OCHS Weblog

By Margaret Ramirez
Chicago Tribune, July 10, 2008

Amid the noise and bustle of downtown Chicago, the groom rode a white horse, shaking to Indian drumbeats in procession to the Palmer House Hilton hotel.

Inside, the bride and groom took seats under thered mandap, or wedding canopy, and the priest began chanting in a high, melodic voice.

For some, the chants heard at the service last month sounded like a break from Hindu custom. Priests are traditionally men, but the presiding priest at this wedding was Shashi Tandon, a respected female elder in the Hindu community and the groom’s grandmother.

Since emigrating from New Delhi in 1982, Tandon has presided over countless religious ceremonies for Hindu families in Chicago, Michigan, Wisconsin and elsewhere, filling a void that has emerged because of a shortage of Hindu priests.

As more Hindu men enter more lucrative, secular professions, Tandon and a handful of Hindu women in America have begun performing priestly duties as a way of passing their faith to the next generation.

There is nothing in Hindu scripture that bars women from becoming priests, also known as pandits.

But in some parts of India and the U.S., women priests face resistance from conservative Hindus clinging to tradition. Tandon, 68, a retired teacher with a feisty attitude, recalled a group of men mocking her at one wedding she performed. They asked, How can a woman be a priest?

“I said to them, ‘I have a question for you. Can you tell me who gave birth to you?’ ” she said. “The mother is the true priest. She is the true teacher, the first teacher of the child.”

Shashi Tandon (center) presides over the Hindu wedding of her grandson, Nitin Malhotra, and Paula Shah. (Tribune photo by Abel Uribe)

Neelima Shukla-Bhatt, a South Asian studies professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, said more Hindu women are learning priestly functions not necessarily because they feel drawn to religious life. Rather, women—including Shukla-Bhatt—are stepping forward to meet the growing Hindu community’s needs.

According to the American Religious Identification Survey, there were about 227,000 Hindus in the U.S. in 1990, composed mainly of Asian Indians. Today there are more than 1 million Hindus in the U.S. and more than 700 Hindu mandirs, or temples. The Chicago area is home to some 80,000 Hindus, according to a Chicago-based interfaith research group.

Although no firm numbers exist, Shukla-Bhatt said fewer Hindu-American men are becoming priests. In her own family, she noted that her father’s cousins were all priests, yet none of their children took up the profession.

“At one time, it was considered prestigious, but now it is not considered prestigious at all,” she said. “If you are educated, you do something more secular. It is considered to be a sign of less educated, less sophisticated, so not many educated people are interested in becoming priests.”

Shukla-Bhatt said many of the earliest Hindu texts speak of women priests. In Hinduism’s most ancient book, the Vedas, there are multiple references to women making sacrifices and participating in philosophical debates. But, at some point, things changed.

“It’s not that women weren’t allowed to do this. It’s that somewhere along the line, it got lost, and it became mainly a male profession,” she said. “But in the most ancient scriptures, there were women priests. So, we should reclaim that.”

Tandon’s grandson, Nitin Malhotra, said having his grandmother perform his wedding last month was an obvious choice. As a child, Malhotra said his grandmother taught him the importance of faith and puja in daily life.

Puja is a sacred ritual that involves fire, bells and chanted prayers to deities. Her fluency in English and Sanskrit, and her vivid explanations of religious rituals are the main reasons that Tandon gained widespread popularity in the Hindu community.

“She taught us how to do puja and chants. And, she explains everything so well that you never felt like it was a chore,” Malhotra said. “All these people know about her and fly her to different places to do their ceremonies. We feel really blessed to have her.”

Tandon was born in Multan, which was then in India, and raised in New Delhi. Her mother taught her how to do daily fire rituals. She concedes that she didn’t like it very much at first. However, once she learned the meaning, she felt a desire to be a priest. She studied in an ashram, learned the scriptures and received training to perform all 16 samskaras, the sacraments or rites of passage for every Hindu. Later, she opened a school for poor girls to teach them the Hindu faith.

“I would sit under a big tree and teach them how to respect each other, help society, how to read scripture. I felt this was my calling,” she said.

Her three children married and immigrated to Chicago, where Tandon joined them. Recently, she moved to Kalamazoo, Mich., to live with her son, Arun Tandon, and daughter, Renu Sharma. Another daughter, Anu Malhotra, lives in Naperville.

In explaining her mother’s role as a priest, Sharma said: “It’s not a profession for her. She doesn’t do this for money. It’s part of who she is as a being.”

In India, the concept of women priests is not new. In fact, in the progressive western city of Pune, there are two schools that train women.

However, those in other regions say female priests are a violation of Vedic law. Some Hindu immigrants from those regions who have come to the U.S. have been shocked to find women performing religious rituals. Anu Malhotra said her daughter-in-law’s family, who are from Gujarat, were surprised when told the wedding would be performed by Tandon.

“In India, each state has its own culture. So for many Hindus, this is a new thing,” she said. “People don’t see it as much. It’s not the norm.”

As more women come forward, they have begun to gain appreciation and respect, especially among second-generation Hindu-Americans.

Tandon believes many women are losing touch with their religion and are not passing traditions to their children.

“Mothers came to America because they didn’t have enough freedom. Then, after getting freedom, they forgot their culture,” she said. “They are not doing prayers because they don’t know why they need to do them.”

For that reason, Tandon is training her two daughters to perform religious ceremonies. At some point, the community’s growth could lead to the creation of a school for women priests. Until then, she said she will continue to perform services, educating future generations on the rituals and their meaning.

“Every single step of worship has a meaning. Do you know why we use fire? Some Hindus don’t even know,” she said. “Fire gives us light and for us, light is truth.”

maramirez@tribune.com

By MADHUR SINGH

Time Magazine, Jul. 07, 2008

The Tirumala temple, in the south Indian city of Tirupathi, is one of Hinduism’s holiest shrines. Over 5,000 pilgrims a day visit this city of seven hills, filling Tirumala’s coffers with donations and making it India’s richest temple. But since 2002, Tirumala has also been generating revenue from a less likely source: carbon credits. For decades, the temple’s community kitchen has fed nearly 15,000 people, cooking 30,000 meals a day. Five years ago, Tirumala adopted solar cooking technology, allowing it to dramatically cut down on the amount of diesel fuel it uses. The temple now sells the emission reduction credits it earns to a Swiss green-technology investor, Good Energies Inc.

Like Tirumala, dozens of holy places across India are moving quietly towards green energy. Muni Seva Ashram, in Gujarat, which combines spiritual practice with social activism, is working to make its premises entirely green by using solar, wind and biogas energy. A residential school for 400 students is already running exclusively on green energy. Starting this year, the ashram will also sell three million carbon credits. A similar movement is afoot at the revered Sai Baba Temple in Shirdi, Maharashtra. “Our aim is to avoid pollution in every way,” says Raghunath Aher, the temple’s chief engineer. “A holy place should be pure and completely in harmony with nature.”

It’s not surprising that religious groups are in the vanguard of India’s green movement: India is the birthplace of four of the world’s largest religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, all of which revere nature and preach conservation. But the country’s environmental practice hasn’t always matched that preaching, leaving its air and water woefully polluted. According to the World Bank, emissions increased 57% in the decade following the India’s economic liberalization.

Now, however, religious groups, keen to marry spirituality with sustainability, are leading the push to reverse that trend. Deepak Gadhia, founder of Gadhia Solar Energy Systems, which provided solar cooking technology to Tirumala temple, says more and more religious organizations have approached him in recent years. “With most businesses, the first question is of economics,” he says, “But spiritual organizations look at larger issues. They want energy that is spiritually positive.”

The emergence of Indian art is further evidence of the country’s influence. An L.A. exhibition takes a look.

By Sharon Mizota
Los Angles Times, July 8, 2008

IN INDIAN artist Mithu Sen’s 2007 picture “Perhaps You,” a dark-skinned woman smiles coyly beneath a blond, ’60s-style up-do. The hair appears to be a wig — until you notice the woman’s pale neck. Is she wearing brown makeup? Then you realize that the image is a photocollage: an Indian face pasted atop a white model’s.

“I grow wild in these images,” Sen said of works like “Perhaps You” in 2007. “The wild woman is not subject to the rules that govern gender behavior in society.”

That concept — the “wild woman” who defies easy description — runs through “Contradictions and Complexities: Contemporary Art From India,” an exhibition on view at two Culver City galleries: d.e.n. contemporary and Western Project. It features Sen and five other artists, all female, whose work combines references to traditional Indian culture with present-day global concerns.

The show, however, is also the latest in a flurry of recent surveys — others have gone up in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois and Kansas — designed to introduce 21st century Indian art to U.S. audiences. They signal not only India’s rising profile on the international art scene but also the emergence of a new generation of Indian artists.

In May, for example, Subodh Gupta, 44, became the youngest Indian artist to hit the $1-million mark when his painting of a man with a luggage cart, “Saat Samundar Paar (10)” (Across the Seven Seas), sold at a Christie’s auction in Hong Kong for nearly $1.2 million. The following month, the auction house took in $25.8 million at a sale of modern and contemporary Indian art — up from what was then a record $3.7 million at a similar sale in April 2005.

A PART YET APART: Sheba Chhachhi’s photographs, including “Jater Ma,” document a little-examined Indian population: women ascetics.

The factors at work

Like the boom in contemporary art from China, the rising fortunes of Indian art are without doubt tied to the nation’s emergence as a global economic power. But Saloni Mathur, a professor of art history at UCLA, sees two major developments at work.

The first, she agrees, is “the opening up of the Indian economy and in general the whole phenomenon of globalization that’s spearheaded by the Internet.” But the other is the growth of a wealthy Indian diaspora — Indians living outside India — who have started to collect art from the subcontinent.

Yet Mathur thinks there are other factors as well behind the success of Indian art in the West. In a course she teaches on modern and contemporary Indian art, she says, she is continually impressed by her students’ enthusiasm. “There’s something about modern and contemporary art from China, Africa, India that the generation of the 21st century identifies with,” she says. Artists in these regions are dealing with “the problems of a traditional society in an era of globalization, or they’re thematizing the questions of colonial history or, like Subodh Gupta, questions of international migration and travel. These are no longer themes that you can identify as uniquely Indian.”

New Delhi gallery owner Peter Nagy, who co-curated “Contradictions and Complexities” with local dealer Patricia Hamilton, concurs. He says that “one of the reasons why Indian culture in general is becoming more important to the rest of the world — especially the Western world — is because the Western world is trying to deal now with inherent hybridity, complexity, contradiction. India’s actually done it extremely successfully for generations.” Indeed, he believes that India, with a diversity of religions, languages and cultures rivaling that of Europe, has always been a “postmodern” nation.

Some of the work in the Culver City show tackles such fragmented realities directly. Anita Dube’s video “Kissa-e-Noor Mohammed (Garam Hawa)” is a monologue by a bearded Muslim businessman that starts benignly but culminates in a lament about religious fundamentalism and fascism. When the credits roll, they reveal that the man is in fact Dube herself in drag. The work’s subtitle, “Garam Hawa” (Hot Winds), is also the title of a film about the 1947 partition of India, which separated Hindus from Muslims and resulted in the creation of the Muslim state of Pakistan.

Religious issues also figure in Sheba Chhachhi’s photographs, which document a little-examined Indian population: women ascetics. Chhachhi became interested in these women because of their in-between, often androgynous status. “They seemed to be neither wives nor mothers nor daughters but women who defined themselves in relation to the metaphysical rather than the social,” she said in a recent e-mail. “While operating within sanctioned religious codes, they challenged ideas about the domestication of traditional Indian women.”

Then there’s Chitra Ganesh, who plays with the codes of Hindu mythology to raise her own questions about feminine roles. Her digital collages remix 1970s Hindu comic-book iconography with subjective musings on sex and gender relationships to expose ingrained stereotypes and violence. Images of dismembered female bodies, lush foliage and floating deities are rendered in the cheerful colors and stylized lines of comic books.

“I’m sort of looking at the things that seem like contradictions or just the multiple layers of meaning,” Ganesh said by phone from New York City, where she lives. “I definitely am interested in portraying alternate arrangements of power and sexuality, but it’s more just trying to look at the other side of the coin which is already there.”

Although of Indian descent, Ganesh was born in New York. She is the only artist in the show not based in India. But her inclusion suggests that the label “Indian” now transcends geographical boundaries. “Because there’s a lot of India shows happening, I try to mess with it,” says Nagy, meaning that he freely mixes artists from the diaspora with artists from India.

Deepak Talwar, owner of Gallery Talwar in New York, goes a step further. “I do not put exhibitions together where the artists are only put together because they’re all Indian,” he says. Although all the artists Talwar represents are of Indian descent, he feels it is more important that they enter the international exhibition circuit as individuals rather than as Indian artists. “Geographical boundaries today are becoming so much less relevant to creative art,” he says. “It’s art first, and then it is Indian.”

Still, the category is a useful organizing principle for curators, says Mathur. “I don’t think that those issues of identity are as limiting as they once were in, say, the ’80s or early ’90s,” she says, when ethnic or national categories were often used to ghettoize artists who were not white, male and from the U.S. or Western Europe.

Nevertheless, she is concerned that the success of the Indian art market is fueling growth without a corresponding rise in scholarship and criticism. “The boom has on the one hand created incredible opportunities for Indian artists and visibility on a global scale and real value in monetary terms,” she says. “On the other hand, it represents a kind of capitulation to conditions of the market.” She jokes that the market may be increasingly driven by “Gujarati doctors in New Jersey buying paintings online to match their sofas.”

Novelty and necessity

Indeed, it remains to be seen whether contemporary Indian art is merely the latest trend — to be summarily replaced by the next big thing — or if it will become a staple of the mainstream art world.

“Markets need fresh meat,” says Nagy. “They need novelty, they need exoticism. It’s happened with the Chinese and now India. So that’s to be cynical, but the world, especially the centers, are interested in these other places. And frankly, the Indian artists are sick to death of always being in India shows.”

16 May - 14 September 2008

Pearson Gallery, The British Library, London NW1 2DB
Admission free
How to get there Opening hours


Discover the epic story of the Ramayana, and follow Prince Rama’s quest to rescue his beloved wife Sita with the help of an army of monkeys.

Over 100 gorgeous 17th-century Indian manuscript paintings are on display in this major exhibition.
The brightly-coloured scenes are packed with incident: battle scenes with 10-headed Ravana, the monkey kingdom of Kishkindha, white elephants and exotic flora, and finally the moment when Rama and Sita are reunited.

• See the manuscript in close-up and turn the pages now
• Take part - by joining our new Flickr group
• Book tickets for our imaginative events programme

The Ramayana manuscripts are brought to life in this stunning exhibition designed by Tara Arts Theatre Company.

Information for journalists

Supported by the British Library Patrons and Friends of the British Library, with the new Turning the Pages production of the Ramayana supported by Sir Gulam and Lady Mohini Noon

Source: http://www.ddinews.gov.in/International/International+-+South+Asia/asa.htm

Source: http://indiaview.wordpress.com/

Source: http://www.hinduonnet.com/holnus/002200804190321.htm

Source: http://telegraphindia.com/1080425/jsp/frontpage/story_9186161.jsp

After the very successful play  - a sell out in fact - at the beginning of April, staged to raise awareness and funds for the OCHS, our Friends of the OCHS team in Harrow are staging the following:

Source: http://www.hindu.com/2008/04/07/stories/2008040758871000.htm

From The Sunday Times, March 30, 2008

By Dean Nelson in Delhi

The assembled businessmen wore black ties and listened politely to a string quartet under crystal chandeliers in a magnificent ballroom. The room buzzed with talk of the old country, but more importantly with commercial speculation about their new domain. What was to be their next takeover target in the local economy?

It could have been a sepia print of the British East India Company, which effectively ruled India as a private colony for 100 years, but a closer look revealed a different kind of burra sahib. More Chandigarh than Cheam, the men gathered at the Grosvenor House hotel in Mayfair, central London, last year were the representatives of a new Indian raj, powerful men intent on buying up chunks of the homeland of their old imperial masters.

They included the host Subodh Agrawal, dealmaker for some of India’s tycoons, and the Hinduja brothers, fourth on The Sunday Times Rich List. An aide to Lakshmi Mittal, the world’s wealthiest steel baron, was there, along with the Birlas and the Jindals, representing India’s oldest industrial families. Britain’s new Indian aristocracy – such as Mike Jatania, who bought Yardley cosmetics – were also in attendance.

They have been called the Indian Billionaires Club and last week one of its celebrated members pulled off the most symbolic corporate takeover in Indian history.