Where is hinduism influential today

The high rates of vegetarianism in Bangladesh are often explained by the large Hindu population, as abstaining from meat consumption is highly revered in Hinduism. Pakistan is home to 4,, Hindu believers, and these are mostly those left in the country after the great divide from when it was formally a part of India.

Pakistan emerged as a separate nation in , proclaiming to form an Islamic state. It triggered the biggest migration that Asia had ever witnessed with communities and families got to move from one country to another by the characteristic of their religious belief. Since then, the Hindu population of Pakistan has been steadily decreasing.

The Indonesian island of Bali is particularly dedicated to Hinduism with lots of temples, sculptures depicting science from the Hindus' famous myths, and deep rooted Hindu traditions across the majority of the island's native population. The island state of Sri Lanka is home to 2,, Hindus and the country's ancient history is tightly related with Hindu's mythology and culture. Being in proximity of the strongest Hindu source, Sri Lanka had all chances to be a purely Hindu state, but the powerful 15th Century emperor Ashoka embraced Buddhism and sent his son to bring the teachings of Buddha to the island of Sri Lanka, and thus made a historic change giving Buddhism to the island and its inhabitants for centuries to come.

Vaishnavites regard him to be eternal and the strongest and supreme God. Shiva is sometimes represented as half man, half woman. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search.

Press ESC to cancel. Ben Davis February 5, How does Hinduism affect society today? How did religion influence Indian society? Where is Hinduism influential today? How has Hinduism influenced American culture? Instead, their movements and messages were relegated to the fringes of society, furthered by the countercultural critiques of American Christian nativism. There were, however, fascinating developments in the field of yoga. Still, it was often positioned in earlyth-century American circulation as a Hindu practice, but often iterated with the language of spirituality because of the negative connotations that white Americans associated with the term Hinduism.

Traveling yogis exhibited their gymnophysical prowess to American audiences, often operating within and exaggerating orientalist tropes for their own profit. These Indian yogis became embodied articulations of the stereotypes of Asiatic magicians, snake charmers, and magical yogis, who could manipulate matter, both internal and external.

This era also encouraged non-Indian Americans to don the religious and cultural apparatus of yoga and Indian mysticism, in efforts to draw power from the prevalent orientalist tropes of the day. So began the age of cultural appropriation that intersects with gray areas of religious conversions.

In the yogic field, non-Indians flourished. People of African descent also saw the yogi as a means of escape from antiblack racism; for example, Hazrat Ismet Ali, a black man from the British Caribbean, became famous in the guise of an Indian yogi. It allowed for an annual quota of twenty thousand immigrants from all nations of the world to apply to enter the United States.

Between the years and , immigration from India increased 2, percent. For the first time in U. Because of U. When these immigrants arrived, they found limited resources for the expression of traditional forms of Hinduism available in the United States. Despite their educational status, they often found themselves bounded by stereotypes of their ethnic and religious heritage and sometimes persecuted by expressions of individual and institutionalized racisms.

Temple building became one of the primary means by which Indian Hindu communities sought to assert their presence in the American religious landscape and foster centers for the expression of cultural and religious values. Once Hindu communities had found their footing in the American context, one of the first communal dreams was often the establishment of a temple wherein Hindus could worship but also where they might connect with each other and teach their children about Hinduism.

India is a country of extreme diversity, with geographic localities governing religious practices and language. In the United States, despite their regional differences, Hindus soon found that they needed to band together in expressions of communal solidarity. An example of this can be found in the fact that some of the first temples established in the United States hosted a variety of Hindu deities, deities who would have been separated by sectarian or geographic traditions in India but who were hosted together in temple complexes in the United States.

This form of practical ecumenism is also evidenced in the urban developments in India, wherein temples become ecumenical as they become increasingly cosmopolitan. For example, in New York, Texas, and New Jersey, where there were concentrations of Hindu populations, sectarian groups began to raise capital in order to support temples dedicated to specific sectarian traditions. That is to say that in high-density Hindu states, one is much more likely to find a temple dedicated to Krishna, another to Durga, and another to Shiva, rather than all of the Hindu deities worshipped together in one temple.

There is also a practical aspect, in that often it is the donors who contribute financially to the construction of the temple who determine which deities are installed. In addition to establishing temples, Hindus also re-created the sacred landscapes of India, as evidenced by the Radha Madhav Dham in Austin, Texas, which is a two-hundred-acre property marked with hills, rivers, and fields representing various locations in Vrindavan, India.

Today, there are approximately Hindu temples in the United States. Significant populations of immigrant Indian Hindus in the United States are from the Indian state of Gujarat, the birthplace of the modern guru Swaminarayan — ce.

BAPS Swaminarayan Hinduism began as a guru devotional movement, but it soon became articulated as a branch of traditional Hinduism. Across the world, the organization has refocused attention toward Hindu heritage, particularly emphasizing Vedic knowledge and history. It has also strategically focused on building elaborate and ornate temple complexes in major urban centers. As a result, BAPS Swaminarayan temples have become tourist attractions and highly visible representations of traditional Hinduism around the globe.

They have become epicenters for the Hindu community and cultural and religious ambassadors of Hinduism for the general public. Their emphasis on the glories of Vedic culture, traditional gender roles, and conservative and sometimes political Hinduism has also influenced Hindu thought in the United States considerably.

The influx of temples in the United States provided expressions for the devotional and ritualistic aspects of Hinduism that had been largely ignored in the U. Temples established forums for these devotional and ritual activities, as well as sanctuaries for the performance of life-cycle rituals—marriages, funerals, first feedings, sacred thread upanayana rites, and so on. They also became congregational centers for community networking and development.

Oftentimes, temples established curricula for the study of Hindu scriptures and other cultural heritage preservation activities, such as language classes, cooking classes, workshops providing immigration information, and community development. The development of temple infrastructure recalibrated the neo-Vedantic emphasis that had until now been the dominant expression of Hindu religiosity in the United States. With the massive influx of various types of Indian Hindus, the diversity of Hinduism radically increased.

Hinduism in the United States contains both universal ecumenism and the particular veneration of personal deities. The outward conviction that all gods are one provides an ecumenical veneer that enables the veneration of multiple sectarian and regional forms of the divine. As in India, the majority of Hindu devotional worship occurs at home altars, with temples providing spaces for congregational worship on special occasions.

Only a small minority of Hindus attend services each week. The most common religious event in which Hindus participate is Diwali, the festival of lights, with nearly ubiquitous participation.

Festival occasions like Diwali provide opportunities for Hindus to celebrate both their ethnic and religious heritage and to represent it with grandeur in the American multireligious landscape. Religious and cultural allegiances are a critical influence on identity formation in the dislocated context of the immigrant experience. After , Hindus established organizations that aimed to unite Hindus in North America and to connect diaspora Hindus with Hindus in India. These organizations are an integral branch of the nationalist Hindutva ideological project; they also claim to unite, represent, and advocate for all American Hindus.

These umbrella Hindu organizations are one of the most vital arenas for the construction of Hinduism in North America, because they are explicitly engaged in knowledge-building projects, from elementary curricula to monitoring the production of Hinduism through academic publications and university-level instruction. In the s, the VHPA was involved in two major knowledge-production projects: the establishment of a Hindu University in Florida and the Encyclopedia of Hinduism project.

This emphasis on controlling the educational instruction about Hinduism largely derives from a fear of misrepresentation. In the United States, many Indian Hindus continue to be dismayed and offended at the manner in which their religion and culture have been presented in elementary, secondary, and university publications in the United States.

Parents objected to elementary and secondary school textbooks that contain factual errors and racist stereotypes. In response, parents and community leaders began to organize to revise and reform the textbooks. They submitted edits with the support of the Vedic Foundation VF and the American Hindu Education Foundation HEF , which aimed to correct factual errors but also to eliminate any reference to caste, polytheism, or the Aryan Invasion theory.

When the edits were submitted for scholarly review, a mixed group of American scholars including Indian and non-Indian members were concerned that the VF and the HEF were attempting to rewrite history and the extant hierarchies and ritual practices of Hinduism as it exists in India.

Ultimately, the California State Board of Education voted to approve the initially agreed-upon edits and to reject the disputed edits. In , the California textbook debate rekindled aggressively. The CSBE issued revisions that attempted to assuage all parties but satisfied few.

Other Hindu organizations and individual leaders have also become concerned about representations of Hinduism more broadly, in American universities and in the publications of American scholars. Most particularly, some Hindus have objected to what they view as the sexualization of Hinduism but also the application of Western theoretical models to Hindu materials particularly psychological ones and the emphasis on caste and gender inequities and exoticism.

Some Hindu groups, such as the Dharma Civilization Foundation which also has connections to Hindu nationalist groups, such as the RSS and VHP aim to reclaim scholarship in the field of Hinduism for scholar-practitioners and to reframe the study of Hinduism within indigenous epistemologies.

These attacks on scholarship are not limited to the U. They are a part of a much broader movement from within the political mobilization of an aggressive Hindu nationalism within India that aims to silence any critique of the nation-state or its dominant religion of Hinduism.

It also equates the Indian nation-state and population with Hinduism, which has had egregious effects on minority religious populations in India since its rise to power.

Often their membership networks overlap significantly. In the s the VHP specifically targeted the middle classes in India and Hindu populations living in diaspora as receptive audiences and generous sources of funding through a series of Hindu world conferences.

They looked to the diaspora Hindu community, in particular, because it was dislocated from local religious complexities and politics in India. In addition to providing services to their local members, these organizations network on a national level through conferences, such as the Future of Hindu Dharma in North America conference for representatives from Hindu organizations held at the University of Central Florida in Additionally, websites provide another effective communicative tool for immigrant Indians in the United States to connect with each other and share resources; they have also become a primary resource for disseminating the Hindu nationalist perspective.

Hindu nationalist organizations aim to diminish the sectarian and caste differences among Hindus by vilifying Muslims and Islam and alternately the West and Westernization as the threatening Other. In so doing, they create unity among Hindus by using scare tactics and scapegoats—often to the point of the propagation of untruths and the rewriting of history. Two other important texts are the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Pilgrimages and festivals are common in Hinduism. Diwali, the New Year's celebration, features gift-giving and lighting of ceremonial lamps.

Holi, the Festival of Colors, marks the arrival of spring each year. India's Caste System. Indian society has traditionally been divided into a hierarchical system called caste or jati, which is not limited to Hindus, but which most Hindus have observed throughout history.

It is hereditary, and each caste has its own set of values, rules, dietary beliefs, etc. Many do not marry outside their castes. There are four major varnas or social classes most caste members fall into: - Brahmans - the priests and other educated professionals.

Made up of laborers, artisans and other servants.