Let me be your Indian friend

Now I’m not the most Indian person in the world. There are real Indians – in India – who are much more Indian than me. My parents are both Indians from India (yes dots, not feathers), and they tried as best as they could to raise me to be Indian and proud of it. The first 18 years or so were difficult, but it’s really grown on me. While I am not an end-all-be-all source of what is true about all Indians, my first generation Indian-American upbringing in an Hindi-speaking Hindu household makes me a pretty decent source.

Now I know that I’m not the most Indian person in the world, but if you haven't any Indian friends, let me be that friend for you. Let me be that person who you can ask all of those uncomfortable or perhaps socially awkward questions about India and it’s culture. If I can’t answer your questions, I will check with my Indian mother. If she cannot answer your questions, I will turn to my old friend, google.com. Between the 3 of us, we pretty much know everything anyway. To embrace my role as your Indian ambassador, let me start with a preliminary lesson: Hindi v. Hindu. This is why you never ask if someone is Hindi or if they speak Hindu.

Hindi is the primary language of India, but just one of hundreds of dialects spoken in India. Hindi is written in Devanagari script, read from left to right like English, but the letters hang from a line on the top. If you were writing on notebook paper, you would start on the top of the lines instead of on the bottom and you’d also draw a line to connect the letters of each individual word. Like this, but upside down. Hindi comes from Sanskrit, an ancient language that isn’t really spoken anymore, but still found in its written form. Hindi classes are commonly offered at universities in the U.S. and Hindi instruction is also available on Rosetta Stone. There are literally thousands of Hindi movies that you can watch with subtitles to learn the more colloquial variety, and they include fun musical numbers and hilarious attempts to blend with Western culture. I highly recommend any films that are directed by anyone with the last name Johar. So that’s Hindi in a nutshell.

On to Hindu, but let me give the disclaimer that I am no Hindu scholar. Hindus are the people who practice Hinduism. Hindus number more than a billion and Hinduism is recognized as the third largest religion in the world after Christianity and Islam. Just as there are many dialects of Hindi, there are many different kinds of Hindus. The best definition I’ve come across was on the back of a t-shirt printed at the temple I attended growing up. I wish I could remember it verbatim, but it was basically that Hinduism is a diverse body of religion, philosophy, and cultural practice native to and predominant in India, characterized by a supreme being of many forms and natures, a belief in reincarnation, and by the view that opposing theories are aspects of one eternal truth. Let’s pick this apart a bit, but let me give the disclaimer that this is only meant to be informative, not to enrage you or convert you.

A supreme being of many forms and natures – This is probably the most misunderstood concept of Hinduism. “Don’t y’all believe in a bunch of different gods?” Well, no. The D/FW Hindu Temple Society’s website explains that:

Hindus believe that even though God is One, He manifests differently at different times to different people according to their need and faith. Further, they believe that He bestows His Grace on humans in whatever form they worship Him.

Long story short, each of the different Gods you may have heard about are incarnations of the same supreme being. These are the same God, presented in different forms. Knowing that, consider the Hindu view that opposing theories are aspects of one eternal truth. For example, if you are a good Christian or a good Muslim, God will bestow his grace upon you according to Hinduism. No need to actually be Hindu. In Hinduism, the Hindu God isn’t different from any other God, so if you live right according to your religion, you are all set. This reminds me of the first time someone told me to “Go to Hell.” I remember thinking (but not saying, as I didn’t have the balls (literally)), “Why don’t YOU go to hell? That’s part of your religion anyway.” Hinduism, like most religions, is an inclusive religion, as long as you don’t ask the fundamentalists, I guess.

Belief in Reincarnation – An explanation of the Law of Karma is pretty essential to understand what Hindus mean by reincarnation. The D/FW Hindu Temple Society’s website explains that:

The Law of Karma can be simply explained by referring to the fact that whatever one sows, that one reaps. Karma is misunderstood as encouraging fatalism. On the contrary, it puts the full burden of one’s salvation on one’s own shoulders. Good living bestows good karma and bad living brings bad karma. One takes birth according to one’s karma to reap its fruits and work it out. Thus the human birth presents a rare chance to nullify one's past karma while making it possible to move closer to God. Human birth is not easily obtained and it is unwise to waste it in ignorance of God.

The concept of rebirth is related to the Law of Karma. All Hindus believe that the soul is indestructible, eternal and deathless. It is only the body that decays and drops off. The soul simply takes on a new body according to its karma. The ultimate goal of all created beings is to reach God and escape this endless cycle of birth and death. This reaching of God is called Moksha (Freedom).

Sounds a bit existential? Probably. Did you defraud hundreds of people for your own personal gain and spend a few years in the federal pen? Saying sorry or even being truly sorry will not be enough in this life for Hindus. Yes, it is kind of a bummer, but let this be an incentive to act right… right now.

And now for the best question of them all: “Do y’all worship cows?” That issue is best addressed by PBS in a special called NATURE: Holy Cow. Click here for the synopsis. I’ll sum it up in what I remember being told as a child. Lord Krishna, an important figure in Hinduism, was a shepherd (see, every religion has a shepherd!) and known as the protector and lover of cows. Not inappropriately, so please, don’t even go there.

So there you have it. Let that be your cultural lesson of the day. There are not people who are Hindi, but there are people who speak Hindi. Those same people can also be Hindu, but they don’t have to be, because Hinduism is a religious, philosophical, and cultural practice. It’s like a Venn diagram, Hindi speaking is one circle, and Hindus are another. There is a wide intersect, but one does not always mean you have the other. So now you know better than to ask if someone is Hindi or if they speak Hindu. And shame on you if you are a Hindi speaker or a Hindu and you don’t correct this mistake!