Invitation to World Religions

138  CHAPTER 4  Hinduism

A bout 90 million Hindus live outside of India, making for an extensive diaspora with a great variety of Hindu communities. In the United States alone, there are well over 2 million Hindus. In Iowa, Hindus account for less than 1 percent of the population (the states with the highest percent- age, at about 2 percent each, are California and Delaware). 1 And yet the Hindu diaspora is well represented there, with organizations that promote very different ways of practicing Hinduism. The Des Moines Balagokulam is one of over 140 meeting centers in the United States of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), which is his- torically rooted in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS; National Volunteer Corps), the con- servative organization inspired by hindutva . HSS, as it states on its website, “is a voluntary, non-profit, social and cultural organization” that “aims to or- ganize the Hindu community in order to preserve, practice and promote Hindu ideals and values. . . . We encourage maintaining Hindu cultural iden- tity in harmony with the larger community.” 2 True to its RSS roots, HSS is highly conservative in ori- entation, seeking to preserve traditional beliefs and practices among those living in the diaspora. About a two-hour drive southeast of Urbandale, Fairfield (pop. 9,750) is home to Maharishi Univer- sity of Management, founded in 1971 as Maharishi International University. This is one of the original institutions of Transcendental Meditation (TM), the new religious movement—or so most scholars GLOBAL SNAP SHOT From India to Iowa: Hinduism in the Heartland

would call it; the organization itself denies that it is religious—established by Hindu guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1918–2008), who taught many West- erners, including the Beatles and the Beach Boys, how to meditate. Like HSS, Maharishi Foundation USA (the official name of the TM organization) is nonprofit, although there is a fee for learning Maha- rishi’s unique method of meditation. Whether or not labeled as “religious,” TM is highly innovative relative to most traditional forms of Hinduism. For more details on TM and other diasporic movements inspired by Hinduism, see the section “The Rediscovery of Eastern Religious Thought” in Chapter 14.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. 1 http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/ religious-tradition/hindu/#demographic-information 2 https://www.hssus.org/about-us PROPERTY OF OXFORD

rewrite Indian history by distributing new school textbooks throughout India. These textbooks reflected the BJP’s vision of India as a Hindu nation and Hinduism as a unified, monolithic tradition. Most important, and dangerously, this historical revisionism minimized Muslim contributions to the development of India and de- scribed India’s Muslim rulers as foreign invaders. The RSS also has a strong presence in the Hindu diaspora communities in Europe and North America. Many Hindu

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