PAHAR GANJ, INDIA -- Shai Levi spent three years in the Israeli army, a mandatory requirement for all Israeli citizens. As soon as his service was over, he fled Israel and spent the last five months traveling in India, a popular post-army activity for an estimated 30,000 young Israelis every year.

Levi, 23, came to India to unwind, relax, and forget the horrors he witnessed during the height of the Palestinian intifada, when blood stained the streets of Israeli and Palestinian neighborhoods on a regular basis. He came to escape responsibility and the stress of Western life.

Pahar Ganj bazaar, where Israelis have formed a distinct enclave (Carolyn Slutsky)

Inside the Chabad House in New Delhi, a Jewish community center set up by the Lubavitcher sect of Orthodox Jews, Levi looked calm. He wore a red zip-up sweatshirt, warm-up pants and sandals even though it was raining outside and the unpaved roads of the Pahar Ganj bazaar had turned into a slippery maze of mud. He hadn’t shaved in days and his shoulder-length brown curls were in disarray.

It was Friday afternoon and two Orthodox Jewish men were bustling around preparing a Sabbath dinner for the unknown number of Israeli tourists that would be dropping by that evening for a taste of home. A huge pot of Matza Ball soup was simmering on the stove while one of the men kneaded a bowl of dough for the challah, a rich bread eaten on the Sabbath. The Chabad House serves as a meeting place for Israelis, who travel to India alone or in pairs, but hope to link up with others along the way. The religious center also provides meals, advice and prayer services.

“I started to pray here in India,” said Levi, who admitted that he rarely goes to synagogue in Israel. “You start missing Shabbat dinners when you’re away from home,” he said in Hebrew. “You miss feeling Jewish.” He has come across other Israelis during his travels across northern India who had the same experience of rediscovering their religious connection.

As for the connections they make with the Indian culture, Levi characterized them as mostly superficial. Although he found the people to be very open and easy to get along with, he noticed that Israelis tend to keep to their own kind, only interacting with Indians in matters of business. They communicate with Indians in English and barter, sometimes aggressively, over goods. His impression of Israeli-Indian relations was one of mutual respect and warmth. “Indians love Israelis,” he said. “We’re noisy and crazy. They love our energy.”

Ramesh Choudharg, a room service attendant at the Hare Rama guest house where the Chabad center is located, had mixed feelings about the Israeli guests he encounters.

“Sometimes they make big balagan,” he said, using a Hebrew word meaning “mess.” He was reluctant to elaborate on the specific problems that Israelis cause, except to say that they are sometimes loud and difficult to handle.

The Hare Rama is known for housing Israelis; if you ask an Indian rickshaw driver to take you to the Israeli area of Pahar Ganj, he will most likely take you to this guest house. Word of mouth keeps young tourists coming to the cheap and bustling part of the market, located within walking distance of the New Delhi railway station.

Israeli tourists have so firmly established their presence in the area that signs in Hebrew have been set up outside many shops and the Indian shopkeepers have picked up a few key Israeli words. They call out “Shalom! Shalom!” to passers-by who look Israeli. One woman ran her finger above her upper lip, saying “safam,” – mustache – meaning she waxed facial hair, and “gabot” – eyebrows. The book store around the corner from the Hare Rama guest house displayed 20 or 30 books in Hebrew.

Choudharg is a Hindu and has been working at Hara Rama for two years. He said the Friday night gatherings on the rooftop of the hotel occasionally get rowdy, but he has enjoyed learning about the Jewish religion and the Israeli culture. He’s even learned some of the Sabbath songs. Just as he was starting to sing one in the third floor hallway outside the room Chabad rents, he was drowned out by a much louder singing. A circle of five young Israeli men had formed inside the Chabad House. Their arms around each other, they danced and jumped and sang joyously:

“Mishe, mishe, mishe, mishe
Mishe, mishe, mishe, mishe,
Mishenichnas Adar.
Mishe, mishe, mishe, mishe…”

Singing group of Israelis (Carolyn Slutsky)

Two young women who were rolling dough into mini challahs stopped their work and clapped along. The song was in honor of the Jewish holiday of Purim, which celebrates the deliverance of the Persian Jews from persecution in ancient times. The words were about the happiness of the Jewish month of Adar when Purim falls. Choudharg remained in the hallway, watching the boisterous group from the doorway.

Naresh Fernandes, the editor of Time Out Mumbai, has been observing Israelis in India for almost 10 years. An article he wrote several years ago for Man’s World, an Indian publication, explored the relationship between Indians and Israelis: “Paradoxically, while Israelis came to India to seek peace and spirituality, Indian tourism industry workers came to regard Israelis as being loud, unruly and possessing a healthy propensity for aggressive bargaining.”

Asaf Shema, a 23-year-old Israeli traveling in India with his girlfriend, Maria Samyonov, 22, thinks that the only reason Indians might dislike Israelis is because unlike American or European tourists, Israelis love to haggle over prices. Picking up the glass of water in front of him as he sat at the Chabad House in Mumbai, Shema said, “If a European buys this glass for 20 rupees, I can buy it for 10 rupees.” He explains that bargaining is not as much about saving money as it is about not being a friar, or fool. Israelis hate feeling like they’ve been swindled.

Fernandes discussed his research on Israelis with several visiting students from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism at a reception in Mumbai. Driving a hard bargain at the bazaar, he said, is the least of Israelis’ offenses in India. According to him, the perception Indians have of Israelis is that they are only interested in drugs and parties. The post-army twenty-somethings alternate between being lazy idlers, he said, and violent aggressors.

Gavriel Holtzberg runs a Chabad House in Mumbai that caters mainly to Israelis on their way to party hotspots such as Goa and Rajasthan. Three flights a week bring hundreds of them from Israel to Mumbai and Holtzberg recognizes the nature of their needs.

A silver menorah marks the location of the Chabad House in Mumbai (Dikla Kadosh)

“They need relief,” said the young rabbi who grew up in Brooklyn, from the army, from work, from real life. “They come here to do everything the army didn’t allow them to do. Their shoes had to be polished and tied – here they wear sandals. They had to cut their hair – here they grow their hair long.”

Holtzberg is not excusing their behaviour. He just understands the reasons behind it better than the Indians that come into contact with the hordes of escapists.

Itzick Sabag, a 23-year-old Israeli who came to the United States after completing his army service and now lives in New York, is not surprised that Israelis have such a negative reputation in India. The type of person who goes there, he said, has no ambition or direction and is mainly interested in doing nothing. India is the perfect place to do just that.

“People go to different places for different reasons after the army,” he said. “They go to South America for hiking, climbing, outdoors stuff. They go to America to work or go to school. And they go to India to do drugs.”

An article in the Los Angeles Times in 2003 reported that the “post-army India meltdown has become so common that the government is crafting a policy to respond. Weary of organizing teams to scoop the wayward soldiers out of the backwoods hospitals, Israel is negotiating with the Indian government to install treatment outposts…”

The Israeli government may be aware of the problems Israeli tourists are causing and Israelis in other parts of the world may be aware of the reputation their countrymen have, but it seems that the thousands of revelers who flock to the subcontinent are completely unaware of the situation. At a time when Israeli-Indian political relations are just beginning to warm up, it is unfortunate that on the ground – at back-alley bazaars and beachside cafes – it is more of a love-hate relationship, with the Israelis doing most of the loving and the Indians doing most of the hating.

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Most of ORT’s children and teachers are no longer Jewish (Shira Schoenberg)

MUMBAI, INDIA -- In many ways, Queenie Mendoza, 34, is a typical success story for ORT India’s Vocational Training and Computer Center in this coastal Indian city once called Bombay. She worked as a servant, caring for children in an upper class home, before entering ORT’s beautician program on her employer’s recommendation. After graduating, she started a full time job in the school’s salon, and has worked there for 13 years.

But Mendoza is not the type of student that the school’s founders had in mind when they established it 45 years ago. Mendoza is Catholic. ORT, the Organization for educational Resources and Technological training, is an international Jewish organization with the mandate of helping impoverished Jews.

When the Mumbai school opened in 1961, it was almost entirely Jewish. Three years ago, its boys’ school closed due to a lack of Jewish students. Today, only one of 18 girls studying early childhood care and education is Jewish, according to the program’s coordinator, a ratio that is consistent across ORT’s preschool, and virtually every other vocational course except computers. ORT is not the only school that has seen its Jewish population virtually disappear. Two Mumbai high schools started by Jewish donors, which previously had Hebrew and Torah classes for the Jewish students—the Sir Jacob Sassoon and Sir Elly Kadoorie High Schools—also have only a handful of Jewish students.

Religious schools with diverse student bodies are common in India. Many Hindu and Muslim parents, for example, send their children to Christian convent schools to get a top education. Nevertheless, the Mumbai Jewish schools are only one symptom of a Jewish community depleted by mass immigration to Israel and abroad.
When asked about the community’s future, Benjamin Isaac, the director of ORT India, said confidently, “We will always have a Jewish presence in Mumbai.” Then he paused for moment and qualified his statement. “At least for the next 15 to 20 years.”

In a country where more than 30,000 Jews once lived, only about 5,000 remain, 4,000 of those around Mumbai. In order to stay open, Jewish schools had to accept a broader population. Part of the reason for this, in the case of ORT, is that Mumbai’s remaining Jews are leaving blue-collar jobs for fields like management and computers, Isaac said. Rabbi Joshua Kolet, 36, a Mumbai native and the community’s rabbi since 2001, added that for the past decade, the Jewish population has shifted to newly growing suburbs, like Thane. This draws children away from ORT, Jacob Sassoon and Elly Kadoorie in South Mumbai and into suburban schools.

But the main reason given by ORT employees for its demographic makeup is immigration. “Young people are migrating to Israel because there are better prospects,” said Elkan Palkar, 29, head of ORT’s computer department. “All families have relatives in Israel.”

This does not mean that Jews have no religious life around Mumbai. ORT sells kosher wine, challah, chicken and baked goods. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee runs a Jewish Community Center for 500 members who attend classes on Hebrew and Judaism, holiday parties, youth discos and clubs for children and seniors.
Kolet two years ago started the Hazon Eli Foundation for Jewish Life in India, based in Thane, to teach Torah, Hebrew and Jewish law to the suburban population. He runs a Sunday school for children under 13, which attracts about 25 students weekly. He dreams of starting a new Jewish school in Mumbai.

But many question whether these measures will be effective in reenergizing the small remnant of the formerly vibrant community.

Even Palkar, who has family in Mumbai and a steady job at ORT, said he would consider leaving. Palkar lives in Panvel, a suburb of Mumbai, and travels more than an hour by train one Sunday a month to teach Torah in local villages. He visited Israel last summer with 40 Indian students on birthright Israel, a free educational trip for Jewish young adults, and said he wants to move for religious reasons. In Mumbai, he said, synagogues have trouble getting a minyan and unless one works for a Jewish organization, it is difficult to take off work for Shabbat and holidays. “If the time comes, I’ll go to Israel,” he said.

The 4,000 Jews left in Mumbai are descendants of two communities—the Baghdadis and the Bene Israel. The Baghdadi Jews, many of whom were wealthy traders and businessmen, came from Iraq about 250 years ago. These included the Sassoon family, who made a fortune in cotton mills and became known nationally for their philanthropy. The Baghdadis, who at their peak numbered 5,000, were generally anglicized and comfortable under British rule. After Indian independence, virtually all of them left for England, Israel or other countries. Today, less than 200 Baghdadi Jews remain in Mumbai.

One recent Friday night in Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue, one of the city’s two Baghdadi synagogues, about 20 people attended services, mostly visitors. At Shabbat lunch the next day, three elderly Baghdadi women proudly compared the accomplishments of their children living abroad. The elderly stay because life is comfortable, they said, but all the young people have left. About 1,000 Baghdadi Jews currently live in Israel, according to Ze’ev Schwartzberg, head of the Jewish Agency for Israel’s India desk.

Most of Mumbai’s community is comprised of Bene Israel, Jews who trace their origins to a shipwreck off the Maharastra coast around 175 B.C., which according to legend left seven Palestinian Jewish couples living on the Indian coast. The progeny of these Jews today speak Marathi, dress in Indian styles, and maintain customs peppered with Indian traditions. “They eat rice and mangos, play cricket and wear saris,” said Isaac of ORT. “If you live in a village for 2,000 years, you’re not going to be eating matzoh.”

For years, the Baghdadis looked down on the Bene Israel as inauthentic Jews. Today, any Bene Israel can recall with pride when in July 2002 the Times of India published a story about a DNA study done by University of London professor Tudor Parfitt proving that that the Bene Israel are descendents of the Jewish priestly class.

Yet for the last half century, the Bene Israel have also been emigrating in large numbers, motivated in early years by Zionism, economic uncertainty after independence and a sense of Jewish identity. Immigration started after 1948, mainly to Israel, and increased when the Israeli government accepted the Bene Israel’s legitimacy as Jews in 1964, after some controversy. The 1970s saw large scale immigration from the villages. Part of the reason the ORT school was founded in 1961 was to help Jewish men gain skills in draftsmanship, electronics or mechanics, which would make them employable in Israel. There are between 55,000 and 60,000 Bene Israel living in Israel today, according to the Jewish Agency.

Today the largest Bene Israel synagogue in Mumbai, Magen Hassidim, attracts about 60 worshippers on Shabbat, Isaac said. The other synagogues get less than 30 worshippers.

According to community leaders, aliyah has slowed over the last 10 to 15 years, and the Jewish population in Mumbai has remained constant. Kolet said particularly over the past two to three years the number of people making aliyah has declined significantly, largely for economic reasons. Maybe 25-30 percent of the youth are leaving, he said. “If the community wants to continue, it’s viable,” Kolet said. “And the community doesn’t want to move.”

But the numbers remain small. Several men are paid 1,500 rupees a month (about $30) to attend Magen David Synagogue’s daily minyan to ensure a prayer quorum of 10 men, said tour guide and cantor Benjamin Dandekar.

Although ORT offers education to Jews at only 10 percent of its full fee (it offers a free education to impoverished Jews and non-Jews alike), the school still remains largely non-Jewish.

When Palkar of ORT was asked how he envisions the Mumbai community in 20 years, he laughed and shook his head. “After 10 years, I don’t know what will happen,” he said.

Despite immigration, community leaders and institutions such as ORT, the JDC and Hazon Eli remain committed to ensuring that those left behind can live Jewish lives.

Leora Ezekiel, 37, the JCC director, said most Jews growing up in Mumbai never had a formal Jewish education. “Most of my generation went to convent schools because they were the best quality,” she said. They got their Jewish education from their families at home. Today’s children, she added, have more than she did. “So much is happening with the Jewish community that didn’t exist in our generation or before.”

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On top of the usual packing decisions tourists must make—this shirt or that one? a money pouch or a fanny pack? white tube socks or black tube socks?—our intrepid group of travelers from Columbia University had extra considerations to weigh for our recent visit to India.

When a two-week trip entails visits to a dozen holy places, each with different rules regarding appropriate attire of the devout pilgrim, the idea of sensible footwear acquires a new meaning.

From Mathura to Varanasi, almost every site of worship we visited required visitors to enter in a shoeless state as a sign of respect. So first and foremost, shoes must be easy to take off and put back on, a lesson that Ari Paul had learned the hard way from a previous trip to India.

“I’d been to India a year ago, and on that trip I was wearing Doc Martens,” the popular British boots, Paul said. But his boot laces ultimately took too much time to tie and untie.

“At temples, everyone had to wait for me every time and I really held up the group. I really regretted bringing the Doc Martens,” he said. “This time, I was wearing Pumas,” sneakers that Paul said, “you can just slip on really easily.”

At times there seemed to be a cottage industry centered around the protection of visitors’ shoes. Outside some temples and mosques there were stands where visitors could leave their belongings. At the Golden Temple in Armritsar, our group checked in our sandals and sneakers en masse, which attendants placed together in a large dusty jute bag and kept behind a counter.

Mariana Martinez Estens takes off her shoes outside a temple. Again. (Sophia Chang)

But at sites like the Jama Masjid in New Delhi, a couple of local residents sat on stools and kept watch over the assortment of shoes left on the steps outside the mosque. It was an ad-hoc arrangement that Maura Moynihan, daughter of former ambassador to India Sen. Daniel Moynihan, had warned us might result in a few pairs of stolen shoes, but luckily no one lost footwear on this trip.

The shoe guardians do not watch visitors’ belongings just for fun, of course, a fact that Michal Lumsden learned early in the trip while we were in New Delhi. There, she went with a group of students to visit the shrine of Nizamuddin Chishti, a Sufi saint.

“We took our shoes off and there were two little boys out front who were watching the shoes. I thought they were just making sure no one was going to steal them,” she said. “But they demanded that we pay them. I wasn’t going to pay them to get back my shoes. So we walked away and they started yelling at us.”

Like putting on a yarmulke or a headscarf, the simple act of shedding one’s shoes serves both as a sign of respect but also as a preparation to enter a sacred place, Paul noted.

“When you’re taking off your shoes it’s a real reminder that you’re entering another space, and it’s the defining moment between the outside and the holy,” he said. “For actual worshippers and for journalists like us, that moment of taking off your shoes really reiterates the fact that we’re entering a sacred space.”

Other rules were in play, especially for the 14 females in our group. The women had to cover our heads with scarves during trips to Muslim sites, such as our visit to the Darul Uloom Wakf madrassa in Deoband. At the Golden Temple, even the men had to cover their heads, with white cloths offered by temple officials. And at the Jain Temple in New Delhi, all visitors were asked to remove leather items in deference to the Jains, whose belief in nonviolence eschews the use of animal products.

Some of the prohibitions reflected not sacred dogma but modern reality. In Varanasi, we could not bring in electronic equipment to the Sankat Mochan Temple where a recent bomb explosion had killed several people, and we filed past metal detectors in Mathura on our way to Lord Krishna’s birthplace, Shri Krishna Janma Bhoomi.

During our sunrise visit to the Taj Mahal in Agra, tour guides offered visitors slipcovers that resembled shower caps for their shoes to protect the beautiful expanses of white marble. Erik Wander, who had already abandoned the notion of wearing socks with his sneakers earlier in the trip, chose to paddle around barefoot.

“Walking up on the marble with no shoes or socks on, it was nice and cool and smooth. That made me feel a little more in touch with the place,” Wander said.

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General Jacob keeps his parents’ ketubah (Jewish marriage certificate) (Shira Schoenberg)

NEW DELHI, INDIA -- In a dimly lit apartment here filled with antique furniture, Buddhist statues and old Indian paintings sits a war hero. He is Major General Jack Frederick Ralph Jacob, the Jewish general who commanded the Indian army through the 1971 war with Pakistan that resulted in Bangladeshi independence.

Now 83, the gray-haired General Jacob lives alone, with a servant to help him, and spends his days reading, surfing the Internet and working on his autobiography.

“The later it’s published the better,” he said. “I’m a very private person.”

Jacob was born into a Baghdadi Jewish family from Calcutta, whose ancestors came to India more than 200 years ago. His parents were Orthodox and kept a kosher home, he said, and Jacob has maintained a strong Jewish identity throughout his life. In 1941, when Jacob was 18, he decided to join the army. “I was inspired to fight the Nazis,” he said. “A lot of boys in Calcutta joined. I think I was first.” His three brothers, now deceased, followed his lead, joining the air force and infantry.

From that decision, Jacob embarked on what was to be a 37-year career in the military, the highlight of which was negotiating the 1971 surrender of Pakistan. He retired from the army in 1978, after becoming its highest ranking Jew, but remained involved in politics, with close ties to the National Party (BJP). He served as governor of Goa and Punjab in the 1990s before retiring to Delhi.

His Jewish observance became more difficult as his career progressed, he said. “How can you be kosher in the army?” he asked. “It’s not possible.”

But Jacob never forgot his roots. “I believe in God. I’m proud of being Jewish,” he said. He went to synagogue on high holidays and festivals. After his mother died, he donated her silver and her wedding dress to an Israeli museum.

Today, he keeps his parents’ ketubah, marriage certificate, in his apartment. Written in Aramaic with a hand-painted border of purple and green flowers with two yellow lions crowning the top, the document bears the date March 22, 1910, 10 Adar 5670, with the names Alias Immanuel and Sally Jacob. General Jacob himself never married.

Although Jacob says little about the work he has done to promote Indian-Israel relations, Sourav Roy, a staff writer with The Indian Express, called Jacob a “pioneer in the modern India-Israel relationship.” Jacob, Roy said, has connections in the highest echelons of the Israeli government and meets visiting Mossad agents in India, in attempts to bring the countries together.

Although Jacob has a strong Jewish identity, he does not believe his Judaism influenced his professional life. “I do it not because I’m a Jew, but because I’m a human being,” he said. “I respect every being, not because they’re Jewish or Christian, because they’re human. The roots are different, but all religious in the world should aim at doing good-Hindu, Jew, anyone.”

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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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NEW DELHI, INDIA -- The motorized rickshaws of this city have the engines of lawn mowers but are driven like rocket ships. It is a rainy day in March, and as buses, fuel trucks, grandmothers on motorcycles, and vintage cars swerve within inches of us, all producing their mad cacophony of honking horns, my face goes whiter and whiter.

Beside me a young woman laughs.

Her name is Priyanka and she is a 22-year-old university student. She has volunteered to help me find sources for a story I’m working on.

But on this Wednesday afternoon, as we careen around the curves and charge across the flyovers, I do nothing but pray for survival and listen to Priyanka’s melodic voice.

“Let me tell you something about this Jennifer Lopez,” she says. “Americans think she is fallen from the sky. I don’t understand. She is not so beautiful.”

“Can you tell him to drive slower? I think I’m going to—”

“And Leonardo DiCaprio? Let me tell you. I was happy when that boat sank.”

The rickshaw stops. A woman holding an infant runs through traffic to tug my arm. We pull away as Priyanka hands her a tiny silver coin.

“How old are you?” Priyanka asks. I’ve told her my job in New York is to write about love and dating. Perhaps that’s where this question is leading.

“I’m 33.”

“You’re so old!” She laughs. “In India if you are not married by 30 you are finished. For girls it is 27.”

This seems a little harsh.

“I will finish university when I am 25,” she continues. “Then I will be married at 27.”

To a New Yorker who writes about dating and nightlife, who has interviewed so many women who have abandoned even the idea of finding a spouse, it sounds like someone saying she will find a six-bedroom apartment on Central Park West. On a Friday. In September. When it happens to be windy. Sure, it’s possible, but life isn’t ever that simple, is it?

A Different Way

But perhaps the point is that for many Indians, it is that simple. Forget the reports that appear in magazines like Newsweek, each featuring the obligatory photos of scantily clad 20-somethings in the nightclubs of Mumbai. This country, when it comes to marriage, is still founded more on the customs and principals of Hinduism and the extended family than those of “Sex and the City” and the free market.

Spouses meet through parents. Overwhelmingly. Recommendations begin in the late teen years and serious introductions start not long thereafter. The entire family—parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles—constitutes the search committee. I’ve begun to wonder whether the word “arranging” even comes close to how marriages begin here. “Networking” better captures it.

The sexual mores of secular American youth—premarital sex beginning at 17, for example—that are purportedly on the rise here, are still largely blocked by two obstacles: religious tradition and to a lesser extent, logistics.

Families live together, often in the same room. Even in Mumbai, where there is money and anonymity, desire is held in check by the extant elements of the Rent Act. Think of New York City’s rent control laws re-written by Lenin and you have a sense of this legislation. Many tenants pay what they were charged in the 1950s. Developers don’t build apartment buildings—what would be the point when you can’t raise rents or evict anyone? The housing shortage is just staggering. There may be 18 million people in that city, but not many of them are young and single and have their own apartments.

But even those who are young, dress in Western clothes, speak English, go to nightclubs, and who are ambivalent about arranged marriage, will scoff at this typical American arrangement: two people living together for years, unmarried, childless, unsure if the other person is “the one.” Isn’t the whole point to be loved, to carry on your traditions, and to start your own family?

In America

12,000 miles away, on an April afternoon in Flushing, Queens, Jagdish Sabbir is praying. He is a 19-year-old undergraduate at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York. Today he is inside the Ganesha Temple, 45-57 Bowne Street, circling the navagraha, a shrine to the nine planets. He is dressed in designer jeans and a sweatshirt, he lives in one of the world’s most secular cities, but he comes here everyday.

“A devout young man,” says, Ganapathy Pamanabhan, the temple’s public relations officer who is affectionately known as “GP.”

It is a Saturday and the temple is crowded. Most of the women wear traditional Indian dress; most of the men do not. Sabbir is one of the few people who appears to be by himself. I can’t help asking him a few questions about marriage. Is he open to his parents finding him a spouse?

“I would like to meet her on my own but that really isn’t the most important thing. So long as she respects my mother and we can carry on the traditions, you know, how we meet isn’t what matters.”

The answer is a key to understanding not simply Indian cultural values, but Hinduism itself.

It is a religion with neither a centralized bureaucracy nor a uniform dogma. Beyond the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, there may be millions of other gods. Ceremonies vary widely from region to region, family to family.
And yet it connects the majority of Indians in a way Judaism may be said to connect Jewish Israelis: it is a religion, yes, but one that is synonymous with national origin, ethnicity, and a way of life. And a key to that way of life is marriage.

I ask Sabbir if he has a time table.

“My mom wants me to graduate first, get a degree, get a job, and then think about marriage. She doesn’t want me to think about it all right now.”

When does he expect a wedding to take place?

“Late 20s. Early 30s. At the latest.”

Changes

The debate over arranged marriage, at least as it is posed in the West, has been framed not unlike the debate between socialism and capitalism. Should one submit to planning from above, and the limitations of freedom that might entail, or is one better off when individuals are left to compete for resources – in this case a spouse – in the marketplace? We see it, in other words, in the secular terms of contemporary politics: freedom versus subjugation.

Most Indians don’t see it that way. For them, there is nothing oppressive in meeting a potential spouse through family recommendations. Some might say involving the extended family and paying attention to matters of social standing and character actually have many more centuries of success behind them than modern American love marriages.

Perhaps the real question for Indians is whether the values and practices of Hinduism—with its emphasis on the family, and view of marriage as being not just between two people, but between two families—can thrive despite changing economies and immigration to the West.

And when asked about the continuation of their religion and their traditions with respect to marriage, around the world, from the streets of New Delhi to a temple in Queens, the answer still appears to be a very firm “yes.”

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AMRITSAR, INDIA -- Rama Ranjit Mehra watched cancer take her husband’s life and nearly take her own. Mehra turned to Ayurveda—a 5,000-year old Indian holistic system of healing—after Western science failed her husband. She beat her cancer and opened an Ayurveda clinic and hotel with her two grown twin sons near the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhism’s holiest site in northern India. Her customers are mostly Westerners who come to this red-brick spa clinic with 20 lemon grass-scented rooms to escape the ever-present crowds in India. Ranjit’s Svaasa, as Mehra’s clinic is known, is a curious mix of old and new; it is housed in a 250-year-old colonial mansion, for instance. Yet it also offers Wi-fi access and the latest glossy-boxed herbal yogi tea.

Rama Ranjit Mehra speaks with guests at the Ayurveda hotel and spa she opened in Amritsar in northern India. (Courtesy: Ranjit’s SVAASA)

Ranjit’s Svaasa is one of many places throughout India that uses savvy modern marketing techniques to repackage ancient Ayurvedic practices. As a result, Ayurveda is attracting an increasing numbers of followers both in India and cosmopolitan cities like New York. Foreigners either travel to India to stay at Ayurvedic spas and attend courses on Ayurveda. Or they sit in their homes abroad and get Ayurvedic treatments over the Internet. Celebrities like Deepak Chopra - who swears by it - and beauty companies such as Aveda—an abbreviated form of Ayurveda—also help generate interest.

“Our focus is on natural healing, self-consciousness and self-improvement of the body and spirit,” said Mehra. Many come to Ayurveda for the nutrition or yoga aspect, which become gateways to the spiritual side, she said. She often recommends meditating on ancient Sanskrit scriptures as a way of creating and maintaining concentration.

While Ayurveda is a centuries-old tradition in India, it is only in the last 25 years that is has made real inroads in Europe and North America. To be sure, there are many traditional biomedical doctors who remain skeptical. But patients are more keen to “talk about their health and how it connects to spiritual rituals and the cosmos,” said Dr. Vincent Silenzio, a medical doctor at the University of Rochester, New York, who has set up a Web site on complementary and alternative health and guest-edited an issue of The American Journal of Public Health on the same topic.

In 1992, Congress established the Office of Alternative Medicine within the national Department of Health and Human Services and allocated $2 million to this new initiative. In 1998, this organization became The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. In 2006, Congress allocated $122.7 million to NCCAM. While the number of Americans who specifically use Ayurveda is not reported, 62 percent of Americans use complementary and alternative medicine, including prayer for healing, according to a recent study by the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The word Ayurveda comes from the Sanskrit words “ayus” meaning life and “veda” meaning science or knowledge and is roughly translated as "the science of living." At roughly 5000 years old, Ayurveda is nearly as old as Hinduism. It was created by the rishis, enlightened Indian sages, from Vedic scriptures.

Ayurveda rests on the belief in the need to balance the physical body, the spiritual soul and the psychological mind. It does so by balancing three biological forces, it calls doshas. Ayurveda includes diet and herbal remedies and emphasizes the use of body, mind, and spirit in disease prevention and treatment.

An Ayurvedic clinician in New Delhi,India with the latest herbal remedies and a Hindu shrine to Ganesh, the Elephant god. (Aili McConnon)

Ayurvedic clinics like Ranjit’s Svaasa can be found in many hotels throughout India, often run by families because it is a system of healing some learn from their grandparents and pass on through the family, and through family businesses. Madhu Mahor, for instance, works as an Ayurvedic masseur at the Best Western in Agra near the Taj Mahal. Her two sisters work in Ayurveda at other hotels nearby and she is training her 9-year-old son in the art as well. Many Indian practitioners realize the growing interest in Ayurveda abroad and plan to spend time in Europe or North America. Mahor is planning to move to the United Kingdom to try her trade there.

Ranjit’s SVAASA, an Ayurveda clinic and hotel in Amritsar, India. (Courtesy: Ranjit’s SVAASA)

Ayurveda is also reaching foreign shores through online clinics such as Ayunique, the first online Ayurveda clinic, created by Dr. Partap Chauhan. Chauhan is considered by many to be the world’s leading Aryuvedic physician and has also created an online college. Ayunique currently sends out packages of medicine to clients in 150 different countries, according to Steve Rudolph, a director of its umbrella organization, the Jiva Institute. Being based in India allows Ayunique to avoid the barriers to entry it would encounter based in the United States for instance. “Our products are classified as dietary supplements and so they go under the FDA radar,” said Rudolph, referring to the Food and Drug Administration.

An Ayurveda massage bed in the Jiva Ayunique Clinic & Panchkarma Centre, New Delhi, India. (Aili McConnon)

In recent years, there has been concern about the lack of regulations for preparing the medications. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2004 found that out of 70 Ayurvedic remedies purchased over-the-counter (all were manufactured in South Asia), 14 (one-fifth) contained lead, mercury, and/or arsenic at levels that could be harmful. Such studies understandably concern customers and make it all the more important to research the specific company behind Ayurvedic remedies. Ayunique, for instance, rigorously tests all of their products for heavy metals, said Rudolph.

Ayunique has improved life dramatically for Sheila, who did not want to give her last name for reasons of privacy. Sheila is an assistant at an Evangelical bookstore in Virginia and had had severe migraines and stroke-like episodes that plagued her for years. She has been an Ayunique patient since December 2005 and her symptoms have already decreased. “The episodes are basically gone and I’m beginning to sleep much better,” she said. She receives her medication package in the mail every two months and lifestyle guidelines from her Ayunique doctor over e-mail more frequently.

Meditation is an area Sheila feels she particularly needs help on. She has found this spiritual side of Ayurveda complementary to her own religious practices. “The Bible tells me to meditate on God’s Word,” she said. So when she receives her online instructions from her Ayunique doctor in India, she finds a quiet spot in her home and begins with breathing exercises to quiet herself. Then she envisions a candle and meditates on the name of God or a piece of scripture. “I’m working to make this a ritual,” she said. Ayunique personalizes its healing guidelines for every patient, so the spirituality it emphasizes can be tailored to any individual’s existing religious rituals or it can introduce customers to ancient Sanskrit scriptures.

The Jiva Institute is also using other technology like telephones to spread the benefits of Ayurveda through India. In its Teledoc program, village-based healthcare workers record and transmit diagnostic data through mobile telephones. Jiva’s Ayurvedic doctors analyze the data, and then prescribe medication and treatment. Jiva hopes to reach 12 million villagers over the next five years.

As Ayurvedic doctors reach out to the West through lecture tours and online clinics, Western doctors are beginning to envision a larger space for alternative medicine within their medical communities. This is partly because there is more patient demand for Ayurveda, said Dr. Silenzio, the doctor in New York. “Spirituality has been so thoroughly excluded in traditional biomedicine, so the religious dimension of Ayurveda is certainly a big draw,” he said. The profile of medical doctors in powerful positions is much more ethnically diverse now than it was 25 years ago. This, in turn, contributes to an openness to incorporating healing philosophies from all over the world, said Silenzio.

“Ayurveda makes people feel intensely light in the body, mind and spirit,” said Mehra, the Ayurvedic clinician in Amritsar. “Who isn’t looking for that?”

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MUMBAI, INDIA -- It’s a mid-March afternoon, and on sun-drenched playing fields and vacant lots all over the city, the crack of the bat can be heard along with the exuberant cries and good-natured taunts of the players. These are the unmistakable sounds of grown men playing a game in fierce but friendly competition with one another.

Although this may sound like a description of just about any city in mid-March Florida, from Ft. Lauderdale to Port St. Lucie, it is not. This is not Major League Baseball’s spring training. The place is Mumbai, India, and the game is not baseball, but cricket, India’s unofficial national pastime.

At Cross Maidan cricket grounds in Mumbai, within view, if not a cricket ball’s toss, of Wankhede Stadium, India’s beloved sport is being played at the amateur level by hundreds of men and boys of all ages. At the stadium, England is visiting India today. It is Day Two of the third five-day test match between the two nations. The first match resulted in a draw. The second was a resounding, 9-wicket victory for India. The current match, being played several hundred meters away, is to be the decider of the series.

Although the rules are very different, the essential concept of cricket is similar to that of baseball. Teams bat in successive innings and attempt to score runs, while the opposing team fields and attempts to get the batting team out. After each team has batted an equal number of innings, the team with the most runs wins. One major difference, however, is that a batsman continues to bat and score runs until he is out. This usually results in hundreds of runs being scored in a cricket match, unlike in a baseball game.

The previous day England scored a seemingly insurmountable 400 runs in their first innings against the Indian national team. Mumbai’s own Sachin Tendulkar, one of the best batsmen in the world according to many, was booed on his home turf for producing just one run after 21 balls and 34 minutes of batting. Eight days prior, during the second test-match, Anil Kumble the famed Indian “spinner” took his 500th career wicket in Mohali, becoming only the fifth player in history to accomplish the feat.

Ultimately, after the five-day test match is complete, England will have virtually thrashed India by a margin of 212 runs. However, on this particular day, hopes are still high. It is a perfect day for cricket in Mumbai.

Javinder Singh, a Sikh, dressed in a traditional, white cricket uniform and a black turban steps away from his own match to offer some instruction to a 12-year-old Muslim “spinner,” a bowler who puts spin on the ball while delivering it to the batsman. He has had his eye on the lad “for quite some time,” he says. The boy is playing cricket with a tennis ball and too few players to fill the pitch at the far end of the Cross Maidan grounds, opposite from where Singh’s amateur Mumbai Cricket Association league match is taking place.

“I told him he has to keep his arm perfectly straight if he ever wants to bowl for India,” Singh, a 34-year-old computer technician from Mumbai and “serious amateur” cricketer says.

Singh takes the ball from the would-be future bowler, and shows him how to do it correctly, taking a running start and delivering the ball to the young, baffled batsman who does nothing but watch in mild amusement.

“Now do it again, and keep it straight,” he says to the bowler, “that’s the most important part. It doesn’t matter how much spin you put on it if you don’t keep your arm straight.”

“I don’t care if he’s Sikh or Muslim or Hindu,” Singh later says, “on the pitch, there is no talk of religion.”

“Cricket is the one religion that unites the country,” says veteran Indian sports journalist, Gulu Ezekiel, echoing an oft-repeated sentiment that one is likely to hear when asking just about any Indian about the relationship between cricket and religion. “Cricket simply is a religion in India.”

And although it may seem a hyperbolic statement, in a country with India’s history of inter-religious struggles and tensions, to say that religion pervades practically all aspects of life and society, including sport, is an indisputable fact.

Ezekiel, who says he has a specific interest in the intersection of cricket and religion, says that cricket is the one area of Indian society that is “religious blind.”

“The captain of the Indian National team is the second most important job in India after the Prime Minister,” he says, before pointing out that current Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is Sikh and noting that past Indian captains have included four Muslims, one Sikh, two Christians and two Zoroastrians. The current captain, Rahul Dravid, is a Hindu.

Charles Maideen, 39, a junior college lecturer and Muslim originally from Chennai, began playing cricket at the age of eight, hoping, as many young Muslims do, he says, to one day “make it big as a professional cricketer.” Maideen concurs with Ezekiel’s take on cricket as a religion but has his own perspective to offer.

“For people who don’t really follow any particular religion in India, cricket becomes that religion for them,” he says, adding, “Tendulkar is like a god to people. The whole country kind of worships him.”

However, when asked about his own experiences on the cricket pitch, Maideen, who says he played with Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians for his district and school teams throughout his teens and early adult years, says religion was never an issue.

“We never really mixed religion with cricket,” he says “nobody really cared about that when we were playing.”

Ezekiel, 46, who covers and writes about cricket for numerous online and print publications including www.khel.com, Sportstar Weekly, BBC Online and also for an Australian radio station, is a “non-practicing Jew,” he says. Religious or not, he keeps a virtual shrine in his modest Delhi home to his cricketing heroes, past and present.

Ezekiel has an extensive collection of sports books, which he organizes on his bookshelves by sport, the largest section being books on cricket, cricket memorabilia and artwork. He laughingly refers to his collection as his “museum.”

Lining the crest of the walls of Ezekiel’s museum or shrine are hand-painted portraits of many of his favorite players. Ezekiel, who is a member of the Autograph Collectors Club of India and is in touch with “artists around the world,” commissions portraits rendered from photographs and has the players, who hail from nearly all cricket-playing countries, many of whom he knows through his work, sign them. They are then framed and become a part of his collection. His prized possession is the signed bail, a small wooden piece that connects the stumps, that he personally received from Kumble from a 1999 match against Pakistan in which the star bowler took all 10 wickets, a feat that has only been accomplished twice, according to Ezekiel, in cricket history.

“Give me anything from that match,” Ezekiel recalls telling Kumble of the historic match when the bowler showed up for a television interview later the same day. “Give me your socks,” Ezekiel pleaded.

Another veteran sports journalist who covers cricket extensively, Clayton Murzelo, since 2001 the Mumbai-based Sports Editor of India’s largest circulated tabloid, Mid Day, and self-professed “cricket-mad fan,” says of religious harmony among the members of the current Indian national team, “it's a great and happy unit. The only time teamwork is questioned is when the team is not faring well. It is like any other team sport.”

Murzelo goes on to report of the team that “of the current squad of 15, there are three Muslims, one Sikh and the rest are Hindus.”

According to Clayton, a Christian, however, to say that equating cricket with religion is going a bit too far.

“I was a cricket mad fan, but I did not treat it as a religion,” he says, “It's just a good line, that's all. This is my view, and it could well be contested. But I’ve been a mad fan, so I know. Going to church did not equate to cricket.”

It’s a hot, sunny afternoon in Mumbai, and the English national team is in town. The result of the match will prove to be a great disappointment to Indians everywhere, but particularly to the “cricket mad” residents of Mumbai, in which “the most passionate interest in cricket in India” exists, according to Ezekiel. On this day, Indians of all faiths are not in church, and they’re not at the mosque, or the temple, or the synagogue. They’re at Cross Maidan or just about any vacant lot or open field in the city, playing cricket. If they’re lucky enough to have procured themselves a ticket to the big event, they may be worshiping at Wankhede Stadium.

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VARANASI, INDIA -- It was more than 50 years ago when Veer Bhadra Mishra’s dhoti kurta lost to the lathe. His teacher in the machine shop at Banaras Hindu University’s engineering school took one look at the flowing dhoti wrapped around his student’s waist and the loose kurta, a traditional Indian shirt, hung from his shoulders. He imagined them flapping near the spinning gears of the lathe machine and told Mishra he couldn’t work in the shop unless he was in proper pants and a shirt.

“So I said that I was not going to go to the engineering school,” he recalls, laughing now at this youthful stubbornness from the vantage point of his 68 years. After a week of gentle convincing by his mother and a family friend, Mishra returned to the machine shop, this time dressed in new pants and a shirt.

Mishra has spent the years since then moving between the world of the dhoti kurta and the lathe. By inheritance he is the mahant, or head priest, of the Sankat Mochan temple, one of the holiest temples in the holy city of Varanasi (formerly called Banaras). By training he is a professor of hydraulic engineering, recently retired from the faculty at his alma mater Banaras Hindu University (BHU). At the intersection of his role as priest and his work as an engineer he found his true calling: cleaning the sacred water of the Ganga (or Ganges) River, a calling that has brought him into the world environmental movement, put him on stages with leaders of countries and earned him a spot on Time magazine’s “Heroes of the Planet” list.

Today when he receives guests, Mishra, a small man with a moustache and full head of white hair, does so wearing a dhoti and kurta. He sits in a building that once belonged to Tulsi Das, a legendary 16th century poet and his family’s spiritual forbear. Sankat Mochan temple is built on the site where it is believed the monkey god Hanuman appeared to Tulsi Das 500 years ago. The building, perched over the river, also houses the offices and research laboratory of the Sankat Mochan Foundation and Clean Ganga campaign.

Mishra’s job as mahant recently pulled him into the headlines. On March 7, bombs erupted at a train station in Varanasi and at Sankat Mochan temple, killing 20 people. By the next day, figures associated with the Hindu nationalist wing of Indian politics were trying to use suspicion that the attacks were carried out by Muslim extremists to build capital for their agendas. When a leader of one of these groups attempted to enter the temple the day following the blasts, Mishra forbade it, telling Outlook India that politicians were “practicing politics on the bodies of the dead.”

Priyankar Upadhyaya, a professor and coordinator of the Malaviya Centre for Peace Research at BHU, says that such posturing by Hindu politicians always puts Varanasi Muslims on the defensive. “Every time they have to come out and defend themselves against Hindu nationalism,” Upadhyaya said. “The onus is on Muslims to say that they’re Indians.”

Mishra says that religion is being misappropriated in Indian society. “Those who are in power, those who run this country, I don’t know what they have in their heart and their mind,” he said. “Religion is exploited in so many ways that are not good.” While Mishra’s refusal to allow the blast at the temple to be used for political gain was an ideological stance, it was also a practical one. Some politicians demonstrated near the temple, “but by god’s grace, we could stop that in the temple, and it was not exploited. Otherwise there would have been a riot in Varanasi.”

Mishra comes from a traditional Hindu family, and speaks of Hindus like himself as “practicing Hindus” as opposed to “fundamentalist Hindus.” He is the seventh mahant in his family, a position that is passed between generations from the father to the eldest son. When his father died in 1952, Mishra found himself a mahant at the age of 14, “even before I knew what mahant meant,” he said. One thing that it meant was becoming acquainted with the Ganga. He learned the practice of saying prayers at the river’s edge and submerging himself in the river, taking the holy dip that now begins every day.

Becoming mahant at this early age might have meant a life spent entirely in sacred service to the temple, and Mishra is still unclear about the steps that led him to a secular education. He was the first person in his family to get a college degree. When he talks about going to study engineering at BHU he speaks with a sense of wonder. “I don’t know why this happened,” he says. He can’t remember the logic that took him to engineering school, but he sees God’s hand in the fact that it finally led back to the Ganga.

After graduating from BHU he started lecturing in the university’s engineering department and would later become chair of the department. When he first started teaching and was introduced as the mahant of Sankat Mochan and a BHU professor, the next question would be if he was a professor of philosophy or Sanskrit. During his teaching career, which stretched from 1961 to 2001, Mishra’s days again found him traveling between the traditional Hindu world and the secular world of the university. In the mornings he would descend to the Ganga to do his morning prayers, teach during the day, go to the temple in the evenings, and then return home to prepare his lectures for the next day.

For Mishra, the Ganga represents where these two worlds combine. He describes the world of scientific thought as being one bank of the river, and the deeply spiritual world, one alive with a limitless pantheon (“I would say there are as many gods and goddesses as people who live in India.”) as the other bank. And, he says, they are both equally important. “A rationally trained mind and a committed heart; I am blessed with these two things. If I were only a believer in Ganga, then I would say, I’ll shout at you if you say the Ganga is polluted. And if I were only a scientist with the data we have, we would write a few papers in American Society of Civil Engineers.”

It was with the rational mind of a scientist and the committed heart of a practicing Hindu that Mishra began to think about how the Ganga River could be cleaned. In 1982 he started the Sankat Mochan Foundation and its Clean Ganga campaign. The campaign originally worked to raise public awareness of the river’s pollution with various events in the streets and lecture halls of Varanasi. Since its founding it has moved from being an awareness-raising organization to an environmental monitoring group. It has also been a critic of what it sees as the failure of the first phase of the government’s $100 million Ganga Action Plan, which implemented technology unsuited to the realities of Indian infrastructure and weather. This included treatment facilities that were rendered inoperable during the months of monsoon rains the country has every year.

In 1993, at the end of the first phase of the government’s cleanup plan, the Clean Ganga campaign established a research laboratory to measure the health of the river. What they found was not good: water sampled at various points on the bank of the river revealed that the level of some pollution indicators is 300,000 times what is classified as safe for bathing. Mishra estimates that nearly 95 percent of this pollution is from raw sewage being dumped into the river at 30 points in Varanasi. The existing sewage system is basically unimproved from the one the British put in nearly 90 years ago, even though the population of Varanasi is seven times the size it was when the original system was installed.

The Clean Ganga campaign has openly opposed the government’s idea for the next phase of the Ganga Action Plan and put forward an alternative, far less-costly solution designed by an environmental technology company in Berkeley, California. This plan would cycle wastewater through a system of settling ponds that accelerate the natural cleansing activities of algae. India’s central government won’t approve this plan and private companies won’t agree to fund it without the government’s blessing. In the meantime, the campaign also continues to push awareness-raising locally and internationally and Mishra continues to lecture on the effort to clean the Ganga.

Although a mahant lecturing on aspects of water purification and bio-oxygen demand may seem counterintuitive, Job Kozhamthadam, a professor of physics and the founder of the Indian Institute of Science and Religion in Pune, India, believes that the culture’s intellectual tradition lends itself to such cross-pollination. In an email, Kozhamthadam wrote: “In India, scholars do not see much tension between science and spirituality. One reason is that the Indian tradition is predominantly syncretic, often focusing on commonality. We have a tendency to overlook minor differences.”

While the Sankat Mochan Foundation’s Clean Ganga campaign struggles to find funding, Mishra is also unsure about his legacy as mahant of Sankat Mochan. Mishra has two sons, one an engineer living in Varanasi, the other a neurobiologist in Delhi. He doesn’t think either is inclined to take on the role of mahant. He chooses his words carefully when talking about what mahant means today. “Mahant, now it is not very…who cares for mahants and sadhus [Hindu mystics]?” Mishra says. “There is no commerce, no career involved in it. It is a mission that I am carrying on my shoulders. I hope and wish and pray that this responsibility is taken over by somebody who also does it as best as he or she can.”

A certain broad-brush approach to Hindu theology begins with a trinity: Brahma, the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva, the god of destruction. When asked about this cosmology, Mishra takes issue with this understanding of Shiva, saying the god should be thought of as bringing joy to life’s decay. “We know that this whole creation and all of us, we are not permanent, we are decaying and one day everything has to come to an end,” he said. “It is a shallow pool of time for us in our life. That is the inherent characteristic of our creation in this world. So we have to be happy, we have to be enthusiastic.” Even when he’s talking about conflict between religious groups, the degradation of the Ganga or the uncertainty of his family legacy, the smile that tugs at the corner of his eyes never totally leaves.

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In Pakistan and India, rock star Salman Ahmad plays to crowds of hundreds of thousands, filling cricket stadiums with fans obsessed and screaming his name. The goateed, long-haired musician can’t walk the streets without being besieged for his autograph. His every move is tracked on blogs maintained by devotees.

The founder of Junoon, South Asia’s best-selling rock band, Ahmad, 41, has been called the founder of “Sufi rock,” a style that blends the traditional qawwali music of the region’s Sufi shrines with guitar riffs that someone the likes of Led Zeppelin or Santana might play. His band has sold more than 25 million albums – a number that places him in the realm of Janet Jackson and Nirvana and makes him no stranger to MTV India’s No. 1 spot.

Rocker Salman Ahmad jams at a recent reunion concert for his band Junoon in Dubai, Saudi Arabia. In Urdu, "Junoon" means obsessed. (Courtesy Salman Ahmad)

The glow of fame in New York, however, is a different story, and since Ahmad moved here three years ago, he has found himself playing to a bevy of smaller, more academic audiences. As if to explain, posters outside university lecture halls label him the “Muslim Rock Star.” He only sometimes finds his CDs buried in “World Music” bins at record stores. And the multicultural organizations that host his shows often request pre-concert talks so he can tell who he is and what he’s about to play.

It’s a contrast, but Ahmad was the one who chose it. He moved his family here not only to provide them some breathing space and anonymity, but because his heart told him he needed to come. He’s in America, he said, to build bridges after Sept. 11 and to add his Sufi-influenced tolerant outlook to the worldwide discussion on the future of Islam.

“It’s been a roller-coaster ride,” said Ahmad, reflecting. “But I can better see Pakistan and South Asia from this perspective. And I’m trying to get where more mainstream America can find out what I’m about.”

Ahmad’s approach to rock ’n’ roll has been compared to Bono, and his band’s to U2: Their lyrics aren’t about women or sex, but about greater matters of peace, health and healing. Banned in Pakistan for several years in the late 1990s because of songs challenging government corruption and the nuclear race with India, Ahmad was later appointed a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador. He has used his most recent releases – about AIDS prevention and reconciliation after India and Pakistan’s historic 1947 split – to raise money for victims of last fall’s earthquake in Kashmir.

The credit for that social-justice outlook, Ahmad said, goes to Sufism, the mystical tradition within Islam and the dominant form of Islam in South Asia. There, Sufis seek God or spiritual truth directly, through a wide range of beliefs and rituals – such as meditation, music, ecstatic dancing and poetry – and practitioners include not only Muslims but Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and most anyone else who wants to join in.

With love as a central theme, Ahmad said, peace and tolerance follow.

“It’s like all the time being inside and thinking about the beauty and truth in the universe,” he said. “You acquire an ability to see with the heart. Religion, color – they just melt.”

A visitor to any of the Sufi shrines that dot India and Pakistan’s landscape will hear, on Thursday or Friday evenings, the sounds of traditional Sufi qawwalis – Urdu or Punjabi praise music played on tablas, or hand drums, and harmonium, a hand-pumped organ. Decades ago, singers such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Abida Parveen made qawwalis commercially famous; Ahmad took them one step further in the merge with rock ’n’ roll.

Ahmad’s Sufi leanings come not from growing up in a Sufi-following family. With much of his childhood spent in the United States – in Rockland County, N.Y., because his father worked for Pakistan International Airlines – Ahmad was turned on to Sufism only after returning to Pakistan for medical school. After completing his degree and joining a well-known Pakistani pop band called the Vital Signs, he found himself unfulfilled until he met Nusrat at a benefit concert about 15 years ago. Discovering the depth and meaning of Sufi tradition, he spent two years studying with Nusrat, learning to merge qawwalis with his Aerosmith-sounding guitar.

“The Sufi idea came through music and I was stung. Obviously there was something in me waiting to be wounded,” Ahmad said. “It kind of blew my mind. I had just associated Sufis with religion. Then I was so blown away by the poetry, by the voice.”

Describing himself as musically “born again,” Ahmad now uses the words of the Qur’an and Sufi poets Rumi and Bulleh Shah when he writes. While not a member of any particular Sufi order – the mystics are grouped together in certain lineages, almost like monastic orders in the Catholic Church – he describes the composing process in the same spiritual terms Sufis use to describe their zikr, or meditation.

“Once I got into music I had all these questions about where melodies come from, where inspiration comes from, where creativity comes from,” he said. “When I write, I get possessed. I get struck. I have no concept of time.”

The band Ahmad pulled together in 1990 with Pakistani Ali Azmat and later Brian O’Connell, a boyhood friend from New York, drew its name from that concept – Junoon in Urdu means “obsessed” and its fans are called Junoonis, or “obsessed ones.” The group hit its stride in 1995 with a CD called “Inquilaab,” or revolution, and a song called “Ehtesaab,” or accountability, followed by a music video featuring a horse dining at a fancy hotel – a stab at then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s husband, who owned polo ponies. A few years later the band toured both India and Pakistan with hits from their album “Azad,” which means freedom.

Parallel to the group’s rapid rise in success was an increase across India in the popularity of Sufi music, a trend both Swaminathan Kalidas, India Today magazine Arts Editor, and Sohail Hashmi, a documentary filmmaker, attribute to Muslim-Hindu violence in Ayodhya in 1992 and Gujarat in 2002. The nation was seeking calm in the midst of religious tumult and Sufi groups like Junoon – singing of harmony and acceptance – spread a message that soothed that need, the Delhi-based critics said.

The popularity of Sufi music continues today, but Junoon does not: The band decided to call it quits after more than a decade and after Ahmad and O’Connell each moved back to New York. Citing too many years together and needs to explore new avenues, Ahmad said one of the main reasons the group broke up was so he could get beyond that fame kept him from doing the work he likes most.

“I felt frustrated with what I was doing with Junoon. I was in this rock ’n’ roll circus. People were affected by my celebrity,” Ahmad said, so much so he felt he couldn’t get out his social-justice message.

Sept. 11 made him realize, more than ever, his role: “For most Muslims it was the lights being turned on, somebody asking the question, ‘Are Muslims inherently violent?’” he recalled.

He knew it was up to him to answer the question.

Living again in Rockland County, his boys enrolled in the same middle school he attended and his wife Samina, also trained as a doctor, serving as his manager, Ahmad has been at work on his solo album, “Infiniti,” released last year, and two documentaries for the BBC. The first show, “The Rock Star and the Mullahs,” tells the story of a tour Ahmad made of northwest Pakistan after increasingly fundamentalist Islamic leaders attempted to ban music in all forms. The second, “It’s My Country, Too,” features his interviews with Muslim Americans on life in post-Sept. 11 America.

In February, Ahmad performed at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, and in March, he joined former Junoon members for a reunion concert in Dubai, Saudi Arabia. At the end of April he’ll be honored by the Muslim Public Affairs Council for his use of music to promote peace. He’s also slated this summer to perform in Central Park.

It’s a busy lineup, but the shows Ahmad most looks forward to, he said, are the ones on small university stages where only a few audience members may know his name.

“That’s where I find myself in my element,” he said. “Doing unplugged storytelling concerts, telling how the Sufi tradition and Sufi music translate into the 21st century.”

If a recent performance at Nassau Community College on Long Island is any example, Ahmad is talking about meeting crowds of 20-somethings who live lives far from Pakistan, far from understanding the complexity that is Islam. Students who, if they’re paying attention, will meet through music the Sufi outlook Ahmad hopes can open doors between East and West.

Backed by a tablas drummer who beats out rhythms on the floor, Ahmad – clad in stonewashed jeans, a black V-neck shirt, wooden necklace and backward baseball cap – will pluck out qawwali ecstasy on his guitar strings, his knee lifting and head shaking in pure rapture as the audience slowly rises to its feet. Students from the South Asia who already know his music may lead, but soon others will join in unabashed, full-arm, above-head hand-clapping and bangra-influenced fancy footwork. Cell phones will snap pictures, friends will ride friends’ shoulders, cries of “Pakistan Zindabad” (“Long live Pakistan”) may even be heard.

Ahmad plans to be here for the next 10 years at least – enough time, he hopes, to show that Islam, especially Sufi Islam, has more to offer the world than bloodshed and war.

“The world separates and polarizes, yet Sufism sees everyone as one,” he said. “Sufism is for me a long-lost bridge people have to find. It allows me to look at someone else – black, white, green, red, Jewish, Christian, Muslim – and see them as human.”

Junoon (.mp3)

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DELHI, INDIA --Sadness and rain filled the faces of about 200 Tibetans, their cheeks painted with the rising sun flag of the country they long to see again.

Hands chained together and their voices raised aloud, school children, monks, elders, women and teenagers sang songs remembering the 47th anniversary of Uprising Day, March 10 1959, when, after nine years of occupation by the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), the revolt against communist rule failed and tens of thousands of people where killed as a result.

Tashi Tobgyal, a 25-year-old Tibetan photographer was there too, but expressed his doubts about the purpose. “We manifest every Uprising Day but it is repetitive, not effective,” he said.

Tobgyal´s parents where amongst the 85,000 people who fled Tibet in 1959 and sought refuge in India. The Indian government gave them land to found 36 settlements, including Dharamsala, where the 14th Dali Lama,--spiritual and political leader of Tibet, now heads the government in exile.

About 2,000 Tibetans flee their country every year. Since then, the Tibetans in exile, scattered in communities mainly in Nepal, India and the United States have lead a relentless fight to regain autonomy from the PRC.

The deeply rooted tradition of Buddhism amongst Tibetans has been the driving force behind their struggle, as the values of compassion, nonviolence and the rejection of extremism, -called Middle-Way approach, as a way to end suffering are clearly put into practice.

In his address on the 47th Uprising Day Anniversary, the Dali Lama said in his statement that:
“The basic principles of the Middle-Way Approach for resolving the issue of Tibet, trusting that a time must surely come when we would have the opportunity to engage in talks with the Chinese leadership.” Reinforcing his commitment with values consistent with Buddhism.

“The exile government has worked hard to maintain the traditions,” said Prof. Geshe Ngawang Samteu, director of the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, India.

“[It has done so by] founding schools for Tibetans where there’s a large community in exile and maintaining cohesion through teaching of Buddhism,” he said in his office on the university campus, witch is in the town where Buddha gave his first sermon.

Tobgyal had just seen Motorcycle Diaries, a recent film about Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Argentinean freedom fighter and one of the fathers of the Cuban revolution.

“When Che was in a march of coal miners, he threw a stone at the soldiers and said “can’t you see they’re thirsty, give them some water!”…Well, I feel we don’t have anyone to throw a stone at China and say that,” said Tobgyal.

Ahimsa, the Sanskrit term for avoidance-of-violence and central belief in Buddhist practice, has been evoked constantly in the evolution of the freedom movement.

But the practice and understanding of ahimsa is not set in stone, and the Buddhist teachings of accepting destiny, even if it means endless exile are challenged.

Tobgyal’s concerns and need “to throw a stone” are part of growing frustration and sense of urgency amongst young Tibetans, most of whom, now in their 20s and 30s, where born and raised in exile.

Whereas the Dali Lama rejects even hunger strikes as part of his understanding of ahimsa, this practice is increasingly used by protesters and is bound to play a role in the numerous protests sprouting around the world leading to the 2008 Olympics hosted by China.

Most of the protesters on this day in Delhi belong to the Tibetan Youth Congress, deemed as the major organization for Tibetan independence and claiming to have over 10,000 members all over the world. They are convinced hunger strikes and civil disobedience are acceptable means of protest, not contrary to ahimsa.

“Buddhism is the correct path to freedom,” said Tendin Kalden, 32, president of the Tibetan Youth Congress in New York and New Jersey.

“Gandhi borrowed the Buddhist value of nonviolence, ahimsa to free its country thru nonviolence and he did it,” said Kalden.

Addressing the questioning of ahimsa’s effectiveness in the 21st century, Kalden added, “even if the world has changed since then, and Tibet is in a different circumstance than India, the path is the same, the midway approach [taught by Buddhism] is the way most Tibetans want to fight for the freedom of their nation.”

Kalden was one of the organizers of a Tibetan Festival in New York, hosted at the Diocese Armenian Church, located at 630 2nd Ave in Manhattan.

The mood was festive; the women dressed in their traditional outfits, very colorful pieces of cloth tied around their waists, their long black hair came down the back framing their round faces with deep black eyes.
Little girls where walking around smiling at the crowd and selling CDs of Tibet’s musical sensation, Phurbu T. Namgyal, who played latter that night.

Half the public where also performing, so the crowd was filled with costumes with yak skin and dangling hair adornments.

Around 100 families, young and old performing together.

Sonam Chonzom, 29, born and raced in Darjeeling, India, came to New York five years ago to be a babysitter. Until recently Chonzom served as president of the Tibetan Woman Coalition, refugee women’s organization working for Tibetan freedom.

Chonzom is also a teacher in a Tibetan Sunday school, where she sees the children and parents trying to maintain their Tibetan identity while immersed in a different culture. “I just wish to get to see Tibet in my lifetime” she said as her happy eyes turned watery but never stopped her smile.

A fight in the line to get food broke out and quickly security escorted two men outside.
The crowd seemed shocked and several people followed them outside, reprimanding the men.
One of Chonzom’s students, six-year-old Sonam, came running and hugged her around the legs.

“I’m sure they’re fighting because of something stupid,” she said. “Fighting is always stupid, right?”
Chonzom hugged her and shock her head in approval, while her eyes drifted of to the land she longs to see. She never cried.

Rinzin Dolka, 31, Tibetan Women Coalition accountant, is organizing the protest, taking place on April 21, during the visit of China’s Prime Minister to New York. Dolka expressed both hope and urgency for a peaceful resolution of the Tibetan conflict.

“[I hope] nobody gets hurt or killed,” she said. “Our nonviolent way it’s working but I’ll take a while.”
After a long pause, and a glance at the room filled with children that have never seen Tibet, Dolce added, “I hope for the best, because we are running out of time, so many Chinese are coming in to Tibet and diluting the culture… the culture is vanishing.”

Dolce, like many others, hopes to go back to Tibet, even if the latest peace talks with the government in exile do not lead to Tibet’s full autonomy.

“The culture is dying in our country, “said Dolce. “In America we can tell them stories, we can sing in public, in Tibet we would be killed. We are running out of time.”

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AMRITSAR, INDIA -- Here, in the spiritual center of the Sikh faith, one man stands out. He appears to be a walking contradiction: he is both taller and fairer, but also much more visibly "Sikh" than almost everyone around him, even the Punjabis who have practiced the faith for generations. He is Sada Sat Simran Singh Khalsa and he is over six feet tall, with pale skin, a towering turban, ruddy beard, and floor-sweeping blue robes. As he walks the perimeter of the Golden Temple, he attracts stares from Punjabis and Westerners alike—all trying to classify him, all coming up short. India is rife with Westerners who adopt an Eastern philosophy and begin dressing and practicing like their Indian counterparts, but few are like Khalsa.

He was born and raised outside of Washington D.C, in a decidedly American community, but also in the Sikh tradition, albeit the particularly American variety of the Indian faith. At age eight, he was sent to Miri Piri Academy to study and now, on a warm spring evening some 18 years later, Khalsa can be found in the school’s music room, giving lessons to a group of young devotees.

At the Miri Piri Academy in Chhertha Sahib, outside Amritsar, India, the students faces look American, they speak in American English, and many of them have all the trappings of American youth: iPods, cell phones and reggaeton ringtones, but nobody could mistake these kids for the average American student. Neither could they be mistaken for the Indians among whom they live, pray and serve. Their white turbans are tied more elaborately, their robes are longer and their symbolic swords, kirpans, are bigger and less, well, symbolic.

Sada Sat Simran Singh Khalsa looking at a book of photographs of ancient Sikh warriors. (Erik Wander)

Located on 17 acres in a village in the Indian state of Punjab, Miri Piri Academy is a school for the children of Western, mostly white, Sikhs who are followers of Yogi Bhajan, an Indian Sikh who brought the faith to the west in the late 1960s. They are often called “American Sikhs,” but the group bristles at the distinction, asserting that Sikhism in the East and Sikhism in the West are one and the same and there is no such thing as an “American” version. Nevertheless, the school’s students are mostly the children of Americans who converted to the faith in the 1970s, often after becoming practitioners of Kundalini Yoga and eventually studying under Bhajan. Bhajan—who is alternately known as Siri Singh Sahib Bhai Sahib Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogi Ji, Siri Singh Sahib, and, simply, Yogi Ji—founded the school, and his influence is everywhere.

Bhajan’s philosophy is rooted in discipline. He taught, “Without discipline you achieve nothing. With discipline the doors of life are open and yours to choose.” That principle is echoed constantly in these words beneath the school’s emblem: “School of Royalty and Reality. Our first principle is the Love of Discipline.” The school’s mission is “to train the future leaders, teachers and healers of tomorrow through rigorous discipline, quality academics and strong self-discipline.”

At Miri Piri, students begin their day two hours before dawn with an hour of Kundalini yoga and meditation followed by physical training. “The reason, scientifically, is because your mind is calm then,” Sada Sat says. “The world hasn’t started. You can meditate and you can conquer all your demons at that time. There’s a whole science behind it. You have to experience it to really understand.” Twice a year, for 40 days at a time, they arise even earlier, at 2:30 in the morning to do their sewa, or service, at the Golden Temple. There, they wash the marble floors surrounding the “pool of nectar” upon which the temple appears to float.

Khalsa’s fiancée, Guru Das Kaur Khalsa (most followers of Yogi Bhajan take on the last name Khalsa), only came to the school as a high school junior, but she credits the rigorous structure with transforming her life. “When I was in school in America I drank and I partied,” she says. “But when I came to school here I decided not to. I think I just became happier.” She credits this happiness to the rigorous discipline the school enforces. “They pack the schedule in. One of Sri Singh Das’s philosophies was to be really disciplined in your life. He said, don’t leave room for them to be, like, rebellious. Keep them busy and disciplined and working hard and doing all that stuff and then kids won’t have time to do stupid stuff. He says that kids rebel because they’re unhappy and if you create a solid home for them that makes them feel secure in themselves then they won’t need that.”

Most of the school’s 130 students start young, some as early as age six and seven. Bhajan encouraged his followers to send their children at a younger age, teaching that when a child is one to three, their mother is their teacher; when they are three to seven, their father is the teacher; and after that, their peers and God are the teacher.

“He liked it when kids would come here when they were younger,” Guru Das explains of Bhajan’s philosophy. “He thought when you’re young, it’s so important for you to have good parents and for them to give you a good structure. But then send them to boarding school and let the environment be their teacher. Because kids get too attached to their parents and then they take on their parent’s issues, and then they might get divorced or whatever, it’s good to be separate.”

Guruka Singh Khalsa is representative of the older generation of Sikh Americans. He began to practice the faith in the 1970s, after a roommate who practiced Kundalini yoga moved into his home in Berkeley, California. “We called it Berserkly at the time,” he says. “We were a raggle-taggle bunch of gypsies.” Now a webmaster for the site sikhnet.com, he sent both of his sons, who are now 26 and 16, to Miri Piri Academy, even as he chose to stay in America as part of Bhajan’s core group of leaders, who are concentrated in Espanola, New Mexico.

Guruka’s elder son was sent when he was just 6 years old; it was his first trip to India. “The whole process of sending a child that young halfway across the world totally freaks a lot of people out,” Guruka says. “It freaked me out too. But for most of these kids, the overall experience of being in a third world country, not protected by your parents, having to face who you are much earlier in life, allows you to test your own grit, your own strength.”

Guruka says that part of the appeal of sending his children so far away for so long was the larger influence of spirituality and faith in India. “Overall when I look back, what does the experience of being at a school like that give to a child?” he says. “A deep grounding in a spiritual energy that simply isn’t present in America. To be in a culture in whose central values are steeped in spirituality is very different than to be in