The making of the Hindu in Australia: a diasporic narrative

Contributed articles presented at "International Conference on the Hindu Diaspora", held at Concordia University, Montreal, in August 1997

Hindu temples in the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict : capture and excess

Developing Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of territorialization and the apparatus of capture, this article explores the role that Sri Lankan Hindu temples have played in the formation of ethnicity and ethnic conflict. Analyzing three contemporary events, the article introduces ways in which many different Sri Lankans (Sinhalese and Tamil) interpret their country's predicament and seek to resolve or prolong it. The events also reveal how scholarship becomes entangled in ethnic nationalism. I then examine in greater detail a village in which temple construction was a critical feature of identity formation during the creation of Sri Lanka as a colonialist and capitalist bureaucratic space. Through this account, I argue that the formation of polarized ethnicity in Sri Lanka is the product of multiple refractive forces, of which temples are one, and not the end result of a singular colonialist bureaucratic agency.

Thaipusam in Malaysia : a Hindu festival misunderstood?

[No Abstract]

Sustainable consumption as a means to self-realization: a Hindu perspective on when enough is enough

In this paper, I investigate the religious notion of self-realization or self-actualization in the context of sustainability, and argue that sustainability is the means to this end. I am particularly interested in Hindu perspectives on self-realization or the Purusharthas. The Purusharthas provide an interesting sustainability critique because they consider the satisfaction of material want as an important step to self-actualization; the reconciliation of want and need is a fundamental sustainability tension. The issue of growing want is doubtless an important one, given the rapidly growing middle classes in the developing world that aspire to Western material dreams, as illustrated by the case of Delhi. The Purusharthas may be seen to give consumption legitimacy; however, I argue that it is the selective understanding and institutionalization of the religious message that causes the sustainability problem. Viewed in their entirety, the Purusharthas provide the correct prescriptions for the sustainable enjoyment of want, and take the adherent beyond sustainability into greater transcendence or self- awareness.

Uneasy alliances: Traditional dynamics in women's relationships in urban Hindu society (1910-2010)

This paper argues that in spite of the phenomenal economic progress made by India, the urban Indian Hindu woman still faces major challenges and hindrances in charting the course of her existence, some aspects of which are still located within a very traditional discourse. Women of particular age groups combine highly competitive careers in medicine, management, engineering, and other demanding professions with marriage and motherhood, while simultaneously juggling the eternal roles of the docile, hardworking daughter-in-law and the dutiful daughter. It is, yet again, another sacrifice of individual needs and time on the part of the urban Indian Hindu woman within a discourse that imposes constant adjustment and compromise from one's birth as a female child. The economic context might appear to be very different in this century, and the socio-cultural discourse may appear to have changed along with it, but the expectations and the status quo of the urban Hindu woman has not changed very much, given the underlying historical and socio-cultural discourse that is still extant.