The Future of American Hinduism Won’t Be Built on Shame
Building dignity, dialogue, and depth across generations
This week, a young Hindu American woman gave the commencement address at MIT. In her speech, she made a critique of her university’s role in furthering atrocities in Palestine. (She was not the first to do this; commencement speakers at many other universities and colleges did the same.) As the video circulated, the online outrage from the global Hindu community, which is still reeling from the Islamist attack on Hindus last month in Pahalgam, was immediate. Accusations of betrayal. Claims of “wokeism”, of stupidity, of a lack of thinking, of a “pathetic” lack of identity. And the same clever “tight slap”: this is what happens when you focus only on spelling bees and math Olympiads.
But in the pile-on, I fear we are missing an important opportunity.
Of course I don’t agree with what she said. Yes, I wish she had spoken more broadly about ethics, about complexity, about humanism. And if she was going to invoke genocide, I wish she had named the countless communities facing unimaginable horrors right now. And since she talked about divestment (including $11 million from the Israeli Ministry of Defense), I would have loved to hear something about divesting from the tsunami of petrodollars shaping American institutions, like the $247 million MIT took from Qatar between 2001–2021. But I digress. More than anything, I recognize that she was speaking from within a pressure cooker, one that was built by that tsunami. And that she is 22. She’s supposed to be idealistic and righteous. That’s the point of 22. I was insufferable at 22.
People in the Hindu American community are quick to say our kids are being “turned” against us by the American education system. That college is the problem. I want to be clear: yes, there are real issues with how Hinduism is represented in schools. I’ve worked on this, I’ve studied this, I’ve published academic work on this, I’m writing a book about this.
But we must also examine some of the very predictable backlash to Megha Vemuri’s speech . It followed a familiar pattern: a young Hindu woman speaks publicly, possibly in chorus with mainstream progressivism, and a cacophony of online Hindu voices rushes to discredit her not just for what she said, but for who she is. There are legitimate critiques to be made — about the intellectual honesty of some of her claims, the ethics of hijacking a commencement platform to deliver them, and the very real ways her acts created a chilling, unsafe moment for Jewish and Israeli graduates and their families. She must reckon with that. But alongside the serious concerns came something else: a kind of performative glee from the global online Hindu community, as if they were licking their lips waiting for her future to be destroyed. As if the only acceptable response is exile, not engagement.
But how will she — and all of the young Hindu Americans watching this unfold — ever have the opportunity to wrestle with any legitimate critiques if we cancel her and deny her the possibility of growth? All we’re doing is reinforcing the narrative that she was right to “die on this hill.” That she was silenced for “telling the truth.” And in doing so, we lose an opportunity to model something far more powerful — something she likely hasn’t had much access to in her education: engaging generatively with viewpoint diversity and reconsidering assumptions in pursuit of truth. For many Hindu American families, what’s unfolding isn’t just a political disagreement — it’s a generational reckoning. A moment to talk honestly with our children about history, harm, and complexity. About what it means to stand for something — and how to do so in a way that still allows others to stand too. This capacity — for meaningful, generative, and honorable dialogue across political and community lines — is not just a moral ideal. It is the very skill that will determine the future of American democracy.
What We Haven’t Built…Yet
A few years ago, I wrote a letter to Hindu American parents. I said that disagreement is not betrayal and that if we want our children to speak with us honestly, we have to create the conditions where they don’t have to lie to be loved. I still believe that. In so many instances, whether it comes to politics or substance use or dating, we’ve taught our children, sometimes subtly, sometimes directly, that disagreement or difference is dangerous. That asking hard questions means you don’t respect and, therefore, you don’t belong. That deviating from what your parents tell you is “a good Hindu” means you are no longer welcome in the community, that you are “bad.” And so they learn to hide the parts of themselves that might not be welcomed. To be palatable.
We continue to confuse performance with belief, much like the social justice activism that members of our community critique. Being Hindu American isn’t a branding exercise. It isn’t about temple attendance or presenting a good Indian girl aesthetic. But we’ve created a culture where that’s largely what our kids see: performance. Surveillance. Shallow calls to pride that don’t make space for wonder, doubt, or transformation. We underestimate how deeply the Hindu activism that immigrants present in the United States is from India and is shaped by entire backstories and ideological legacies that our children don’t always see clearly and isn’t a part of their lives. This doesn’t mean they’re deracinated — it means that they’re growing up here and that we can’t force them to pick national loyalties in order to prove their Hinduness. We also haven’t invested in creating the spaces — inside and outside community spaces — that would allow them to ask about this in really radical ways. To question. To struggle. To be human. To do something differently here. To teach us. We haven’t cultivated and invested in building the permission structures for Hinduism and Hindu struggles to be represented with real diversity and intellectual integrity.
Instead, we rent rooms on college campuses, center older immigrant voices on panels meant to galvanize Hindu youth (or, sometimes, younger Hindu youth who parrot the uncles), force our kids to major in STEM, convinced that we’re “speaking back to academia.” We shorthand all of this in coded language that makes no sense to the young people we claim to speak for. The “truth” offered to them often sounds more like radicalization than thoughtful participation in American society — which should matter to them and to us. Sometimes they push back with their parents, but oftentimes they keep quiet until it’s safe to speak.
When they get to college, their masks may drop. And the community reacts as if this came out of nowhere — blaming professors, blaming social media, blaming “the West.” Yes, there are major issues with a lack of viewpoint diversity on campuses. This is a serious problem that absolutely must be addressed. Yes, there are issues with the way equity is taught on campuses. But as a community, we rarely ask: what do we need to do differently? What isn’t working? Where is our viewpoint diversity? How can we teach our children the skills of discernment, deep inquiry, questioning, truth-seeking that are inherent to the Hindu path?
We have no shortage of Sunday schools, Bhagavad Gita competitions, Sanskrit classes, temple events. But ask your children, honestly: do these programs actually meet them where they are? Do they recognize the full complexity of what it means to grow up Hindu in this country? Or are they built on the nostalgia of another place and time, run by well-meaning volunteers, usually immigrants from India, who have no experience with what our kids encounter every day in school, online, in public life? That doesn’t make those volunteers bad. It just means they’re operating from a reality that is not our children’s.
We have content. What we don’t have is pedagogy. We don’t have curricula designed by people who understand American adolescence, spiritual seeking, intergenerational dissonance, or the modes of learning that our children are not only accustomed to in school — they’re modes that are profoundly dharmic. Instead, we offer rote content delivery. Recitation. Lists. Rules. Memorization. What we lack is sufficient space for reflection, ethical inquiry, for doubt, for rejection, for the creative construction of something new. (There are exceptions to this, but they are…exceptions.) This has a huge impact on how our young people perceive Hindu spaces and Hinduism, itself.
Add to this the fact that large swathes of our community actively reject contemporary gurus, the very enlightened masters meant to guide the spiritual and moral life of Hindus through the muck and moral dilemmas of daily life, mocking them all as New Age charlatans and flattening their specific significance and effectiveness in the American context. In their place, they’ve installed finger-wagging uncles (and aunties) with narrow theories about American society.
So when some of our kids arrive on college campuses and look outside the community for identity and purpose, it’s not their failure. It’s a predictable part of their development. And it’s exactly what’s being encouraged and supported in campus life, outside of formal coursework. Meanwhile, other communities (and foreign governments) have invested in research centers, departments, language, cultural capital, and social discourse that speaks directly to this need. We haven’t. At least not in a sustained, substantial, or strategic way.
Who Gets to Shape the Conversation?
And we also have to be honest about who is shaping the conversations about Hindu identity in the US. The people with the loudest and most widely-circulated opinions about Hinduism in the United States are often those who grew up entirely in Indian Hinduism. That perspective is valuable, but it cannot dominate. The reality here is different. The questions are different. The challenges are different. And so must be the discourse and vision. Those who immigrated here still have to raise their children here, of course, but we also need something else growing and blossoming. Something rooted, pluralist, American, coded and embedded in the full complexity and texture of our lives here for generations to come.
(For context: as my son was proofreading this piece, he pointed out that the rabbi at our neighborhood synagogue is a beloved figure in the community. Young Jewish adults regularly stop her on the street to talk about life. That’s not just presence, it’s embeddedness and relevance. That’s what we’re missing.)
And since I’ve been needing to say this for some time, let’s also look at the tired question that surfaces every time something like this MIT speech happens: Why is it always Hindu American women who betray our community?
Yeah… why is that? It’s a question worth sitting with, not just flashing rhetorically.
But instead of examining what might be happening in the community, the finger wagging lands on “feminism,” “Marxism,” and a host of horribly degrading comments about our women. No one is really asking what the community might do differently, why so many women are feeling disenfranchised, silenced, demoralized, perpetually sat in the back of the room. And let’s be honest: these panels and conferences and podcasts are UncleCons. Room after room filled with uncles, and now HinDudes (their younger, American-born counterparts), making pronouncements about Hindu identity and the future of our youth. Many of these gentlemen have no idea how to run a household, let alone understand what our kids are actually facing. They repeat what another uncle or HinDude told them, they generalize their own experiences, and consider it to be profound insight. They might be fathers, but how many of them are genuinely connected to their daughters’ experiences? How many of them would take over family responsibilities so that their wives could be there instead of them? How many are listening to the entire community before they speak for it? Or are they too busy at conferences and podcasts as armchair sociologists, pontificating about raising and building the community?
Meanwhile, Hindu American women are busy raising and building the community generation to generation. We are the quiet center: raising families, in yoga spaces, in classrooms, in the arts and music, in professions and disciplines that sit at the intersections of American society. But we’re called in only when it’s convenient. Never when it matters most. I can’t count the number of times I’ve received a call because an organizer has realized they don’t have enough women on the panel or at the conference, and I’m told that I can speak about any topic they need me to, because they just need a woman.
My brother, I am not a seat filler.
I have spent decades in the field of education — teaching, designing curriculum, training teachers, working with youth. And yet, I’m regularly spoken over on panels and in meetings by men with no background in child development, pedagogy, or schooling — just confidence and half-baked critiques of American education. Some have “started schools,” but what they’ve built are containers for compliance that likely resemble their own post-colonial Indian educational experiences, not spaces for learning. Their ideas go under-interrogated because they are loud, familiar, and male. It happens all the time.
What We Must Build
So here we are.
And here’s what I want to say, because I am a problem solver, and the current “solutions” aren’t working: Being Hindu in America is not the same as building an American Hinduism. The first is about location and preservation. The second is about intention, imagination, design, and stewardship. It’s about creating a space of belonging and depth that doesn’t rely on nostalgia or fear. A space rooted in dharma, not dogma. A space where our children can grow and question and leave and return.
In less than ten years, we will see the birth of the fourth generation of Hindu Americans — the great grandchildren of Hindus who immigrated here in the 1960s and 1970s. We urgently need second- and third-generation leadership. We urgently need feminine leadership. We’re way behind, actually. We need less performance and more listening. We need the elders to grow into the spiritual phase of dispassion and to kindly and respectfully pass the talking stick. We need to create communities where hard conversations don’t mean exile or stigma. Where successfully calling someone in to have a generative conversation is considered a more powerful and valuable skill than calling people out on social media. Where shame is discarded as a tool to carve out Hindu American society. And we need to focus on building the skill of staying in conversation with people whose ideas challenge ours. I don’t mean debate, I mean dialogue. That especially includes our children, of all ages.
We need to develop the forbearance, the stamina, the humility, the self-awareness, and the social awareness to talk with people who think differently than we do. And we need to teach our children how to do that, too. This is what has been degraded on college campuses.
But I also see this skill sorely lacking in our community. Whether it’s online “activists” or selective community leaders, what’s getting circulated now are clips of this young woman’s speech, screenshots of her profile, and cruel commentary meant to mock, ridicule, and humiliate. Not just her, but all Hindu American children and their parents. Jab jab jab. Poke poke poke. Get lots of likes and shares. Because that is how you demonstrate that you are better and win more followers on social media.
But this isn’t a game. This is real. There is a very real transformation that has happened on American college campuses. A new permission structure has taken root — an atmosphere in which certain views feel safe and others don’t. That is a serious problem. But the solution isn’t to tear down the young people navigating that reality. The solution is not to strip them of dignity or agency. How can Hindu Americans claim to be the standard-bearers of pluralism and intellectual inquiry…and this is our reaction? Mockery? Vilification? Groupthink?
Holding Our Children With Dignity
Our children are looking for purpose. They are trying to figure out what it means to be good people in the world. That is not a threat and it is not a weakness or “wokeness.” Adolescents and kids in college are melodramatic. That is a natural part of their development and it can be a beautiful opportunity for them to really feel and be connected. That is not a bad thing.
And before someone says I’m coddling these young adults, let me be clear: This is not about coddling. It’s about skillful cultivation, the kind that Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff talk about in The Coddling of The American Mind. Cultivating the clarity, conviction, and courage to have real dialogue, especially when it’s uncomfortable, is a dying skill in American society. Cultivating the skill to stay in relationship with our children even when they challenge us, scare us, or say things we disagree with. That’s not weakness or a lack of conviction. That’s strength and that is what it means to raise children in today’s world, whether you’re in the United States or India or anywhere.
There is nothing weak about this approach, but it is also not harsh. Raising adolescents with integrity in a country that reduces Hinduism to a punchline in textbooks and reduces your child to a checkbox on a college form requires grit and skill, not countering their righteousness with your own. Staying in generative conversation when your niece or nephew comes home from college with a head full of questions and a heart full of contradictions requires stamina and quick access to resources that reach them effectively, that speak their language and meet them where they are, even if they’re not necessarily from a Hindu perspective. Teaching dharma as practice through role modeling is not easy. But it’s necessary.
I’m not saying our children are always right. I’m saying they’re ours. All of them, even the obnoxious 22 year olds. And we better make sure our doors remain open for dialogue, for difference, and for return.
We do not need counter-radicalization programs that justify certain acts of political violence. We don’t need to have one uniform definition about what Hinduism “really is.” We need to understand how Hinduism expresses itself as culture and consciousness and skill in action here in the United States. (And no, I don’t mean New Age crap or an anything goes approach.) We need the confidence to let our children (young and adult) ask every question and still know they belong. Because if they see that all we have to offer them is mockery, fear, and shame when their peers do something they might not fully understand, we will lose them. And we will have no one to blame but ourselves. Because this isn’t just about one student or one speech. It’s about whether we’ve built something strong enough, honest enough, nimble and gracious and spacious enough to hold the next generations with dignity and to grow alongside them.
I am not willing to cut off our youth. I am not willing to cut off our women. If we claim to steward dharma, then we must embody it, not only in lofty ideas, but in how we hold one another close. Especially our women and our children.
