My family has a tradition: if we are all in India on New Year's Eve, we go to evening arti at Triveni Ghat in Rishikesh. We purchase tiny boats made of leaves, heaped with flowers, incense and a small earthen lamp. You can hold the whole thing in your cupped hands. We trek down to the water, roll up our pants and wade out into the cold water of the Ganges. Lamps are shielded against the wind and finally lit, prayers are said, and we place our tiny lights onto the water. The current takes them. We stand with our arms around each other and watch our wishes merge into the mass of little bobbing lights. After awhile, you can't tell which one is yours.
At nearly every temple in India, you will find an area where people are eating a meal provided by the temple through donations made by pilgrims. Some of the people eating will be pilgrims themselves, but there are always a large number of hungry locals. Feeding the hungry is part of the responsibility of a pilgrim, a temple, and society as a whole. This social awareness and engagement is integral to Hinduism. During a recent pilgrimage to Kalighat temple in Kolkata, one of the priests solicited a donation by asking me: "How many people do you want to feed?"
I am only a visitor to India. I was born in the United States and have lived most of my life here. Being Hindu in a country where, growing up, it was an oddity, meant that my family had to find new ways to express our Hinduness. Putting flowers and lights in the Mississippi on New Year's isn't feasible in Minnesota, since the river is frozen. While I love my country and enjoyed my childhood, I often felt cast adrift, as if my family and I were alone on a bright but tiny boat of Hinduness. It was often isolating, and I sometimes felt like a visitor in my own nation. As I grew older, and the Hindu-American community grew with me, it was exciting every time I identified another Hindu. If that Hindu was a public figure, I was astounded and thrilled. Look! I would think. We're really here!
We really are here. Pew Research recently released a study: Asian-Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths. Rather than restate the findings here, I recommend Khyati Y. Joshi's article which summarizes the high points of the data on Hindu-Americans, and addresses some of the concerns regarding the format of the study. I think the study is a great start. It's hard to overstate the feeling of inclusion one experiences as a minority that is finally noticed by the larger society in a matter-of-fact way.
One question that is not addressed by the Pew study is the myriad forms that religious expression takes in the Hindu-American community. Seva is embedded in and an expression of Hinduism. As Hindu communities become more established in America, seva is rapidly becoming a way that Hindus engage with their community and society as a whole. Seva work is also a keystone in the encounter between our traditional religious heritage and the way our community finds its place in and contribution to American life.
In the same way that Hindu-Americans have had to adapt traditions of worship to accommodate being in a new culture, traditional forms of service also have to be adapted. Our temples don't have hundreds of thousands of pilgrims donating funds to feed the hungry. It can be hard to figure out how to start social service work without traditional support structures in place. Yes, one can volunteer at a secular organization (and many Hindus do just that) but developing structures within the Hindu community to support social service projects have to be envisioned, designed, and built from the ground up. It can seem daunting.
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