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HVK Archives: Culture vultures

Culture vultures - Communalism Combat

Vijay Prashad ()
1997 February

Title : Culture vultures
Author : Vijay Prashad
Publication : Communalism Combat
Date : February, 1997

On 11 June 1995, at a Satyanarayan temple in New York City, the New
York shakha of the Hindu Swayamsewak Sangh held a Hindu Sangathan
Diwas (Hindu Unity day). Dr.Yash Pal Lakra, president of the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), was the keynote speaker.

The Sangh advertised the event with a quotation from Swami
Vivekananda: "You are a Hindu when the distress of anyone bearing
that name comes to your heart and makes you feel as if your own son
were in distress."

What "distresses" a group of professional Hindu migrants to the
United States? For what must this group of Hindus be "united"?
What does the VHPA do in America and what is the nature of the
Hinduism imparted by its workers? These are not questions which
this brief note can answer. Instead, I will offer an analysis of
those Hindu migrants who take comfort in the withered arms of the
VHPA.

America turns to migrants from South Asia for their labour, not for
their lives. In 1965, the United States revised its immigration
laws to encourage technical and scientific experts to migrate and
overhaul its scientific and military establishment. These migrants
came for their expertise, not to make American society more
diverse. On the contrary. America was at that moment emerging
from a decade of racial struggle whose principal result was an
illiberalism among whites towards 'racial' and cultural difference.

The migrant from the subcontinent came to work hard and to uphold
an economy which began to crumble under the weight of intensified
military spending n the 1980s (during which time the US outspent
the USSR in Cold war II). Each day, however, these migrants are
assailed by a society unable to deal with people who speak with a
different accent, who have different shades of skin, colour, who
enjoy different music and food and who have their own ways of
social interaction.

In 1987, Navroze Mody was beaten to death during a spate of racial
incidents in New Jersey. In 1994, a South Asian student was
savagely attacked in Rhode Island because he played a Bhangra tape
at a party. America enjoys the technical and manual labour of
these subcontinental migrants, but America is unable to take the
lives of these migrants into its heart.

For this reason, the migrants search for ways to recover their own
dignity as well as ways to protect their children from what they
sometimes see as an overly hostile society.

The new syndicated Hindu movement which began in the 1960s in India
soon turned its eyes to North America and Britain. In North
America, the VHPA was founded in 1970 to gradually spread to about
75 cities with a membership in the thousands. The VHPA is able to
grow because it responded (perversely) to the contradictions of
the, Hindu migrant.

First, it offered a way for the migrants to reconstruct their
dignity as a people with a great culture which is superior to
American culture. The VHPA fought a bigoted culture with its own
bigoted version: "if you say your culture is better, we'll say our
culture is better."

Rather than negotiate the weaknesses in all our cultural
experiments, the VHPA reinforced the idea of the separation of
'Hindu' and 'America' and thereby further segregated the
consciousness of the Hindu migrant from American society. For
example, the VHPA encourages Hindu women to avoid professionalism,
warns Hindu teenagers to eschew sexual and social relations with
non-Hindu youth.

Hindus are urged to five epic lives which serves as a mode of
social control against the youth as well as against women. The
youth are alienated from the re-sources which might help them to
live in a multicultural nation and a complex world.

Gandhi, in 1925, offered the best riposte to the VHPA's static idea
of 'culture': "it is good to swim in the waters of tradition, but
to sink in them is suicide." Tradition must build upon our
contemporary contradictions not be a thing which we must wield
dogmatically against our own collective interests.

The second manner in which the VHP was able to draw support was by
its offer to socialize the youth. American society is under attack
from the rapaciousness of transnational capital which knows that it
can sell whatever the market will bear regardless of ethics.
Parents are fighting a defensive battle against the weight of these
corporations.

Hindu parents do not join in what should be a collective battle to
reconstruct society along the lines of compassion; rather, many
withdraw into Hindu enclaves where they send their children to VHPA
summer camps to be trained in the way of the new syndicated Hindu
Dharma.

At these camps whose numbers are growing, the VHPA teaches the
youth shlokas, stories from Epic literature, Hindi, yoga, bhajans,
dance, and the rituals of a Brahmanical Hinduism. The VHPA sells
these camps as cultural and, in fact, sells itself as a cultural
organization. Of course, those who know of the activities of the
VHP in the subcontinent (destroying the historical mosque at
Ayodhya and participating in sectarian violence) know that they do
not simply do cultural work.

At the Tenth Hindu Conference in New York City in 1984, a
resolution urged "all the Hindus of the world - back home and
abroad - to act in a broad and nationalistic manner rising above
their personal beliefs and creeds, parochial languages, and
provincial and sectarian considerations such as Gujarati, Punjabi,
Tamilian, Telugu, Bengali, Jains, Sikhs, etc." The VHPA offers the
Hindu (and Sikh and Jain!) migrant an easy task: give money for
work in India, to help those Hindus who are in "distress". The
money rolls in (the VHPA does not reveal the amounts).

Biju Mathew, editor of Sanskriti, a secular and democratic journal
published in New York City, estimates that the minimum "saffron
dollars" sent to India between January 1992 and December 1993 was
Rupees 12.5 million.

The money travels to do 'good work', which, to those of us who have
some idea of the VHP in India, means towards such activities as
purchasing conversions, engineering sectarian conflicts and funding
political candidates.

The VHPA asks American Hindus to be nationalistic: that
nationalism, however, allows the migrant to be innocent as the VHP
takes their devotion ("saffron dollars") and puts it to work in the
imaginary homeland (India) where people are not comforted by
Hinduism, but where they are slaughtered in its name.

The tragedy of the Hindu migrants is their inability to reconstruct
their traditions to suit a difficult context. America is, of
course, not all bad. There are many who try to fight against
bigotry and injustice, but they are an ignored minority.

There are those subcontinentals who found organisations to help the
migrant recover dignity and to help the 'accidental
Americans'(their children) find a comfortable place in America.

These groups such as FOIL (Forum, Concerned South Asians, SAKHI)
shun the bigotry of the VHPA in favour of an egalitarian world
which must be built in our image. Those of us who migrate here from
India are Indians whatever we do and in our cultural kit, things
Indian remain.

Indian Americans must draw from our various cultural resources in
order to produce philosophies adequate to our concrete problems.
That is the purpose of culture: as a resource of hope, not a weapon
for self-flagellation.

(The writer is assistant professor of International Studies,
Trinity College, Hartford, and a member of the Forum of Indian
Leftists (FOIL), USA



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