The wedding pavilion: Performing, recreating, and regendering Hindu identity in Houston

Abstract

Transplanted to the U.S., Hinduism in diaspora cannot provide the same framework for identification it supplied in India. Forced to project new religious, ethnic, and gender identities in North America, numerous Hindus I spoke with in Houston, Texas struggled to explain how Hinduism differed in India by distinguishing it as "a way of life."1 In using that somewhat clich?d characterization, they were no doubt unaware of recent academic discussions of its usefulness in the comparative study of religions (see von Stietencron 1997: 40). Unaccustomed to reflecting on Hinduism in India, these middle-class migrants now find it difficult to explain precisely what that way of life entailed and what they mean by calling it that. My conversations with them seemed to suggest that in the U.S. they now experience a twofold sense of religious disorientation. On the one hand, there is an absence of the multigenerational families and traditional temple culture that they took for granted in India. As a result, lay Hindus find themselves taking a more active role in conceptualizing their religion and transmitting it to their children than they might have assumed in India. On the other hand, the landscapes and soundscapes of Hindu ubiquity in India are missing: the local temples, the amplified bhajans at 4:30 in the morning on festival occasions, the noisy wedding processions in the streets, and all the everyday practices that establish the omnipresence and hegemony of Hinduism as a majority religion. Now relegated to the margins of the U.S. public sphere as a religious (as well as an ethnic) minority, Hindus in Houston have to reconstrue the Hinduism they left behind in India to make it more consistent with the characteristic space-time of what geographer Edward Soja (19%) calls the North American "technoburb." As a majority in the Indian homeland (although, of course, some Hindus have come directly from East Africa and the Caribbean), their "religious identities'* were "effectively ascribed from birth"