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Why Hindus ought to have a good time Black Historical past Month

(RNS) — Black Historical past Month can typically really feel tokenized, extra symbolic than substantive. Some of the compelling features of our journey as a rustic previously few years has been to know that the Black expertise is totally intertwined with the thought of America, not compressible right into a month of meditation on a separate historical past.

Abrahamic religion communities have performed a big function on this journey. Christians particularly have examined how slavery and segregation have been lengthy theologically justified and finally condemned. The Black church supplied the ethical compass on the lengthy stroll to freedom, whereas Jews stood beside them within the battle for racial equality. Islam performed its personal half within the lives of slaves and was there when African People turned away from Christianity, the religion of their enslavers.

However the function of Hindus and Hinduism within the Black expertise isn’t as extensively mentioned, and even many American Hindus stay unaware of the connection. As a result of immigration from Asia was  considerably restricted for 41 years of the twentieth century — simply as america was within the deepest throes of the civil rights period — Hindus don’t typically consider themselves or Hinduism as having an affect.

However the connections between American civil rights and Hinduism are exactly why extra Hindus and Hindu temples ought to have a good time Black historical past, not least as a way of understanding their very own story in America.


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It begins with tales such because the Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda’s condemnation of segregated train cars in Tennessee throughout his go to to america in 1894 and his refusal to take a seat in a practice automobile for whites. He understood that the invitation to take a seat in a whites-only automobile was solely afforded due to his rich white hosts, and was not prolonged to others with darkish pores and skin. 

Many People are conscious that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life-changing 1959 visit to India sparked a non secular reference to Mahatma Gandhi. Although Gandhi was assassinated greater than a decade earlier than Martin and Coretta Scott King arrived in India, King discovered how Gandhi used the Bhagavad Gita, certainly one of Hinduism’s most generally identified scriptures, as a foundation of tying one’s dharma to social motion. 

It’s one of many the explanation why the King Middle for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta consists of Gandhi’s strolling stick and a replica of the Gita. As a Christian, King additionally got here to see how points like caste injustice in India contravened Hindu teachings via his conversations with Gandhians and Swami Vishwananda, a Hindu monk who, like Gandhi, was dedicated to ending untouchability.

The Gandhian manner — and the way King got here to know the dharmic idea of ahimsa, or nonviolence — formed a technology of civil and human rights leaders in america of their quest for racial equality. King paid homage to the common high quality of divinity at a sermon in Montgomery, Alabama, when he stated, “O God, our gracious heavenly father. We name you this title. Some name thee Allah, some name you Elohim. Some name you Jehovah, some name you Brahma.”

Even in the present day, many African American civil rights leaders and elected officers spotlight Gandhi’s affect and the function of Hindu teachings within the formation of a nonviolent motion devoted to lasting social and political change.

Whereas King’s go to to India was vastly consequential to his private development and in imparting the teachings of satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance, inside an American context, he wasn’t the primary American to hunt solutions from Hindu teachings on how one can deal with racial injustice. Almost 4 a long time earlier, W.E.B. Du Bois sought counsel from a fiery Hindu reformer who led the resistance towards British rule.

Du Bois started an extended correspondence with Lala Lajpat Rai, a turbaned Punjabi Hindu who was one of many vocal leaders of a Hindu motion generally known as Arya Samaj, which argued that social points comparable to gender inequality or caste weren’t a part of the Vedas. Of the organized sects of Hinduism, Arya Samaj in the present day nonetheless has among the many highest variety of girls monks.

Du Bois sought parallels between the oppression of Indians by the British and that of African People by whites, arguing that Christianity within the West was merely legitimizing the persecution of Blacks and different “darker peoples.” Rai defined a number of the core sides of Hindu teachings to Du Bois, who started to treat the common battle for liberation as greater than nationwide and geographic phenomena.

His exploration of India and Hinduism affected Du Bois so enormously that the latter wrote a novel, “Darkish Princess,” by which the protagonist, a Black man named Matthew Cities, marries a Hindu princess named Kautilya, uniting the “darker races” of their battle towards European imperialism. Du Bois noticed the union as a metaphor for uniting Indians and African People, and others, in a bigger battle. Because of this, Du Bois himself turned more and more disenchanted with the extra average goals of the NAACP, a company he had co-founded a long time earlier.

Whereas Du Bois devoted the e book’s launch to Rai, his pal was unable to learn it. Rai was overwhelmed by British authorities throughout a protest and died from his accidents a number of weeks later. But his affect on Du Bois and a technology of Black globalists who emerged throughout the Nineteen Thirties and Forties was simple.

Because the late human rights activist E.S. Reddy as soon as instructed me, each Du Bois and King have been looking for one thing that American and Christian concepts alone have been unable to supply. Their engagement with Hindu leaders and Hindu teachings would assist to attach them to a bigger thought of righteous motion in a worldwide context.


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Over the following few a long time, different Black People would undergo their very own comparable non secular journeys, together with a number of who would in the end undertake Hinduism as their religion. That included the musician Alice Coltrane, who took on the title Turiyasangitananda, and late Nineteen Sixties political activist John Favors, who turned Bhakti Tirtha Swami, one of many first Black non secular Hindu leaders in america.

This is the reason the significance of celebrating Black historical past is so necessary to understanding our personal connection to our religion traditions. For Hindus, particularly these from South Asian backgrounds, to understand their very own mark on American historical past, it’s time to wholeheartedly have a good time the Black expertise in America.

(Murali Balaji, an award-winning journalist, is a lecturer on the Annenberg Faculty for Communication on the College of Pennsylvania and writer and editor of a number of books, together with “Digital Hinduism” and “The Professor and the Pupil,” a political biography of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson. The views expressed on this commentary don’t essentially mirror these of Faith Information Service.)

This column is produced by Faith Information Service with help from the Guru Krupa Foundation.

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