New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America (review)

In New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America, Khyati Y. Joshi presents a groundbreaking work at the intersection of education, Asian American studies, and religious studies that explores the identity development of second-generation Indian Americans. She highlights issues of ethnicity, race, and religion, each contributing to both the “seed” and the “soil” for the formation of “new roots in America’s sacred ground.” She asks, what does it mean to be second-generation Indian American, to inherit “seeds” of already-adapting religious and cultural traditions but to be “raised in the echo chamber of American religious vocabulary” as well as American racial formation (22)? To answer this question, Joshi interviewed forty-one subjects in Boston and Atlanta. Her findings demonstrate the constitutive roles of race and religion in U.S. life, allowing her not only to highlight the voices and experiences of Indian Americans in particular but also gesture toward policy and educational reform in light of these experiences. Joshi’s ultimate goal is to bring religion to the fore in educational curriculum and training in order to develop educational environments that protect and nurture religious minority students as well as responsibly prepare all students for the religiously diverse world in which they live.

Joshi presents the bulk of her argument in four chapters organized around her four main concepts: ethnicity and ethnoreligious community, lived religion, race, and religious oppression. Each chapter provides theoretical and historical background, Joshi’s applications and interventions, and examples from her subjects’ experiences. For ethnicity, Joshi draws theoretically from but also intervenes in works on ethnicity and generation, particularly those based on white ethnics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States. She theorizes ethnic identity not as static but always historically informed and dynamic, and agrees with previous scholarship that religion plays a crucial role in its development. Religion, however, does not simply play a functional role for “ethnic maintenance.” For Joshi’s subjects, religion was a part of their individual understandings of the world and of “things transcendent.” This leads to Joshi’s use of David Hall’s concept of “lived religion.” Drawing from Hall and other religious studies scholars who highlight “religion on the ground,” such as ethnographer Robert A. Orsi, Joshi explores how religion is actually lived in her subjects’ lives, not simply how theologians and religious leaders define the religious traditions. She finds that her subjects experience religion in four notable ways: moral direction, search for knowledge, ritual practice with family, and transnational experiences of imagining and traveling to India.

Race becomes a key part of her subjects’ experiences, particularly as it intersects with both ethnicity and religion. Indeed, race distinguishes her subjects from the white ethnics of previous scholarship and their assimilation patterns. Drawing on Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s theory of racial formation, along with other work on race in Asian American studies, particularly in history and the social sciences, Joshi outlines the history of racial categorization of Indian Americans in the United States, the ways that race becomes conflated with religion (the “racialization of religion”), and her subjects’ encounters with certain forms of racism. Racial oppression is related to but different from religious oppression, however, which Joshi argues in her fourth conceptual chapter. Joshi illustrates how oppression occurs along religious dimensions: an established Christian hegemony in the United States allows Christianity to define normalcy, results in other religious traditions being misrepresented or delegitimized, and manifests in institutionalized differential treatment of non-Christians, including harassment and even explicit violence. In this chapter, and the previous ones, Joshi demonstrates her arguments with rich examples from her interviews. To complete these vivid illustrations, she ends with three case studies to provide fuller accounts to round out the “snapshots” presented earlier.

The strengths of this...