The Modern Appropriation and White-Washing of Hinduism
Why does it matter and what can you do to stop it?
Have you ever done yoga, drank a turmeric chai tea latte at Starbucks, tried to manifest something using the law of attraction, or thought about how your enemies are going to be hit with karma? Well, I have some news for you, you’re appropriating Hindu beliefs.
Hinduism is the world’s third largest religion and its oldest religion. Yet despite its vast membership and history, as a Hindu growing up in the United States I found that while Hindu beliefs were embedded deep into Western society most people didn’t realize where these ideas originally came from and unknowingly appropriated them. It’s really ironic actually, regularly the Western world takes Hindu ideologies and makes it their own while at the same time diminishing it as a religion and its believers on a systematic level. And the worst part is that it’s become heavily normalized, I bet you or someone you know has participated in this system of white-washing and appropriation without even knowing it.
The effects of this appropriation and white-washing is devastating for the Hindu community, as well as society in general. But don’t worry it’s not too late, you can help fix this easily, I’ll tell you how if you keep reading. In this article, we’re going to discuss the meaning of appropriation and white-washing, look at specific examples of such oppressions, see why it matters more than you probably think, and give you some very easy to follow individual steps you can take to help.
Cultural Appropriation Vs. Appreciation
There is something really important I want to emphasize before we get started. You do not have to identify as Hindu to practice our ideologies. Hinduism is actually one of the most inclusive religions in the world, we don’t care if you identify as a Christian, Muslim, or atheist (actually technically you can be atheist and still be Hindu), we believe knowledge should be freely distributed regardless. One of my favorite Hindu proverbs that demonstrates this is, “There are thousands of paths up a mountain, the only wrong one is the one going around and telling people that their path is wrong.” By writing this article, I am not telling you that you have to convert to Hinduism to practice yoga or to stop doing things like yoga that come from Hindu beliefs, but instead simply asking that you practice cultural appreciation not appropriation.
It’s really important to understand the difference between these two in order to successfully practice appreciation. Cultural appreciation is when you seek to understand and learn accurate information about another culture, respecting their beliefs and where they come from. Cultural appropriation is when you cherry-pick ideas from another culture for your own personal interests, while not respecting where these ideas come from or the people of the culture. One important aspect of cultural appropriation is white-washing. White-washing is when cultural accomplishments and milestones made by people of color have been historically erased and appropriated by the white population (The Emory Wheel). The effects of white-washing and appropriation are horrific not just for the victimized group but everyone else too. Let’s take a more in depth look at these ideas and how they relate to Hinduism.
Some Common Examples of Appropriation You Need to Know
1) Yoga
Yeah goat yoga might be cute on Instagram, but it’s appropriation and is contributing to an oppressive system that does not support Hindus. Yoga was illegal for Hindus to do in India for hundreds of years and now the West has created a billion dollar industry out of the appropriated version of it. And you’re doing it wrong, what most people call “yoga” is actually just the physical portion of yoga which is asana. The next time you do asana make sure the people you’re doing it with know it’s asana and not yoga. Start calling it asana (ah-sun-ah) NOT yoga, trust me you’ll look way less dumb and be helping fight systematic oppression at the same time. Try to only support asana centers that don’t appropriate. If they call it yoga and not asana, give you a Hindu “yoga name” like Satya, have goats, or don’t know what namaste means it’s probably appropriation.
2) Mindfulness Practices: Manifestation, the Law of Attraction, & Meditation
Most western spirituality is just white-washed Hinduism. The concepts of manifestation, the law of attraction, and meditation all come from Hinduism but are barely credited.The international mindfulness industry is worth billions of dollars.These concepts have been rebranded in order to be more marketable to Western and mostly Christian audiences who would see these practices as demonic if they knew they were Hindu. Some still refer to them as witchcraft or magic which is really offensive. Most people incorrectly credit Nikola Tesla for forming ideas like the 3,6,9 manifestation method, but Tesla got this method from Hinduism and was an avid practicer of cultural appreciation. Of course you can use meditation, manifestation, and the law of attraction just know where it comes from and culturally appreciate like Tesla did!
3) Hindu Symbols, Accessories, Gods, and Goddesses
Hindu symbols, accessories, gods, and goddesses are regularly appropriated in the name of aesthetic without repercussions, even by celebrities! A lot of the symbols like the om and bindi have deep, complex, and scientific meanings. A lot of Hindu gods and goddesses are appropriated in Western media and given made up storylines, like the villain Savitar in the tv show The Flash who is actually a Hindu god. When these things are appropriated their meaning is forgotten, and over time completely erased by society. If you wear Hindu symbols or accessory know their meanings and wear them for that, not the aesthetic. And don’t appropriate Hindu gods and goddesses for your own personal agenda.
A Deeper Look: The Effects of Cultural Appropriation and White-Washing
1. It promotes the spread of mass misinformation about the religion and simplifies Hinduism’s complex ideals.
Everything you know about Hinduism is probably wrong, even if you were taught about it in school (actually, especially if you were taught about it in school!). Do Hindus believe in more than one God? Nope. Is the caste system a part of Hinduism? Nah. Do Hindus worship cows? Definitely not. So Hindus don’t believe in heaven right? No, we do believe in heaven. Okay, but Hindus have to have arranged marriages? No we don’t. Your misconceptions are an effect of the cultural appropriation that occurs regularly to Hinduism. If you’re interested in clarifying your own misunderstandings about Hinduism or just learning more about the religion’s basics check out the article I’ve written here.
When people appropriate Hindu beliefs they do not seek to understand the actual meanings behind rituals or traditions, and heavily misunderstand things. Appropriation also includes generalizing, leading people to group all Hindus together or confusing Hinduism with South Asian culture. Hinduism and South Asian culture are two things that are connected but are very different. Not everyone who’s South Asian is Hindu, and a lot of the beliefs that are interpreted as Hindu are actually South Asian.
Unfortunately these many misunderstandings about Hinduism have widely spread in the West and become normalized to the point where a lot of Hindu kids grow up thinking these misconceptions as actuality. Even in Western textbooks kids are taught incorrect generalized stereotypes about the religion. I experienced this firsthand in middle school world history class when one day in class we learned about Hinduism. I was so excited, for the first time I would get to share my beautiful religion. But then when we got to class and started reading the textbook I found that everything listed was incorrect and stereotypical. It painted us as a religion inherently discriminatory through the caste system, filled with barbaric cow worshippers, and with practices like cannibalism. I raised my hand to tell the teacher and she simply said if its in the textbook it has to be right. I was heartbroken. And the saddest part is that honestly if my parents hadn’t taken me every week to the Hindu Sunday School they helped run, to teach me about my religion in depth I probably would’ve grown up thinking all of the information in the book was true. I mean if it’s in a textbook written by adults with PhDs in the subject any 13 year old would presume it has to be correct. But how accurate was this textbook? Well, that week we took a test on what we had learned through the book about my religion, and I, a very religious Hindu and back-then straight A student, got every single question wrong.
2. It normalizes negatively stereotyping Hindus on a systematic level and diminishes people who identify as Hindu for following their own beliefs while praising white people for the doing the same thing.
Let me tell you the second part of the story about the day my class learned about Hinduism and I came upon that very incorrect textbook. After class, we had lunch and a group of girls came up to my table. They made fun of me for raising my hand and for being a barbaric Hindu.
The irony of it is that I still follows these girls on social media and they regularly post about going to yoga, getting henna “tattoos”, and practicing manifestation. Growing up in the West I learned that my religion wasn’t actually stupid, barbaric, outdated, or weird like everyone around me seemed to say. It was just weird because it was on me- a member of the faith and a person of color. I saw the Western world regularly take our ideas. Yet while they cherry-picked from my religion, they continued to make fun of the actual believers of the faith.
This sentiment is reflected very well in western media which I believe is an accruate reflection of western society as a whole. Western society talks about arranged marriages as barbaric (which aren’t even really Hindu by the way), but supports shows like the Bachelor and Married at First Sight. While movies and TV shows take concepts from Hinduism often, Hindu characters in these same movies and TV shows are stereotypical and generalized. Also many of these movies have white-savior tropes which have led to internalized racism within the Hindu and larger South Asian community, who unknowingly celebrate it when white people appropriate their beliefs and culture. I’ve noticed that in the West, if a white person simply includes South Asians or acknowledges that they exist (even if its a racist stereotypical acknowledgement) the community is overjoyed, but we shouldn’t have to settle for that, accurate representation is important. I’m guilty of it too, I remember the first time I saw a Hindu Indian American character on TV, Ravi on the kids Disney channel TV show Jessie. He was stereotypical, got bullied for doing things like puja (Hindu prayer ceremony), and was shown as a weird outsider. But I didn’t care, there was someone that looked like me on TV! Little did I know that this generalized representation hurt more than help. It lead to the normalization of racism and stereotyping against South Asians everywhere.
Examples of Hindu Beliefs in Western Media:
Please note the lack of Hindu characters in these movies/TV shows.
- Star Wars: concept of the “force”, George Lucas was influenced by mythologist Joseph Campbell who himself lived by Hindu mantras
- Avatar: The Last Airbender (TV show): the word avatar comes from Hinduism and refers to when Hindu deities are born to Earth in times of great peril, the four elements come from the five elements in Hinduism, when Aang talks to his past lives the creators says it was inspired by the Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita, the chakras Aang masters are an integral part of Hindu beliefs
- Interstellar: concept of universal super-consciousness that transcends time and space where all human life is connected, repeats central notion of Upanishads(an ancient Hindu text), the multi-dimensional tesseract is bases on Lord Indra’s net
- The Matrix: the Hindu concept of Maya that says the world is an illusion, Neo learns the abilities of advance yogis
- Avatar (the movie with the blue aliens): according to James Cameron Hindu scriptures heavily inspired the plot of the film
Examples of Hindu Characters in Western Media:
Many of these characters are one-dimensional, and never explicitly stated as Hindu and/or completely misrepresented.
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: It shows Hindu people eating giant bugs and frozen monkey brains. They show Hindus are primitive, the village Jones lands in thinks he was sent by Lord Shiva (white savior trope alert!). They represent goddess Kali worshippers as people who kidnap children, murder, and turn people into zombies. The movie creates a storyline where the god Shiva is the pacifist and goddess Kali is the devil which is not true at all.
- The Flash (TV Show): Savitar is a evil villain speedster in the show and comics but in Hinduism Savitar is a version of the Hindu sun god. This misrepresentation has led to a generation of people to believe a god many Hindus worship is actually evil.
- Jessie: Ravi is shown to have a strong Indian accent (even though the actor playing him does not have one) and is portrayed as weak and nerdy. In the show other characters make fun of his traditional clothing and can’t even pronounce the name of it. He is also bullied for doing a Hindu puja (prayer ceremony).
- Phineas and Ferb: Baljeet Tjinder is a stereotypical Indian American character in the show who is shown as awkward and nerdy. His storyline is that his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all killed by tiger attacks.
3. It allows people to steal Hindu concepts and rebrand them as their own, erasing the original meaning and Hinduism’s many contributions to society.
If you’re going to appropriate something at least do it right. Most times when concepts are appropriated they are out of context and a lot of vital information related to them is lost. People who are guilty of incorrectly appropriating Hindu beliefs include white girls in yoga pants and Adolf Hitler. The swastika is an ancient Hindu symbol that represents prosperity amongst other things. It is a symbol Hindus still use today, placing it outside of their homes, businesses, and drawing it during religious festivals. The Nazis appropriated it, rebranding a version of it into one of the most widely used hate symbols in history. This has led to a lot of hate crimes against Hindus who use the swastika and normalized Hinduphobia. Most people do not know the original importance of the swastika. When people appropriate Hindu beliefs, the meaning of this beliefs is lost.
Now let’s get to white girls in yoga pants. Yoga and other Hindu beliefs were outlawed in South Asia for hundreds of years and seen as primitive. Yoga became popular in the West when yogis were coerced to start traveling to England and the United States during British rule in India to show their oppressors that Hindu ideologies were worth anything and should be allowed to be followed. It grew in popularity because it reinforced Europe’s idea of an exotic East and allowed the West to appropriate another culture’s idea while keeping the focus on themselves. And like I stated before the yoga the West learned isn’t even actual yoga, it’s just asana the physical part of yoga. As time went on people started forgetting this and that information has become less and less known even though it’s an integral part of Hindus. Most Hindus in the West don’t even know there’s a difference between yoga and asana. And now many people don’t even know yoga comes from Hinduism. I recently took a yoga class and the teacher didn’t even know yoga came from India or Hinduism. She thought Gwyneth Paltrow invented yoga, like what! Appropriation leads to the erasure of many contributions Hindus have made to society. It doesn’t just happen with yoga it’s happened with so many Hindu concepts you might not even realize are Hindu before they were adopted or discovered by the West! Many of these ideas are mathematical and scientific things like the Fibonacci sequence, the theory of the atom, and a heliocentric universe (which I as a scientist and Hindu find so exciting!).
4. It lets those with privilege who do no respect the religion profit off of Hindu beliefs leading to a discriminatory system.
Cultural appropriation and white-washing also leads to those with privilege to monetarily benefit from Hindu beliefs, while those who are actually Hindu and provide the same services getting less to nothing. One example of this is the billion dollar international mindfulness and spirituality industry that has arisen from Hinduism. Most of these businesses do not care or know about Hinduism and its people, selling Hindu symbols for aesthetic.
5. It trivializes the history of oppression Hindus have faced to keep their religion alive.
According to statistics from the Pew Research Center, Hindus have been the second most persecuted and oppressed religious groups throughout history, after the Jews.
Content warning: This part of the article talks about genocide, sexual assault, massacres, murder, famine, and other not so PG things.
Let’s take a brief summarized look at this persecution and oppression. Hinduism developed in South Asia and mostly stayed there until 1990s and early 2000s, it didn’t really rapidly spread across the world like other major religions. One of the main reasons for this is that historically Hindus do not really go out of their way to promote their religion because in the our scriptures it says that every belief system is valid and Hindus believe that forcing anyone to convert to Hinduism religion is wrong. In Hinduism we are taught every way is right and to learn from other religions. Unfortunately, the many forces that constantly invaded South Asia for its many resources didn’t really have the same mindset.
First came the Islamic conquest of Southern Asia that began approximately 8th century CE and lasted for hundreds of years. These Muslim conquerors burnt down temples and built mosques in their place, raped women, murdered millions of people, didn’t allow Hinduism to be practiced, shutdown Hindu schools, forced Hindus to convert to Islam through murder or enslavement, placed a worship tax on those that remained Hindu, and systematically slaughtered. Many Hindus had to sacrifice themselves to keep their religion alive. Will Durant, a famous American historian, dubbed this time period in South Asia for Hindus as “probably the bloodiest story in history”. But, it gets worse, then came the Europeans.
And by the way this part of the story isn’t ancient history, my grandparents were alive during European rule in India. Throughout history Europeans have wanted to get to India because of its rich resources, spices, and money. Eventually the Portuguese reached the shores of what is now Goa, and created a colony that lasted for 300 years until 1961. Here they forcibly converted Hindus to Christianity and made it illegal for anyone to be Hindu or they were massacred.
Then came the British who ruled for over 200 years. Now, in the West I have found that this part of history is heavily romanticized to portray the white-savior narrative.
The British came and taught the snake-charming Indians modern science, math, philosophy, English, and medicine. The Indians accepted them with open arms. The British helped India built an extensive railroad system for them throughout South Asia that modernized the country, brought equal rights by outlawing discriminatory practices like the caste system, and allowed every religion to be practiced . Then Gandhi, asked the British to leave and so they did.
Yep that’s actually what every textbook I’ve ever read has said about British rule in India (paraphrased of course, they usually have about 2 pages about the amazing railroads they built), but if you’ve been paying attention you know that textbooks can be wrong. The British slaughtered and exploited millions of South Asians for the economic growth of their empire and treated them as second-class citizens who had practically no freedoms in their own country. The British came to India as the British East India Company under the guise of friendship and trade, but this was one of the biggest scams in history. They ended up enslaving and exploiting the sub-continent’s people for over 200 years, many of whom were Hindu. They made many Hindu practices like yoga illegal, forced conversions, stole approximately $145 trillion (17x the UK’s GDP today), created a famine on purpose that killed more than 10 million people, raped women, segregated India making white-only areas, popularized colorism in India, divided the nation’s population in order to control them , spread misconceptions and generalizations about India throughout the world (that still exist today), and regularly executed people for petty crimes, amongst other things. Oh, and those railroads that British are so proud that Western history books say helped Indians… they were segregated. Indians weren’t allowed to even be near most of those railroads, let alone use them.
“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
-Winston Churchill, a British Prime Minister who was in charge during British rule commenting on the famine the British caused
When the British did leave India and the Hindu people that resided within the country, they left it in very bad shape. Using their divide and conquer tactics they made random lines on a map (literally random lines I’m not even exaggerating) creating a majority Muslim nation (Pakistan) and a majority Hindu one (India) which caused about 14 million people to forcefully move from the homes their famililes had been living on for thousands of years and 2 million to die in the process. The conflicts between Pakistan and India exist to this day, leading to the persecution of many Hindus. In the 1990s a group of Hindus called the Kashmiri pandits were forced to flee their home as terrorist groups there started murdering them for not converting to Islam. Still today, many Hindus living in Pakistan are forced to convert and face extreme violence.
All of the beliefs the West regularly appropriates are beliefs my ancestors died protecting. Appropriating Hinduism trivializes this oppression and persecution, a part of history that is already vastly ignored and white-washed.
What you can do to help!
Thank you for taking your time to read this article. By doing this you’ve already done more to help than most people do. Now all I ask is that you practice appreciation for Hindu beliefs, not appropriation and that you help educate others about it. No, you don’t have to read them this whole article in order to that (even though that’d be awesome and I’d love you for it), but just practice simple things like telling your friends that it’s asana NOT yoga on your next gym day or reminding that one classmate you follow on Instagram who’s into spirituality that wearing the om symbol on her neck as a non-Hindu is offensive. Anything and everything you do helps. Change starts with you :)
