New PDF release: Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India,

this present day, there are greater than million Hindus in the United States. yet prior to the 20th century, Hinduism was once unknown within the usa. yet whereas americans didn't write approximately "Hinduism," they speculated at size approximately "heathenism," "the faith of the Hindoos," and "Brahmanism." In Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu, Michael J. Altman argues that this isn't an insignificant sematic distinction-a case of extra politically right terminology being approved over time-but a manner that american citizens labored out their very own identities. American representations of India stated extra approximately americans than approximately Hindus.
Cotton Mather, Hannah Adams, and Joseph Priestley engaged the bigger eu Enlightenment venture of classifying and evaluating faith in India. Evangelical missionaries used photographs of "Hindoo heathenism" to elevate aid at domestic. Unitarian Protestants chanced on a kindred spirit within the writings of Bengali reformer Rammohun Roy. renowned magazines and customary university books used just like darkish, heathen, despotic India to buttress Protestant, white, democratic American identification. Transcendentalists and Theosophists imagined the contemplative and esoteric faith of India instead to materialist American Protestantism. Hindu delegates and American audio system on the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions engaged in a chronic debate in regards to the definition of faith in industrializing America.
Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu is a groundbreaking research of yank representations of faith in India earlier than the flip of the 20 th century. Altman reorients American non secular historical past and the historical past of Asian religions in the US, exhibiting how americans of all types imagined India for his or her personal reasons. The questions that lively descriptions of heathens, Hindoos, and Hindus some time past, he argues, nonetheless animate American debates today.