INDIA, August 12, 2022 (Religion News by Murali Balaji): My dad was born in 1946, a year before India’s independence from British rule. (My mother was born a decade later in Puducherry, which would only become wholly independent of French rule in 1963.) Growing up in newly independent India, his post-World War II, post-independence generation was encouraged to adopt a certain style of secularism that was embedded within India’s new social fabric. Many were also educated in Christian schools, where they were taught a completely different idea of religion than what they learned at home. That in turn informed how that generation practiced its faith when Indians began moving to the United States after 1965. The staunchness with which many Indian Hindus believed in the idea of a dogmatic secularism meant that many of them carried with them a distinct shame of simply being Hindu or didn’t know why they said the prayers or performed the rituals they did. Hinduism’s core philosophies were largely ignored or misunderstood.
I still meet older Indian Hindus who are reluctant to identify as Hindu, even if they are regular temple-goers and are devotees of a specific sampradaya, or Hindu tradition. As one older friend told me, many in his generation were more schooled on the Baltimore Catechism than they were the Vedas, Upanishads and other Hindu texts. As a result, the trauma of colonialism has never been fully processed, and many Indian Hindu immigrants were unable or unwilling to acknowledge the ways in which their religious and spiritual illiteracy impacted their self-conceptualization in the United States, where they were often marginalized religious minorities and frequently had to apologize for their “foreignness.” Perhaps that sense of decolonizing has come too late for some, but it’s still important to note that for many Indian and Indian American Hindus, the sense of identity and connection to a spiritual home is still a work in progress. Even as India continues its own journey from the vestiges of colonialism, Hinduism will continue to evolve and adapt to the changing attitudes and views of the billion people worldwide who embrace it.
More of this insightful article at source.
https://religionnews.com/2022/08/12/75-years-after-indias-independence-a-lost-generation-recovers-its-hindu-faith/