Singer Carrie Grossman has adopted the name Dayashila.
IANS
NEW YORK: Singing of kirtans at an Ivy League university has drawn protests from a multi-racial group of students there.
Unlike in the protests against yoga, the demonstrators this time were not religious fundamentalists, but students spewing leftist rhetoric at Brown University.
They protested a non-Indian white woman singing kirtans, asserting that only those born Hindu should sing the religious hymns, according to media reports.
The performance by Carrie Grossman, who has adopted the Hindu name Dayashila, was disrupted Thursday by protesters claiming that by singing kirtans she as a white person was wrongly “appropriating” elements of Hinduism.
They used radical leftist terminology like white privilege, structural change and “radical love” to oppose what they called “cultural appropriation” by a white person.
“Cultural appropriation,” according to those who protest it, happens when people use or performs elements from a culture not their own.
Many in the audience confronted the protesters, who eventually left the event and staged a sit-in outside.
“Several audience members turned around and asked them to be quiet,” The Brown Daily Herald reported.
“In addition, some of the audience members stood up and moved to where the protesters were sitting to ask them to leave.”
Most of those in a picture published by Herald of the demonstration against the kirtan performance were white and African American, with few Indians.
Rajan Zed, the president of US-based Universal Society of Hinduism, called the protests at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island state, “sad and inappropriate”.
“Color of the person should not matter in devotional singing and anybody should be able pay respectful homage to Hindu deities through kirtan or other forms,” Zed said. “Kirtan offered means to connect to the heart, to the divinity that lies within.”
He asked Brown University president Christina H. Paxson and chancellor Thomas J. Tisch to “make sure that such unreasonable interruptions did not happen at the Hindu events on the campus in the future” and to hold a formal inquiry into the disruption.
The Herald reported that Grossman, a Brown University alumna, told her audience that she discovered kirtans during a visit to India and “found (chanting) very powerful and very healing”.
Describing her mission to spread the singing of kirtans, Grossman writes on her website about her experience in the third person: “At the altar of her instrument she called out to the divine and unburdened her heart. This process was profoundly healing and, the more she did it, the more she felt drawn to share her sound with the world.”
She has produced a recording, “Soma Bandhu,” that features hymns like “Om Nama Shivaya,” “Jai Ma” and “Sarve Bhavantu.”
Although the protesters used radical leftist rhetoric, their agenda appears to be a form of selective opposition to conversions or religious interactions – in effect, banning those not born Hindu from singing Hindu religious hymns or participating in rituals.
Christian fundamentalist also oppose non-Hindus participating in Hindu cultural or health practices. From New York to California, some Christians have protested yoga practice in schools. Most recently fundamentalists in Georgia protested against the namaste greeting during yoga.
However, similar protests are not held by those claiming to be against “cultural-appropriation” when non-Christians sing Christian hymns or participate in Christian observances.
Wearing bindi or pottu by non-Indian women have also been crticised as “cultural appropriation.”
In the face of protests, the Contemplative Studies Departmental Undergraduate Group, which organized the kirtan, issued an apology saying that they “humbly acknowledge that those intentions (in arranging the event) do not preclude harm and hurt that we may have inflicted,” the Herald reported.
Ironically, Anchal Saraf, one of the protesters with an Indian name quoted in the media, was a signatory to a petition demanding freedom of expression at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Freedom of expression in US universities is under threat not from the government, but from students and faculty. At elite universities like Yale, students have in the past year explicitly protested freedom of expression on campuses and tried to silence professors and students not conforming to their version of liberal or radical views.
Even media faculties are not immune despite freedom of expression being at the core of journalism. Last year, a journalism teacher at University of Missouri, who supported an African American student protest, instigated an attack on an Asian American photographer trying to record it in a public place.
6 Comments
The nutty religious meets the nutty left and hilarity ensues.
Why to apologize to, seek for apologies? They have done it the right and should continue with sometimes. If they have sung the kirtanas in the Brown University campus, they have done it rightly for which the Indian students cannot be the contractors of. Mark, it is an overseas performance. What one can as per knowledge or idea, that itself is enough. Such an activity can never hurt or harm. The Indians have to be in the benedictory programmes, we cannot accept it. I think they should continue sometimes taking it as a break during intervals.
A cultural program should not be interpreted in terms of a Hindu singing a kirtana or a non-Hindu, a White or a non-White. Those who have protested against are not on the right track. Hinduism is not the priority of the Hindus only. The recitation of Om, Hare Rama, hare Krishna cannot be ascribed to be of only one closed community or group. One can definitely say namaste. I hate them most who act as cultural or moral police. Kirtanas and good words of benediction are for all to use, not of the Indians reading in America. If they are so much conservative they should not have gone to the States.
I wish Leftists stop being defenders of Hinduism or any other religion, Let Hindus talk on their behalf. Stop doing this non-sense in my religion’s name, there are plenty of good issues to work on and you chose to oppose someone singing a beautiful Kirtan. Regressive in deed.
Leftists of indian origin are anti-Hindu. The bogey of ‘cultural appropriation’ is just another weapon to ensure that the good things related to Hinduism do not become popular.
What is yoga? A few know it as some have really control over it and they do know it. Those who are real yogis will never go for money. Yoga is not that the fraud yogis and babas or fake gurus will teach. The kernel of Hinduism a few have come to realize. One can definitely express his or her love for kirtans and bhajans, but what it is in one’s mindset it is very difficult to predict about. Though India regressed in the medieval times, instead of that the people of different faiths lived in here and were given shelter in a nation multi-ethnic, multi-racial like that of ours. Leftism is good, but not too much if it eliminates and eradicates, censures and sues the non-leftists. Leftism is a heaven for comrades and cadres. The last of all, why are the Muslim countries not secular, a few of them at least? Is Saudi Arabia up to the mark?