Transgressing the Sacred-Secular, Private-Public Divide

by Bandana Purkayastha

This fall, like the previous twenty-two years of my residence in the US, I spent a weekend celebrating Durga Puja with other Bengalis in Connecticut and Massachusetts. This sarbojanin puja (worship by a collective) is mostly celebrated in public spaces in Kolkata, although, prior to the Independence of India in 1947, there were more home-based Durga pujas. The partition of India into Hindu and Muslim majority nation-states led to massive relocations of people and the destruction of the social and economic networks that supported home-based pujas. In independent India, with a few exceptions, people of different localities contribute money for their sarbojonin Durga puja. Intricately decorated bamboo and cloth edifices (“pandals”) are built on public roads, and the images of the goddess and her family are worshipped over four days.

We have managed to enact the “public” part of this puja in the US. We organize it in church halls or school auditoriums that we rent for a weekend. We decorate the hall on Friday evening, to make it, temporarily, a Bengali space. We play Bengali music, women and men set up the images for the next day. The “priests” are people from the community. The last “priest” was a medical doctor, the current “priest” is a scientist. Many years ago, one “priest” wanted to restrict the “helpers of the priest” to Brahmins only.¹ This "priest" was promptly replaced by common acclaim by another person who would not make such caste distinctions. The pujas are performed on Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon. The puja is lead by a male priest; the “stree achar” (tr: women’s rituals) are led by women. On Saturday evening, we organize cultural programs; Bengalis (Hindus and Muslims) perform in and attend this event. On Sunday afternoon, people ritually embrace each other, younger people touch the feet of elders. Plaintive songs of farewells are played on the audio system. Then the decorations dismantled, the images are replaced in their wooden containers and transported back to someone’s house for safe keeping till the next year.

I have been asked why Bengalis choose to hold their pujas outside temples, even when there are temples nearby. There are cultural and spiritual reasons for this. First, the image of the demon slaying Durga does not fit easily with the benign gods and goddesses featured in most Hindu temples in the US. Second, Bengalis are non-vegetarian, and no compromise needs to be made when ordering festive foods to accommodate the sensibilities of vegetarian Indians who predominate in US temples. Third, and this is the core principle, holding the puja in a neutral “public space” makes it easy for Bengali Muslims (from India and Bangladesh) to come to the cultural function because it is not in a Hindu designated place. Some Muslim families come to the pujas; some help out preparing the Prasad. Muslim and Hindu Bengalis still share a culture and keeping the avenues open to foster this relationship is of higher value than building larger and larger temples and mosques. Thus the boundaries between “sacred spaces” and secular ones (temples vs. school or church halls), between who is Hindu and who is Muslim, who is Indian and who is Bangladeshi, who is Brahmin and who is not, is diluted in this form of doing religion.

This event should not be interpreted as a triumph of multiculturalism in modern USA, a testimony to religious freedom in the West that is the staple of discourses about clashing civilizations. While we have been able to work out ways of sharing space for Durga Puja, with churches or schools, this is essentially a private arrangement between principled parties. This year we allowed a Christian group to hold their prayers on Sunday morning in the hall we rented because they had no place to go. But this sharing is not a general trend. We have also been asked to leave another facility where officials were unhappy about the “smell of curry” after we had our event dinners. More important, unlike the well-recognized holiday to celebrate Christmas, we have no right to take a day off (unless we use one of our “personal” days) to celebrate this much-loved community event on the actual days according to the Bengali calendar. As I discuss later, we have only managed to negotiate interstitial social spaces to practice our religion.

I begin my essay with these observations because I had not expected to encounter any barriers to living my religion when I moved to the US from India. I was brought up in a non faith-based, non-ritualistic Hindu tradition that does not require regular gathering at any temple, mediation of priests, any specific set of rituals, or adherence to a set of rules defined in a book. My way of doing religion is to live according to a core principle I share with other Hindus. We all acknowledge the centrality of dharma -- a word implying the essential nature of things (as a noun), and a moral duty (as a verb). The religion of humans, manava dharma (or in Bengali colloquial terms, manusher dharma) is about understanding and practicing how to become more human by getting in touch with the divine in ourselves. This is not divinity in the sense one becomes a superior being, it means the individual has to cultivate and express those qualities that take her/him beyond narrowly defined physical and social selves. Dharma implies living life in a way that reflects our connectedness to a greater essence/energy/universe called Brahman (Nirbedananda 1979).²

Since I do not need any exclusivist congregation to practice Hinduism, I had not thought about the many ways in which socio-political rules can impinge on religious freedoms till I came to the US. Having come up against such boundaries I am very conscious of the way in which my religious freedom is impeded. In order to explain these boundaries, I begin with an overview of the practices I grew up and the principles I expect to live by. My account of being a Hindu is inflected with the easy cosmopolitan and radical intellectual culture of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) where I grew up. It is also inflected with the history, politics, and culture of Bengal, the cultural region that is now split between India (West Bengal) and Bangladesh. I conclude with an account of trying to fit Hinduism within the religious landscape of the US.

Blurring the sacred and secular

Naming a religion often invests it with a degree of exclusivity. The Hinduism I practice (in India and the US) has blurred boundaries; it does not fit neatly into bureaucratic definitions of religion. My parents did not believe in religious orthodoxies.³ My father was involved in the nationalist uprising against the British. Like his peers in the movement, he rejected class and caste based distinctions because he saw such rejection as a valued political principle for post independence Indian society. His political principles overlapped with my mother’s family’s way of doing religion. They followed the teachings of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda-Sarada order (also known as Ramakrishna Mission) ever since my grandfather received dikhsha (initiation as a follower) from Sri Ma Sarada. This movement had begun to influence Bengali religious ethos since the late 19th century, challenging all forms of religious, caste, and gender exclusiveness.

Ramakrishna was a Brahmin, his principle spokesperson Vivekananda was Sudra; Vivekananda, and Ramakrishna’s wife Sarada Ma, and their followers accepted people of all different castes as their disciples. Ramakrishna’s Hinduism is pithily expressed in one homily: that which quenches our thirst is called water or pani or jal, religion is one, people give it different names. Vivekananda insisted on putting service to people above rituals and dogmas. This idea of service to people emanates from the fundamental principle of dharma, it is a way to realize and link one’s life to the greater universe of life forms, to be a part of it.

This overlap of “secular and sacred” principles led my parents to reject rituals and customs that maintain distinctions and hierarchies. My sisters and I received very little formal exposure to faith-based ritualistic forms of religion, yet we were well aware of multiple ways of doing religion, within the same family. We had a set of “thakurs” (a sex neutral term for gods and goddesses) on a shelf at home. These thakurs—a panopoly of deities, real people like Ramakrishna, Sarada Ma and Vivekananda, our grandparents, as well as inanimate objects like a tub of Ganga water--were mainly used by a bachelor uncle for his daily rituals. My father often recited from the Upanishads (in Sanskrit) at dawn. Although knowledge of Sanskrit and the Vedas or Upanishad are the purview of Brahmin males in more orthodox families, we just picked up these gender-neutral prayers because we heard him so regularly. When we were little children we also accompanied my maternal grandmother on her visits to Belur Math, the main center of the Ramakrishna Mission, to meet the monks and attend the evening aarti at the temple. This temple, as Swami Tattwajnananda (2001) has described, is situated on the banks of the river Ganga (Hooghly) is explicitly syncretic in design, combining the architecture of Buddhism (the gate), Islam (the domes), Hindu (the circulating paths leading to the center) and Christianity (the congregation hall). Among the hundreds of books we possessed were children’s stories about the Ramakrishna movement and children’s versions of the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata that many Hindus venerate. My mother had a healthy disrespect for Rama (the hero of Ramayana) for abandoning his wife Sita for political expediency, so, unlike many other Hindus, we never thought of these books as “sacred.” Thus, without any overt lessons about challenging caste and gender distinctions, our parents managed to impart a series of humane principles to us through their everyday practice. ⁴

Outside our family, we encountered many other ways of doing Hinduism. Some of our Hindu neighbors practiced more ritual-dependent forms of Hinduism and they organized regular pujas in their homes. And, through the year, we were drawn to the public pujas. In Bengal, all the public pujas focus on female deities.4 The year began with worshipping goddess Saraswati, the goddess of learning, in spring. She is widely worshipped in individual homes as well. Little children are formally introduced to writing after a ritual called hathe-khari (literally, chalk-in- hand). Older students give their books to the priest who put them in front of the goddess. The books, musical instruments, and other tools of learning were worshipped as an extension of the deity. The biggest and most elaborate was Durga puja (the one I described in the previous section). In preparation for this puja, skilled craftsmen of Kumartuli (a specialized caste of people) in Kolkata create these images of the goddess and her family for months. (Depending on the resources of the group that commissions the images, each image can be double or triple the size of the average human). In Hindu mythology, Goddess Durga is the embodiment of strength and power. According to a legend when one particular asur (demon) got too strong for the male gods they collectively appealed to Durga to vanquish the demon. They showered her with their most potent weapons and she left to confront the evil force that was overpowering the gods. The form of Durga that is worshipped in Bengal represents this tableaux: Durga, standing on her attendant lion, her ten hands carrying different weapons, with the virile Asur, who has partly emerged from the body of a buffalo, pinned down by the force of her trident, semi-prone at her feet. This tableaux also shows Durga’s children: Lakshmi the goddess of wealth, Saraswati the goddess of learning, Kartik the god of war, and Ganesh, the god of benevolence. Each deity is shown with the animals and plants associated with them, symbolizing a deep environmental message about the interconnected-ness of the universe.⁵

Durga puja was popularized in Bengal from the 19th century as part of a radical transformation of society (Kumar 1990). In order to break away from the caste control of Brahmins who presided over the “sacred precincts” of temples, Durga pujas were organized to create a space for people of all backgrounds. To this day, with rare exceptions, Durga is never a permanent deity in a temple in Bengal. Her clay image is created before each puja, ritually invested with divinity, and, at the end of five days the image is divested of divinity and immersed in the waters of a river as a symbolic immersion with the core elements of the universe. Even though the priest is a Brahmin, Durga’s worship includes roles for people of different castes (those who make the image, those who provide the materials for the puja, the music makers, the artists etc.) and different groups of males and females. The puja requires waters from five rivers and earth from various locations including the doorstep of prostitutes. Symbolically and functionally the puja emphasizes three messages: the connections of humans to other animate and inanimate things in the universe; the need to transcend socially created hierarchies in order to recognize interconnections with all human beings; and, the need to understand that “gods” are imagined by humans, and these gods are merely reflective of an undifferentiated Brahman. In a quiet way, this puja has contributed to dilution of gender, class, and caste boundaries among Bengalis.

During Durga Puja, each neighborhood and club in Kolkata tries to outdo one another through the form, material, and beauty of the images and pandals they commission. The city shuts down for the several days, all schools and workplaces are closed for a couple of weeks. As young children, we received new clothes from relatives to wear each day (a different outfit in the morning and one at night if we were lucky); our parents bought clothes for our younger relatives as well as a large number of “needy” people. Like thousands of people who tour the city in their finery viewing images of the goddess, we were allowed to go out in groups, without adult supervision, from a fairly young age; so Durga puja also represented a symbolic rite of passage towards adulthood . After the dashami (the fourth day of these public celebrations), these images are taken off in a procession and immersed in the river Hooghly. The pandals are left standing for one more week for celebrating Lakshmi puja. After the ritual immersion of Lakshmi, the whole edifice is dismantled. Between dashami and Kali Puja, families and friends visited each other for bijoya, a ritual time for renewing ties of love and caring; young people formally visit and ritually touch the feet of all their older relatives and close family friends. Each family prepares special foods to welcome the visitors. Thus the celebrations stretch for several days.

The religious celebrations would end with a bang, literally, with Kali Puja in November. Kali is the dark naked goddess, who is worshipped with a garland of skulls around her neck. Associated with the Tantra tradition, Kali has become “the” patron goddess of Bengal. Her temple in Kolkata is one of the significant points of pilgrimage for Hindus. Kali also represents strength, power of a more fierce, unrestricted variety than Durga’s power. Kali puja means a night or two of incessant fireworks. We would light our own silent sparklers on our rooftop, while the more intrepid young males would ignite noise makers on the streets.

However, our religious awareness did not stop at any exclusive Hindu boundary. The religious landscape of Bengal consists of several public celebrations, patterns of worship within religious buildings (temples, mosques, churches, gurudwaras, fire temples, viharas etc) and, depending on the religion, home-based rituals. We grew up in an area where Hindus, Muslims, and Christians lived in close proximity. The roads in the neighborhoods were not exclusively “Hindu” public spaces. There was a mosque behind our house, and we awoke, every day, to the sounds of the muezzin calling devout Muslims to prayer at dawn. Shia processions to commemorate the deaths of Imam Hussain during Muharrum were very much a part of our regular life. Like Durga Puja, roads were closed to make way for the bigger processions. Eid prayers, greetings and meetings, often spilled onto the streets. Firecrackers during Shab-e-barat were as much a part of our taken-for-granted world as the fire-crackers during Kali puja.⁶ So too with Christian celebrations; we were very used to hearing church bells on Sundays, and a crèche set up at the end of our street during Christmas.

We grew up assuming it was natural for people of all religions to have the formal time and access to public spaces to celebrate. We shared in these varied festivities because people generously shared their special foods with us. We looked forward to eating mutton biriyani during Eid and cake and special cookies during Christams. Since we went to an English medium school with Muslim, Parsi, Jewish, Christian, and Sikh children, we were often invited to partake of their feasts. I remember being amazed at the order and organization of a Sikh langar when hundreds of people are fed, served with a great deal of humility and respect, by members of the community irrespective of their economic status. By the time I was in college I had gone to Christian church services, the Golden Temple (the main Sikh gurudwara in Amritsar), Buddhist temples, and the places commemorating a number of Sufi saints such as Hazrat Nizamuddin’s tomb in Delhi (also see Sengupta 2006).⁷

Hinduism: Working out a Personal Version.

I discovered Hindu philosophy as I read Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s essays on religion, humanism, and ultimately his translations of the Upanishads, Kabir, Baul songs, and Sikh bhajans during my Bengali literature class in high school (Tagore 1961a). During my years at Presidency College, I had the opportunity to travel to many corners of the India for field work, thus experiencing India’s immense religious and cultural diversity. ⁸ Later, I was fortunate to encounter a remarkable network of college students, physicists, university and management professors, corporate executives, homemakers and a monk at Vivekananda Nidhi; an organizaton which had embarked on a unique study and activism project to rekindle a focus on holistic values, which were deeply ecological in character, to get beyond narrow religious boundaries.

We studied religious texts--Hindu, Buddhist, Zen, Islam, Sikhism, Christian—and a range of other books such as Fritjhof Capra’s treatise on the links between the world of quantum mechanics and subatomic particles/waves and Asian philosophical thinking (Yuktananda and Guha 1989). These varied experiences helped me develop a more nuanced understanding of the idea of dharma as connectedness, of the Upanishadic principle ‘Tvat Tamasi’ (“That art Thou”) which implies being one with Brahman (Nirbedananda and Manchester 1957). I also discovered that these principles, expressed in gender and caste neutral language, do not identify any religious, gender or caste boundaries that exclude anyone from its purview. It was equally clear that at any given time, Hinduism represents a dynamic constellation of diverse perspectives and practices on living dharma.

Tagore’s perspective (as opposed to the writings of other religious scholars) not only distill the highly erudite Upanishads, but, breaking away from a narrow, rigid “Vedic” perspective, it draws from “folk” sources to explain the essence of dharma. Among his principle sources were the Bauls, often uneducated men and women, Tagore was equally drawn to Sufi saints and Sikh seers. In his collection of essays, Religion of ‘Man’ (Manusher dharma/religion of humans in its original Bengali), Tagore emphasizes the connections between the abstract Brahman and the sacredness of everyday life, and about conscious, joyful living. Such joyful living brings us closer to sat-chit-ananda (knowledge-consciousness-bliss). Individuals and groups choose different paths for achieving this state of joyful living. A Hindu male in a village in India might acknowledge his ties to Brahman by praying to the rishis (seers), devas (gods), pitri (forefathers), nri (human) and bhuta (plants and animals) each day, while the scientific- minded cosmopolitan woman might dwell on the image of an universe of swirling atoms, which, in spite of the apparent chaos, represents connections and stability (Tagore 1961b, 1913a).

Most of all, Tagore spoke out repeatedly against barriers imposed by religions, narrow nationalisms, ethnocentrism, racism, casteism, gender dichotomies, and other such social exclusionary forms, even when they were disguised as “freedom.” Tagore argued, rather than focusing on “timeless traditions” or reifying rituals conducted in specially designated spaces (“bhajan pujan sadhan aradhana, somostho thak pore, andhokare ghorer kone keno achesh ore? /Why do you sit in a dark corner by yourself chanting these prayers?), humans are invited, each day, to participate in a joyful universe (“jogote anando jogge aamaer nimartran”). It is up to the individual to develop the ever-searching soul of a bride who seeks her union with her lover/destiny/god amidst the mundane routines of each day (“poran aamar, bodhur beshe chole, chiro swamayambora”/my soul, dressed as a bride, travels forever for her union with her chosen lover). (Tagore 1913b).

In sum, there are four aspects of Hinduism that grew into the central pillars of my religious life. First, I value the blurred religious boundaries, the “tradition” drawn from Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and other religions. It teaches, above all, to value connectedness with the continuum of “living” and “non-living” aspects of the universe. Second, overlapping with the first point, this religious framework teaches an individual to live with diversity. In religious matters it talks about four ways of attaining dharma, depending on a persons’ emotional and intellectual bent and her/his stage of life: an individual may follow the path of faith and worship (bhakti-yoga), or one of regulated practice (raj-yoga), or through excellence in work (karma-yoga), or through the acquisition of knowledge (gyana-yoga). And I am expected to understand and appreciate the fact that these paths may characterize any religion; hierarchies and ethnocentric thinking about the superiority of my religion is better than your religion has no place in this scheme. Third, I value the amalgam of lessons from female and male seers, valorizing principles such as care, compassion, and sobriety which are associated with feminine principles, over hyper-rational, glamorous, masculinitist religious traditions (Nandy 1993). I value the gender and sexuality transcending symbolism of ardhanariswara, the merging of feminine and male principles in each person. Fourth, it is a religion embedded in a life of pleasures and pains, it requires no edifices, no gatekeepers, no separation of sins and good deeds, no rejection of the pleasure or diverse experiences of life. And it expects us to change during different stages of our lives—as students, as people forming families, as householders transferring family responsibilities to others, and in the last stage, as individuals who disengage from all family obligations--recognizing the dynamism of humans in a changing universe. As these four points indicate, this version of religion is more universal than reflective of any exclusively bounded religion. This is what makes my description of "religion" similar to Selina Jamil's (see her chapter on growing up in Bangladesh) though we are from different countries, and, we outwardly belong to different “religions.”

Reconstructing Religion in the US.

Since I was not brought up in a faith-based religious tradition, I expected my migration to another secular democracy—the United States--to be a non-issue in terms of my ability to practice Hinduism. I was aware of the Ramakrishna Mission centers—Vedanta Societies--that had been gradually established after Vivekananda’s visit to the US at the turn of the 20th century (Burke 1986, Radice 1999, Sen 2000). I knew there were some temples in New England, but I did not feel any need to visit temples regularly. I did not expect to become so conscious of a bounded religious identity that would constantly define me, irrespective of my own beliefs and practices. As a sociologist, I can identify several factors, some arising from the US mainstream and others from practices among sections of the Indian American community, which contribute to the kinds of boundaries I experience as a Hindu in America.

The limits of US secularism: I recall realizing, with great surprise that I no longer had religious holidays for my events in the US. Without ever giving it much thought I simply assumed that, as a secular country, the US would provide the same institutionalized opportunities for minorities to practice their religion. I was influenced by the Indian version of secularism which allows diverse groups equal freedom (see Bhargava 2005 for a discussion on different kinds of secularisms).

Despite being a society where the vast majority of people are Hindus (much as US has a vast majority of Christians), small groups in India--Muslims who make up 10-15% of the population along with Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Zorashtrians, Jains who make up less than 2% of the population each--get holidays to follow their practices. And they have the right to worship in designated places or on the streets, follow their religio-cultural practices surrounding births, marriages, and inheritances. For instance, when people die they can cremate, bury, or leave their dead for the birds. That lack of insistence on a homogenized set of rules for all religions provides a great deal more freedom than the assimilating framework in the US where people are forced to live according to the organizational structures preset by the dominant religious group.

Similarly, the laws against doing religions in “public” spaces makes sense if worship is solely seen as something that happens within defined “private” spaces such as churches (or homes). Religious practices that are not church, mosque, or temple based—for instance Durga puja or Muhharam processions—are legislated out of the public sphere. These restrictions on public celebrations means children (and adults) in the US get too few opportunities to savor the sights, sounds, smells, colors and sheer joy of the festivals of different religious groups that was so much a part of the lives of many contributors of this book.

The lack of recognized holidays for other religions adds to this marginalization. Those of us who practice “minority” religions have to contend with the invisibility of our religions in public discourse (beyond linking these to questions of national security or debates about clashing civilizations), and we have to work twice as hard to celebrate our religious events. We have compromised by reducing Durga puja to two days over a weekend, because most people do not have the autonomy to seek time off from work for religious events on the appropriate days according to the Bengali calendar. Most people, young and old are under pressure to conform to school, college, and work deadlines. Even when they are able to negotiate private arrangements to take time off, there is a continuing penalty for being part of another religion: we have to work harder to make-up for “lost time.” Every time another colleague organizes a weekend event that is in my field of academic expertise, without bothering to check about possible conflicts with religious events, I am reminded of my position as a member of a minority religion, since my status as a professor does not seem to extend to respecting my religio-cultural human rights. The absence of the particular type of secular tradition and freedoms that many contributors of this book and I grew up with--the taken-for-granted assumption that there are at least seven or eight religions, people worship differently, and that it is right and proper that they have the equal rights to do so--keeps me very aware of my religious outsider status in the US.⁹

The restrictions embedded in the US type of secularism often become burdensome because of continuing racism in this country. This racism operates through the efforts of some over-zealous, bigoted groups and individuals. I continue to be pursued by evangelical groups who operate on the assumption, that, as a person of Indian-origin, I have to be an ignorant, subservient woman. Such groups try hard to convince me to go to their church and learn about “the true religion that would empower me.” They have lectured me on their version of “the true nature” of Hinduism where women-killing (sati and dowry deaths), false-idol worship, and pre- modern animism are key components. They are unable to comprehend that I am extremely knowledgeable about gender and religion (theirs and mine). It is also futile for me to point out that incidences of sati in India in the 20th century are a thousand-fold lower than incidences of polygamous marriages—for instance, among Mormons--in the US. Such groups are determined to “save my soul” based on their absolute faith; their orientalist beliefs do not change because of an immigrant female’s “opinion.”

While I have developed a whole range of ways to rebuff such people, I worry about the lack of contact these people have with people and practices of other religions in public space. Their ideas remain enmeshed in the ethnocentric stereotypes because it is solely created and sustained by whatever is imagined within their closed communities. Other radical “church” leaders, who ignore lessons of Christianity about humility, respect, tolerance, continue to spew their hate-filled messages about other religions, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam often characterizing these as religions of darkness (Grillo 2001). People like myself are always in a bind in the US: our protests against hate-filled messages bring more publicity to these messengers and they revel in the publicity; if we choose silence, the stereotypes they circulate appear to be true. And we always remain aware that any politicized campaign by these groups against the people who let us rent spaces for Durga puja could result in our losing the facility for the following year.

The racial imagery about “Third world” women (subordinated, non-empowered women) that are circulated endlessly through secular media and some sections of academia also erode our authority, as “third world” females, to speak on our religions. As Neela Bhattacharya Saxena points out in her chapter, unless we present ourselves as victims of patriarchal religious practices, we are almost never asked to speak publicly about our religions. It is as though our continued affiliation with our (“not-quite-modern”) religion is a sign of our traditionalism, subordination and lack of understanding of “real empowerment.” The press invariably prefers to talk to temple-based male leaders as “the authority” on matters of religion. Academic studies focus on the lack of women in temple hierarchies, without any attempt to find out how important temples are to the lives of Hindus. And, academic scholarship, which increasingly focus only on Hindu fundamentalism, or Hindu-Muslim riots, without studying mechanisms through which Hindus and Muslim continue to sustain peace, often unwittingly, contribute to sustaining the orientalist tropes about our religions.

Recent political effort to erode the walls between “faith based” religion and state affairs has exacerbated these structural constraints. Since faith based groups are now being allowed to become a primary conduit for social justice efforts, it erodes the space for other kinds of groups. The current political initiative requires each of us to define our “faiths” even if we do not follow faith-based paths. Such requirements confer disproportionate authority to Hindu temples and temple-based leaders to get these moneys and act for “the Hindus”, while eroding the legitimacy of diverse practices that make up the Hindu world. And, people’s “faith” and national origin is also being used for security profiling in ways that keep us constantly aware of our religious identities (e.g. Kelly 2001, Khanna 2001, Sengupta 2006).

Temples, Hierarchies, and Reconstructionists.

Ever since their migration in large numbers from the mid 1960s, Hindus have been establishing temples in the US to carve out spaces where they can practice their religion. For many Hindu groups in India, as Shanthi Rao’s chapter describes, going to temples is part of their regular routine; for them temples are an appropriate religious space for their faith-based worship. But because of the insistence that all religious matters be moved to temples (or mosques or churches), temples face the additional challenge of balancing the needs of all kinds of Hindus with very diverse deities and religious events. There are usually long periods of negotiations about which gods and goddesses are to be represented in each temple. In the end, few temples feature the unrestricted power of female goddesses, represented by Durga and Kali; only benign versions of goddesses are depicted, usually as wives of gods.

The overwhelming dominance of male deities with female ‘consorts” in American temples reflects two intersecting forces. In many parts of India it is more typical to worship male deities and the “laws of averages” lead to the over-representation of male deities. The other reason is that temple boards “self-censure” with an eye to how they are going to be received by the mainstream. If for instance, a temple featuring goddess Kali, her nakedness, her garland of dripping skulls, her stance on the male god Shiva, made the headline news in the local media, how would the worshippers of such a deity be perceived? So the “depictions of tradition” in temples reflect the intersections of patriarchy and racism.

Temples are places for faith-based worship. In the absence of the right to practice religion elsewhere, temples become the de facto community centers for many Hindu Indians. People send their children to learn “how to do puja” as told by a Brahmin male, or how to lead “a” Hindu life as taught through “Hindu Sunday schools” set up in temples (as Monika Doshi describes in her chapter). And a series of “traditions,” many of which are no longer widely practiced in the area of India I come from, such as the “sacred thread” ceremony for Brahmin males are reemerging in the US, much to the astonishment of my friends and family in Kolkata who consider such rituals to be early 20th century relicts. And Hindu practices are increasingly being presented as “Indian” culture ignoring the right of other religionists to make such a culture.

Temples offer few spaces for most women to become authority figures. In India, female gurus co-exist with temple priests and command the loyalty of thousands of people, as Saxena and Narayan describes in their chapters, but established temples are spaces where high caste male authority prevails. While a few women are in prominent places on the boards of American Hindu temples (which has been interpreted as a sign of lessening traditionalism by some academic scholars) there are typically very few professionally successful women in these positions. There are no American female gurus that I am aware of (though some female gurus from India visit their followers periodically). Professionally successful men, with few obligations to contribute to a second shift at home, often take on spokespersons roles in such organizations. Much of the organizing, cooking, cleaning, and community activities remain women’s tasks. Overall, the altered social organization of Hinduism in the US, where temples become the “sole” representatives of Hinduism, contributes to renewed class, caste, gender distinctions that, in India, are balanced by the thousands of other choices people have to practice their versions of Hinduism.

The structural conditions in America which encourage homogenized sets of practices and centralized authority through congregations, has been used by a rapidly growing religious- industry that is hawking their brand of “Hinduism.” Mislabeled Hindu fundamentalism—a mislabeling since there is no “singular” set of fundamentals in Hinduism—these Hindutva recreationists attempt to market a virulent brand of ultra-masculinist, authoritarian religio- politics under the guise of establishing “authentic Hinduism.” There is a virulent recreationist strain of Hindu-ist politics in parts of India which has grown for the same reasons as Christian fundamentalism has grown in the US, and Islamist fundamentalism in the Middle East (Nandy 2005, 1993, Sarkar and Butalia 1995, Sehgal 2007). In the US, Hindutva recreationists use the feelings of dissatisfaction among Hindus who encounter unequal freedom to practice their religion to propose new “global Hinduism” (Joshi 2006, Narayan 2006). They fund hate in India (Stopfunding hate 2008) and are actively organizing in the US to claim “the” voice of Hinduism. The relentless messages about subordinated women in the media serve as a central rallying principle of the Hindutva movement. Their websites discuss how “authentic Hinduism” (Hinduism undiluted by Islam or other religions), uniquely supports very high status for women. Such seemingly affirmative presentations of Hinduism are attractive to those who find few other outlets to challenge the racist images circulating in the mainstream (Kausalya 2006, also see Narayan’s chapter in this book). Their actions violate the most basic human rights (for an example see Threatened Existence 2003).

The “Hinduism” of the Hindutva movement is exclusivist and ethnocentric. Going directly counter to Hinduism’s dictum about diversity and connectedness, it encourages its practitioners to be antagonistic towards other religions, particularly Muslims. Their ethnocentric, masculinist version of “gender empowerment” emphasizes ‘different rights of women and men (a modern-day “separate but equal” hierarchy). This model of gender is very different from the lessons of fluid Ardhanariswara (god as half-male, half-female) in Hinduism. And, their version is directly opposite to the central principle of dharma (interconnection) expressed through the dictum Tvat Tamasi, or Tagore’s notion of a joyful universe, or Vivekananda’s call to serve people as the primary way of doing dharma. Hindutva proponents often quote Vivekananda selectively by focusing on his exhortation to defend Hinduism to evoke the idea of a religion- under-seige. Conveniently overlooked in this version is Vivekananda’s central message about serving all people (and, his temple at Belur, which I described earlier, which enshrines the influence of many religions).¹⁰ Nor is Vivekananda’s dictum to serve all people followed when Hindutva proponents lash out against Dalits (see Shweta Majumdar’s chapter). The kind of Hinduism I practice, with a conscious acknowledgement of the messages of Buddhist, Sufi, Sikh and other saints is exactly the kind of Hinduism recreationists would like to stifle. Unable to control “unruly” Hindus who don’t join their folds, Hindutva proponents have begun to demand that local school boards revise their history books to reflect Hindutva version of “true history” of Indic civilizations as a way to influence future generations (Lal 2006).

Much like the religio-businesses run by TV evangelists who have created new profitable religious consumer markets, there is a new industry for selling “new texts”, holding conferences, Hindu camps, and artifacts of “Hindu culture” like “om” signs. Thus far, the success of the Hindutva movement—to transform Hinduism from a decentralized, variegated practice-driven, change-oriented system of doing spirituality, to a masculinist religion with a homogenous set of practices, distinctive boundaries, one congregation, recreated versions of single sacred texts, and a centralized authority structure—is restricted by an “audience” that still upholds the idea of diverse practices.

It could be argued that, given the variegated nature of Hinduism, this emerging Hindutva can be accommodated under a broad umbrella of practices. These newly invented practices should co-exist with the older more androgynous principles and inclusive forms of practices that I have described earlier. But set as a minority religion within a context where faith-driven initiatives are becoming the framework for main stream politics, where the efforts of radical Christian fundamentalists to impose their beliefs in a variety of arenas breaks our everyday world “into fragments by narrow domestic walls,” such strident oppositional religious movements develop a certain resonance. And, as religion (and phenotype) become the new marker of demarcating “true natives” from naturalized citizens and new generation natives, it becomes harder for people to maintain a set of religious practices with blurred boundaries embracing humanity in general instead of identifying with narrowly defined religio-cultural groups.

Possible Religious Horizons

Given the multiple sources of religious bigotry I described above, is humane religious life still possible? Many of the values I hold dear--respect for multiple religious traditions, constantly striving to serve people (including activist work to reduce inequalities), finding ways to practice peaceful and mindful living, and not having to subordinate my intellectual understanding of the universe to a framework of unquestioning faith--, are shared by a network of friends from Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and other religions. My criticism of fundamentalist Christianity does not make me blind to the humane practices of other Christians. I am inspired by the history of social justice efforts by some Christian groups on behalf of the poorest, voiceless immigrants. The vast majority of the participants in the Civil Rights movement were inspired by the messages of humanity spread through black churches; their efforts and sacrifices opened the doors for me to come to the US. The Quakers who went voluntarily to internment camps for the Japanese Americans were practicing these same Christian principles. These groups did not use the proximate suffering of others as an opportunity to proselytize about their religion as some groups have done recently (Baron 2006). Instead the motivation was to share in a common humanity, including the pain of injustices and deprivations. Such “histories of doing” are synonymous in my mind with living dharma. Whether it is a historical memory of Gandhi’s marches in India in the early 20th century, or those of the Civil Rights Movement in the US in the mid 20th century, or the sacrifices made by anti- apartheid participants—Christian, Muslim, atheist, Hindu--in the late 20th century in South Africa, I can “see” dharma being enacted in a million ways.

Many religions teach me lessons in connecting with others. Each year, about the same time as Durga puja, I marvel at the humane principle that lead all Muslims who are more than 12 years of age, all over the world, regardless of class and sex, to participate in a month of dawn-to- dusk fasts so that they can actually experience some of the pains of deprivation felt by the poor. It has always seemed to me to be a more principled way of engaging in subsequent charitable contributions. While I often contribute to “humanitarian” or “charitable” causes prompted by pity for the suffering of distant others, I do not meet the same high standard that prompts so many Muslims to try to experience the pain of living a deprived life as part of the act of giving. Recently my daughter participated in Ramadan fasts, for a very short period of time, when some Muslim students in her college suggested this might be an appropriate way to link their interest in blurring boundaries between religions with their attempt to raise money for Darfur. Since she was not able to come home for Durga puja, she interpreted this fast as a way of enacting a principle, i.e. making an effort to reach beyond the boundaries she normally lives by to consciously identify with a larger humanity. Such activism, grounded in religion, humane in substance, helps us to combine the sacred and the secular in meaningful ways. We try to uphold this principle through our own family practices; we continue to participate in a variety of religious practices—Satyanarayan pujas, visits to Ramakrishna Mission inspired gatherings, Christmas celebrations, Eid celebrations--even though we do not follow rituals ourselves. And we are proud of the fact that our combined families include Hindus of many castes, as well as Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians.

How do feminist principles fit into these religious horizons? I am very comfortable with situating myself within the long history of formal activism for women’s rights and social justice that dates back at least to the early 19th century in India. This movement was not an exclusive movement of Hindus, nor was it a movement that was exclusively by women. Unlike the feminist movements in UK and US, the Indian movement always considered narrow nationalism, state roles, and colonialism as central influences in constructing gender hierarchies. As a “woman of color” in the US understanding the complex sources of the barriers I encounter are important to me. I have been fortunate to develop networks of feminist and human rights groups in several countries, groups that attempt to make sure human justice principles and actions are not framed in narrow nationalistic, civilizational, ethnocentric terms. As a Bengali Hindu I was brought up, almost exclusively, with Durga, Kali, Lakshmi, Saraswati; the symbolism of Shakti (female strength/power), the force of regeneration that arises from the twin forces of creation and destruction, colors my feminism with its specifically Hindu roots. The idea of ardhanariswara, a symbol of god as half male half female, that insists I move beyond atomized, notions of essentialized females and males, is very important to my thinking in militating against gender hierarchies.

These religious/spiritual ideas intersect with my academic training to hone my “secular” intellectual capacities to recognize and challenge the multiple ways in which many women’s lives are restricted and injured in the name of religion. I can knowledgeably criticize sections of Hindus--male and female—who continue to evoke the 13th century “laws” of Manu or other “traditions” to justify their violent behaviors towards women. I challenge Hindutva groups who finance and practice genocide against Muslims and lower caste groups and try to frame it in terms of “correcting history” or “establishing “religion.” I am equally critical of Islamist fundamentalists. Recently a friend’s father was murdered by such a group for speaking out against growing fundamentalism in Bangladesh; it served as a stark, personal reminder of the dangers of the growing power of fundamentalism in different South Asian countries. I recognize the virulence of Christian fundamentalists in the US and I denounce their activities too. As a sociologist I can trace the paths through which their hate filled actions get enacted as “neutral” public policies. My religious principles and my academic training overlap toto shape my interest in understanding and exposing the inhumanity of exploitive economic systems. As I watch contemporary LGBT groups struggle for rights in the US, I am reminded of the fluid sexuality described in Hindu traditions (Vanita 2000), perspectives that are largely invisible in the strident heteronormative claims by different groups of fundamentalists in the US. Since I believe in human freedoms, I cannot be anything but a feminist. How I think of my connections to a boundless universe is structured by Hinduism. I practice Hinduism and feminism, finding these non-antithetical, without any need to guard the boundaries of versions that are linked to any exclusive “foundations” in a selected history. The more universal, boundary-less, manusher dharma shapes how I think about human ties and humane freedoms. The ongoing challenge is to resist exclusionary boundaries while holding onto humane principles and translating them into everyday action in multiple realms.

End Notes

Euro-American texts books typically describe the caste system as a four-fold, Hindu social hierarchy with Brahmins (typically the teachers, scholars) at the pinnacle, followed by the Kshatriyas (administrators, soldiers), the Vaishyas (traders, business people), and at the lowest rung, the Sudras (menials, servants, laborers). Caste distinctions started as a system of occupational specialization, but it quickly became a birth-defined hierarchy. One cannot achieve caste, so many Western scholars conclude there is no chance of moving up socially. The system, as it works on the ground, is more complicated. First, each “caste” is divided into hundreds of jatis whose exact social status depends on the local cultural region (See Srinivasan 1962). A brahmin who performs pujas at funerals does not hold the same power as the Kshatriya king. At a social organizational level, caste is about power, and how much power a group can control depends on the landscape of power at the local level. Historically, Brahmins have controlled the power of knowledge, Kshatriyas political power, and Vaishyas the finances. These three together have wielded enormous power over the last group, especially when they acted together, as they frequently have, to protect their social privileges (Kaviraj 1990). In modern India, the combination of caste based-organizing and ability to gather political power adds another dimension to the operation of caste system (Kothari, 1979). This is why caste-like social organization is evident among Christians and Muslims in India (Kurien2004, Syed 2002). Second, caste is also a patriarchal system. Women’s caste is mostly based on the husband or father’s caste; in other words, half the population has the potential to “take on” and change castes. Arrangement of marriages is the primary means of gate-keeping for caste exclusivity. Third, caste based distinctions are officially banned in India, however the human rights violations against Dalits continue with impunity in parts of the country. Thus, caste, like other forms of social hierarchy, is a dynamic system that adapts itself to contemporary conditions to maintain the privileges of the powerful.
Words such as dharma or Brahman do not translate into English, because there is no equivalent social understanding that might be expressed through language. There were several other caste/gender challenging rituals my parents, a Brahmin and a Baidya, rejected. Though they were Brahmins, my cousins were not initiated into sacred thread ceremonies to initiate them to male, caste- based statuses because my parents, as the eldest in the family were responsible for setting the family norms. Dowry taking or giving not allowed. When my father died, my mother performed the funeral service for him, while we--the female children--performed it for our mother.
The only male god who is worshipped, is Biswakarma, the god who of instruments and instrumentality. But Biswakarma puja is only performed in factories and workshops, it is not a puja for householders or neighborhoods. Biswakarma puja, is marked by a kite duels, like the one described recently in Khaled Hosseni’s book Kite Runner.
Saraswati’s attendant is the swan, which, supposedly, can filter the good from the filth, a discernment essential for learning, Lakshmi’s is the owl, which can see in the dark, a skill necessary for handling wealth, Kartick’s attendant is the peacock, gorgeous and deadly in its attacks, and Ganesh’s mouse reminds us of the value of the lowly rodents in the environmental chain.
Shab-e-barat is celebrated as a Day of Accounting of past deeds and day of atonement in preparation for Ramadan by Indian Muslims. Houses are illuminated, firecrackers burst, sweets are widely distributed. Sunnis commemorate this day as the day Prophet Muhammed entered Mecca, while Shias celebrate it as a day of birth of their last imam. For more on this event see Shabebarat, 2006.
While we certainly experienced some elements of utopia during our childhood, I do not mean to romanticize the experience. I remember a sense of acute fear during a Hindu Muslim riot, sometime in the 1960s, in our neighborhood, which had to be quelled by special squads of armed police, a sight unthinkable in Calcutta. And many of our Hindu neighbors continued to mourn the loss of family and possessions because they were forced to move as refugees after India and Pakistan’s partition. (They rarely had much to say about the suffering of Muslims who had to move in the opposite direction). Many of our neighbors would also not venture through the Muslim dominant parts of Calcutta. The Partition of India and Pakistan, and the move to India must have been traumatic to our parents’ generation, but thanks to our parents, it did not cast long shadows of hatred in our minds. Our parents had very respectful relations with Muslims, Christians, Sikhs. We were not subject to any restrictions on eating anything or with anyone, the main process through which social and emotional distance is built up at the individual and community level. Nor did our parents fuss about the foreign missionaries who would come to our school to proselytize. I now think their matter-of-fact reaction to the presence of these missionaries helped reduce the missionaries messages to “white noise” (the kind of noise that is inaudible on planes).
This diversity arises because there is no single Hindu definitive “holy book”. Four Vedas are the oldest known texts, composed about 2000 C.E., the Upanishads are a distillation of the end part of the Vedas, the Vedanta. Epics like the Mahabharata (especially the section called the Gita) and Ramayana are considered to be sacred by some people. Others live by the Manusmriti, a set of rules of social behavior devised in the 10th century A.D. by a Brahmin called Manu. Yet others follow the teachings of locally relevant spiritual leaders or lessons handed down through oral sayings. A vast panoply of practices that make up the diversity of Hinduism.
The wave of multiculturalism that has opened up some space for cultural rights of different groups in the US does not solve this problem, though it has made people somewhat more aware of different religious and cultural traditions. I have discussed the problems and prospects of multiculturalism for South Asians in my book Negotiating Ethnicity (Purkayastha 2005).
Vivekananda’s message is about interactions between religions: he repeatedly talks the ideal of having a Hindu mother and Muslim father, his poetry emphasizes the commonalties between the Vedas, Bible, Koran, his designed the overtly syncretic design of the Belur temple that I mentioned earlier. Vivekananda’s talks about valor were a challenge to Western missionary and political leaders who attempted to justify colonization and Christian conversions in India (See Burke 1986, Basu 2001, Radice 1999, and Sen 2005).