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10 - Globalizing Hinduism: A ‘Traditional’ Guru and Modern Businessmen in Chennai

from Part Three - Culture and Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2012

C. J. Fuller
Affiliation:
London School of Economics
John Harriss
Affiliation:
London School of Economics
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Summary

Affirming the Sanatana Dharma and Recording the History of a Billion-Strong Global Religion in Renaissance.

The need for cultural revival in India is the need of the hour. How are we to hand over our cultural values to our next generation when westernization is the current trend via the media, social and peer pressures [sic]. The Indian cultural forms will disappear from this nation if its constituent elements are not understood and imbibed by our next generation.

The first of the two epigraphs above is the masthead on the website of Hinduism Today, a magazine published in Hawaii since 1979, which enjoys a wide readership among overseas Hindus, especially in the United States. Using the standard modern phrase sanatana dharma or ‘eternal religion’ to refer to Hinduism, the epigraph is a striking example of how Hinduism may be proclaimed as a genuine global or world religion, flourishing as never before. The second epigraph comes from the website of a religious trust in Chennai (Madras) and it announces the Vedic Heritage Teaching Programme (VHTP), which was designed in America but is also being promoted in India. The epigraph, which equates ‘Indian’ culture with the ostensibly Vedic Hindu religious tradition, expresses a profound anxiety that westernization may soon lead to its extinction.

Optimistic confidence about global Hinduism and pessimistic concern about Hindu Indian culture are obviously antithetical. Nevertheless, they belong to the same discourse of globalized Hinduism and highlight a crucial ambiguity that runs through it.

Type
Chapter
Information
Globalizing India
Perspectives from Below
, pp. 211 - 234
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2005

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