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It is ironic that Britain's over 400,000 Hindus have burst upon the country's consciousness with the flash of controversy, not the glitter and noise of Diwali just past. Ironic, of course, but understandable. Much of Britain's Hindu community is generally perceived as well-heeled, well-schooled, non-confrontational and intent on keeping its head below the parapet in a way the much larger Muslim community has not. Now, it has taken a shoe company's unfortunate choice in trendy brand names to put the Hindus
in a right royal conflict with the British high street.
Clarks called two of their designs - a 30-pound sterling sandal and an 89-pound sterling boot - Vishnu and Krishna, and thought it was an exercise in ethnic chic. When observant Hindus noticed the names on the shoe boxes, they protested and Clarks apologised, obscured the offending names and called it quits. But the community didn't let up and asked for the designs to be withdrawn and trashed. Clarks said it couldn't, or wouldn't. And a rather well-advertised, but much less well-attended Hindu demonstrat
on was organised. The result has been an impasse of sorts.
Hindu Demonstration
So what does it say about Hindu Britons? Only that they have remained rather true to type so far. Unlike the 1.5 million Muslims with their splendid array of 150 purpose-built mosques and feisty political presence and clout, the Hindus have just four purpose-built temples. But it is not, of course, a simple matter of adding up numbers and counting heads. So what if the Muslims have 600 mosques overall and the Hindus one-sixth the number of temples? It is more a matter of image, or rather the lack of it
o far.
For all their money - Lakshmi and Usha Mittal are the seventh richest people in Britain today. Surveys put British Hindus as notoriously better endowed with the world's goods than other Asians. Yet Hindu Britons haven't pointed up their separate religious identity in the way of their nearest economic parallel, the Jews. This is unusual in an age when sub-cultures are seen as the only way to survive the homogeneous McDonaldisation of ethnicity. But, the British establishment hasn't been made overly aware
of this minority within a minority - Hindus as part of the Asian community. Incidentally, or perhaps consequently, the community has no political voice barring perhaps the Tory politician, Baroness Sheila Flather.
Although the Hindu community is fairly small it is larger than the Jews. It may have never perceived the need to make its presence felt and it is better this way as the community is judged less potentially troublesome than the Muslims.
But, it is in matters like the offending shoes that the community's impotence is revealed. The unholy shoes were hardly worth a rath-yatra of sorts. Recently, there was a fracas with Yorkshire Water company, over the use of carbonised cattle bones as a filter, instead of the more traditional sand. The community's outrage was reportedly all the greater because the cows were imported from India. This added insult to injury. But outraged or not, there wasn't a whole lot done. A local MP, Keith Vaz, expres
ed horror. The community threatened mass disruption and then it became yesterday's news. Yorkshire Water said it couldn't do a great deal to satisfy the area's 24,000 Hindus. This despite the fact that scientists had objected as well, saying Yorkshire Water was wrong and BSE or mad cow disease might spread. The pattern of impotent rage continues five years back in time. Then, it was a demand for a France-based waste management company to remove its initials "SITA" from rubbish vans because of the unsought
divine resonance.
Lottery Funding
And so it goes on. If it's not shoes, water filters and rubbish vans, there is the controversy over lottery funding for London's Swaminarayan Temple, the largest temple outside India. Since its inauguration two years ago, the great white confection of the Swaminarayan Temple has become a London landmark and something of a celebrity draw. Prime Minister Tony Blair came visiting, various royal personages have dropped in and the Archbishop of Canterbury stopped by to propose a Christian-Hindu alliance to fi
ht racism. Some 30 new temples are being planned in the next decade and the Hindu community has emphasised its desire to build quietly and in the words of the Hindu cultural trust, give "no trouble". If the overwhelming impression is of peaceable sorts, it may be true that it is by design, not default. Or else it may be karma and there probably isn't a great deal wrong with that either.
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