Dhruv Pathak
By Dhruv Pathak
Pathak. I answered to it my whole life before I thought to ask what it meant.
My surname comes from the Sanskrit pathaka: one who recites, one who carries others along the path. Most likely, my ancestors explained the rituals to the masses but did not perform them. I always just took my dad’s word for it. He said we were “Brahmins,” so we were invited to the secret club of hidden Hindu knowledge. Or, through my teenage angst, I interpreted it as meaning we were better than non-Brahmins. This confusion about our place would echo in many of the practices I eventually inherited.
On many Sundays, sometimes Mondays (you never knew which day), we’d be at the mandir. I sat cross-legged on the red carpet. My lungs filled with incense. I watched my parents mouth prayers I couldn’t follow. I knew the rhythm: Om Namah Shivaya. The slow rocking motion, then the smooth, satisfying clockwise turn while holding the aarti flame with my brother. I knew when to pass it to the impatient auntie behind me. I knew when to stand and sit. But I couldn’t tell you what it meant, or why we couldn’t just do this at the small temple we kept in my bedroom at home.
Outside, boys tossed a football in the grass, their laughter drifting through the open doors. For a child desperate to belong, ritual stripped of meaning never stood a chance against the unquestioned joy of pickup football.
Some of us attended our mandir’s Children’s Religious-Oriented Program (CROP), our version of Sunday school, held in a repurposed church in Charlotte called the Gandhi Bhavan. The name itself is a lesson in how Hinduism works. Gandhi, a secular political figure, absorbed into spiritual significance. In one of those early-morning sessions, I remember a third-grade girl being called to the front to explain, in a high-pitched but serious voice, why Hindus should not eat marshmallows. Beef gelatin. The other kids nodded. We applauded. And then we moved on.
There is a name for the education we received: orthopraxy. Correct practice over correct belief. This emphasis in Hinduism was never accidental. For centuries, high-level theological inquiry was largely the domain of the priestly class, while others received only the functional layer. Rituals were meant to ease anxiety, ensure prosperity, and unite the community. My parents did not withhold the deeper tradition out of indifference. They passed down what had been passed to them. Orthopraxy was the inheritance. I never knew it had a name.
The gap between performance and understanding is not a personal failure, nor is it only an American one. In India, Hinduism travels through families, temples, and the rhythm of daily life, yet even there, ritual has long outpaced intentional clarity. The immigrants who arrived after 1965 were largely doctors, engineers, and scientists, not theologians. When they were stripped of the extended-family networks that informally transmitted the tradition, they improvised. The ocean crossing did not create the gap. It only removed the scaffolding that had been quietly disguising it.
On a sunny Saturday afternoon when I was twenty-four, two Jehovah’s Witnesses came to our door: a kindly older Black woman and an older Black man. They offered my mother a Watchtower pamphlet. She asked me what it was about. I tried to explain in my tragically bad half-Gujarati, half-English, interspersing the wrong Hindi idioms. My mother laughed, but we moved on. Later, as I reached to throw the pamphlet away, she stopped me. She said, switching between English, Gujarati, and Hindi, “Look, I never throw away anything with bhagvan (God) on it. You never know what he will do, and when I die, I want to be in heaven, okay?”
Heaven. Not moksha. Not svarga. Heaven, borrowed from another tradition. My mother spoke it in a house full of murtis, a framed picture of Ganesha, and a statue of the Buddha.
Scholars of diaspora studies note that Indian women abroad often supervise pujas, prepare offerings, and hold families together, even as they feel uncertain about their own place within it. My mother practiced, as best I can tell, out of ingrained orthopraxy and reverence for the unknown. The form survived her journey; the essence did not.
I did not question it, partly because questioning felt disrespectful, and partly because America in 1965 wanted engineers, not gurus. Yet within our tradition, questioning holds a unique significance.
In the Katha Upanishad, a boy named Nachiketa is inadvertently given to the god of Death, Yama, by his own father. He arrives at Yama’s door and waits three days without food. When Death finally appears, he offers the boy wealth, kingdoms, and long life. Nachiketa refuses. He wants only one thing: to know what we truly are beneath the body and the name. Yama relents and teaches him. Our tradition has kept this story alive because Nachiketa’s refusal to be distracted was itself the practice. Questioning was the entry point.
The mandir gave us every offering, tokens of reverence I cradled and dropped in turn. But no one told us our questions were holy, too. That unspoken expectation shaped how many of us approached faith.
My father prays to Ganesha. My aunt follows Lakshmi. I have family members who are Jain or at least follow Jain dietary restrictions. Some have found meaning through the Brahma Kumaris, and others through various sadhgurus. Each of them would call themselves Hindu. None of them practices the same religion in a strict sense. All of them are right. Others would say all of them are wrong.
Hinduism holds this conflict without making it an irreconcilable contradiction. Instead of handing you a three-line creed to sign, the tradition offers you a question and asks you to sit with it honestly. In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is offered three paths, not just one: jnana (knowledge), bhakti (devotion), and karma yoga (action released from its outcomes). Conflicted and unsure, Arjuna admits his helplessness. Only the individual can know the right path for themselves.
That freedom is real, yet it is also a challenge. Hinduism offers no map, no institution, no clergy to catch you when you stumble. The tradition was always meant to be personal, a dialogue with yourself. That is not a weakness in the architecture. It is the architecture.
At the center of Sanatana Dharma sits a mahavakya, a great saying: tat tvam asi, “that thou art.” Not a commandment. An invitation to recognize yourself in what you seek. I keep returning to it.
My surname means the one who carries others along the path. Yet I am still stumbling forward, hands outstretched in hope. I sit with these ancient words, letting their centuries-old questions turn over in my mind. Sometimes, unexpectedly, they comfort me.
I haven’t arrived anywhere yet. My path is about seeking, not arriving. Embracing this quest is itself the tradition. That is our Hinduism.
Dhruv Pathak is a salesman and aspiring writer based in St. Louis, originally from Charlotte, NC. He writes to better understand people and contribute to our shared humanity. Contact: pathak.d@icloud.com.
