The New American Ganges: Hinduism and Health in American Religious History

Today's post comes from our newest contributor to the blog, Michael J. Altman! Michael is a Ph.D. student in American Religious Culture at Emory University, where he researches the American encounter with Hinduism, and more broadly constructions of the category of the sacred in American religious history. Michael's first post, below, concerns the connections made in the 19th century between Asian religions and the spread of disease, versus more contemporary conceptions of the connections of Asian religions and health. Welcome to Michael! You can also follow Michael on Twitter: @MichaelJAltman.

Cholera, India, and Religious Epidemiology in America

Michael J. Altman

Today is the end of the Kumbh Mela—a Hindu festival held every three years—which means millions of Hindus are bathing in the Ganges river at the City of Haridwar to cleanse themselves of their wrong doing in order to achieve moksha (liberation from the cycle of rebirth). What does this have to do with religion in America? Or American history, even?

Glad you asked.

I recently came across a handful of articles in the Chicago Medical Examiner, and a few other medical journals from the late nineteenth century which argued that this same ritual bathing at Haridwar would lead to a cholera outbreak in the United States.

As one 1868 article from John C. Peters, M.D. of New York puts it:

“There is a great nursery of cholera in the northern part of Hindostan, at the foot of the Himalaya Mountains, viz., at HURDWAR, where the thrice sacred Ganges emerges from the mountains…The largest of all the Hindoo festivals and fairs is held at Hurdwar every year…but every twelfth year, which is particularly holy, as man as 1,500,000 to 3,000,000 of devotees and traders are often crowded together…As a matter of course, cholera is often brought to Hurdwar; often originates there; and is frequently carried away from it.”

The article then goes on to explore how various 19^th century epidemics of cholera began at Haridwar and then spread to Europe. While many of the explanations focus on trade routes, a lot of them also focus on religious practices as the spreading disease. Hindu pilgrims spread the disease throughout the subcontinent and then Muslim pilgrims spread it across Russia and the Near East. As the story goes, it then spreads to southern Europe, then to Western Europe and then possibly to the United States.

The relationship between Hinduism, Islam, and southern (Catholic) Europe to the spread of cholera brings three points to mind regarding American religious history.

First, the connection between “superstitious” or “heathen” religious practice and disease highlights the relationship on the other hand between Christianity and rational Western medicine. All of the writers in these journals doctors and Protestants and the two are intimately connected.

Second, the spread of disease tracks along a religious/cultural/ethnic hierarchy from the lowest, “heathen India,” through the Muslim Middle East and Catholic Italy to Christian Europe to the highest, democratic and Protestant America, that reflects the ethnological theory of the period. At this point in American history, non-Christian religions were not only encountered through a missionary lens but also through this pseudo-scientific, ethnic, and racial lens as well. Furthermore, this religiously flavored epidemiology is another way of thinking through the connection Thomas Nast makes in his cartoon “The New American Ganges” between Catholic ritual and Indian religion.

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Finally, these articles provide the background against which later nineteenth century encounters with Asian religions in America would occur. Vivekananda and members of the Brahmo Samaj could have moderate success at the World’s Parliament of Religions because their Hinduism looked nothing like this ritualized, disease spreading, “superstition.”

A century later, Asian religions would provide resources for new forms of spiritual and religious healing. That move from disease to health reveals a lot about the success of the turn of the twentieth century Indian gurus like Vivekananda and his 1960s progeny. Now, ideas about health and Hinduism in America tend more toward ideas about Transcendental Meditation than communicable diseases like cholera.