HINDU AT HEART
Education, Faith, and What it Means to Belong in America
Hindu at Heart explores what it means to grow up Hindu in America — and how public education has shaped the story of belonging for generations of Hindu American families and communities. Drawing on archival research, personal narrative, and in-depth interviews with Hindu American families, it traces the overlooked entanglement between faith, immigration, and schooling in the American story.
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Who should read this book?
Hindu American families, students, and communities who want language, history, and context for what they have long sensed but rarely seen named.
Immigrants and diaspora communities of any background who have navigated the gap between home and school and wondered why that gap exists and where it came from.
Educators and school leaders who care about whose perspectives are present in their curriculum and want practical tools for thinking about that more honestly.
Anyone curious about how American public education was built, what assumptions it carries, and how every wave of immigrants has been shaped by, and has shaped, that system.
Readers who believe that understanding another tradition's way of seeing is both a civic skill and a human one.
Anyone who has felt that dominant conversations about diversity and belonging were missing something and wondered what a different framework might look like.
About the Book
What does it mean to grow up Hindu in America and how have schools shaped that story for generations of Hindu American families?
Hindu at Heart: Education, Faith, and What it Means to Belong in America reimagines the story of American public education through an unexpected lens: how Hinduism and Hindus have figured in its long project of shaping its citizens and negotiating American identity. From early missionary-influenced textbooks that cast Hinduism as antithetical to civilization and democracy to the contemporary classrooms where Hindu American children encounter modern expressions of those inherited ideas, Indu Viswanathan traces the overlooked entanglement between faith, belonging, and schooling.
Drawing on archival research, personal narrative, and in-depth interviews with Hindu American families, Viswanathan uncovers how the public school has long been a stage for America’s encounters with the “other,” and how Hindu Americans are participating in and strengthening its democratic promise. Moving between historical analysis and glimpses of homes and classrooms, the book listens deeply to those who have rarely been heard, showing that the story of Hindus in American education is one of striving, dialogue, and contribution.
At once scholarly and accessible, Hindu at Heart offers a new way of understanding the Hindu American experience and beyond: the moral purpose of education itself—to listen to each other, act with integrity, and co-create a more pluralist and brave democracy.