by Diana L. Eck
As a scholar of India teaching at Harvard University, I had always taken note of the effects of the new immigration on India, the so called "brain drain", as thousands of Indian professionals, doctors, and scientists left for the United States. However, I had never stopped to think what this would mean for the United States until the children of this first generation of Indian immigrants reached college age and enrolled in my classes in the academic year 1989-90. There were Muslims from Providence, Hindus from Baltimore, Sikhs from Chicago, Jains from New Jersey. They represented the emergence in America of a new cultural and religious reality.
In the past, I had always had several students from India in my classes on India, but in that year, their numbers increased. Only now, they were not from India, but were Indian Americans, born and raised in San Antonio, Baltimore or Cleveland. They were, as I discovered, the children of the first generation of immigrants who had settled in America after the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. That historic event finally removed the legal legacy of racism that had been built into immigration legislation from the first Chinese exclusion act in 1882 to the Johnson Reed Act in 1924, which effectively barred Asian immigrants for four decades. The 1965 policy opened the door again for immigration from Asia and other parts of the world.
Some of my Indian American students came from very secular families and knew little of their Indian heritage. Others had grown up in the new Hindu or Muslim culture of temples and Islamic centres their parents had begun to establish in the United States. Some had been to Muslim youth leadership camps, organised by the Islamic Society of North America. Some had been to a Hindu summer camp at Rajarajeswari Pitha in the Poconos, or to a family Vedanta camp at Arsha Vidya Gurukulam in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. Some were involved as founding members of the Jain Youth of North America.
Straddling two worlds, critically appropriating two cultures, they lived in perpetual inner dialogue between the distinctive cultures of their parents and grandparents and the forceful, multiple currents of American culture. In their own struggles with identity lay the very issues that were beginning to torment the soul of the United States.
Religious diversity shattered the paradigm of an America the sociologist Will Herberg had confidently described as a "three religion country"—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. By the 1990s, there were Hindus and Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains. There were more Muslims than Episcopalians, more Muslims than Presbyterians, perhaps soon more Muslims than Jews. The sons and daughters of the first generation from South Asia rose at Harvard to become some five percent of the Harvard undergraduate population. In the spring of 1993, when that first class graduated, I sat with the families of Mukesh Prasad and Maitri Chowdhury, the first marshals of the Harvard and Radcliffe graduating classes that year—both Hindus. Maitri recited a hymn from the Rig Veda in Sanskrit. It was a new Harvard.
What has happened at Harvard has happened at major universities throughout the country. It is not uncommon to have Hindu and Jew, Muslim and Christian in a single rooming group. These changes in university demographics have come not from abroad, but from the rapidly changing cultural and religious landscape of the United States. Harvard's issues, America's issues, have become, increasingly, a fresh recasting of many of India's issues, the world's issues: race, culture, religion, difference, diversity, and whether it is possible to move from diversity to pluralism. Driving out New Hampshire Avenue, one of the great spokes of Washington DC, just beyond the Beltway, there is a stretch of road a few miles long where one passes the new Cambodian Buddhist temple with its graceful, sloping tiled roof, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the Muslim Community Centre with its new copper domed mosque. Further along is the new Gujarati Hindu temple called Mangal Mandir. The many churches along the way also reveal the new dimensions of America's Christian landscape: Hispanic Pentecostal, Vietnamese Catholic, and Korean evangelical congregations sharing facilities with more traditional English speaking "mainline" churches.
The diversity of New Hampshire Avenue, however, is not simply a curiosity for a Sunday drive. What it represents has profound implications for every aspect of American public life. What is happening to America as all of us begin to renegotiate the 'we' of "We, the people"? That 'we' in the United States is increasingly complex, not only culturally and racially, but also religiously. will this religious diversity mean for American electoral politics, for the continuing interpretation of "church state" issues by the Supreme Court, for American public education and the controversies of school boards, for hospitals and health care programmes with an increasingly diverse patient population, and for colleges and universities with an increasingly multi-religious student body? While many Americans are only dimly aware of the changing religious landscape, the issues this new diversity has raised are already on the agenda of virtually every public institution, including Harvard.
A few years ago, my Harvard colleague Samuel Huntington, the distinguished political scientist, wrote of the deep religious currents that so profoundly shape the great civilisations of the world. In the new post Cold War era, he predicted "civilisational identity" will have a major role in the coming political realignment. He contended that the Confucian, Islamic, and Hindu worlds will be forces to reckon with in the geopolitical arena and he foresees a "clash of civilisations". But where exactly are these worlds and civilisations, we might ask, with Hindus in Leicester, Durban, Toronto, and Houston? With huge mosques in Paris, London, Chicago, and Toledo?
One of the decisive facts of the 1980s and 1990s has been the tremendous migration of peoples from one nation to another, both as immigrants and as refugees. Every part of the globe is experiencing the demographic changes of these migrations. Today, the Islamic world is no longer somewhere else, in some other part of the world; instead Chicago, with its 50 mosques and nearly half a million Muslims, is part of the Islamic world. America today is part of the Islamic, the Hindu, the Confucian world. It is precisely the interpenetration of ancient civilisations and cultures that is the hallmark of the late twentieth century. This is our new georeligious reality. The map of the world in which we now live cannot be colour coded as to its Christian, Muslim, or Hindu identity, but each part of the world is marbled with the colours and textures of the whole.
The plurality of religious traditions and cultures challenges people in every part of the world today, including the United States, which is now the most religiously diverse country on earth. Diversity, we have here in America and here at Harvard. It is not an ideology invented by the multi-cultural enthusiasts of the left. It is the new reality of our society. Diversity, we have. But what is pluralism? First, pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with that diversity. Diversity can and has meant the creation of religious ghettoes with little traffic between or among them. In this new world of religious diversity, pluralism is not a given, but an achievement. In the world into which we now move, diversity without engagement, without a fabric of relationship, will be increasingly difficult and increasingly dangerous.
Second, pluralism will require not just tolerance, but the active seeking of understanding. Tolerance is a necessary public virtue, but it does not require Christians and Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and ardent secularists to know anything about one another. Tolerance is simply too thin a foundation for a world of religious differences. It does nothing to remove our ignorance of one another, and leaves in place the stereotype, the half truth, the fear that underlies old patterns of division and violence. In the world into which we now move, our ignorance of one another will be increasingly costly. And finally, pluralism is not simply relativism. The new paradigm of pluralism does not require us to leave our identities and our commitments behind, for pluralism is the encounter of commitments. It means holding our deepest differences, even our religious differences, not in isolation, but in relationship to one another. The language of pluralism is that of dialogue and encounter give and take, criticism and self criticism. In the world into which we now move, it is a language we will have to learn.
Whether in India or America, whether on New Hampshire Avenue or at Harvard University, the challenge for all of us today is how to shape societies, nations, neighbourhoods, and universities that now replicate and potentially may reconfigure the differences that have long divided humankind.