Stereotyping Hinduism in American Education

Stereotyping Hinduism in American Education:
by Rajiv Malhotra

This essay is based on an inquiry in which I wondered why:

• Hindu kids and even adults in America are apologetic about their religion, generally preferring to distance themselves from it and keep quiet about it.
  
• Educational material used to teach Hinduism focuses on caste, idol worship, lack of social values among Hindus, and other negative portrayals.
  
• A major academic Web site examines the Bhagavad Gita in negative terms of Arjuna killing his relatives because of his Hindu outlook.
  
• Teaching grants to train secondary school teachers on religious pluralism have been used to develop material that portrays Rama as 'oppressing' women and lower castes.
  
• There is minimal coverage given to the positive contributions by India's civilization to mathematics, science, medicine, metallurgy, linguistics, logic, and other 'rational' areas; and when pointed out, such avoidance is sometimes defended.
  
• Most of the educational material on Indic religions is written very authoritatively by Americans who have advanced degrees in Sanskrit and/or Religious Studies, who have spent years researching in India, and would easily impress anyone with their scriptural knowledge about India.
  
• Very few Indians have gone for academic careers in Religion or Philosophy, and those in such careers must be very cautious not to step out of line in complaining about the above matters.

There are two major families of religions in the world:

The Greco-Semitic family consists of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, characterized by their faith that God revealed his truths to man through prophets only, that these revelations ended early, and hence these revelations must be inferred from the interpretation of the original texts, parts of which have been codified into the equivalent of 'law' books by human.

The Indic family consists mainly of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, which combine revelations through historical persons with truths discovered by an endless line of humans (rishis, buddhas, etc) upon attaining higher states of consciousness attainable by all humans.

This essay addresses how the Greco-Semitic religious paradigms, being the prevailing undercurrents in Western civilization's narrative of the humanities, have influenced the portrayal of the Indic religions. Hinduism is used in this essay to make the points concerning Indic religions, but similar issues also apply to all Indic religions. This paper raises the following questions:

1. Is Hinduism being portrayed inappropriately through Greco-Semitic concepts and categories? For example, monotheism and polytheism are a priori assumed as mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories, and Hinduism gets incorrectly classified as polytheistic. The notion of a 'complex unity' that is neither purely mono nor poly is absent from the discourse.
   
2. Should Hinduism be described primarily through the lens of anthropology and socio-political history, or does it offer us universal ideas in the same sense as Greek thought does?
   
3. Does Hinduism have something useful to say in the fields known as consciousness science, humanistic and transpersonal psychology? Did these post-modern Western disciplines receive key ideas from the East, and are there further opportunities for collaboration?