Kurien, Prema. A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of American Hinduism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

I searched the Lafayette library catalogue for “Hinduism in the United States” because I’m interested in how all religions have found a place in the United States and shaped how we conceptualize what religion is in America. The first few returns did not catch my eye, but several chapters from Kurien’s A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of American Hinduism were highlighted in the search. One of the chapters was “The Transformation of Hinduism in the United States,” indicating an interest in historical change and immigrant life – themes that always interest me. So I then searched for the full title of Kurien’s book and went to the stacks.

Everything about the book was exciting: the cover had a great image, and I was excited about the chapter titles and the introduction to the book. The book is divided in three sections: “Popular Hinduism,” “Official Hinduism,” and “The Relationship between Popular and Official Hinduism.” These were especially intriguing because I am always interested in thinking about the complicated relationship between how everyday people practice religion and how institutions form and conceive religious practice. When I flipped through the book, I could see Kurien asked many other questions that overlapped with my interest in religion and our course, such as whether or how Hinduism is a religion and about religion and politics. I’ve written a lot about how Jews have imagined pluralism or multiculturalism, so I am interested in comparing how other groups have addressed and influenced similar conversations. If I were going to write a paper for this class using Kurien’s book, I would probably read the introduction, chapter 9 on “Challenging American Pluralism” and maybe chapter 10 on student organizations, which could be an interesting case study of Hindu life in the United States.

Near Kurien’s book, I saw a lot of other materials that looked interesting. There were several that focused on specific Hindu gods and goddesses, as well as many on various elements of practice. I was especially interested in Women’s Lives, Women’s Rituals in the Hindu Tradition, an edited volume that includes a chapter by Lindsey Harlan that describes the social context for the performance of the kinds of songs we read about, and in another textbook from the Princeton series on religions in practice called Tantra in Practice, which includes an article co-written by Robin Rinehart, who has taught about Hinduism at Lafayette and is currently the Dean of Faculty.