<p>A lot more than 1/3 of the population of India is Hindu. The figure one sees most often is about 80%, although there is a lot of politics in the definition of what is Hindu (e.g., Hindu politicians will count Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jainists as “Hindus”, although those groups probably define themselves separately). There is no formal hierarchy in Hinduism to define clearly what is and is not Hindu, and I suspect the term means even less than “Christian”, which covers a gamut from Albanian Orthodox to Catholic to Presbyterian to Methodist to Pentacostal to Latter Day Saints. In other words, a lot of variation even before you start looking at variation WITHIN the identifiable groups. But under any definition, Hindus are certainly the vast majority of the population of India, with Muslims representing about half of the rest. (Although India’s formal name is Bharat, inside and outside of India the term “Hindustan” gets used a lot more often.)</p>
<p>However, some regions of India are a lot less Hindu than others. Kerala, where a lot of ethnic Indian families around here came from, is about 60% Hindu and 20% Christian. Punjab has a large Sikh population. Religious minorities, especially Christians, may feel relatively more comfortable emigrating to the US, as may also be true of families including different religious backgrounds. Also, thanks to the way the British Empire worked, and to the normal pattern of sophisticated trade centers on the coasts vs. more traditional interior, religious minorities are probably overrepresented in the more affluent and educated strata of Indian society, which probably also means that ethnic Indian kids in college here are disproportionately non-Hindus (although plenty are Hindus, too, of course).</p>
<p>There is a movie, American Desi, that I heard about from a Pakistani law student a few years ago, and that represents a pretty Indo-centric view of “ABCDs” (American Born Confused Desis) (“Desi” is a term that, among other things gets used to generalize all people from the Indian subcontinent). I gather that it is pretty popular among Indian and Pakistani kids. It is a pretty sweet, innocuous comedy about a diverse bunch of American-born and immigrant ethnic Indians at a US college, and the difficulties they have deciding how “ethnic” to be, as well as getting along with each other, and dealing with the fact that many of the other students don’t understand that they are not a monolithic group. It’s an Indian film, so of course the moral of the story is “India is great!” (don’t worry, America is great in the movie, too), but the nuances along the way feel about as true to life as you’re going to get in a glossy teen movie. (Cool soundtrack, too. It sort of straddles the line between Bollywood and Hollywood filmmaking styles – no one bursts into song, but there are some substantial music-video type interludes.) Anyway, it’s not a waste of 2 hours, you could probably get it from netflix, and it probably gives a better short introduction to the issues some Indian-American kids may deal with than reading up on Hinduism would.</p>