MUMBAI, INDIA -- When Sameera Khan and Manesh Patel got married here in December of 1998, they decided to hold a civil ceremony rather than plan a wedding that would have them choose between their faiths.

“There was a prayer meeting at Sameera’s place prior to the wedding and there was a prayer at my house the day after the wedding, but the wedding itself was through the court registration process,” said Patel via email. “That way we ensured that no one religion got primacy.”

Patel, who is Hindu, and his wife, a Muslim, are among the swath of young, urban, middle-class Indian professionals finding themselves drawn to interfaith marriages at a time when the practice is still regarded with skepticism and derision among much of Indian society.

“There is a kind of social script one is supposed to follow in India,” said Rohit Chopra, a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University, who co-authored part of a book “Inter-religious Marriage by Muslims: Negotiating Religious Identity in Family and Community.”

“When you deviate from the script, social anxiety and negative reactions are produced.”

For Khan and Patel, their marriage provoked a mixed reaction among their families. Khan, a journalist in Mumbai, said it took her father about a week to digest the news that his daughter would be marrying a Hindu, but that once he met Patel, an engineer who works at Ernst & Young here, his disappointment vanished.

Hindus and Muslims in South Asia have had a volatile relationship since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Tensions have flared and calmed in the intervening years, most recently erupting after a series of bomb blasts rocked Varanasi, India’s holiest Hindu city, in early March. In April, L.K. Advani, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party opposition party, commenced a widely-publicized nationwide security tour to raise awareness of Hindu nationalist interests and to protest what he sees as the conciliatory treatment of Muslims by the dominant Congress party in an effort to gain political support.

Adding such unease between religious groups to the already tricky navigations of a marriage can be unworkable, but for many couples who are not fanatics and who embrace people of different faiths, the pressure can be overcome.

Despite the civil ceremony she and her husband chose, Khan made some concessions to ritual for her wedding. In a terrace garden overlooking the Arabian Sea, the lights of Mumbai twinkling all around them, her grandmother tied imamzamins (cloths holding blessings and a few rupees for a safe journey) around her and Patel’s arms. Tradition says that those rupees are to be given to charity when a destination is reached. Khan’s aunts tied symbolic objects representing health, beauty, financial well-being and fertility to the ends of her dupatta, the scarf she wore along with the traditional gharara, which was borrowed from her mother’s wedding in 1967.

“It felt wonderful to be blessed in this way by my family. It showed their faith in us and in our marriage and their support of us as a couple,” Khan said.

The couple also had a Hindu pooja, or prayer ceremony, the day after the wedding, and Khan participated, if reluctantly, to appease her new in-laws.

“I don’t think it would have worked if we’d asked each other to convert, abandoning this in favor of this,” said Khan. “If I choose another faith I choose it, not just because my partner follows it.”

For Patel, there was also some resistance from his Hindu family when he told them he would marry a Muslim. But since he had previously dated a Roman Catholic woman, they had resigned themselves to a non-Hindu daughter-in-law. Still, said Khan, the daughter-in-law traditionally enters the husband’s household and takes on his family’s mores in Indian homes; if the couple comes from two different religions, the woman generally converts, something Khan had no intention of doing.

Patel said that many of his friends and colleagues have interfaith marriages, but that, “by and large I think India has still not progressed at all since the day of my wedding almost a decade ago. The same issues of parental pressure, etc., crop up in all the cases I am aware of.”

Jyoti Punwani, a Mumbai-based journalist who conducted interviews for the Emory book on interreligious marriages with Chopra, agreed that the trend toward interfaith marriage is becoming more common in India. “But,” she said, “opposition remains the same, it hasn’t reduced.”

For Khan and Patel, who married under the Special Marriage Act of 1954, which allowed marriages between people of any religion, as well as for many in their circle, class has more to do with coupling in a modern world than with religion.

Shabnam Minwalla, a journalist friend of Khan’s, is the product of a mixed marriage herself. From Mumbai, her Parsi father met her mother, a Bohra Muslim, on a bus, and they married in 1966. Though she saw her parents’ struggle to be accepted by Indian society firsthand, when Minwalla went to study journalism at the University of Southern California, she met and fell in love with Vivek Ramakrishnan, a Tamil Brahmin from the southern city of Chennai. Their parents encouraged them to stay in the United States, as many Indians feel that intermarriages are more accepted there than in India. More than Minwalla’s religion, Ramakrishnan’s traditional parents bristled at her informal manners: she put her feet up on furniture and ate out of the communal food bowl when she was menstruating, taboos in his house.

But both say their parents were ultimately tolerant, and that that was all the encouragement they needed to go ahead with building their family, which now includes a two-year-old daughter and infant twins. They say as atheists, they hope to raise their children with an appreciation of mythology and an understanding of religion, but would not want them to embrace religion themselves. As Ramakrishnan said via email, “My only desire is that my children become good swimmers.”

“Everybody compromised,” said Minwalla, “Nobody got exactly what they wanted, but nobody got screwed, either.”
“[It] boils down to one thing – the broadmindedness of my parents,” said Ramakrishnan. “They have taken the essence of Hinduism in their lives and made it liberal while they are traditional…I am quite proud of them that way.”

The increasing trend toward intermarriage in India can also be witnessed beyond the Hindu-Muslim divide. Elkana Ezekiel, a Jew from Mumbai, met his Hindu wife, Molshri, through the matrimonial ads. He was older than 30 and felt it was time to marry, and had not liked any of the Jewish women his parents had introduced him to. “There was no pressure to only marry within the community,” he said of the Jewish community of Mumbai, which numbers just a few hundred people. Molshri’s mother is Bengali and her father Punjabi, and inter-caste marriage is akin to interreligious marriage in some of the issues it raises for the couple and society.

Their wedding included some Hindu rituals, and they plan to raise their 4-month-old daughter as a Hindu since religion passes most often through the father in India, though they have given her a Jewish name, Rivka.
For those in what Ramakrishnan calls the mid-middle class, interreligious marriage is increasingly common, but for others, it remains objectionable. Punwani, a Hindu, recalled stories from her mother’s childhood in Pakistan, where Hindu girls were buried alive for marrying Muslims boys. She spoke of villages today in which interfaith couples are stoned or shot for marrying outside their caste.

“In interfaith families, usually if the family accepts the spouse they still don’t accept the religion. They still maintain stereotypes,” she said.

For Gregory Nevis, a young Catholic man who works in quality control for a Mumbai exporter, his marriage to his Hindu wife, Rohini, a teacher, was unexpected. He said about 80 percent of his Catholic friends marry Catholics, but it was his wife’s family who had concerns at first. Her father “said I was too skinny,” said Nevis, “but mostly he didn’t like my faith. The other qualities were just an excuse.”

At their wedding at St. Joseph’s Church here, Rohini wasn’t expecting her father to attend, but he did and bestowed a blessing on the couple. “She was happy, and I was relieved,” said Nevis.

Rohini is planning to convert to Catholicism and they will raise their children in the Catholic faith. Her husband says the conversion is her choice, and that he is not forcing her.

“In India we don’t talk about religion,” he said. “It never comes in our way.”

Interfaith marriage may be growing more acceptable in India, but that does not mean that intermarried couples are universally well-received. For Khan, once the wedding ceremony was negotiated, other obstacles soon followed. She was fired from a job teaching journalism to young Muslim girls because, her superiors said, she set a bad example for the students. Though she collects statues of Ganesh, the Hindu elephant-headed god, because she likes them aesthetically, she says she feels “irked that there are quarters where I’m not considered Muslim.” She would like to do the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca Muslims must make once in their lifetime, and though women are not required to take this step, Khan feels barred from this opportunity because of the Hindu world she occupies.

Still, as Rohit Chopra of Emory said, marriage is ultimately about two people, the husband and wife, and it is up to them to negotiate their differences. In reference to the subjects in his study, Chopra said, “They say they didn’t get into interreligious marriages to make a political statement. The reason they’re doing it is for love.”

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In the early morning glow, a sadhu and woman bathed and prayed on the banks of the Ganges. (Sophia Chang)

“Going to the Ganges is like going to church. But church is a matter of choice, and the Ganges is a religious obligation.”

This was the introduction to the spirituality of the Ganges River from our guide, Onkar Dubey, on a pre-dawn bus on Day 12 of our journey. We were driving toward the river to observe the Hindus of Varanasi bathing in its sacred waters. Varanasi is a city of early risers and morning ablutions in the river are considered one of the most sacred and auspicious of Hindu rituals. They are so valuable in Hindu mythology that when some men and women get older, they leave their families and move to Varanasi, where they bathe daily in the river until their deaths.

Dubey explained that sadhus, holy men who renounce family and material possessions to seek a greater spirituality, are particularly drawn to the river’s sacred waters. Many sadhus ritually bathe in the Ganges early each morning, get a blessing from a priest, receive a mark on their foreheads, then sit for an hour or so reading the Bhagavat Gita or pages from their own prayer books. They may visit one of the 2,000 temples that dot the banks of the Ganges for the seven kilometers that stretch through Varanasi. Praying to the rising sun, said Dubey, brings light and life to people.

From a rowboat as the sun was rising, we observed sadhus bathing along with locals and spiritual westerners; monkeys, considered holy in Varanasi because of their relation to Hanuman, the monkey god, chasing each other along steep ghats; two rams butting heads repeatedly; a man floating on his back in the river, surrounded by candles and marigolds. Dhobis, or washermen, soaked clothing in the polluted waters of the Ganges, then slapped the pants and shirts against rocks by the river bank, knee-deep in water.

Dubey pointed out that no houses are built on the east bank of the Ganges, and that the temples and guest houses along the west bank are submerged when the water rises 40-50 feet in the rainy summer months. A local myth says that if someone builds a house on the flood-prone east bank he will be reincarnated as a donkey.

Varanasi is sometimes called a city of burning, and cremation ceremonies take place 24 hours a day along the Ganges, with people coming from all over India to burn their dead on funeral pyres and scatter the ashes into the holy river. Hindus believe that if the body is cremated on the Ganges, the soul goes directly to heaven and achieves moksha, or freedom from the cycle of birth and rebirth. To build a funeral pyre takes about 360 kilograms of wood and costs around Rs 3,000 (or nearly $70). In the funerals we witnessed, bodies wrapped in red and white shrouds burned silently. No one wept or displayed grief as they felt blessed to provide their relatives a burial in the Ganges, Dubey explained.

Aruna Viswanatha, our Hindu student journalist, felt more connected to Varanasi than to any other stop on the trip. She was taken with the authenticity of the city, among both the long-time residents and foreigners alike. “In the U.S., capitalism co-opts culture,” she said. “But in India, India co-opts culture. It’s captivating in the way that it’s such an openly spiritual experience, it’s open but personal and not in a contrived way. And that seems really hard to do.”

After checking out of another hotel (“if it’s Saturday, it must be Varanasi!”) we traveled the 10 km to Sarnath, a famous site of Buddhism in India. Buddha was born Siddhartha Gautama around 600 B.C. in Lumbini, Nepal and achieved enlightenment in Bodh Gaya in the Himalayan foothills. He gave his first sermon to five disciples in the deer park in Sarnath. Sarnath was destroyed in 1197 by Muslims, according to Dubey, and became a buried, forgotten city until the 1830s when it was rediscovered and excavated by the British.

Sarnath has a touristy feel, but inside the Buddhist temple built on the site of Buddha’s cottage in the deer park all was peaceful, and colorful frescos depicted the important moments in Buddha’s life. At the end of the temple an altar held a giant statue of Buddha surrounded by flowers in vases.

Buddha was originally a Hindu, and his teachings are in part a response to Hinduism. Buddha sought to do away with the caste system, and to abolish temple rituals, priests and animal sacrifices. Instead of these, Buddhism pointed to a middle path, a life of moderation that avoided extremes. Jesse Ellison was taken with the connection between Hinduism and Buddhism. “I thought it was so telling that Hindus believe Buddha was a reincarnation of Vishnu,” she said later in the Varanasi airport. “The way Hindus embrace the Buddha as part of their ancient faith speaks to the complexity of Indian culture. India and Hinduism are like giant sponges. They soak everything up and make it their own.”

A lot of the artifacts found at the temple during the British excavation are on display at a nearby museum, including the four lions of the Asoka Column that are featured on all rupee notes and coins. Sophia Chang and some others observed a group of Thai Buddhist monks, clad in yellow robes, chanting in front of a statue of Buddha. Chang found their chanting beautiful. “It was nice that they turned the museum into a place for prayers and redefined what a shrine or temple has to be.”

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On a hazy Friday evening at the New York Buddhist Church at 331-332 Riverside Drive, a small group gathered in the upstairs meditation room to hear an introduction to the practice and teachings of Buddhism.

The group was led by T.K. Nakagaki, a Buddhist minister from Japan who practices Shin Buddhism, a tradition founded by Shinran in the 13th century. Clad in a black robe, his head shaved, Nakagaki sat on a large, black cushion on a raised, gray rattan meditation mat. An ornate fireplace dwarfed him, as did the objects surrounding him. He explained the significance of each: to his left was a burning candle, symbolizing wisdom, and to his right stood a vase of fresh flowers symbolizing the impermanence of life. A small bench held pots of incense, used in offerings of respect, and decorating the mantle were statues of the Buddha. Nakagaki explained that the statues were in no way meant to be gods, and were in fact developed in reference to European and Greek depictions of gods.

"In Buddhism, there's no failing because there's no God," Nakagaki said of the nonjudgmental aspect of his religion.

Nakagaki began the session by asking the students to sit on identical black cushions in a row on the floor, backs straight, bodies relaxed, heads straining toward the ceiling as if hanging by their hair. In Buddhist meditation practitioners start by breathing out and then breathing in. Those meditating sit cross-legged on the cushions in the position of a triangle, legs supporting the weight of the back, leaning forward, hands in front forming another triangle. The eyes should be slightly opened and fixed on a point on the floor.

"If thoughts come into your head, think them then let them go," said Nakagaki. "When you're sitting, your body becomes a mountain. Whatever comes, rainfall, crowds, the mountain is still there." After meditation, Buddhists chant. In the Shin Buddhist Service Book, the Japanese chants are transliterated and their pitches are denoted in horizontal lines stemming from a vertical line. Practitioners memorize the chants, which praise the Buddha's enlightened wisdom, and each chant is a sutra. Nakagaki explained
to the group that sutra is connected to the word suture, as in a text sewing the Buddha's words together.

Nakagaki reflected on the nature of comparative religion, saying that Western religion tends to be more linear, with a beginning and end point, while Eastern religion is circular; indeed, one of the main symbols of Buddhism is the wheel, symbolizing that the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. He also explained that Theravada Buddhism is closer to Catholicism in its conservative approach to the teachings of the Buddha, whereas Mahayana is more like Protestantism. Theravada is a rural tradition and Mahayana comes from the city.

"All paths are different, but all reach enlightenment," said Nakagaki.

He ended his teaching with a lovingkindness meditation. "May I be happy, well and peaceful," he intoned. "May my parents and all my relatives be happy, well and peaceful." He expressed wishes for his friends, enemies, neighbors, those who live in his city, his country, his world, all animals and plants, all sentient beings, all future generations to be happy, well and peaceful and free from suffering, pain and attachment. Then he placed his hands together and bowed his head.

Aaron Schumm, an MBA student at Duke who said he was looking for an
alternative to the Christianity he was raised with, was impressed with the evening's lessons.

"I'm a big fan of awareness and respectfulness," said Schumm outside the temple later that evening. "No one's aware so I find that interesting. And attunement with your surroundings, you look at things in a different light. This gives you a different perspective."

As for whether he would incorporate the teachings he'd just learned,
Schumm had mixed thoughts.

"I like the meditation part, I can't relax. But I'm not going to sit around my apartment and chant."

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