Category Archives: Religion

A place at the table

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Hot-off-the-press (so hot that it won’t even be available until July) is a book whose subject matter seems to tackle some of the same topics we often post on this site, as well as might contain some good explanations as to why our website sometimes attracts bigotry/ignorance of a certain persuasion. The book is titled, A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American Hinduism. The book is by author Prema A. Kurien (who I see has been denounced in some way or another on a smattering of websites). Indolink reports:

According to its publisher Rutgers University Press, the book offers an in-depth look at Hinduism in the United States and the Hindu Indian American community.

The book focuses on understanding the private devotions, practices, and beliefs of Hindu Americans as well as their political mobilization and activism. And it probes the differences between immigrant and American-born Hindu Americans, how both understand their religion and their identity, while it emphasizes the importance of the social and cultural context of the United States in influencing the development of an American Hinduism…

Drawing on the experiences of both immigrant and American-born Hindus, Kurien demonstrates how religious ideas and practices are being imported, exported, and reshaped in the process. The result of this transnational movement, according to Kurien, is an American Hinduism- an organized, politicized, and standardized version of that which is found in India.

The book explains that Hinduism has undergone several modifications in interpretation, practice, and organization in the United States in the process of being institutionalized as an American religion. Kurien argues that while Hindu American spokespersons espouse a genteel pluralism and attempt to use Hinduism to secure a place at the American multicultural table, they also use the ideology of multiculturalism to justify and legitimize a militant Hindu nationalism. Drawing on this contradiction, she develops a theoretical model to explain 1) why multiculturalism often seems to exacerbate émigré nationalism, and 2) why religion is often involved directly or indirectly in this process. [Link]

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Mending the Rift in a Post-9/11 World

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There’s a really interesting article in the New York Times on the “uneasy” coalition that’s building between African American and immigrant Muslims in post-9/11 New York. Although I’m generally cynical of articles that tout people of color solidarity, I found this one to be fairly realistic and yet uplifting at the same time.

One interesting fact that I learned from the article is that of the estimated six million Muslims who live in the United States, more than a third are desis. About 25 percent of American Muslims are African-American, and 26 percent are Arab. Unsurprisingly, there’s been little cohesion between the African American and immigrant Muslim communities. The article explains that some of the decades-long tension is based on class:

Many Muslim immigrants came to the United States with advanced degrees and quickly prospered, settling in the suburbs. For decades, African-Americans watched with frustration as immigrants sent donations to causes overseas, largely ignoring the problems of poor Muslims in the United States.

Then there’s that skin color thing:

Aqilah Mu’Min [an African American], lives in the Parkchester section of the Bronx, a heavily Bangladeshi neighborhood. Whenever she passes women in head scarves, she offers the requisite Muslim greeting. Rarely is it returned. “We have a theory that says Islam is perfect, human beings are not,” said Ms. Mu’Min.

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What did Guru Nanak look like?

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In California, the Times reports that the School Board unanimously voted last week to alter a seventh grade textbook image relating to Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion (or panth), after protests from the Sikh community (thanks, Chick Pea). 10nanak textbook newyorktimes.jpg

The controversial image isn’t the big one pictured, but the small one (I’ve added a circle to make it clearer). The image is a 19th century painting of Guru Nanak wearing a crown and what looks like a somewhat cropped beard. Both the crown and the beard shape are troubling to Sikhs, who are accustomed to seeing images of Guru Nanak more along the lines of the bigger image to the right — flowing white beard, and humble attire.

Though the New York Times has helpful interviews with community members on this, the Contra Costa Times actually spells out the issue more clearly:

The image is taken from a 19th-century painting made after Muslims ruled India. The publisher used it because it complies with the company’s policy of using only historical images in historical texts, said Tom Adams, director of curriculum for the Department of Education.

After Sikhs complained that the picture more closely reflected a Muslim man than a Sikh, Oxford offered to substitute it with an 18th-century portrait showing Guru Nanak with a red hat and trimmed beard. But Sikhs said that picture made their founder look like a Hindu.

The publisher now wants to scrap the picture entirely from the textbook, which was approved for use in California classrooms in 2005. There are about 250,000 Sikhs in California.

Sikh leaders say they want a new, more representative image of Guru Nanak, similar to the ones they place in Sikh temples and in their homes. The publisher has rejected those images as historically inaccurate. No images exist from the founder’s lifetime, 1469 to 1538. (link)

All of this raises the question — what, in fact, did Guru Nanak look like? We don’t have any images from his lifetime, and the later ones are clearly products of the values of their eras. What, historically, do we actually know? I went to Navtej Sarna’s recent book, The Book of Nanak, to see what I could find out. Continue reading →

Paging Betty Ford

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In high school I had a social studies teacher who was a HinJew. He was an old hippy who found eastern religion, and through that became more of an observant Jew (no, it doesn’t make total sense, but that’s how it was). I was just thinking that Mr. Steinfink would have been very busy last weekend with both Holi and Purim falling at the same time.

It’s funny how similar the two events are. They’re both great holidays for kids — you get to throw colored powder on people, dress up, and make noise — but they also involve the sanctioned or encouraged use of mind altering substances as well. A little something for for all ages, I guess.
Holi
Purim
Fun for kids You get to throw colored powder and water at people, no matter how important or old You get to use loud noisemakers (greggars), dress up in costumes, and eat pastries (homentashn)
Adult fun Drink marijuana in thandai, eat pot mithai It’s a mitzvah to drink wine until you can no longer tell the difference between the phrase “Cursed is Haman” and “Blessed is Mordechai”
Bonfires Holika burned in effigy (Traditionally) Haman burned in effigy
Somewhat bloody theological justification The Asura, Hiranyakashipu, tries to burn his own son, Prahlad, alive, but instead incinerates his sister, Holika. The vizier, Haman, plots a genocide against the Jews. The Queen, Esther, saves the Jews and instead they get to destroy their enemies.
How religious is it? There are different theological explanations for the event, so I would guess not very. The book of Esther is the only book in the Hebrew Bible that doesn’t mention G-d.

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On Reasons for Holi

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The LA Times has an article on a Holi festival that took place in southern California last weekend:

About 150 people from Southern California gathered Saturday at Arcadia Park to celebrate Holi — the Pan-Indian “festival of colors,” a holiday celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs and some Muslims that rejoices in the coming of spring and the triumph of good over evil. It is considered a major Hindu festival.

According to whom? I’m a Southie, and as far as I know, playfully throwing water balloons and colored powder at one another isn’t really our thing.

The reporter also gives a run-down on the history of Holi:

One version of the tale tells of Prehlad’s father, Hiranyakshipu, an evil man who wanted Prehlad to worship him, not the Hindu god Vishnu. After many attempts to change his son’s mind, Hiranyakshipu decides to burn him to death, and his aunt, Holika, is to help. In the end, Holika is burned to death and Prehlad is saved.

A woman is burned alive to save her nephew — what a wonderful reason to celebrate!

Another story is about the Hindu god Krishna, who is said to have lived 5,000 years ago. He enjoyed dalliances with the milkmaids, especially Radha. On Holi, Krishna asked his mother why his skin was darker than Radha’s. His mother told him to rub paint on her. She retaliated and eventually, all the villagers joined in. Since then, Holi has also been celebrated with colors.

I always thought Holi had little religious significance and had more to do with celebrating the beginning of spring and the harvest. But maybe that’s just the Chicago grad in me talking. In any case, Professor Vinay Lal of UCLA has his explanation of Holi:

Holi is something anybody can take part in because you do not need anything, just water and color. You can go to the home of an upper-caste person and throw water at them and rub color on them. But the following day, everything reverts back to normal.

So it’s really all about having a day to whoop some upper-caste ass. On a lighter note, the last part of the article made me smile:

In the United States, celebrants said it was a good day to take time off from hectic days of work, relax with friends and family and to renew friendships. “If you are on bad terms with someone, you don’t need to speak words to them,” said Sonia Anand, 35, of Arcadia. “Sometimes the words hold you back, and all you need is some color and a hug.”

Sounds more like the Holi I know. Continue reading →

A history of European vegetarianism

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I know that many SM readers like to partake in one particular cross-border skirmish we seem to have a lot here. You know the one of which I speak, right? It’s the herbivores vs. the carnivores (although technically we are all omnivores). Well, to throw a little fuel on to that fire I submit to you this book review over at Slate.com.. The book is titled “Bloodless Revolution” and is meant to be a sort of “history of European vegetarianism.” I haven’t read the book but the review was quite insightful. First the background on the book:

Here’s the story as he tells it in The Bloodless Revolution: In the 17th century, a fundamental question about the relationship between ourselves and the other creatures of the earth broke out into passionate debate, a debate that swooped over and around and through the culture, rattling long-held European assumptions about the very nature of life. There was no single word adequate to capture the ideas that were bursting forth, until the term vegetarian emerged in the middle of the 19th century. And with that, the battle was over–not because meat-eating came to an end but because European culture made a home for this challenge to dietary norms, giving it a local habitation and a name. Whether or not this constituted a victory for animal-lovers is hard to say. As Stuart points out early on, when the concept of vegetarianism became domesticated, it turned into “a distinct movement that could easily be pigeon-holed, and ignored.” But people did start thinking differently about animals, human responsibilities, and the rights of living creatures, albeit rarely to the extreme sought by such groups as PETA. Stuart sums it up well: Nowadays, he says, “negotiating compassion with the desire to eat is customary…” [Link]

The critic contends, however, that vegetarianism from a European perspective isn’t so much something they accept as a way of life but is rather a philosophy to be practiced off an on:

If vegetarianism has settled comfortably into Western culture by now, it’s because the term vegetarian has become so vast and shapeless that it describes just about everybody who isn’t on the Atkins diet. To be sure, there are vegetarians who avoid all animal food. But most are willing to eat eggs, and many eat fish. Chicken is fine with some because hey, it isn’t beef. Hamburgers? Absolutely not–or maybe just once in a while. And turkey because it’s Thanksgiving, ham because it’s Easter, pepperoni because it’s pizza–what on earth is a vegetarian, anyway? No wonder Stuart never tries to define the term. A huge, wonderfully entertaining cast of dietary rebels parades through his chapters, but all we really know about the eating habits of these pagans, scientists, doctors, scholars, theologians, writers, philosophers, and crackpots is that most of them ate meat. [Link]
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Daytheists in the closet

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I have a number of brown friends who are staunch, one might even say devout, atheists but you’d never know it because they are very private about their beliefs. I find this a bit perplexing because they are quite outspoken on most other personal and political matters, but when it comes to matters of religion and God, these desi atheists (==> daytheists) are still in the closet because of the social costs involved in exposing themselves.

Stamp celebrating the founder of India’s Atheist Center

On the one hand, it’s not surprising that they have some hesitation about outing themselves. Religion plays less of a role in the US than it does in India, but even so most Americans have a negative view of atheists, as shown in a 2003 Gallup poll:

Very Favorable: 7%
Mostly Favorable: 27%
Mostly Unfavorable: 19%
Very Unfavorable: 33% [Link]

That’s even more negative than American opinions about Muslims, both amongst born-again Christians and amongst non-Chiristians! In fact, more Americans would be willing to vote for a gay candidate than an atheist:

Atheists “are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public,” … In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, Americans said they believed in God by a margin of 92 to 6 … and only 37 percent said they’d be willing to vote for an atheist for president. (That’s down from 49 percent in a 1999 Gallup poll–which also found that more Americans would vote for a homosexual than an atheist.)… [Link]

Surprisingly, tolerance for atheism might be higher on the desi side. While I don’t have comparable poll numbers, atheism has a long history within India as a philosophical movement, going back to 600 BC:

Carvaka, an atheistic school of Indian philosophy, traces its origins to 600 BCE. It was a hedonistic school of thought, advocating that there is no afterlife. Carvaka philosophy appears to have died out some time after 1400 CE. [Link]

[Amartya Sen says:] “Sanskrit had a larger atheistic literature than exists in any other classical language. Even within the Hindu tradition, there are many people who were atheist.” [Link]

In fact, some prominent Hindutva figures are actually atheists:

Well-known personality, Veer Savarkar, who was president of Hindu Mahasabha, was an atheist. He is credited for developing a Hindu nationalist political ideology he termed as Hindutva (Hinduness).

Bal Thackeray, the founder and president of the Shiv Sena, has publicly proclaimed himself an atheist after the death of his wife.[Link]

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Like Skin

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Sonny Suchdev, of the band Outernational, has a nice personal essay up at RaceWire, the blog for the magazine Colorlines (thanks, Dave).

It’s a story describing an experience that many Sikh guys have had — having the dastaar (or pagri, or turban) pulled off as someone’s idea of a joke:

I’m riding the F train like usual in Brooklyn when dozens of kids – perhaps in junior high – get in my subway car on their way home from school. The train is bustling with adolescent energy.

As the train stops at 4th Avenue, I hear a boy yell “Give me that!” as he and his friends run out the train door. The next thing I realize, my dastar has been yanked completely off my head. My uncovered joora dangles, and I am in complete and utter shock. Everyone on the train is staring at me. Other kids from the school are both laughing and shaking their heads in disbelief. Not knowing how to react, I stand up quickly, look out the doors of the train car and see a group of young boys of color running down the stairs. Startled and confused, I pick it up my dastar from the grimy platform and get back in the train. (link)

The part that I found most thought-provoking was the following:

I get off at Smith and 9th Street with my dirty dastar in my hands, not knowing what to do. My eyes fill with tears immediately. I feel naked and exposed, so small, so humiliated, and so so alone. . . . I get to a corner of the platform and break down in despair, remembering fifth grade vividly, feeling so angry and exhausted from living in this country. The twenty something years of this shit is going through me at once – the slurs, the obnoxious stares, the go back to your countries, the threats, the towel/rag/tomato/condom/tumor heads, all of it. But somehow pulling off my turban hurts more than anything. Maybe it’s the symbolism of my identity wrapped up in this one piece of cloth that, like my brown skin, I wear everyday.(link)

Skin is a good metaphor in one sense, though the sense of shame entailed in this type of experience is actually more like having a private part of your body exposed — in other words, it’s like being forcibly disrobed. Part of what makes it complicated is the fact that the perpetrators generally don’t know the symbolism of the turban, though they definitely know that what they are doing is going to result in humiliation. But maybe the sense of hurt Sonny is talking about is not about symbolism or Sikh theology, but about the more contemporary concept of “identity”: this turban, irrespective of why I wear it, is who I am. It’s what I wear every day; it’s what makes me, me. It’s about having that sense of self dismantled and disrespected for no apparent reason — for someone’s idea of a joke.

I think this story, while definitely unique in some ways to the Sikh experience, is an experience that other people who are visibly marked as different (either for ethno/religious reasons or for any other reason) can also identify with. Also, I wonder if being vulnerable in this way is at least partially analogous to the way the threat of sexual harassment can affect women. (Note the phrase “partially analogous” — as opposed to “exactly similar”) Continue reading →

Zen and the Art of Painful Clichés

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religionandethics-bluefluteplayer.jpg

Two Sundays ago, the PBS program, Religion and Ethics, decided to ask the question: “Why are Hinduism and Buddhism capturing the attention of business and management circles?”

The show profiled Professor Srikumar S. Rao, of the enormously popular Columbia University class Creativity and Personal Mastery, and Gautam Jain, of the Vedanta Cultural Foundation.

So the answer to the PBS question? The usual hodgepodge: happiness is elusive, the material world is illusory, one must not be possessed by one’s possessions… Since the 80s proved to business people that greed is not necessarily good, satisfying, or even lucrative in the long run, people are searching for another peg to hang a slogan upon.

I have a reflexive gag reaction to anything that smells of Deepak Chopra and the “pot of gold at the end of the spiritual rainbow” school of thought. While Prof. Rao and Gautamji came across as sincere, thoughtful and genuine (at least in the 5 mins alloted to each), I wonder if, despite their best efforts to explode the If/Then model of happiness, their students listen selectively. After all, these are people willing to pay $1,000 over the cost of the class to listen to Prof. Rao. His website, Are You Ready to Succeed? opens with this passage:

Life is short. And uncertain. It is like a drop of water skittering around on a lotus leaf. You never know when it will drop off the edge and disappear. So each day is far too precious to waste. And each day that you are not radiantly alive and brimming with cheer is a day wasted.

Which, frankly, leaves me lost (lotus, skittering, radiant cheer -what?) and slightly thirsty. Continue reading →

Aish Marries Tree(s)–A Setback for Feminism?

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Aishwarya Rai, who has been in the news lately because of her engagement to Abhishek Bachchan, has apparently been ritually married to not one but two trees before her real marriage (thanks, Antahkarana). The aim is to counter the astrological effects of being born a Manglik:

But Ash is reportedly blighted with what in astrological terms is described as “manglik dosh,” which means that the planet Mars (mangla) and possibly even the planet Saturn are in the seventh house. People with manglik dosh are prone to multiple marriages, according to San Francisco Bay Area Vedic astrologer Pandit Parashar. That means Ash’s marriage to Abhishek could either end in divorce or his death.

In Hindu tradition, in order to offset the evil influence of manglik dosh, a woman should marry a peepal or banana tree before she ties the knot with her fiancé. Or she could even marry a clay urn, which should be broken soon after the nuptial ceremonies, signifying that the bride has become a widow, and the manglik dosh problem has been solved.

ItÂ’s not known if Ash has married, or plans to marry, an urn, but she reportedly has married a peepal tree in the holy city of Varanasi, and a banana tree in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. (link)

The Indian media is reporting that a case has been filed against the Bachchan family by lawyer Shruti Singh to the effect that these types of practices promote untouchability. She has also suggested that it’s offensive to women.

There has been some discussion of this event on the blog Feministing, and one commenter there points out that the practice of marrying a tree can also be recommended for men, though I haven’t been able to confirm that. (If true, that would definitely weaken the case that this is a misogynistic ritual.) Other commenters have suggested that this is probably pretty harmless in the big scheme of things — especially since honor killings, dowry killings, child marriages, and forced marriages are still problems in Indian society.

What do readers think? Is this “backward” practice part of a slippery slope (only one step away from things that are much more problematic), or something basically harmless? What do you think of Shruti Singh’s claim that this practice promotes untouchability? I must admit I don’t know very much about Hindu astrology, and so can’t say what role caste plays in these practices in general. Continue reading →