WITCHITA, KANSAS, September 17, 2006: Fourteen-year-old Samanvitha Sridhar has a reason for choosing not to wear the bindi on her forehead in public. It has nothing to do with how she views her Hindu faith and everything to do with how non-Hindus react. “There’s very few Hindus in our community, and it takes forever to explain to everybody why I do some things,” said Samanvitha, a freshman at East High school. “And by not doing that, it just makes it a little bit easier.” For Samanvitha, it’s one example of the challenge that some Hindu youths face while trying to maintain the traditions and customs of their faith in America.
For Hindu temples in the U.S. it has meant taking on roles that Christian churches have long held but that temples in India would find unfamiliar–such as community hub and religious education center. The Hindu Temple of Greater Wichita is one example. The temple is a site for events ranging from worship to social outings to classical Indian dance classes and, more recently, bi-weekly religion classes for first through eighth graders.
While most temples are designed like temples in India, the founders realized over the years that they would have to operate differently than they do in India, said Anantanand Rambachan, professor of religion at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. The various Christian denominations separate themselves from each other and define themselves by the doctrines they follow, he noted, but Hinduism in India doesn’t operate the same way. There, a single religion covers a wide spectrum of Gods and beliefs. In America, Hindus ‘are increasingly being challenged to articulate the Hindu tradition in a manner that places more emphasis on doctrine,” Rambachan said. “People will ask, ‘What do you believe?'” Faced with that, temples and cultural organizations that had been working to make outsiders understand more about the faith realized they need to help young people within the faith know what they believed, if the religion was going to be passed on.