BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham / BAPS

The Hindu diaspora in the West can justifiably take pride in its achievements. By nearly every external measure, it has flourished. Educational outcomes are strong, economic success is widespread, and contributions to host societies are substantial. Hindu children dominate spelling bees and academic competitions, gain admission to elite universities, and rise to leadership roles in technology, medicine, finance, and research. The community is often held up as a model of integration and upward mobility.

But this impressive record of accomplishment has exacted a price that is rarely acknowledged. Beneath the surface of prosperity and recognition, the foundations of Hindu civilizational continuity have been steadily thinning. What is being preserved is often cultural familiarity rather than understanding, participation rather than conviction. Dharma remains visible, but increasingly marginal to everyday life and moral formation.

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This is the uncomfortable contradiction the community now faces: exceptional success in the public sphere alongside a quiet erosion of the inner structures that once gave that success meaning and durability.

Ambient Dharma Meets Minority Reality

The erosion of transmission did not begin with neglect or an explicit turning away from tradition. It arose from the friction between inherited modes of living and a radically altered environment. Hindu families who settled in the United States were largely drawn from educated, urban, and professionally mobile strata. Their academic credentials and economic security facilitated swift assimilation, but they also weakened dependence on the communal and social structures that had historically sustained civilizational continuity.

Many of these families carried with them an upbringing formed in post-1960s urban India, where dharma operated less as a subject of instruction and more as a background condition of life. Meaning was absorbed through immersion rather than explanation. The Hindu calendar shaped the year. Festivals, fasts, and rites of passage organized time and memory. Language, food, and everyday customs quietly reinforced shared references. Children learned not because they were taught, but because they inhabited a civilizational ecosystem that transmitted belief and practice by default.

Within such an environment, systematic teaching was often unnecessary. Even when rituals were performed without detailed explanation or texts were not studied closely, the surrounding society supplied reinforcement. Public spaces echoed religious vocabulary, and social norms aligned with inherited moral frameworks. Dharma seemed to reproduce itself without conscious effort.

In the American context, this same approach is frequently carried over unchanged, despite the absence of supporting conditions. The wider society offers no ambient reinforcement. Schools, media, peer groups, and public institutions operate within an entirely different civilizational logic. Yet within the home, transmission often remains casual and episodic. Prayer is sporadic. Scriptural engagement is minimal. Civilizational history appears in fragments, if at all. Hindu identity surfaces mainly during festivals and family rituals, rather than structuring daily habits or moral reasoning.

Material success obscures the consequences of this mismatch. Children thrive academically, adapt socially, and move confidently through elite institutions. There is no immediate penalty for cultural dilution. Continuity is presumed to persist on its own, rather than treated as something that must be actively sustained.

Over time, recognition displaces comprehension. Symbols are familiar, rituals are performed, but their significance becomes difficult to articulate. Dharma remains present in form, yet increasingly peripheral in function. A model that functioned adequately within a civilizational majority begins to fail silently when transplanted into a minority setting.

Interfaith Homes and Western Education

Once foundational grounding begins to erode, other dynamics move in to hasten the process. Among the most consequential are the internal structure of interfaith households and the formative influence of the American education system. Neither advances through overt antagonism. Both operate through defaults, in a social environment where minority traditions survive only through sustained and intentional effort.

Interfaith marriage is now a common feature of Hindu American life, particularly among U.S.-born professionals and the highly educated. These unions are typically entered with goodwill and an earnest commitment to mutual respect. Parents often emphasize inclusivity and choice, framing both traditions as equally valid parts of the family narrative and leaving questions of identity open-ended for children to resolve later.

In practice, however, households require a coherent organizing framework. Daily routines, school schedules, moral vocabulary, and social cues tend to align with a single set of norms. In the United States, those norms are still largely shaped by Christian cultural inheritance, even when families identify as secular. Absent deliberate structuring, the minority tradition gradually recedes, surfacing mainly during festivals or ceremonial occasions. This retreat is rarely intentional; it reflects the quiet force of default settings.

Formal education compounds this imbalance. In K–12 curricula, Hindu civilization is often presented through a narrow lens that foregrounds caste and social hierarchy, treated as timeless characteristics rather than historically situated constructs shaped by colonial interpretation. Philosophical traditions, ethical systems, and metaphysical inquiry receive limited treatment, while Hindu contributions to fields such as mathematics, astronomy, linguistics, and logic are frequently folded into the Western intellectual narrative without clear attribution.

At the university level, critical frameworks often eclipse genuine understanding. Hindu traditions are approached primarily through the language of power, domination, and identity politics. Labels such as “Hindutva” circulate as charged terms, frequently detached from historical or civilizational grounding. Students who arrive with a strong internal framework can engage these narratives with discernment. Those without such grounding often cannot.

In these conditions, external interpretations quickly occupy the space left by weakened transmission. Curiosity gives way to distance, and critique substitutes for comprehension. No explicit hostility is required for this process to take hold; structural forces are sufficient.

Where Institutions Fall Short

In theory, institutions are meant to provide what individual households cannot sustain over time. In reality, many Hindu institutions mirror the same limitations that weaken transmission within the home. Temples continue to serve as important communal spaces, but they are seldom organized as centers of sustained formation. Activity calendars are dense with festivals and devotional gatherings, yet systematic education remains thin. Celebration is abundant; instruction is episodic. Children learn how to participate, but are rarely equipped to understand, articulate, or contextualize what they are participating in.

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This institutional lightness echoes a broader ambiguity at the household level. Many families rely on a well-intentioned but flattening language: all religions are fundamentally the same, distinctions are unnecessary, and spirituality matters more than form. The aim is tolerance and harmony, not erasure. Yet the effect is often confusion. When difference is consistently softened or deferred, children are left without a clear sense of what their own dharmic inheritance entails. Institutions seldom challenge this vagueness; more often, they absorb and reproduce it.

That this pattern persists should not be mistaken for inevitability. The experience of BAPS demonstrates what becomes possible when institutions treat transmission as a core responsibility. In BAPS communities across the United States, temples operate as coherent educational environments rather than purely devotional sites. Children progress through structured, age-appropriate programs that integrate scriptural learning, ritual practice, ethical discipline, and seva. Participation is regular, expectations are explicit, and learning builds sequentially over time. Young people are given responsibility early, including teaching and mentoring roles, which deepens understanding and fosters ownership. Difference is addressed directly, without defensiveness and without dilution.

This institutional clarity does not come at the expense of engagement with wider society. On the contrary, BAPS youth are well represented among high-achieving professionals in medicine, engineering, science, law, and business. Formation and modern success reinforce one another rather than standing in tension.

Elsewhere, however, philanthropic patterns often entrench the opposite outcome. The Hindu American community possesses the financial capacity to build durable educational infrastructure, yet a substantial share of giving continues to flow toward elite Western universities and cultural institutions that confer social legitimacy. Hindu educational efforts remain fragmented, under-resourced, and heavily dependent on volunteers. The constraint is not ability, but the absence of aligned priorities.

The Cost of Inaction

The costs of inaction are no longer hypothetical. As the first generation of immigrants ages, lived memory and embodied knowledge fade with them. Over one or two generations, Hindu identity may endure in name and outward presence while steadily emptying out as a lived system of meaning. Temples may continue to function and festivals may draw large crowds, yet dharma ceases to inform everyday conduct, ethical judgment, or moral orientation.

This process is cumulative and resistant to easy correction. Once transmission falls below a critical threshold, continuity cannot be rebuilt through symbols, sentiment, or occasional participation. Communities that postpone sustained investment in formation gradually lose the ability to explain themselves, regenerate leadership, or equip the next generation to engage the world with confidence and clarity. Identity remains, but coherence erodes.

The response this reality demands is necessarily collective. Sustaining continuity under minority conditions requires treating dharmic education as essential rather than optional, building institutions oriented toward long-term formation, and directing philanthropic resources toward civilizational infrastructure instead of external validation or prestige. Goodwill and tolerance matter, but they cannot replace structure.

What is ultimately at stake is not the survival of Hindu identity in America, but whether the next generation will inherit a tradition they can inhabit — or only one they can admire from a distance.

 

The writer is  Vice President of Education at Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America and is a member of its Governing Council and Executive Board.

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of  New India Abroad.)