In Hinduism, women creating spaces for their own leadership

By DEEPTI HAJELA

When Sushma Dwivedi started seriously thinking about performing wedding rites and other Hindu religious blessings in New York City and elsewhere, she knew who she needed to talk to - her grandmother.

Together, they went through the mantras that are recited by pandits, the priests who perform Hindu religious rituals, to find the ones that resonated with what Dwivedi was trying to do -- offer Hindu blessings and services that were welcoming of all, irrespective of gender identity, sexual orientation, race, any of it.

Her grandmother isn’t a pandit — in India, as well as in Indian diaspora communities, that’s been a domain that is largely populated by men, with cultural mores at play. But she had a wealth of religious knowledge, of ritual, of proper pronunciation, to share with her granddaughter.

And that her grandmother played an integral role in Dwivedi’s understanding and practice of Hinduism reflects a larger religious reality. Those who study the religion and its traditions say that while there aren’t a lot of women priests (although that is changing in India and in other places), women in Hinduism globally continue to take on leadership roles in other ways - building communities, taking on positions in organizations, passing on knowledge.

“We just jammed together and sort of went through scriptures. ... And in that sense, that’s the ‘old school’-est Hindu way on Earth, right? You pass it down,” Dwivedi said.

After all, it was through her grandparents, immigrants from India, that Dwivedi had been exposed to Hinduism while growing up in Canada. They helped build a Hindu mandir, or temple, in their Montreal community, and made the religion an integral part of her life from childhood.
Full Coverage: Women in religion

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This story is part of a series by The Associated Press and Religion News Service on women’s roles in male-led religions.

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Hinduism encompasses a range of practices and philosophies, and has a pantheon of divine figures encompassing both male and female. People can call themselves Hindus and yet practice in different ways from each other. There is no central authority, like an equivalent to the role the pope plays in Catholicism.

So leadership, in India as well as Indian immigrant communities, is decentralized and diverse, encompassing religious scholars, Hindu temple boards and more, said Vasudha Narayanan, a religion professor at the University of Florida who studies Hinduism in India and in the Indian diaspora.

“I would also say that women sometimes create the spaces where they can be leaders in all these other ways,” she said.

Dr. Uma Mysorekar, president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, sits in her office in the Flushing neighborhood of New York's Queens borough Friday, Dec. 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

They’re women like Dr. Uma Mysorekar, who serves as president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America. It runs one of the oldest Hindu temples in the United States in the Flushing section of New York City’s Queens borough.

Mysorekar, trained as a physician, got involved with the temple in the mid-1980s, and has been part of its administration for years, as it expanded its facilities as well as its programming. There are programs for seniors as well as young adults; the temple kitchen is available on food delivery apps.

Being an administrator wasn’t her intention when she started, Mysorekar said.

“I didn’t get involved to become a president. But when the circumstances were forced in, I did accept that challenge.”

She’s convinced that in Hinduism, women can be leaders simply by virtue of their ability to communicate the faith to others, notably to children.

“How many women have led ... going back to times immemorial, and what they have contributed, it should give you that exemplary feeling,” she said. “It’s not that women have to be priests to be leaders, women have to be able to spread the teachings.”

And in this modern age, when so much vital activity occurs online, women are making a difference there, too, said Dheepa Sundaram, assistant professor of Hindu studies, critical theory and digital religion at the University of Denver.

“If you look at social media spaces, you see a lot of women leading different kinds of groups now,” she said.

She pointed to shubhpuja.com as an example, a site co-founded by a woman, Saumya Vardhan, that allows people all over the world to connect with pandits in India, who perform pujas, the religious rituals, that can be seen via videoconferencing.

“We’re seeing women carve out different spaces in the spirituality ecosystem to find a way to actually gain power in that ecosystem,” she said.

And there are examples of women making inroads even when it comes to being pandits, of pushing back against patriarchal restraints.

Manisha Shete, a practicing Hindu priest, smiles as she performs posthumous rituals for her client's mother at a residence in Pune, India, Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2021. (AP Photo/Abhijit Bhatlekar)

Manisha Shete, 51, a female priest who has been working as the coordinator at Jnana Prabodhini, a Hindu reformist school in Pune in western India that trains men and women to perform rituals, first began to officiate at religious ceremonies in 2008.

Her aspirations stemmed in part from an interest in India’s ancient scriptures; after getting married, she studied

“After my wedding, I studied Indology — the history, culture, languages and literature of India.

“During my research work at the Sanskrit language department in Jnana Prabodhini ... I felt that I can do this and I should do it. It was my favorite subject,” Shete told The Associated Press.

Shete said at her school in Pune, where the course for the priesthood can extend up to 18 months, 80% of the students were women, including many who had been housewives and many others who voluntarily their jobs to enter the school.

She said the demand for female priests is growing in urban areas, especially among young women, and she often gets requests even from Indian families overseas to conduct rituals.

“People have started accepting women priests. Every reform comes with some obstacles. But it is happening.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through The Conversation U.S. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

S1 E4 Wendy Doniger on Hinduism – Thinking About Religion

https://www.thinkingaboutreligion.org/s1-e4-wendy-doniger-on-hinduism

Dr. Wendy Doniger’s On Hinduism is a sort of captstone on an epic career exploring Hindu literature, religion, and history. In this conversation we discuss a number of themes from the book, including her own religious background, common misconceptions about Hinduism, the caste system, orientalism, the so-called “Hindu Trinity,” Hindu nationalism, a controversy in India over the charge that she committed …

Wendy Doniger and the Hindus | by Murali Balaji | The New ...

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/07/10/wendy-doniger-and-hindus

In her essay “India: Censorship by the Batra Brigade” [NYR, May 8], Wendy Doniger touches on a number of issues when it comes to the academic study of religion and larger questions of representation. She frames the debate over her book, as well as other topics when it comes to Hinduism, as one between Hindu right-wing activists and scholars, which essentializes a complex history that involves academic …

On Hinduism - Wendy Doniger - Oxford University Press

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/on-hinduism-9780199360079

Wendy Doniger. Includes more than 60 essays and lectures spanning the decades-long career of one of Hinduism's most prominent scholars. Examines a rich array of Hindu concepts--polytheism, death, gender, art, contemporary puritanism, non-violence, and many more. On Hinduism. Wendy Doniger.

“Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History” by Wendy Doniger

Birth of the Celestial Twins, detail of Mughal watercolor, ca 1585-1590 (LAMCA)


Traveling in rural Bengal in 1963, the 23 year-old Wendy Doniger spied the bas-relief of a horse carved into a simple mud and thatch hut. “Resembling the T’ang horses at a gallop … in style something like Picasso bulls, [it was] altogether one of most beautiful things I have ever seen.” The Bengali villagers did not own horses, and seldom ever saw them. Her insight contrasting the profusion of Indian horse imagery with the animal’s actual rarity in India germinated, 58 years later, into Doniger’s latest book, Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares.

The historical and cultural importance of the animal—highly prized for its rarity—is indeed in inverse proportion to its numbers in India.The status of the horse in India has been described by many authors, going back to Marco Polo, Lockwood Kipling (Rudyard Kipling’s father), and most recently Yashaswini Chandra. The monsoon-dominated weather, the lack of wide pastures and the mineral-poor soils combine to make it difficult to graze horses freely in large numbers. India’s neighbors in Afghanistan and Iran, from the Kushans to Nader Shah, could invade and conquer India with droves of bigger, faster and better trained horses. To defend themselves against invasion, Indian rulers had to import horses from drier climates and raise them in stables, feeding them on costly delicacies to make up for the lack of grass. Unlike the steppe horses living in a semi-wild state, the stabled Indian horse was like a pampered, yet willful child. This made the horse a vehicle and symbol for power, for divinity, for beauty, an inaccessible object of desire.

Why are the mares wicked?

Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History, Wendy Doniger (University of Virginia Press, April 2021)

Doniger’s ride through four millennia of Indian legend and folklore is full of sacrificial horses, horse-headed gods, transformations and couplings. These horses emerged, wingèd, from the primordial churning of the sea. They pulled the chariot of the sun. They give birth to the heavenly twins, the Ashvins, India’s Dioscuri. The protagonists of the great Sanskrit epics and the historic Buddha all rode heroic horses. Closer to modern times, horses featured prominently in Brothers Grimm-like folk tales with a dazzling magical variety and echoes of more ancient practices like the Vedic horse sacrifice.

Doniger seeks to make sense of this rich legacy of equine myths with her combination of Sanskrit erudition and equestrian experiences. Why are the mares wicked? Doniger suggests that as horses raised in stables are deprived of their natural social environment, the mares in particular wind up responding badly to the advances of the stallion, often biting and kicking, sometimes fatally, their suitors. I note, in contrast, that in Turco-Mongol folk tales such poor behavior on the part of their steppe-raised horses is unknown. Doniger, as in her previous writings, retains her knack for poking fun at the phallocracy, showing that her sympathy clearly lies with the wicked, put upon mares.

Her study suggests that animal sexuality deeply permeated pre-modern society. Living side-by-side with animals, such societies inevitably developed religious traditions and folklore heavily-colored by the love and fear such animals inspired. Some of the stories recounted here make for heavy going, with bodily fluids liberally splashing about. If Hindu mythology often seems messy and inordinately concerned with sex, it is only when compared to the sanitized version of Greek mythology that most of us learned in school via the prim Ms Edith Hamilton. The original Greek episodes, peeping out of the ancient texts, show a similar preoccupation with equine sexual symbolism. What is striking about India, as opposed to Greece, is how their equine-inspired myths have lasted into early modern times, reflecting the political and military importance of horses down to 1800.

Stallions symbolize “good” male power. Mares stand for “bad” female desire. Since any work by Doniger comes with a strong point of view concerning gender, it presents a puzzle to her, and a challenge to the book’s title, when the heroic stallions of the great Sanskrit epics are replaced in the 17th century Rajput ballads with dutiful mares. Her tentative explanation that this reflects an influx of Arab mares does not stand up, because the Arabs did not export mares to India in any number (as Marco Polo himself noted). It may simply reflect the fact that the brigands of Rajasthan preferred the quiet mares for raiding and plunder. The Mughals rode stallions into battle and fought on horseback. The Rajputs rode to battle but dismounted to fight.

There is no ancient myth that doesn’t lead us further and further into the deep past.

Readers familiar with the literature on horses in India, or indeed elephants (eg, Thomas Trautman’s Elephants and Kings, Chicago University Press, 2015), will find few new historical insights in this book. On the other hand, Doniger uses her deep equestrian experience to probe both historical sources and legends. She claims that foreigners’ complaints that Indian fed their horses ghee (clarified butter) or lamb biryani are groundless calumnies. She asserts that most of the advice given in Sanskrit equestrian manuals, so decried by the British colonialists, must have been good, otherwise the Mughals, who knew a thing or two about horses, would not have so assiduously translated them into Persian. Legends about people eaten by horses or killed by their bites, she writes, are transmitted by people unfamiliar with horses. Getting bit by a horse’s blunt teeth is no worse than getting your fingers caught in a door! The back of a horse is where the danger lies.

Reviewers of Doniger’s many previous works have remarked on their erudition but also their similarity to American shaggy dog stories (which go on and on). Doniger excused herself once by saying that the book in question was not meant to be so long “but it got the bit between its teeth, and ran away from me”. Readers will sometimes feel this way about this book as well. There’s no horse that cannot be ridden, and no rider that can’t be thrown, writes Doniger. There is no ancient myth that doesn’t lead us further and further into the deep past, and no interpretation that doesn’t fall a little flat at the end. Readers will enjoy the long ride even if they experience a few falls and kicks.

David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019). He is working on a new book about the horse in Asian history.

David Chaffetz 11 August 2021 Non-Fiction

Learning to Live Diversity in India

Twenty-two-year-old Wendy Doniger of Great Neck, Long Island, NY arrived in Calcutta in August 1963, on a scholarship to study Sanskrit and Bengali.

Wendy Doniger, Githa Hariharan
26 Jun 2022

Image courtesy: Speaking Tiger

Twenty-two-year-old Wendy Doniger of Great Neck, Long Island, NY arrived in Calcutta in August 1963, on a scholarship to study Sanskrit and Bengali. It was her first visit to the country whose history and culture she was deeply interested in. Over the coming year—a lot of it spent in Tagore’s Shantiniketan—she would fall completely in love with the place she had till then known only through books.

In An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-64 (Speaking Tiger, 2022), the country comes alive through her vivid prose, introspective yet playful, and her excitement is on full display whether she is writing of the paradoxes of Indian life, the picturesque countryside, the peculiarities of Indian languages, or simply the mechanics of a temple ritual that she doesn’t understand.

In this conversation with Githa Hariharan, Doniger talks about her letters and recollections as well as her journey, from the young girl who wrote those letters to the woman looking back and how in many ways, that journey has also been the journey of what India was and what it has become.

Wendy Doniger | UChicagoNews

Githa Hariharan (GH): Throughout the collection of letters and recollections in An American Girl in India, I had a sense of a ‘prequel’ – in terms of the work you have done, the first loves that have grown deeper, and the books; but also the kind of person you have become. In what ways did travel, specifically travel to a crazily diverse place like India, train you in crossing cultural borders? In being open-minded to ideas as well as experiences?

Wendy Doniger (WD): That first trip to India was indeed the most important educational experience in my life, so much more important than everything I ever learned in universities. The letters betray the constant tension between my passionate love of so many facets of Indian life – the ancient culture, the people I met, the architecture, the music, the food, even the extremes of the climate – and my disappointment in myself for not being able to love everything about India, the poverty, the begging; I never got used to being begged from, especially by women and children. I learned how to go on loving and appreciating all the facets of India – and by extension, eventually, all sorts of other things on the planet earth, and indeed other peoples – despite being painfully aware of many of their tragic shortcomings. In particular, I learned to appreciate all that I loved about Hinduism – its diversity, its great stories, its passions, its architecture, its music – without losing my awareness of its capacity for violence, in animal sacrifices as well as in human conflicts, perhaps, in some ways, always reflecting the violence of the climate.

Also read | An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-64

GH: In the same vein, I think of the trope of travel to other places to understand where you come from, and meeting all kinds of ‘others’ to understand a little more of yourself. This is also underlined by the connections you make, whether it is through films, literature, songs, jokes and proverbs. Did you leave with a different sense of ‘identity’ than you came with? And now, when you read the letters, what are the selves that reveal themselves to you?

WD: I certainly learned, from living in India, how very privileged I had been growing up as I did in America. And I learned, from experiences such as passing out cold when they chopped off the head of the goat in the sacrifice, that any plans I might have had to become an anthropologist had to be abandoned for good. I learned that I really did love the Sanskrit stories best of all, better even than the Bengali stories, and that the reality of India – the fabulous temples and spectacular rivers and mountains, the way people dressed and danced and sang – was even more wonderful than the India that I thought I knew from the texts. When I read the letters now, I am embarrassed by the naivete and arrogance of my young self, particularly about politics, but I am proud of her courage and her determination and the way that she never lost her sense of humour, even in difficult situations.

GH: I was struck by your early discovery that humour is so essential to survive the cross-cultural experience. The element of play makes the weighty – whether matters of myth or language or inscrutable cultural practice – a fairly joyous process of discovery, rather than a series of obstacles to be overcome. The tenor is also brisk, almost racy. Is this optimism, or a case of writing cheerily to one’s parents, or a strategy you learnt early to grapple with ‘big’ ideas and experiences?

WD: I was raised never to lose my sense of humour even (or, in fact, especially) in difficult situations; this was my mother’s way of dealing with life, and it stood me in good stead in India. I still can’t resist the temptation to make a joke, even when I’m writing about fairly serious matters. And so the letters are inevitably light-hearted, as indeed was much of my later serious academic writing. But of course you are right about the need to stay cheerful in reassuring my parents that I was well and happy. And so I did not, for instance, tell them how ill I had become, with both amoebic and bacillary dysentery, or how frightened I was by the angry Hindu mobs attacking Muslims in Calcutta in the first skirmishes of what was to become the war between India and Pakistan in 1965, or, in another sphere, how I had, inadvertently, gotten quite stoned on bhang on the night of Durga Puja in Bengal. Often the best way I found to explain to myself, as much as to my parents, a particularly troubling or puzzling aspect of Indian life, was to find a parallel in a much-retold old family joke.

GH: This has been quite an exercise in looking back, reconstructing, but also judging and forgiving yourself. How self-conscious and deliberate were you in constructing the persona of the past, and the present older persona looking over the girl’s shoulder?

WD: My first reaction to the letters was that I would have to censor a great deal if I was going to publish them. I did, in fact, cut out a lot of boring paragraphs about asking my parents to send me stuff and telling them what I was sending them and so forth. But then I wanted to cut out the stupid things that I had said, the spoilt-brat assumptions as well as blatant errors about Indian history and contemporary Indian politics, and even mistakes in the plots of the myths I recounted. However, my Indian publisher, Ravi Singh, urged me to keep in those uncomfortable, often embarrassing bits, but to write a preface to the book as a whole, and individual prefaces to sections and sometimes to particular letters, noting that I now realize that these were, in fact, mistakes; and, in a way, to forgive my younger self for her ignorance and her naivete, but always to make it clear that I stopped holding those opinions long ago. And I returned again and again, in later years, to many of the myths that had fascinated me even then, now correcting my errors as I read the texts of the stories that I had often just heard people tell when I was in India, and I came to understand more and more of the history that had framed them. So those prefaces did in fact construct what you rightly call an ‘older persona looking over the girl’s shoulder,’ somehow forgiving her for at least being frank about her wrongheaded ideas. In a way, leaving those wrong ideas in the letters and apologizing for them is my answer to the excesses of the cancel culture: yes, we were wrong in the past, and we are not going to go on doing that now, but we need not condemn everything about the way we were then, nor deny it.

GH: You have a deep, almost poetic connection to the landscape – do you continue to have that, and revel in the sensory as you did during your early travels in India?

WD: Never again did I have the chance to immerse myself as deeply in the landscape as I did in those months when I lived in the countryside at Shantiniketan. But on later visits to India, I often spent weeks, if not months, in other parts of India, and always left the cities to travel to the countryside. I particularly recall getting to know the feel of the land when I stayed on the coast of Kerala some years ago, after watching some Koodiyattam performances, and again traveling in the desert outside of Jaipur after speaking at the Jaipur literary festival, and on another occasion traveling in a boat all around Sri Lanka, frequently going ashore for a day or two. And, of course, I never lost my pleasure in immersing myself in Indian music, and Indian art, and Indian stories most of all, even back in America.

Also read | Hindutva, Counter-Culture and Manusmriti

GH: There are so many worlds that co-exist in this slim volume, and you seem to straddle all of them. What is your description of a true cosmopolitan?

WD: I don’t think I was a true cosmopolitan when I arrived in India, though I was certainly open to new ideas and new places right from the start. I remained very much an American in my tastes and many of my habits, but I emerged from that year much more aware of the limits of the American world I had grown up in, and much more appreciative of the sensibilities of people who felt very differently from me about basic aspects of human life. Perhaps that is a working definition of a cosmopolitan.

GH: Inevitably, the India you saw up close then and the India that we are all struggling to understand now: are we in danger of eroding that gloriously multi-stranded, argumentative narrative so characteristic of Indian myth and tale as well as cultural practice?

WD: Certainly the intrusive presence of mass world culture, first in film and then in television and now in the Internet and YouTube and podcasts and all the rest, and particularly as these media are manipulated in the hands of rich, powerful people who know how to use the media to change the opinions and the lives of people at all levels of society – certainly all of this does threaten to erode the India that I saw and loved in the 1960s, a place where geographical variations and caste traditions and village traditions and just the whole polytheistic and polyphilosophical and polyritual nature of Hinduism was still alive and well and living in India, right alongside Islam as well as, to a lesser but still significant extent, Buddhism and Jainism and Christianity and even Judaism. So much of this is under serious attack in India today. But people in India are still telling their stories and publishing their poems and novels and showing their paintings and their sculptures and practicing their family rituals all over the great subcontinent, and that gives me hope.

GH: Finally, a word or two about your first love, Shiva. Did it last? Were there competitors?

WD: Ah, Shiva has always remained the god who seems to me best to express the way the universe really is, as well as being the god who is the subject of the best stories and much of the best sculpture in India. The Shiva of the Puranas, the Shiva of Kailasanatha at Ellora, Shiva with Parvati and Nandi – I still find him fascinating and, though enigmatic, the deity best able to explain to me the nature of reality.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

I FIRST CAME ACROSS WD WHEN I READ SOMA, BY WASSON, SHE WAS THE COLLABORATOR AND TRANSLATOR OF RG VEDA THE SANSKRIT REFERENCES TO THE MAGICK MUSHROOM SOMA. WE USED THIS TEXT IN MY SHAMANISM CLASS IN COMPARITIVE RELIGION AT THE UNIV OF ALBERTA

I ALSO READ HER WORK ON SHIVA, AS WELL SHE HAS WRITTEN A REVISIONIST HISTORY OF HINDUISM I CANNOT RECCOMEND ENOUGH

Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality

by R. Gordon Wasson

Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, by R. Gordon Wasson (New York, 1968), in 404 bookmarked and searchable pdf pages, with numerous color plates and illustrations.  A Wikipedia entry discusses the remarkable work of Wasson, and his identification of the Amanita muscaria (or, fly-agaric) mushroom as a psychoactive component in the mysterious Soma beverage mentioned in the Hindu Vedas. Sanskritist Wendy Doniger is the book's coauthor. Scanned by Robert Bedrosian. Internet Archive has a selection of works about ethnobotany.

Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality,: Wasson, Robert …

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• Format: Paperback

• Author: Robert Gordon Wasson

Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, Paperback – April 1 1972 by Robert Gordon Wasson (Author) 11 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle Edition $3.45 Read with Our Free App Hardcover $2,391.99 1 Used from $2,391.99 Paperback $152.65 5 Used from $124.00

https://www.amazon.ca/Soma-Immortality-Robert-Gordon-Wasson/dp/015683…

Revisiting Wasson's Soma: exploring the effects of …

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21305914

In 1968 R. Gordon Wasson first proposed his groundbreaking theory identifying Soma, the hallucinogenic sacrament of the Vedas, as the Amanita muscaria mushroom. While Wasson's theory has garnered acclaim, it is not without its faults. One omission in Wasson's theory is his failure to explain how pre …

• Author: Kevin Feeney

• Publish Year: 2010

Oppenheimer’s use of sacred text in sex scene angers Hindu right wing in India

Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi

THE GUARDIAN
Mon, 24 July 2023 

Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/AP

Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer has prompted outrage among the Hindu right wing in India, who have alleged that a sex scene featuring a scared text has offended religious sentiments.

The blockbuster tells the story of Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb and includes a sex scene in which the tortured physicist, played by Cillian Murphy, reads
the Bhagavad Gita to his lover Jean Tatlock, played by Florence Pugh.

The words he reads aloud, which he translates from Sanskrit, are those of the god Krishna – “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” – a quote the real Oppenheimer recalled after the first detonation of the atomic bomb he had invented. Oppenheimer taught himself Sanskrit and during his life, he spoke of drawing from the Hindu text.

The presence of the Bhagavad Gita in the middle of the sex scene prompted a member of India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government to call the film an “attack on Hinduism”.

In an open letter, Uday Mahurkar, an information commissioner, said the scene was “a direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus”. He alleged it amounted to “waging a war on the Hindu community” and almost appeared to be part of a “larger conspiracy by anti-Hindu forces”.

Anurag Thakur, the information and culture minister, was among those to demand that the scene be removed and called for action to be taken against India’s Central Board of Film Certification. The film was rated U/A, which recommends parental guidance for viewers aged under 12.

Oppenheimer has proved popular with Indian audiences, taking £1.2m on the first day alone, the biggest box office opening day for a Hollywood film in India this year.

The blockbuster is not the first to fall afoul of rightwing Hindu groups since the BJP government came to power. The BBC/Netflix television adaptation of A Suitable Boy was also accused of hurting religious sentiments by senior BJP ministers and subjected to police complaints for a scene of a Hindu girl and Muslim boy kissing near a temple.

Tandav, an Amazon series, was forced to delete several scenes after its creators faced charges in court and were summoned by the BJP government for allegedly insulting Hindu gods and the office of the prime minister.

‘Oppenheimer’ Sex Scene Involving Sacred Text Stirs Backlash in India: ‘It Amounts to Waging a War on the Hindu Community’

IT'S CALLED TANTRA

Ryan Lattanzio
Mon, 24 July 2023 

Updated: Variety has added to reports that a nude scene featuring Florence Pugh in “Oppenheimer” was censored with a computer-generated black dress to secure release in India and the Middle East.

Earlier: A sex scene in “Oppenheimer” is facing backlash and protests in India, where a moment involving J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and his lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) reading a sacred Hindu text in bed together has sparked outrage and reportedly censorship.

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“Oppenheimer” was passed with a U/A certificate — meaning children under 12 can see the film with parental guidance — by India’s Central Board of Film Certification. Christopher Nolan’s three-hour IMAX-shot epic also performed well at the box office in India, where Nolan has a strong contingent of fans. But now officials in India are calling for the movie to be further censored despite it now allegedly featuring a CGI-created dress superimposed over Pugh’s naked body during one post-coital moment later in the film. (IndieWire has reached out to “Oppenheimer” studio Universal about this allegation shared online and seemingly corroborated by India-residing audiences as well as those in Indonesia.)

The scene criticized by Indian officials involves Oppenheimer and Tatlock mid-intercourse when she stops to pull a copy of the “Bhagavad Gita” out of a bookshelf and asks Murphy to read a passage. He reads, “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds,” which came to mind for Oppenheimer during the detonation of the atomic bomb he developed out of Los Alamos. The “Bhagavad Gita” is featured in the “Mahabharata” and depicts dialogue between a prince and the divine Krishna mid-battle.

In a letter addressed to Christopher Nolan shared on Twitter, India’s Information Commissioner and Save Culture Save India Foundation founder and Hindu nationalist party affiliate Uday Mahurkar called the film a “scathing attack on Hinduism” over the weekend.

Mahurkar wrote: “It has come to our notice that the movie ‘Oppenheimer’ contains a scene which make a scathing attack on Hinduism. As per social media reports, a scene in the movie shows a woman makes a man read Bhagwad Geeta aloud while getting over him and doing sexual intercourse. She is holding Bhagwad Geeta in one hand, and the other hands seems to be adjusting the position of their reproductive organs. The Bhagwad Geeta is one of the most revered scriptures of Hinduism. Geeta has been the inspiration for countless sanyasis, brahmcharis and legends who live a life of self-control and perform selfless noble deeds. We do not know the motivation and logic behind this unnecessary scene on life of a scientist. But this is a direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus, rather it amounts to waging a war on the Hindu community and almost appears to be part of a larger conspiracy by anti-Hindu forces.”

The letter concluded, “We urge, on behalf of billion Hindus and timeless tradition of lives being transformed by revered Geeta, to do all that is needed to uphold dignity of their revered book and remove this scene from your film across world. Should you choose to ignore this appeal it would be deemed as a deliberate assault on Indian civilisation.”

According to Variety, India’s minister for information and broadcasting Anurag Thakur requested per NDTV that the scene be deleted entirely.

THE FAUX OUTRAGE IS NOT ABOUT HINDUISM BUT HINDUIST NATIONALISM

HINDUISM IS FAR MORE VARIED THAN THAT

SEE

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In the Hindu diaspora, dancers and feminists celebrate the modern cultural significance of Navaratri

Throughout the United States, South Asian Americans young and old have come out to dance garba, the folk dance that began as a devotional form of worship and has now become a cultural phenomenon for Hindus and non-Hindus alike.

People dance during the Dandiya Drop garba in New York City. Photo by Misha Patel

October 24, 2023

By 

Richa Karmarkar

(RNS) — The garba, a folk dance from western India once performed by women at home to celebrate the Hindu goddess Durga, has improbably inspired Bollywood-sized performances at social gatherings and competitions in the United States.

The garba originated in Gujarat, the state along India’s western coast, as part of celebrations of the holiday of Dussehra that marks the end of Navaratri, a nine-day festival of devotion to the Hindu goddess Durga that ends Tuesday (Oct. 24).

Honoring the divine feminine energy of Durga and her incarnations, the garba, whose name comes from the Sanskrit word for womb, has been danced by thousands of colorfully dressed South Asians across New York and New Jersey over the past nine days. It is often danced on college campuses and at local community centers until long after midnight.

Many of those dancing will be non-Hindus, as second-generation Hindu Americans have hosted garba events that emphasize the dance’s fostering of community. 

At Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn, New York, on Sunday, professional dancer Alisha Desai, whose father is Gujarati, welcomed passersby to take part in a garba performance and workshop in collaboration with the Brooklyn Arts Council.

Alisha Desai, left, performs alongside other dancers. Photo courtesy of Alisha Desai

“I wanted everyone to feel comfortable,” said Desai. “If you are Hindu, I wanted you to have a good time and practice your beliefs with everybody. But I wanted anyone who maybe doesn’t even know who Durga is to feel comfortable enough to join in and celebrate.”

Describing herself as spiritual, not religious, Desai said the art form has been vital in connecting her to her own heritage. Desai studied classical Indian dance in India for a year while in college, where she was inspired to bring a taste of large-scale garba back to her own community in Brooklyn.

“Art and dance are spiritual acts,” said Desai. “It is a way to connect to the oneness and everybody, and a higher power. That’s kind of my meditation, and my way of grounding myself.”

Pankti Doshi, a Gujarati American from the Bay Area, said the communal nature of the dance led her to co-found the event planning group and/aur, which hosts meetups and parties for South Asian American New Yorkers looking for a way to connect with their culture. 

“I was constantly surrounded by South Asian people,” said Doshi. “I had this feeling instilled in me that: I am South Asian, I am Indian, and I’m so excited to be a part of this community.”

People dance during the Dandiya Drop garba in New York City. Photo by Misha Patel

Her group’s unique garba was called Dandiya Drop: a pop-up event for adults, complete with drinks and dance influencers, specifically pitched toward the children of immigrants like her, who have a unique American experience, she said. (A dandiya, or dandiya raas, is a variation of the garba, in which sticks are slapped together.)

“Garba is really an experience where people are gathered to build that sense of belonging, where they’re sharing a new culture, a new dance and a sense of contagious energy,” she said. “There’s this underlying feeling that we’re creating a sense of home in such a large city.”

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According to Shana Sippy, an associate professor of religion and chair of Asian studies at Centre College in Kentucky, the traditions of Hinduism, diverse as they are, readily adapt to the local context. Garba, as it has migrated out of Gujarat, has transitioned from a domestic folk dance to become “a way to represent your culture and your tradition,” said Sippy. “Not only are you embodying your culture by dancing, but you are representing it to others.”

Navaratri celebrations don’t end with garba. In south India, women of the house put together golus, or tiered altars of dolls and items depicting events in Hindu mythology. Bengali people celebrate Dussehra with a large-scale Durga puja, or ritual.

The first time Vasudha Narayanan, a Hindu scholar at the University of Florida, participated in a garba was when she came to America from southern India in the 1980s. But for years since, she has hosted a golu open house.

Vasudha Narayanan poses in front of her golu, a tiered Hindu altar. Photo courtesy of Vasudha Narayanan

The United States, Narayanan said, lends itself to pan-Hindu celebrations, where immigrants and their first-generation offspring can share the nuances of local traditions their families left behind.

“It is the transmission of culture through music and dance, both horizontally — communicating it to Hindus from other parts of India — as well as vertically, to the next generation,” said Narayanan. “That kind of transmission helps us understand the diversity of Hinduism and that it’s not a single way of celebration or belief.”

Anu Sehgal founded the Culture Tree in New York with the intention of teaching South Asian language classes to kids in the diaspora. But since its start, the school has become a hallmark of Indian cultural programming geared toward children, from puppet shows to museum exhibits.

While her goal is to keep religion out of her educational programs, Sehgal doesn’t shy from introducing Navaratri traditions to children with its cultural history, including the widely known story of Durga’s victory over the demon Mahisha.

People attend Navaratri festival celebrations in India Square in Jersey City, New Jersey, Oct. 21, 2023. RNS photo by Richa Karmarkar

“There is such a huge benefit of celebrating festivals for these children, for including their heritage, their culture, their languages in everyday life,” said Sehgal. “Our kids will learn about their heritage, customs and community through all of these celebrations. All while having fun!”

Her organization’s garba event at New York’s Waterline Park brought together thousands of South Asians, Hindus and people of other faiths, for a family-friendly evening, including two dance circles: one for seasoned experts and one for kids. 

Even as South Asians of all faiths have come to enjoy garba, so too have college students of any faith and none: On campuses across the U.S., competitions have sprung up that go all year long. In April, the University of Texas’ Dirty South Dandiya won the 15th annual Raas All-Stars National Championship in Chicago.

“Garba is not just about feminine power, but it’s also about bringing people together,” said Sehgal. “People were in sync with each other, they were looking at each other, following each other’s cues. Everyone has to dance in unison. How powerful is that?”




People participate in a garba dance during Navaratri festival celebrations in India Square in Jersey City, New Jersey, Oct. 21, 2023. RNS photo by Richa Karmarkar

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 Outside the West, the Kundalini tradition presents a model of the ‘divine feminine’ beyond binary gender

(The Conversation) — Drawn from tantric traditions, Kundalini points to spiritual practices that go beyond traditionally understood concepts of the masculine and feminine.

A piece of art shows the tantric tradition's depiction of Kundalini and energy centers – or chakras. (Tantrika painting/Wellcome Collection, CC BY)

Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya FoxenDecember 10, 2025

(The Conversation) — The notion of the divine feminine is a recurring motif in American pop culture, playing with the assumptions people make when referring to God – often the deity described in the Bible – as “He.”

Whether it’s Alanis Morissette’s iconic portrayal of God in the 1999 comedy “Dogma” or Ariana Grande’s titular declaration in her 2018 track “God is a Woman,” the effect is the same: a mixture of irreverence and empowerment. It dovetails, moreover, with a ubiquitous political slogan: “The future is female.”

But in a historical moment when society is bitterly contesting ideas about gender, we’d note that these notions still rely on a simplistic binary.

As two scholars who study the entangled history of spirituality and gender, we often observe an especially fraught version of this dynamic playing out among “spiritual but not religious” practitioners, often called spiritual seekers. To many such people, the divine feminine represents an escape from oppressive gender norms, and yet many stumble in trying to reconcile the idea with the embodied realities of biological sex.

An approach that escapes this dilemma is the centuries-old Kundalini tradition, which paints a model of the divine feminine beyond gender altogether.

The feminine Shakti

There are certainly examples of the feminine divine to be drawn from Christian and other Abrahamic religious traditions. Yet many seekers quickly find themselves reaching beyond these borders.

When they do, one of the first concepts they come across is Shakti, a divine feminine energy that manifests in the human body as the electrifying force of Kundalini. Both terms originate in South Asian religions – especially Hinduism – that fall under the broad umbrella of tantra.

Tantric cultural and spiritual traditions, which began to emerge in the early centuries of the Common Era, take a positive perspective on the material world in general and the human body in particular, as opposed to traditions that regard both as inherently illusory or sinful. In tantra, the material world and physical body are suffused by divine energy. This energy is called Shakti, and it is feminine.

Another key idea common to tantric traditions is that the universe is composed of two fundamental principles – or rather that it has two poles: a dynamic energy, which is female, balanced by an unchanging consciousness, which is male. As the great Goddess, Shakti goes by many names, including Durga, Kali and myriad others. The masculine principle is usually called Shiva, though this can vary as well.

Divinity beyond binaries

Tantric traditions span over a millennium in time and a subcontinent in space, so it should come as no surprise that they are incredibly diverse. However, most practices that enjoy global popularity today, especially those centered on the divine feminine energy of Kundalini, can be traced to a specific tradition called Kaula Tantra, which developed in the northeast of modern-day India near Kashmir.

A picture of tantric art from the 19th century.
Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

This tradition is distinctive by maintaining that while the cosmos is polar, it is also nondual, meaning that there is only one ultimate reality. So, the pairing of Shakti and Shiva, feminine and masculine, energy and consciousness, is best understood not as a binary but as the two sides of a Mobiüs strip, where one seamlessly flows into the other.

Take a strip of paper, twist it into a figure eight – also the symbol we use for infinity – and glue the back to the front. That’s the Kaula model of the universe.

In such a world, Shiva is Shakti. The masculine is the feminine. Both are divine, but even more than this, both are ultimate, because there is no difference between them. God is goddess, and both are nonbinary.

Awakening Kundalini

Kundalini yoga is a centuries-old practice quite different from the branded version popularized more recently by Yogi Bhajan. It involves using complex meditative and physical techniques to awaken and raise this energy from its usual resting place in the bottom of the torso.

In doing this, tradition says the practitioner experiences a radical transformation both of the body and of consciousness. Premodern texts describe Kundalini’s fiery energy burning through the tissues of the body, shooting up to the crown of the head, where the feminine Shakti unites with her masculine counterpart and all dissolves into oneness.

While some texts treat this ascent as equivalent to a sort of voluntary death, others describe how, once she has ascended, Kundalini returns to bathe the body in a cooling nectar of immortality, resulting in an embodied state of enlightenment and liberation.

According to this tradition, the body may appear the same but is now enlivened with a new consciousness that has transcended all dualities – including male and female.

Is the divine feminine female?

Human gender norms often prove difficult to shake, however. Though the energy of Kundalini is understood as feminine, Kundalini yoga in South Asia has been traditionally practiced by men. The reasons for this are perhaps almost entirely social, and yet they remain a powerful force.

Ironically, the very fact that Kundalini is often believed to be associated with womanhood has resulted in women being excluded – or at least deprioritized – from cultivating their own practice. Instead, they have historically become assistants or accessories to the enlightenment of men.

The fieldwork we present in our recent book on the topic bears this out. Among South Asian practitioners, the common attitude is that women embody the maternal principle, and this makes them extremely powerful. In them, the energy of Kundalini operates naturally. Men, on the other hand, need to be purified by a woman through ritual in order to effectively engage in Kundalini practice.

A woman meditates during festival for a modern, branded version of Kundalini yoga.
Godong/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Such ideas are also common among Western practitioners, who tend to believe women have a more natural aptitude for Kundalini awakening. One of our subjects said this is because women have less ego. Another attributed it to female sexual fluids.

However, cultural difference plays a role, too. Western notions of the divine feminine are much more inclined to cling to the binary, resisting the idea that male and female bodies alike are ultimately woven from the same nondual reality.

Most striking, perhaps, one man who had spent a lifetime among seekers at spiritual retreats in the U.S. and South America told us of a long-held and common belief that only women were capable of Kundalini experience. It was, to him, an energy exclusive to the female body. He recounted having been shocked, only months prior, at encountering a copy of the 1967 classic “Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man,” authored by the decidedly male Gopi Krishna.

The broader point, however, is that the historical core of Kundalini practice has always been about transcending all dualities.

Thus, even as a goddess representing the ultimate “She,” Kundalini is best understood as nonbinary. Perhaps if we can wrap our heads around this idea, we can cultivate a more inclusive empowerment.

(Anya Foxen, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, California Polytechnic State University. Sravana Borkataky-Varma, Instructional Assistant Professor of Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Houston. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.

The Conversation religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The Conversation is solely responsible for this content.

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