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DIWALI: White House Celebrates Diwali - photos & video

Earlier this afternoon, President Barack Obama lighted the official White House diya (lamp) to mark the celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights this weekend. A local Hindu priest from Maryland recited the mantra as Obama lighted the lamp.

The president also signed the executive order re-establishing the President's Advisory Commission and White House Initiative on Asian American and Pacific Islanders, a program which he hoped would improve the health, education, and economic status of AAPI communities.

[NOTE: The ceremony marked the first-time that Diwali was observed in The White House itself. The Bush Administration traditionally celebrated Diwali in the Indian Treaty Room in the Old Executive Office Building, next to the main White House. And, yes, that's a different kind of Indian.]

"I think it's fitting that we begin this work in the week leading up to the holiday of Diwali, the festival of lights, when members of some of the world's greatest faiths celebrate the triumph of good over evil," Obama said.

While this is a time of rejoicing, it's also a time for reflection, when we remember those who are less fortunate and renew our commitment to reach out to those in need.

While the significance of the holiday for each faith varies, all of them mark it by gathering with family members to pray and decorate the house and enjoy delicious food and sweet treats.  And in that spirit of celebration and contemplation, I am happy to light the White House Diya, and wish you all a Happy Diwali, and a Saal Mubarak.

Photos from the event are below:

President Obama lights the lamp to mark the celebration of Diwali.

President Obama addresses the audience before signing the AAPI executive order.

Penn Masala, the Hindi a capella group from UPenn, performed the song "Aicha" from their new album.

Kal Penn, who was appointed as the Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, helped putt the event together.

A Hindu priest from the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple in Maryland chanted the mantra as President Obama lighted the diya during the event.

Please post your comments below.

PHOTO FORUM: The Orange Men of Rishikesh, by Charlotte Purin

The Orange Men of Rishikesh

Text and photographs © Charlotte Purin

It was fitting that I met G.T. Roa (above) on the holiday of Holi, the Indian festival of color that celebrates a man’s survival thanks to his unwavering devotion to God. On this day Hindus, especially adolescent boys, throw or smear brightly colored, staining powders at anyone in the street. Despite this, I left the safety of my ashram and ventured out for sweets. Zig-zagging in order to avoid the boys, I bumped into G.T., a much-bemused sadhu, who was color-free except for the orange uniform that all sadhus wear to signify their life path. I thrust some sweets into his hands and said, “Happy Holi!” He smiled: “Come and talk sometime. I will be sitting here. I am always sitting here.”

The next day, there he was in the same exact spot. And he was there every day until I left four weeks later.  G.T. Roa is a man who left his job as a welder for the life of a monk, renouncing worldly desires for a life of devotion to God. One day he told his family he was going to the mountain – the Himalayas, refuge of seers (rishis) and saints. 

BOOKS: Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus: An Alternative History"

The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger fills a significant gap: It is a scholarly but mostly accessible book that recounts millennia of South Asian history, as much as possible, through the eyes of non-elites. The book has garnered both praise and sharp criticism, as Doniger’s work often does, and has spawned a feisty but confusing New York Times review by Pankaj Mishra.

Doniger (bio) is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. To match her hefty title, Doniger’s curriculum vitae weighs in at 39 pages. For better or for worse, she is one of the most influential American scholars of Indian religion.

Blogging for The Washington Post, Doniger explains her purpose in writing the book:

My narrative is alternative both to the histories promulgated by some contemporary Hindus on the political right in India and to those presented in most surveys in English—imperialist histories, all about the kings, ignoring ordinary people. But the texts tell us not just who was the ruler but who got enough to eat and who did not.

The reviews that appeared recently in The Washington Post and The New York Times could not be more different. The former is simple and unsurprising while the latter is convoluted and apparently looking to pick a fight.

Michael Dirda’s review in the WP summarizes the book and argues that it is “probably too scholarly and specialized for readers looking simply for an introduction to Indian philosophy and religion” but still recommends it for people who already know the basics.

In contrast to Dirda’s by-the-book review, Pankaj Mishra wrote a more interpretive piece in the NYT that was destined to be misinterpreted. The first three grafs invoke a hodgepodge of references: the novelist E.M. Forster, the colonial preference for the supposed clarity of Islam over the supposed muddle of Hinduism, and the claim that “the first British scholars of India went so far as to invent what we now call ‘Hinduism.’”

POLITICS: The Case of Varun Gandhi and the Fake Degrees

At just 29 years old, Varun Gandhi is widely regarded as a rising star in his political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP, which could sweep to power in India’s upcoming national elections when the results are announced on May 16th, is a Hindu nationalist party with a history of anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Recently Gandhi caused uproar when he was caught on tape using such rhetoric. In the aftermath it was discovered that he had lied about academic credentials from the London School of Economics (LSE) and the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), both constituent colleges of the University of London.

The young Gandhi is an asset to the BJP because he is a high-level defector. His family is a political dynasty in the Congress Party, the secularist party currently holding on to power with a thin majority in the Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament). His aunt Sonia Gandhi is currently leader of the Congress. Additionally, his grandmother is the late former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (Congress) and his great grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the first Prime Minister of India (Congress). After a family feud, Gandhi and his mother joined the BJP in 2004. (He explains his conversion to the BJP in a 2005 interview with the BBC.)

In contrast to his usually soft demeanor when speaking to the media in English, Gandhi recently made a series of fiery Hindi speeches in Pilibhit, Uttar Pradesh, where he is the BJP’s candidate for the Lok Sabha. In them he threatens violence against Muslims, saying for example that after the election the “Lotus Hand” (the BJP’s emblem) would cut the throats of the “circumcised.”  That is of course a derogatory reference to Muslims that has more or less the same effect as the ‘N’-word in American politics. A video is available here from IBN, and it is not pretty to watch.

PHOTO FORUM: The Believers: Indian Christians Under Attack, by Massimiliano Clausi

The SAJA Photo Forum presents the work of photographers covering South Asia and its global diasporas in order to highlight important but often overlooked stories.

The Believers: Indian Christians Under Attack

Text and photographs © Massimiliano Clausi

 

In August and September 2008, a wave of violence perpetrated by Hindus on Christian villages swept through the Khandamal district in the in the Indian state of Orissa. Most estimates put the death toll between sixty and one hundred people, with dozens of churches destroyed and thousands of homes burned to the ground. More than 50,000 people were displaced from their homes. The official reason for the violence was the murder, blamed on Christians, of a widely followed religious and political leader. But the roots of hatred lay deep in a mix of poverty and political interests undermining the fragile peaceful coexistence of faiths and ethnic groups in Orissa.

Khandamal is a mountainous area where every plain is cultivated with rice, the major source of income for the villages. Most of the inhabitants belong to the Khanwa tribe; hence the district's name. The Panos, who are the dalits at the bottom of the caste ladder, form the next big group and converted to Christianity generations ago. The percentage of Christians in Khandamal – 25 percent – is high compared to the 2.4 percent for India as a whole.

On August 23, 2008, 81-year-old Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati, a leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a political party, was gunned down at night in the district. Notwithstanding the fact that Maoist guerrillas took responsibility for the murder, Christians were immediately blamed by politicians belonging to the major Hindu parties. Two days later, hordes of Hindu militants were attacking Christian homes and places of worship in Khandamal, mainly at night. Whole families were forced into hiding in the nearby forest for days with no food or water. Those who stayed behind, the old and sick or those simply not willing to surrender their land and belongings to the assailants, were killed, mutilated and burned, or severely injured.

Three months after the peak of the violence, the situation is deadlocked. While Christians are still stuck in inadequate relief camps, the local government is encouraging them to go back to their villages. But they say the threat of fresh attacks is too high, and the local police force is unable to protect them. Every week new assassinations of isolated Christian peasants are being reported, and the promised compensation of Rs. 20,000 is not enough to rebuild a house.

A relief camp near Dopakia village. There are now 12 state-run relief camps hosting displaced Christians.  The situation is still tense, with the killings of Christians being reported every week.

An estimated 20 churches were burned. At least 15 Christian leaders, including Lutheran pastors, Catholic priests, and Christian missionaries, were killed while guarding their places of worship.

OBAMA INAUGURATION: Religious pluralism and our new president

In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama made a point of proclaiming:

"[the United States's] patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth."  [link]

This morning, at the Washington National Cathedral, the Inaugural Prayer Service extended Obama's message of spiritual pluralism by including participants from a variety of different religious traditions. Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, and Uma Mysorekar, president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, were two of the six participants to give responsive prayers during the service.

SAJAforum readers may recall Mysorekar from her appearance on The Colbert Report and her efforts to have Diwali placed on New York City's official "parking holiday" calendar. Mattson, who is a professor of Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Seminary, is "the first woman, the first nonimmigrant and the first Muslim convert" to be elected as ISNA's president.

The video of the service is available here, and the text of both Mattson's and Mysorekar's responsive prayers appears in the official program for the service:

POLITICS: Muslim conference prompts gay-evangelical love, peace, harmony

President-elect Barack Obama's selection of conservative fundamentalist minister Rick Warren, who supported California's Proposition 8 in last month's elections, to deliver the invocation at the presidential inauguration has caused many of Obama's progressive supporters to feel a sense of "betrayal," as Neil Buchanan has written at Dorf on Law. Singer, songwriter, and Prop 8 opponent Melissa Etheridge, who is openly lesbian and has been a longtime activist for gay rights and other progressive causes, had much the same initial reaction. While she had never previously heard of Warren, she wondered whether Warren was a "hate spouting, money grabbing, bad hair televangelist like all the others," and whether she should boycott the inauguration on account of his selection.

Given the controversy, Etheridge was "stunned" to learn that Warren would be giving the keynote address at the Muslim Public Affairs Council's annual convention in California -- where Etheridge herself was scheduled to appear with Junoon's Salman Ahmad to perform "Ring The Bells," a song they had co-written "call[ing] for peace and unity in our world." (Since December, apparently, is "Using Music to Change the World Month," the MPAC performance was intended to initiate a broader "Ring the Bells for Peace" Campaign, which you can read more about here.)

Etheridge says that she initially contemplated canceling her appearance at MPAC on account of Warren's appearance. However, as she recounts at the Huffington Post, Etheridge ultimately decided on a different approach to the situation:

OBAMA: Sonal Shah joins the White House transition team, and gets smeared

[Update: Please scroll down to the comments section to see Vijay Prashad's responses, as well as those of both supporters and critics of his piece. You can also read a letter in defense of Sonal Shah, by some prominent academics and others]

The history of the Indian-American community is so brief - roughly the four decades since doctors, engineers and others started arriving in this country in large numbers - that the passage of even a few years seems like a long time. The community grows that much larger (and wealthier), its youth climb to higher posts in a greater variety of fields, and the barometers by which we measure our collective success are re-calibrated: what we thought of as a big deal, not too long ago, now seems just normal.

And so, when I read Vijay Prashad's recent attack piece, "The Many Faces of Sonal Shah," I had something of a flashback. Prashad's column, in Counterpunch (along with numerous other pieces in the South Asian press), raises questions as to whether Sonal--one of 15 members of the Obama-Biden transition team--is in fact a closet Hindu fascist. And suggests that her silence on anti-Muslim violence in India is consistent with others on the Obama transition team: "many of them have similar commitments to the far Right in Israel or in other parts of the world."

Vijay raised the exact same issues about Sonal in 2005. At the time, I was with India Abroad, and writing a longish piece on desi summer camps like Youth Solidarity Summer, where activists can learn about social justice issues. I noticed that desis on the political left were having heavy online discussions about Indicorps, the group Sonal started with her brother Anand in 2002. Indicorps is a little like Peace Corps, in that it arranges for young Indian-Americans to work with development projects on the ground in India. Sonal had also worked at the Treasury department, which sent her to Bosnia, Kosovo and Southeast Asia, but it was her creation of Indicorps that earned her India Abroad's Person of the Year Award in 2003 (which I also covered).

On one hand, the prize sort of canonized her--here was a new kind of Indian-American youth, who combined Beltway success with entrepreneurial, homeland activism--but on the left, some people were unhappy with her and Indicorps, and the accolades they received. They felt she and the group were secretly aligned with the Hindu right. For those on the left, operating in a post-Godhra environment, this was an Indian-American culture war, in which one could not be involved in any way with a Hindu group without being fully implicated in its worst acts.

In his Counterpunch piece Vijay writes about Sonal's family:

The Shahs remain active in Houston’s Indian community, not only in the ecumenical Gujarati Samaj (a society for people from Gujarat), but also in the far more cruel organizations of the Hindu Right, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Overseas Friends of the BJP (the main political party of the Hindu Right) and the Ekal Vidyalaya. Shah’s parents, Ramesh and Kokila, not only work as volunteers for these outfits, but they also held positions of authority in them. Their daughter was not far behind. She was an active member of the VHPA, the U. S. branch of the most virulently fascistic outfit within India. The VHP’s head, Ashok Singhal, believes that his organization should “inculcate a fear psychosis among [India’s] Muslim community.” This was Shah’s boss. Till 2001, Shah was the National Coordinator of the VHPA.

Vijay aims for guilt by association until that last part, when he names Sonal the VHPA's National Coordinator. However, that title appears to be incorrect: Sonal headed U.S. relief efforts for the VHP in 2001, when the Gujarat earthquake struck (see her statement below). So what exactly is the issue? Here I quote from the article I wrote for India Abroad, more than 3 years ago:

HALLOWEEN: Heidi Klum's idea of a good costume

[UPDATE: Klum's explanation about her costume appended below]

Supermodel Heidi Klum throws a big Halloween party each year - a bash attended by many celebrities. Last year, she went dressed as a cat. This year, she chose to dress as the Hindu goddess Kali.

Hard to imagine it would be all right for her to dress as a god of any other religion. What do YOU think? Post your comments below.

In the photo below, you will see that her husband, the singer Seal is dressed in a costume that appears to be that of Angulimala ("garland of fingers"), a killer who was converted by the Buddha to a life of faith (or is that some figure associated with Kali?).

DIWALI: Spotting the festival in the U.S.

For three years now, we have been marking Diwali's appearances in the U.S. See our 2006 and 2007 collection of items about the "festival of lights" below.

Meanwhile, here is a roundup of some 2008 Diwali items:

Here's Yahoo's Diwali logo today on the main Yahoo.com page:

• President Bush's annual Diwali message
  
• SAJAforum posting: Senator Obama issues Diwali greeting
• Ruchira Gupta, president of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, a New Delhi-based NGO that fights prostitution, talked about Diwali, among other issues at a White House non-Diwali ceremony. Her speech and press release are below. Her e-mail is ruchiragupta[at]gmail.com.
• SAJAer Sandip Roy had a three-minute commentary on NPR's "Morning Edition today: "Diwali Without the Fireworks"
• Here in NYC, it's the third year of Diwali being on the official City of New York "parking holiday" calendar. You can read about how it came to at my personal site  in a page entitled "The NYC Diwali Parking Saga," The graphic below is from NYC.gov:
  .

If we missed anything, let us know! Post your comments, please.

EARLIER DIWALI STORIES ON SAJAforum:

• 2008 NYC, White House, others mark Diwali
• 2007 Houston Chronicle on Diwali's Mainstream Appeal
• 2006 Nasdaq Diwali Photo
• 2006 Diwali Stamp Hoax