Sharmistha Chaudhuri (heart, carrying pink), 35, at her wedding in Kolkata, India, in January 2020. Chaudhuri discovered some Indian wedding traditions retrograde, so she employed 4 feminist priestesses to officiate at hers. They carried out a multilingual, egalitarian ceremony stripped of patriarchal traditions.
Sharmistha Chaudhuri
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Sharmistha Chaudhuri
Sharmistha Chaudhuri (heart, carrying pink), 35, at her wedding in Kolkata, India, in January 2020. Chaudhuri discovered some Indian wedding traditions retrograde, so she employed 4 feminist priestesses to officiate at hers. They carried out a multilingual, egalitarian ceremony stripped of patriarchal traditions.
Sharmistha Chaudhuri
KOLKATA, India — When Sharmistha Chaudhuri determined to get married in her native India, she confronted a dilemma.
Chaudhuri, 35, is a PR skilled in Austin, Texas. She’s impartial, educated and has traveled the world. She needed her wedding to replicate her liberal values and the equal partnership she has together with her American fiancé.
But Chaudhuri discovered some Indian wedding traditions patriarchal. Hindu weddings are normally officiated by male clergymen. The bride’s mother and father “donate” her to her in-laws. It’s usually solely the bride, not the groom, who prays for her new household’s longevity — and will get her brow anointed with coloured powder to suggest she’s married.
“I just knew that I didn’t want to do this,” Chaudhuri recollects. “It was more like, ‘How can we do something less traditional?'”
Her like-minded mom discovered a resolution: Instead of clergymen, they employed 4 Hindu priestesses to carry out a multilingual, egalitarian ceremony, stripped of patriarchal traditions.
Members of Kolkata’s Shubhamastu priestess group, from left to proper: Sanskrit scholar Nandini, who goes by one identify, Ruma Roy and Paulomi Chakraborty. The priestesses spoke to NPR at a stage arrange in downtown Kolkata, the place they’re formally participating in India’s Durga Puja competition this week for the first time.
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The priestesses belong to a Kolkata-based collective often known as Shubhamastu — “let it prosper” in the historic language of Sanskrit — that started revising Hindu wedding liturgy about 10 years in the past. Two are Sanskrit students with many years of educational expertise. Along with the conventional wedding chants, they typically incorporate secular hymns with lyrics by Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.
The Shubhamastu collective is a part of a feminist push to make one of the world’s oldest religions extra inclusive and interesting to youthful and extra progressive adherents. They are working in one of India’s most liberal states, West Bengal, however have gained fame throughout the nation.
For the first time, feminine clergy are becoming a member of rituals honoring a Hindu goddess
They’re not simply officiating at weddings. This week, for the first time, the Shubhamastu priestesses are presiding over rituals at one of India’s greatest festivals, an homage to the Hindu goddess Durga. Traditionally, solely male clergymen have carried out the Durga Puja rituals, that are hottest in Kolkata however are noticed throughout the nation. This 12 months, after the loss of life of a veteran priest, the 4 priestesses have been invited by competition organizers to play an official position at the foremost celebration in Kolkata, alongside their male counterparts.
“Women storm male bastion,” one Indian newspaper headline reads.
A Durga idol throughout this month’s Durga Puja competition in Kolkata, India.
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Debarchan Chatterjee/NurPhoto by way of Getty Images
Hinduism has no central doctrinal authority — not like Roman Catholicism, for instance, which has the Vatican. So there isn’t a universally accepted ordination scheme for Hindu clergymen. While the overwhelming majority of them are Brahmin males — members of what is perceived as Hinduism’s highest caste — feminine clergy have lengthy been round, albeit in very small numbers. (Experts say they quantity in the a whole lot or probably low 1000’s on this nation of almost 1.four billion individuals.)
“You have to be confident, you have to study hard,” says Nandini, a Shubhamastu priestess who lately began utilizing solely one identify to keep away from revealing her caste. “But you can become priests by profession. Why not?”
On hiatus from her job as a professor of Sanskrit at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University, Nandini, 60, claims as a lot proper to interpret — or reinterpret — Hindu scripture as some other priest.
“I have just omitted those portions [of Hindu wedding liturgy] which are regressive to women. Like kanyadaan, the donation of the daughter to the husband and in-laws,” she explains. “How can I keep that, when women of today are so enlightened? They are empowered! Most of them are working.”
A youth dressed as the Hindu goddess Durga distributes face masks as a part of a COVID-19 consciousness marketing campaign forward of the Durga Puja competition in Kolkata on Oct. 10.
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Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP by way of Getty Images
In India, Hindu weddings are ruled by the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, which units the authorized marriage age for girls as 18, and for males as 21. It says marriages could also be solemnized in accordance with “customary rites and ceremonies,” and mentions the Hindu follow of circling a sacred fireplace seven occasions — however doesn’t require it. It doesn’t legislate the gender of the officiant, nor any liturgy.
Nandini says she and her fellow priestesses’ telephones have been ringing off the hook since their position in the Durga Puja competition was introduced a few months in the past. They’ve officiated a whole lot of weddings over the previous decade, and are at the moment booked via late 2022. In addition to weddings — together with these of each of her daughters — Nandini additionally officiates at memorial companies and housewarming blessings.
But that wasn’t at all times the case.
“In the beginning, we got very few calls. People naturally did not believe in us. They thought, ‘What will the women do?'” Nandini recollects.
Once, after she married a couple, a conservative relative of the newlyweds employed a male priest to return in and repeat the ceremony afterward, simply to verify it was legitimate.
Devotees carry out a ritual for Durga Puja.
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Suraranjan Nandi/Pacific Press/LightRocket by way of Getty Images
“You can’t blame them, you know? This is such an age-old belief,” she says. “It will take time to change.”
But Nandini thinks India and Hinduism are prepared for this modification. Hungry for it, even.
Indian courts in recent times have backed women’s access to certain Hindu temples that used to limit their entry. A recent TV ad for Indian bridal fashion options a prime Bollywood actress taking part in a bride who questions the kanyadaan custom of “donating” a bride to her in-laws. The advert obtained reward, but in addition some criticism from conservatives.
Some Hindu clergymen really feel threatened
Women dance on Juhu seashore in Mumbai throughout the Durga Puja competition.
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Ashish Vaishnav/SOPA Images/LightRocket by way of Getty Images
Sudeshna Chakraborty has heard from some conservatives. Inspired by the 4 Shubhamastu priestesses, Chakraborty left her job 5 years in the past as a customer support govt with one of India’s greatest firms, Reliance, to review Sanskrit and scripture full-time. She’s since been awarded a certificates in Sanskrit from West Bengal’s Visva-Bharati University, and final 12 months started officiating at weddings.
Like the Shubhamastu priestesses, she makes a speciality of revised, egalitarian Hindu weddings in Kolkata. But Chakraborty, 40, says she’s obtained harassing cellphone calls from male clergymen she suspects really feel threatened.
“Some people used to call me up and say, ‘How can you do this? What is the reason behind it?'” she recollects.
She says she’s by no means obtained a direct, particular menace associated to her work as a priestess. But she nonetheless lately registered with a native human rights group and retains its cellphone quantity programmed in her cellphone, simply in case.
For each harassing cellphone name, Chakraborty says she will get many extra from girls who need to comply with in her footsteps. This 12 months, she began instructing a handful of them.
A dance carried out throughout Durga Puja in Mumbai.
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Bachchan Kumar/Hindustan Times by way of Getty Images
Sanskrit mantras, chanted in unison, ring via the third flooring of an previous colonial constructing in downtown Kolkata. It’s the place Chakraborty holds courses for priestesses-in-training. She’s affiliated with an occasions planning firm that handles weddings.
“After a few times practicing this, I got confident in myself,” says one of her college students, 38-year-old Tina Halder, who comes from one of India’s oppressed castes. “We can change this and break the rules. It feels good.”
Breaking the guidelines feels good for the wedding {couples}, too
Chaudhuri, the bride primarily based in Texas, was married by the Shubhamastu priestesses in Kolkata in January 2020. Months later, the pandemic erupted. Under lockdown, she and her husband had a number of time to look at their wedding video.
“How can we do something less traditional?” Sharmistha Chaudhuri puzzled earlier than her wedding. The egalitarian ceremony that she and her husband opted for was carried out in Bengali, Sanskrit and English. Their wedding company have been so enthralled, she says, that some even forgot to eat.
Sharmistha Chaudhuri
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Sharmistha Chaudhuri
It reveals Chaudhuri in a shimmering, salmon-pink outfit — not the conventional crimson shade which most Hindu brides put on. It reveals her and her fiancé continuing into the ceremony collectively. Neither one was “donated” to the different. It reveals them anointing one one other’s foreheads with coloured powder.
And it reveals their company captivated by a uncommon Indian wedding that they might really perceive, as a result of the ceremony was in Bengali, Sanskrit and English. People could have even forgotten to eat — one thing that by no means occurs at Indian weddings, Chaudhuri jokes.
“We look back at certain parts of the ceremony and just laugh and smile,” she says. “There’s nothing we would cringe at. I would say that’s pretty good.”
NPR producer Sushmita Pathak contributed to this report.