Sunday School at the Chinmaya Mission in Tustin. (Elise Hennigan)

The hall is humming with conversation punctuated with laughter. Women in multihued, glittering saris, men in smartly tailored, vibrant ensembles, children tugging on legs and kicking at the carpet loiter by the entrance.

Krishnamurthy engages a friend in easy conversation and waits for his daughter, who is twelve, to come out of her Hindu class. She has spent the afternoon learning about the characters in the Mahabharata, one of the two major epics of Ancient India.

“I did not go to anything like this when I was growing up,” said Krishnamurthy, who was raised in Hassan, a suburb of Bangalore in Southern India.

The surrounding scene is Sunday school in all its glory—Hindu Sunday school, a convention that would have never happened back India. But in the predominantly Christian United States, parents who are looking to raise their children with Hindu values are increasingly taking the whole family to weekend faith-based learning classes.

“The Chinmaya Mission has been at the forefront of organizing such educational programs,” said Diane Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at the Harvard Divinity School said.

The Chinmaya Mission’s Sunday school program, Bala Vihar, started in 1995 with 10 children in the home of a volunteer. As the group grew, it took over a building in Anaheim and then, in 2003 moved the entire congregation to the two-level building in Tustin. They have continued to grow; eight satellite centers in Southern California absorb the overflow of worshippers.

Every Sunday, 800 children come to the Bala Vihar classes. They are divided into sessions—morning and afternoon—and broken down by grade level—from pre-school to 12th grade.
 
The classes fill up quickly—they’re capped at 30 children for each grade level, which means families are often turned away. Some attend classes in a satellite center and try to enroll in the main center the following year.

Programs like this do not exist in India because the temple is not central to traditional Hindu worship. Hinduism is mostly practiced individually, in front of home altars or through devotion to specific deities in temples. There is rarely a situation where Hindus come to a temple and worship as a congregation.

In India, since eighty percent of the population is Hindu, Vedic myths, values, and philosophy are part of the shared consciousness. Children hear about the great epics at home, informally, and talk about them in school or at play. 

In Krishnamurthy’s daughter’s sixth grade class in the US, it is unlikely that her classmates will relate to the Mahabharata’s lessons or values, let alone know the cast of characters. But in the context of this Sunday school, she mingles with many children her age who are learning the same lessons at home.

“These [courses] provide ways of learning about the basics of faith as well as gathering with youngsters of their age who may be quite scattered in public school contexts,” said Eck.

Rekha Acharya, the class coordinator for the center, said that one of the goals of the program is to teach children lessons that people in her generation learned just by growing up in India. Acharya emphasizes the importance of written curriculum that is uniformly used in all of the centers.

“Ours is the only program all over the world that is structured and has books. It’s almost like a little school district that we run,” Rekha Acharya, the class coordinator for the center.

There are other Hindu study groups in Southern California, but few match the level of organization of the Chinmaya mission. It is common for families to form informal discussion groups to teach children cultural and religious lessons, but such groups often lack quality materials from which to teach.

“Often, the literature that we use in our study group comes from India,” said Manju Kulkarn, a mother of two is involved in such a group, “the English is not good and the stories are not relevant to life in America,” she said.

Kulkarn said that the workbooks that come from Chinmaya mission are known to be the best. Informal study groups and structured classes in Southern California purchase the curriculum from Chinmaya mission and use them in their own courses.

It is the curriculum, developed by the resident swami of the center, Swami Ishwaranandaji, that differentiates the Bala Vihar at Chinmaya mission from other Hindu classes.

The books are written in English, and this is key. Swamis at many Hindu temples speak English, but the volunteer staff will only speak one regional dialect and as a result, attract worshippers only from that corresponding geographical region in India.

Since the Chinmaya mission only uses English, it attracts families from all regions and castes. This broad base helps to unify and strengthen a Hindu congregation.

As Hindu worship traditions in America shift from informal transmission of values to structured classes, the congregation’s relationship to their faith is also changing.

Susheel Mantha, a former Sunday school teacher for ten years, has seen how teaching children through written rather than spoken stories affects the kids’ relationship with the religion.

“The children learn more here than they would in India,” Mantha said, “they actually spend time reading the lessons. This also means that they question more.”

Children often surprise parents like Krishnamurthy, who grew up in India and do not consider themselves religious.

“When they talk to their grandparents [who remain in India], they know a lot about the ancient epics. Sometimes more than I do. Their grandparents are very pleased.”

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