evidence that they face

many of the same prejudices and self-defeating doubts as other marginal

minority groups.


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At our first meeting, Pooja confided that her neighbourhood was ‘going

down’. When I asked her to clarify, she spoke about how the white families in

the community were moving out and being replaced by black families,

a development that made her apprehensive. Affiliating themselves with their

ethnic identity and religion, Indians in the USA also often, unfortunately,

separate themselves from blacks. As wearers of the so-called model minority

mantle in a capitalist society, they identify with Euro-Americans, thus evading

racial marginality as a strategy for upward mobility (Kibria 2002; Maira 2002;

Mazumdar 2003; Prashad 2000; Rajagopal 2000).

In describing how they straddle the line between two profoundly different

cultures, the parents indicated that they face conflicts in childrearing that are

occasions for struggle, and many times only partial resolution. Naina said that she

sometimes jokes to her husband that perhaps they should go back to India.

Although both of them like the idea in theory, she concluded, ‘Considering the

present-day situation, it’s not easy to just pack up and move’. Nostalgia played

out frequently at the parental level. When asked whether they would go back to

India, Komal said she would not; she wanted to stay close to their children, who

were growing up in, and would most likely settle in, the USA. In an elegiac

moment, her husband divulged that after retirement, he would like to settle in a

rural part of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Komal scoffed at him and

dismissed it as an impossible dream. Yet on another occasion, she acknowledged

softly, ‘We lose a lot, you know, when we come here.’

How not to raise an ‘American’ child

Concurrent with the discourse of cultural maintenance (Khandelwal 2002), the

deep yearning for cultural continuity with Indian culture and attempts at

becoming integrated into a foreign society were narratives of ‘American’ life that

these parents disapproved of and unequivocally rejected for their children. This

included the perceived disrespect of parents by American children; the apparent

lack of a ‘culture’ and ethnic roots; wearing clothes that expose the body (‘you

know how girls here dress when they are teenagers’,20 said Komal); the

individuality, acquisitiveness and material wastefulness of daily life in the USA;

the alleged lack of family cohesion as seen from the high divorce rates, family

conflicts and lack of parental involvement; and the values their children could

potentially learn from that.

Naina commented on the use of bad language by some of the children in her

neighbourhood, contrasting this with the closeness of the ‘typical Indian family’

and the politeness and respectfulness of Indian children. ‘We were taught like

that. I mean, being an Indian . . . if I was an American, I would teach him the way

I was taught. But being an Indian, that is what I was taught’. In evoking the

schema of the ‘typical Indian family’ and the deferential behaviour of Indian

children towards figures of authority, Naina is making an implicit reference to the

traditional concept of a Sanskari21 child (Misra, Srivastava, and Gupta 1999).


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Jalpa wanted her sons to have friends who were Sanskari. She also ranked being

Sanskari very highly as a socialisation goal for her children, which she explained

as ‘not lying, always telling the truth, not harming anyone, being helpful and

being respectful of elders’. Being Sanskari or having Sanskar involves a cluster

of social values such as being respectful and obedient towards parents and other

elders, and personal-moral values such as being truthful, humble, religious,

trustworthy, modest, sincere and kind (Ganapathy-Coleman, 2013b; Saraswathi

and Ganapathy 2002). Conceptually, the term Sanskar is an idealised cultural

artefact or a cultural script for conduct that is given materiality by its purposeful

embodiment in speech as a set of desirable qualities and through its incorporation

into the daily routine (Cole 1996; Diaz-Guerrero 1977). Naina uses yearning for a

bygone time and a land far away, as well as national chauvinism, as a selective

mechanism to socialise her child and legitimise her choice of strategy. In a

similar vein, Pooja narrated how a white child from her neighbourhood dropped

in early one Saturday morning. Several hours later, when the child admitted that

her mother did not know where she was, Pooja made a trip to the neighbour’s

house to reassure the mother. Although the other mother, who was talking on the

phone, saw Pooja standing on the porch, she did not come to the door. The child

left 13 hours later. Outraged that the girl’s mother remained unconcerned about

her child’s whereabouts, Pooja characterised it as parental neglect, saying, ‘We

would never do that’. For Pooja, culture is performative: ‘what we do’ and

conversely ‘what we do not do’ and ‘what they do’. Modest young girls, soft-

spoken children, caring parents, thrifty living – all these become emblems of the

purity of ‘Indian’ tradition, which must be preserved (Maira 2002), irrespective

of widespread changes in the lives and worlds of young people in India. In this

way, both ‘Indian’ and ‘American’ culture become ahistorical (Mathew and

Prashad 2000).

A value such as learning about one’s cultural origins and its importance in the

construal of identity was assembled through an active interpretation by each

participant of his/her own background or life events, by invoking the importance of

tradition and with the intention of preserving language and identity in a still-

foreign country. The claim to a higher civilisation and spirituality enables

immigrant parents of Indian origin to transform a claim to ancient civilisational

greatness into ethnic consciousness, pride and cultural capital and to locate

themselves socially in an attractive space in a society still bedevilled by racism

(Kibria 2002; Prashad 2000). At the same time, in the light of the emphasis on

diversity andmulticulturalism in theUSA today, the perceptions of belonging to an

upwardly mobile, model minority, as well as the perception of India as culturally

rich and on the rise politically and economically in the global marketplace, Indian

parents are also laying claim to ethnic identity capital (Kibria 2002).

Cultural proficiency, interlaced with and often interchanged with religious

fluency, deflects the challenges to one’s identity. And in the USA, the

distinctiveness of Hinduism in terms of its ancient origins and rituals offers

protection to Indian Hindu immigrants, a minority group in a pluralistic society


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that continues to be racially polarised, while also facilitating cultural and

religious reproduction and rejuvenation (Ganapathy-Coleman 2013a; Rajagopal

2000). Even as affiliation with India and Hinduism helps Indian immigrants to

push back at racism, the encroachment of the West’s materiality and perceived

moral degradation (Basham in Gelberg 1983) causes parents to be concerned for

themselves and their children. They combat this by offering an alternate

framework that challenges the idea of Western cultural superiority (Hopkins in

Gelberg 1983). In the sacred precinct of the temple, Indians, who encounter

racism and non-acceptance of their culture in mainstream US society (Joshi

2006b), enact ethnicity, transcending the profane of American life (Eliade 1959).

Bucking ‘the effect of the normalizing and disciplining project of secular

modernity’, the parents in this study used their religious and cultural identity as a

source of resistance (van der Veer 2005, 256). Christians send their children to

Sunday school and Bible classes. Hindus in the USA send their children to Bal

Vihar (Shinn in Gelberg 1983; Narayanan 1992).

There have been negative attitudes towards Hinduism for decades in the USA

(Crosby 1986; Melton 1989; Takaki 1989), but since 9/11, Islam has been the

reviled religion. Indian Hindus, who also faced a backlash in the post-9/11 years

because they were mistaken to be Muslims, have used this turn of fortune to hold

their heads up, defining themselves in proud opposition to Muslims. Aversion not

just to black Americans but also to Muslims, two communities whose identities

are perceived as stigmatised (Goffman 1963), is not uncommon among Asian

Indian Hindus in the USA. Thus, whether it is directed at the perceived cultural

degradation of white Americans or the stigma associated with being black

Americans and/or Muslims, it is not unusual for Indian Hindus to follow a

strategy of religious and cultural othering to socialise their children. Some

researchers (Falcone 2012; Kurien 2007; Mathew and Prashad 2000; Rajagopal

2000) argue that Bal Vihar is strongly influenced by the nationalistic Hindu

ideology of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which organises these classes in many

parts of the USA. Since the early 1990s, supporters of Hindu nationalism in the

USA have defined Hinduism as Indian identity, Indian history and Indian culture.

Hinduism (not Christianity or Islam) in the USA is defined as a repository of

Indian culture (Kurien 2007), so it has also been known as Cultural Hinduism

(Fenton 1988). Pooja’s belief that Indians must to ‘go back to the Vedas’,22

as well as her stance that ‘we need to unfold these to the world, our sages knew

everything’, originates from her fervent belief in the all-knowingness of

Hinduism in contrast with other religions.23

Concluding discussion

The Indian Hindu immigrant parents in this study were aware that religion and

cultural values are inextricably linked. Socialising their children into the

enclosure of ‘Indian’ culture and Hindu religion was a crucial goal for them.

Encapsulated in the careful design of the physical setting of the domestic space


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and systematic patterns of behaviour, rituals, values and beliefs rooted in Indian

customs and traditions, religion provided these parents with what Geertz (1973),

in his essay ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, characterises as a cultural design for

living and for understanding and interpreting life, which the parents were

committed to transmitting to their children.

In India, a secular country in principle, Hindu hegemony ensures that

children’s socialisation into Hinduism happens almost unbidden, with most of it

being the preserve of the family. In their self-definitions, Hindus in India often

invoke the trope of a tolerant, non-proselytising Hinduism that upholds peaceful

coexistence with all other religions. Challenges to the discourse of secular

Hinduism (van der Veer 2005) come from militant Hindu nationalism, from

periodic Hindu–Muslim clashes that stem from and lead to anti-Islamic feelings,

and from reports of Christian missionary activity in parts of India that arouse anti-

Christian sentiment. Since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, there has

been a concerted effort by Hindu nationalists in India to ‘take back’ Hinduism

(Hawley 2006). Within this movement, the antiquity of Indian civilisation is

aggrandised into contemporary cultural superiority, and the demographic

majority of Hindus is used to justify the idea of a Hindu country.

When Indian Hindus immigrate to the USA, they become aware of several

new realities. One, Hinduism is a so-called minority religion vis-a-vis

Christianity in the USA. Two, Hinduism and Asian Indian languages have a

long history of being perceived negatively through the lens of racism in the USA.

Three, the USA is a country that professes a secular ideology but is nevertheless

predominantly Christian in practice. Socialisation of children into Christianity is

a serious business that involves congregational worship, weekly Sunday schools

and Bible classes, and othering of non-Christians. Four, although Indians are

willing immigrants to the USA, when they nostalgically contrast their more

conservative social and moral values (especially with regard to issues such as

attire, dating and parent–child communication styles) with those of ‘Americans’,

they frame the values of their host society as morally deficient. Living as a small

religious group in the midst of a proselytising Christianity and in what is widely

perceived to be the very centre of the ‘moral degradation’ of the West, the parents

worry for their children. However, the Indians in this study, who were, for the

most part, an educationally accomplished, economically successful and well-

acculturated group, refused to be constrained by the ‘minority’ label (Moscovici

1985, 2000). Rather than permit the vacuum of material cultural and religious

loss to be filled with chaos or desolation or worry, they chose instead to seize on

immigration as an opportunity for revitalised self-definition and innovation

(Moscovici 1994), using the foundations of received cultural and religious

patterns and pride to lucidly map their new environment.

Although these parents had adapted to many of the structural and economic

conventions of the US society, they were aware that to permit their children to

conform completely to the US society could mean losing them to another culture.

So they focused on socialising their children into Hinduism and ‘Indian’ culture


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and loyalty to that in-group (Rajagopal 2000). Given the small number of Indians

in the USA, social learning (Bandura 1986) of cultural and religious values from

the general milieu is not feasible for the children of the Indian diaspora. It must

now be deliberately facilitated. The parents in this study maintained continuity

with India in their physical settings by making their homes into an Indian Hindu

space, through the use of home altars and home aesthetics characterised by

devotional religious objects, art and artefacts (Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2009),

and by adhering to the religious routines of the Hindu traditions they had grown

up with. These home arrangements served to remind them of their origins, acting

as psychic, material and emotional anchors (Cooper Marcus 1992). The objects,

images and artefacts that profusely adorned the homes of these parents and the

rituals and routines that guided life within these domestic spaces not only

expressed religious and cultural identity, but also shaped it in the next generation.

The parents used the enormous power of traditional imagery, repetitive

storytelling and rituals and the symbolism inherent to these to persuasively mould

and transform their children’s understanding of the world.

Outside the home, socialisation into Hinduism and ‘Indianness’ was

facilitated by the collectivities of Indians who congregate in temples, united in

the shared aim of religious and cultural preservation and transmission. In the

USA, in conjunction with the personalising of home space and the use of home-

based rituals and routines such as prayers and storytelling, these Hindu parents

also deepened communality through regular temple attendance, congregational

worship and formal, routinised Bal Vihar classes together with cultural and

religious othering to socialise their children into their vision of a timeless

religious and cultural identity as Indians (Joshi 2006a; Rajagopal 2000).

At first, due to cognitive developmental constraints, the religious and cultural

practices that are prescribed for the children have little, if any, of the meaning that

they will have later (Elkind 1970b). Children initially engage almost playfully in

the performance of religious ritual, even if it is merely a self-centred prayer,

in order to satisfy authority figures (Piaget 1932) and solidify their identification

with those who provide security and approval (Allport 1950; Erikson 1977). Only

later do they learn the purpose of the ritual. During the teenage years, as children

synthesise an identity, they question everything, including religious authority,

with religion becoming a set of tentative or heuristic beliefs (Erikson 1950). The

parents are implicitly aware of this impending moratorium and its potential to

create a rift between them and their children. At the same time, they are confident

that early socialisation in religious and cultural observance creates themotivations

thatmake these children liable to gravitate towards religion later in life, too (Geertz

1973). By pre-emptively and systematically instilling religious and cultural pride

and the rules for its performance (Erikson 1977), these parents aim to forestall both

a breach in the parent–child bond as the children grow up, and the anomie that can

result from living a life cut adrift from one’s ethnocultural–historical and religious

ancestry. They also envision that later in life, their children will bridge the gap

between the normative religious/cultural guidelines and moral criteria learned


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early in life and their own adult ethics (Erikson 1950; Ozorak 1989), choosing to

remain committed to their religious and ethnocultural roots. They hope that their

children will appropriate what was initially social into something personal. A

mature personality has a unifying philosophy of life, and the parents hope that

Hindu philosophy and ‘Indian’ culture will provide that philosophy, guiding their

children’s lives as it has done theirs. To me, how the children might be receiving

the religious and cultural ideology interpreted by the parents (Heller 1986) was

demonstrated most completely in the unrehearsed and innocent yet dramatic play

behaviour of Komal’s daughter, who I observed, clad in a Western-style dress,

conducting an imaginary puja, complete with the ringing of the brass handbell and

application of vermilion to the murtis, as she enthusiastically sang the Indian

national anthem. Although Komal dismissed the little girl’s naıve play behaviour

as ‘showing off’, it was a commanding performance at the junction of religion and

patriotism.

Acknowledgements

The writing of this paper was made possible by the undisturbed time and institutionalsupport offered by a Visiting Professorship at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Educationat the University of Toronto during 2012–2013. My gratitude to Vasudha Narayanan andRaymond Brady Williams, as well as Kevin Coleman and Joby Taylor, for their valuablefeedback on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. The pseudonyms for the participating parents are Hetal, Jalpa, Komal, Lakshmi,Naina, Neeta, Pallavi, Pooja, Raj and Shailesh.

2. This study utilised the methodology of the Baltimore Early Childhood Project,a longitudinal project undertaken at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County,by Robert Serpell, Linda Baker and Susan Sonnenschein from 1993 to 1998 (Serpell,Baker, and Sonnenschein 2005). The study examined distinctive patterns ofsocialisation and parental beliefs in different sociocultural environments and howthese variations impact children’s academic performance. Varied systematic,ethnographic, participant-led and ecologically grounded procedures were used fordata collection.

3. The word murti means the physical embodiment of a divinity, such as a statue of adeity.

4. Meera or Meerabai is an important figure in the Hindu Vaishanava Bhaktimovement, which is defined by exclusive devotion to Lord Krishna. Meera’s deeplypassionate and prayerful songs are very popular among Hindus in India.

5. The reference to God as a man and as ‘Father’ is iconic in the Judeo-Christiantradition, but in Hinduism, although there is the concept of a supreme being, there aremany deities/Gods who are worshipped, often one at a time (Eck 2006). Muller(1867) coined the term ‘kathenotheism’ to capture this. In this case, Lakshmi’s sonis, in all likelihood, referring to his favourite God, Lord Krishna.

6. Although I draw mostly from my extended conversations with these parents,I supplement my data with the interactions I had with parents of Indian origin who,despite not being participants in my study, gave me the gift of their time andperspective at the temple or in their homes. I also draw extensively from my


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experience as a participant observer, both within the Indian Hindu community in theUSA over the past 14 years, and in India, where I was born and raised.

Mothers and/or fathers could participate in the study, although only two fathersended up participating. In three other cases, the fathers occasionally wandered intothe interviews, offered their perspectives on various aspects of childrearing and left.In one case, when her husband did this, the mother visibly tensed up, relaxing onlywhen she was alone with me once again.

7. These parents did not ‘drop out’ of the study in the conventional sense of the term.They were deeply interested in participating but were simply unable to; we continuedto talk informally many times, both over the phone and in person.

8. One of the largest influxes of Indians into the USA can be traced to the years after1965, and as a result, there is now a rich body of scholarship on various aspects of lifeamong Indian immigrants such as identity, dating and marriage and religiouspractice. But the study of religious socialisation of children in immigrant IndianHindu families is still a very young field. In the years since 2003, when this study wascompleted, only a handful of studies had addressed the topic of children’ssocialisation into Hinduism, and even their focus was not on socialisation per se.

9. In this study, few differences were discerned between the parents that could beconnected with their diverse regional origins in India. One difference was in thelanguage used at home. Another was that the Tamilian (Brahmin) mother in thisstudy was the only one to emphasise enjoyment of South Indian classical music as adimension of her sons’ ethnic identity. Such emphasis on classical music is commonin Tamilian Brahmin families. The participants in this study belonged to the top threecastes in the Hindu hierarchy. For a searing account from a Dalit perspective thatresists the hegemonic imposition of the ‘Hindu’ label on all Indian non-Muslims,non-Christians and non-Sikhs, see Ilaiah (2005).

10. The terms ‘religion’ and ‘Hindu’ both grew out of confrontation with others(Pandeya in Chatterjee 1993; Searle-Chatterjee 2000). In the late eighteenth century,British colonialists coined the term ‘Hindu’ to refer to the non-Islamic people of theIndian subcontinent. Prior to that, non-Islamic people spoke only of Prasthanas(points of departure) and Panthas (paths) or darshanas (perspectives; Eck 2006) thatGurus or spiritual traditions recommended.

The term ‘Hindu’ also deserves to be contextualised in terms of its history in theUSA. During the 1800s, all Indians in the USA were labelled as ‘Hindus’ at a timewhen 85% of the Indian immigrants were Sikh, 10% were Muslim and only 5% wereHindu (Leonard 2000, 2007; Prashad 2000). The stereotyping of all Indians asHindus persists today even as Indian ethnoreligious communities in the USA practicevarious religions, including Hinduism, Christianity, Sikhism and Jainism, to name afew. Today, ironically, the stereotypical view that all Indians are Hindus, which wasinaccurate in the 1800s, holds more weight; Hindus are in the majority among Indianimmigrants in the USA (1–1.3 million), followed by Muslims (1.5 million SouthAsian Muslims, including Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims) and Sikhs (250,000–500,000) (Joshi 2006a).

Hinduism refers to a variegated and ever-changing body of philosophical andreligious beliefs and heritages that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent.Hinduism is made up of multiple schools of thought that variously emphasise mind–body dualism, mysticism and meditation as well as strands centred upon devotion toa particular deity, including Vaishnavism, or veneration of Vishnu (e.g. the HareKrishnas), and Shaivism, or worship of Shiva (Radhakrishnan 1948). Hindus do notshare a unifying, comprehensive philosophical doctrine that sets their perspectiveapart from the philosophical views associated with other Indian religions such asBuddhism and Jainism (Dasgupta 1922; Moore 1967). Hence, scholars of religion


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typically understand the term ‘Hindu philosophy’ as denoting the collection ofphilosophical views that share a textual connection to certain core Hindu religioustexts, such as the Vedas. Despite the diversity of Hindu philosophies, most Hindus,self-identified or otherwise, recognise at least some of the main concepts in Hinduphilosophy, such as Dharma (the duties or works an individual must perform in life),Karma (the net balance of good and evil deeds from previous lives, traces of whichkeenly impact an individual’s present life), Moksha (self-realisation or uniting withthe infinite) and Ashrama (the Hindu model of the ideal life cycle; Motwani 1958;Olivelle 1993). In fact, Hindus in particular, and many Indians more generally,frequently see Hinduism as a manifestation of a broader Indian identity (Joshi2006a). Hinduism offers a foundation for so many aspects of daily life, includingethnotheories about parenting, socialisation goals and children that it has beenconsidered more often a lived religion, in contrast with the rule-based, organised andcongregational form of Abrahamic faiths (Fenton 1988; Joshi 2006a).

11. Sharad Poornima, a harvest festival, is celebrated in September/October on a nightwhen the moon is full, by worshipping Lakshmi, the Hindu Goddess of wealth, in anovernight vigil. During the vigil, some Indians, notably Gujaratis, dance thetraditional Dandiya Raas. In this dance form, men are said to personify Krishna,while women symbolise Gopis, the cowherd girls famous in Vaishanava theology(a branch of Hinduism that venerates Lord Vishnu/Krishna) for their unconditionaldevotion to Krishna.

12. Vishwa Hindu Parishad is a right-wing Hindu organisation with active branches inmany parts of the world where large numbers of Hindus live.

13. Shlokas are prayerful verses written to follow certain grammatical rules in Sanskrit.Collections of Shlokas are known as Stotras. Meant to propitiate various forms ofdifferent Hindu Gods and Goddesses, they are prayer devices that are said to conferspiritual and intellectual powers, grant wishes and rid individuals of sins. Shlokasalso often contain philosophical messages and values that are intergenerationallytransmitted when they are taught and repeated (Balbir 2012).

14. In places with very large numbers of Indians (e.g. Toronto, Canada), regional andlinguistic distinctions continue to be maintained. The Indian community in theWashington, DC, area, while large, is not as significant as the one in the GreaterToronto area. Another important point noted by Williams (1988) is that because ofthe shared connection with India, the British Empire and the Commonwealth,immigrant Indian communities in Canada and Britain resemble one another but arequite different from immigrant Asian Indians in the USA.

15. Demographically, about 80% of Indians are affiliated with Hinduism; roughly 13.5%are Muslims, 2.3% are Christians, 2% are Sikhs and 0.8% each are Jains andBuddhists.

16. Lord Krishna in his manifestation as a seven-year-old boy widely worshipped byGujarati and Rajasthani Vaishnavas.

17. Hari is another name for Lord Vishnu; ‘Hari Om’ is meant to invoke the grace ofLord Vishnu to help transcend material life. When I met Pallavi for the first time, sheinstructed her shy, dreamy-eyed son, ‘Say hello to Aunty’. He draped himself on thecouch opposite mine and looked unimpressed by his mother’s injunction. She said itagain, and he said ‘hi’ to me in a bored voice. ‘What else do you say to an IndianAunty?’ she prodded, and he said, ‘Hadi Om’ with an American accent. ‘Not HadiOm, honey. It is Hari Om’, she corrected him, to his mortification.

18. Years later, living in the USA Midwest, I was repeatedly coaxed by some membersof the local Indian community to send my teenage daughter first to Shloka classes,then to ‘self-unfoldment’ classes run locally by an Indian compatriot (which sheattended briefly) and then to have her sit for a Bal Sanskar test (to assess her


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knowledge of the qualities of an ideal child), the first prize for which was an iPodTouch (which she declined to do).

19. Joshi (2012) documents that although Hinduism remains an integral part of theirlives, second-generation Indian American Hindus do not find religion in their localtemples, especially if the temple was not integral to their growing up.

20. For an ethnographic account of youth culture through the eyes of second-generationIndian American adolescents, see Maira (2002).

21. Etymologically, the word Sanskar stands for ‘cultured’.22. This slogan can be traced back to Swami Dayanand Saraswati, a scholar of religion

who in the 1800s founded the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement that aimed toweed out evils such as casteism and bring Hinduism back to the founding principlesof the Vedas, whose authority he respected.

23. None of these parents said anything against Christianity or Islam, but they weredetermined to have their children learn about Hinduism.

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‘he thinks krishna is his friend’: domestic space and temple sociality in the socialisation...

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