India Is Deeply Embedded in American Culture
By J. J. Ghosh | 14 Apr, 2026

India gave America its morning routine, its vocabulary, and its philosophy of the mind. Most Americans have no idea.

In 2018 actress Gwyneth Paltrow claimed that she’s the reason yoga is popular in the US.

As outlandish as the comment was, I’d argue that it did more good than harm.  Not only did the incident yield some high caliber memes but it led to a general discourse about yoga’s Indian roots and what it means for a privileged White woman to take credit for another culture’s 5,000 year old tradition.

But while yoga got its, it is far from the only piece of India’s culture that has had a profound impact on the US.

A substantial number of words we use on a daily basis has Sanskrit roots

India has shaped daily life in America in ways that are quieter, more diffuse, and considerably more surprising: the words we use every day, in the way we think about our minds, in the food in our cupboards, and in the philosophies that built Silicon Valley. 

Most Americans have no idea.

Speaking Sanskrit 

Let’s start with the language. 

The Beatles famously studied meditation in Rishikesh, India

English has been absorbing words from Hindi and Sanskrit for centuries, mostly during the British colonial period in India, and many of them have become so thoroughly embedded that their origins are essentially invisible.

You know the word "jungle"? That's from the Hindi word jangal, meaning wild or uncultivated land."

“Shampoo" comes from the Hindi champi, meaning a head massage with oil.  Europeans encountered the practice in India, took the concept home, changed the application from massage to hair-washing, and kept the name. 

"Bungalow" comes from the Gujarati bangalo, referring to low, thatched houses built in the Bengal style for early European settlers in India. 

"Bandana" comes from the Hindi bandhnu, a method of dyeing fabric by tying it in multiple places. 

“Dungarees" — what we now call overalls — come from the Hindi dungri, the name of a coarse cotton fabric worn by laborers in India.

"Avatar" comes from the Sanskrit avatāra, meaning "descent" — in Hinduism, a physical embodiment of a deity who incarnates on earth. The modern digital usage flips that concept entirely: instead of a god taking human form, a human sends a digital alter ego into an abstract world.

"Candy" traces back to the Sanskrit khaṇḍa, meaning a piece of sugar, which traveled through Persian, Arabic, and French before landing in your Halloween bucket.

"Thug," "loot," "guru," "karma," "mantra," "juggernaut," "pajamas," "cashmere."  All of them Indian. 

All of them are so embedded in daily English that nobody questions where they came from.

The Mindfulness Industrial Complex

Here is a sentence that would have sounded absurd twenty years ago: American corporations now pay employees to meditate at work.

Major companies including Google, Facebook, and Twitter have adopted mindfulness practices.  The mindfulness industry is now worth over $1 billion in the US, and corporations like Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, General Mills, and Aetna have joined Silicon Valley in offering mindfulness training. 

Some estimate that 20% of US companies now teach mindfulness, and many of them fund mindfulness training in public schools.  Even the US military has used mindfulness to calm soldiers before they are sent into combat.

This is, at its root, an Indian export. 

Meditation as a practice traces directly to Hindu and Buddhist traditions rooted in the Indian subcontinent.  The concept of mindfulness itself derives from the Pali word sati, meaning awareness or alertness — a term from the ancient Indian Buddhist tradition.  Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin all meditate and encourage their employees to as well. 

To be clear: the way Silicon Valley has absorbed these practices is not always faithful to their origins. 

Critics have coined the term "McMindfulness" to describe the corporate version — stripped of its spiritual context, repackaged as a productivity tool, divorced from the Buddhist teaching that suffering is a collective problem rather than an individual one to be optimized away.

A practice that was originally about compassion, community, and the dissolution of ego has been rebranded as a way to be a more focused employee.  That is, to put it gently, a creative interpretation.

But the roots are Indian.  The billion-dollar wellness industry — yes, that includes yoga as well as the meditation apps, the breathwork coaches, the corporate mindfulness retreats, and the therapists who tell you to practice present-moment awareness — all of it traces a direct line back to practices that originated in India.

“American” Food

Indian spices and flavors have been quietly reshaping the American palate for decades, well beyond the obvious presence of Indian restaurants.

Much like yoga, it’s generally been established that turmeric — now a staple of American health food culture, added to lattes, smoothies, and supplements — has been used in Indian cooking and Ayurvedic medicine for thousands of years. 

But many don’t realize India’s pioneering role in vegetarianism

Vegetarianism as a lifestyle choice — not just a dietary restriction but a conscious ethical stance — has deep roots in Hindu and Jain philosophy, with its emphasis on ahimsa, or non-harm. 

The American vegetarian and vegan movement has many parents, but Indian philosophical traditions are among the most significant.  When your colleague tells you they don't eat meat for ethical reasons, they are, knowingly or not, operating within a framework that Indian culture helped build.

Any diehard Simpsons fan will remember that when Lisa is struggling with the ethics of eating animals, it’s Apu the Indian Kwik-E-Mart owner who introduces her to his vegetarian lifestyle.

Philosophy

Perhaps the most subtle and significant influence is philosophical. 

The ideas of karma, dharma, and the interconnectedness of all things have become genuinely mainstream in American culture — not just as buzzwords but as frameworks that shape how people think about cause and effect, about purpose, about the relationship between individual action and collective consequence.

The presence of Indians in the US helped develop interest in Eastern religions and resulted in their influence on American philosophies including transcendentalism.  Swami Vivekananda's appearance at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 led to the establishment of the Vedanta Society — and with it, the introduction of Hindu philosophy into the American intellectual mainstream.  Vivekananda's speeches at the Parliament of World Religions that year are credited by historians as one of the pivotal moments in the Westernization of Eastern thought.

Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists were reading the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads.  The counterculture of the 1960s was drawn to Indian spiritual philosophy. 

The Beatles – who are British but had a major influence on American pop culture — went to Rishikesh, a city in India with a renowned center for studying meditation and yoga.  Steve Jobs famously kept a copy of the Autobiography of a Yogi — a classic of Indian spiritual literature — on his iPad, reportedly returning to it repeatedly throughout his life. 

The idea that the mind can be trained, that attention is a resource that can be cultivated, that there is a relationship between inner stillness and outer effectiveness — these are Indian ideas. They are also now the philosophical foundation of the American self-help industry, the wellness economy, and a significant portion of modern psychology.

The Credit Gap

What's striking about all of this is how rarely India gets acknowledged when Americans celebrate the things it gave them.

Yoga gets a pass — the Indian origin is at least nominally recognized, even if it's often forgotten in the context of a Wednesday morning hot vinyasa class.  But the mindfulness movement, the philosophical framework of karma and interconnectedness, the words embedded in daily speech, the spices in the cabinet — these are treated as simply American, as if they arrived fully formed with no source address.

Part of this is how cultural transmission works. 

Things get absorbed, adapted, stripped of context, and eventually become so familiar that their origins stop being interesting.  That's not always malicious. 

But it’s worth thinking about at a moment in history where anti-Indian racism in the US feels more prevalent than ever. 

Social media and far right discourse have more or less normalized calling Indian people dirty and portraying us as leeches on American society.

There’s something particularly rich about telling us to go back to where we came from while making use of our contributions to American society.

If we do leave, I can think of a few things we should take back with us.