As an educator who believes in the ability of education to inspire people to build a better world and to develop people into fuller human beings, I take issue with the claims of the Hindu American Foundation that Hindu children must be shielded from the history of Hinduism to protect their self-esteem and prevent bullying. This issue is personal. The child they seek to protect with their historical revisionism, well that was me.
I was the only Hindu kid in my grade in my overwhelmingly white hometown of
During our 6th grade social studies class, when the unit on Hinduism came up,
I wanted to disappear into my chair. I already felt painfully different as
the lone brown girl, but those 45 minutes of tortured explanations about
the caste system and mangled pronunciation of Hindu philosophies like
“karma” and “dharma” made me want to gag. I felt that someone else was
defining my culture for me, and I felt powerless to define my identity for
myself.
Thankfully, or so I thought, my community taught me, through forums like the
Chinmaya Mission, about the universal beauty of Hinduism, and that caste
was long in the past. At one point, it had been a social reality manipulated
by evil people, but it was not inherent to the religion itself. Hinduism
was always something to be proud of, a set of lofty
philosophies that advocated peace and tolerance, and had contributed to the
world positively.
I never learned anything to the contrary until I came across a Dalit retelling
of the Ramayana in college. Within it, a Dalit activist flipped the
narrative of Rama, the fair skinned Aryan God of the North, as the good
guy, and Ravana, the dark skinned Shudra king of the South as the bad guy.
He laid out the history of the term “Dalit”, or “the oppressed”, the centuries-long
oppression by the Bramhinical order, and the revolutionary vision laid out
by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. He spoke about manual scavenging, an ongoing
practice in which millions of Dalits are forced to clean sewers without
equipment at the behest of their upper caste oppressors, and honor killings,
in which people who dare marry outside their caste are ostracized and even
killed.
I was stunned. The story ran against everything I had been taught about Hinduism. From this perspective, Hinduism was a tool of oppression that had been used for millennia to perpetrate an unjust system, rather than the wise and gentle philosophy that I had always understood it to be.
I could not deny the dignity and truth-telling power of the storyteller in the video. One line in particular rang in my ears and refused to leave, “Not only will we reclaim our humanity, but we will make you human as well!” I began to read more about the ways the caste system has dehumanized people by separating them and denying them what Ambedkar calls “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” I realized there was so much of my history that I had not been taught.
My desire to learn more led me to
Outside of the classroom, I got an education from friends, movements, and organizations such as Dalit History Month and the Ambedkar International Mission, which draw attention to the continuing regime of caste apartheid both in modern “India Shining”, as well as the Indian diaspora.
As an educator I believe in the transformative power of education. The process of working through the contradictions between my monolithic view of Hinduism and the narratives of Dalits, Adivasis, and other oppressed peoples was vital for my growth. It led me to a broader community and larger truth that has shaped who I am as a community organizer and educator.
Pointing out and understanding contradictions in history do not have to simply lead to low self-esteem for the Hindu child; they can be a valuable pedagogic tool to develop people into critical thinkers who can transform themselves and transform the world.
By trying to protect Hindu children from the shameful aspects of Hindu history and erase the contradictions within the tradition, you deny them an opportunity to learn about histories in which ordinary people came together to try to build a world free from inequality and injustice. In denying the humanity of Dalits by advocating for edits that erase their histories, those of us who were born with caste privilege deny our own humanity, and foreclose the opportunity to build a world in which everyone can be human. As an educator, this runs fundamentally against my values.
As a person of Hindu descent, the Hindu American Foundation does not speak
for me.
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Meghna Chandra is a writer, organizer, and educator living in
http://theaerogram.com/why-the-hindu-american-foundation-doesnt-represent-all-hindus/