Lably
Skip to content

Hinduism in England

  • 6 min read
  • 6 chapters

Related on Lably

Through Hinduism, Europe and England

Lab · Class 10Nationalism EuropeLab · Class 10French RevolutionLab · Class 11Nomadic Medieval

History

Hinduism has been in England since the early 19th century. Occasionally there were Hindu scholars, philosophers, reformers and also visitors from the princely states of India. Raja Ram Mohan Roy (born in India in 1772) was founder of a Hindu reform movement in India. He was in England in 1829 to visit his Christian friends. He also had audience with King William IV. Roy died in Stapleton, Bristol four years later.

The orientalist and reformer Sir R.G. Bhandarkar visited London in 1874. In 1879 Aurobindo went to England as a boy with his two brothers to study, living in Manchester, London (St. Paul's School) and Cambridge (King's College) where he stayed until 1893. Swami Vivekananda visited England in 1895 and 1896, having addressed the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. In England Vivekananda's talk on Hindu philosophy and particularly on Vedanta deeply influenced Miss Margaret Elizabeth Noble, who was later known as Sister Nivedita.

Early Hindus in England were usually students. Rabindranath Tagore (later a Nobel Laureate) went to England in 1878, returning to India in 1880. Fifty years later Tagore was at Oxford delivering Hibbert Lectures (1930) on the Religion of Man. Ramanujan, a mathematical genius and an orthodox Hindu, spent almost five years (1914–19) at Cambridge University. Professor Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at the University of Oxford from 1939 until 1952. Hinduism had already received widespread attention in the Victorian era largely due to the work of the Theosophical Society and emergence of the new field, Indology. In 1878 Max Muller, an Indologist, delivered inaugural Hibbert Lectures at Oxford on the Religions of India.

In 1929 Dr. Hari Prasad Shastri (1882-1956), who was a highly learned teacher (Acharya) of Adhyatma Yoga in India, went to England having taught for many years in Japan at Imperial and Waseda Universities and then in China also as a professor of philosophy. Hari Prasad Shastri founded Shanti Sadan (temple of inner peace) in London. Trevor Leggett, an English Judo teacher, met Shastri in 1936. He was deeply influenced by Hari Prasad Shastri's yoga teachings.

In 1935 Paramahansa Yogananda visited England, returning from the USA. In London he addressed a large meeting at Caxton Hall introduced by Sir Francis Younghusband. He again visited England in 1936 addressing more meetings and especially a large gathering at Whitefield Congregational Church, organised by the British National Council of the World Fellowship of Faiths. A Self-Realization Fellowship Centre in London was formed after Yogananda's departure. In his autobiography Yogananda commented that the 'English tenacity has an admirable expression in a spiritual relationship'.

There have been three waves of migration of Hindus to England. The first wave was before India's Independence in 1947. Before the Second World War Hindu migration to England was minuscule and largely temporary. During the post-war era, economic conditions compelled many Indians including Hindus to leave their country in search of better opportunities. The fact that Indians, as Commonwealth citizens, didn't require a visa to enter or live in the United Kingdom was a factor. In the early 1960s, in order to save the NHS, the Conservative Health Minister The Rt Hon Enoch Powell recruited a large number of doctors including Hindus from the Indian sub-continent

The second wave of migration occurred in the 1970s after Idi Amin's expulsion of Gujarati and other Asians (who were British Overseas Citizens) from Uganda. Initially, Hindu Immigration was limited to Punjabis and Gujaratis. Later Hindu communities from other regions of the Indian sub-continent and countries like Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Mauritius and Fiji could be found in England.

The last wave of migration began in the 1990s with two types of people settling in England – Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka and professionals including doctors and software engineers from India.

Leicester's Chanda Vyas became the first female Hindu priest, or purohita, to conduct ceremonies including weddings and funerals, in the United Kingdom, conducting ceremonies in both the English and Gujarati languages.

Sign in to keep reading

5 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

More in Religion

PinyinRomanization scheme for Standard ChineseHindusAdherents of HinduismTraditional Chinese charactersStandardized set of Chinese charactersLiteral translationWord-for-word translation of a textReligionSocial-cultural systemTheologyStudy of the nature of deities and religious beliefs