NEW DELHI, INDIA—Transported in plastic bags or clasped between hands, the birds arrive 30 to 40 a day. In the summer, they are often dehydrated; in the winter, they suffer from pneumonia. Whether wounded by a passing auto-rickshaw or a whirling ceiling fan, the injured fowls arrive at the Charity Birds Hospital inside the Digambara Jain Temple compound, seeking a remedy for everything from pigeon pox to the common cold. One thing is for sure at this, the only hospital of its kind: The patients never admit themselves.

The Charity Birds Hospital located inside the Jain Temple. (Amanda Millner-Fairbanks)

Opposite the historic Red Fort and situated amidst the noise and chaos of Chandi Chowk, a bazaar in the old quarter of the capital city, the three-story hospital, founded in 1929, treats nearly 30,000 birds each year. The birds are first held in the intensive care unit and eventually transferred to the general ward, where they regain wing power and eventually take flight.

Fed a vegetarian diet of bread and cheese, treatments are free of cost and funded by Jain donations. The hospital separates its vegetarian patients from their non-vegetarian counterparts. Carnivorous predators such as eagles, hawks and falcons are housed exclusively on the first floor. Every Saturday, a section of the roof is opened and the recovered birds fly away. The hospital follows a central tenet of Jainism—a commitment toward enabling the freedom of all living beings, no matter how small or insignificant. And once the birds are admitted, they are never returned to their owners for fear of likely confinement.

“People bring the birds here, Jain or not,” explains veterinarian Dr. Vijay Kumar, who has worked at the hospital for nine years and while not a Jain himself, quickly mentions that he is a vegetarian. One of India’s smallest religious communities who comprise approximately one percent of India’s one billion people, Jains are, first and foremost, vegetarian.

“Just like us, a pigeon will never eat another animal. Even if it is very hungry,” says manager Sri Kamal Kishore Jain, as he describes the folk-art mural in the hospital’s second-floor entrance. It's shows a scene from a famous Jain and Buddhist tale: A king whose hand and foot have been cut off is pictured next to a scale that balances his bleeding foot and hand on one side and a bird on the other. The mural reads: “Brave and merciful king put pieces of his own flesh and finally his whole life in exchange to save a pigeon from prey of hawk.”

Walking barefoot through the bird hospital, two words come immediately to mind: bird flu. The U.S. Embassy in New Delhi warns on its website: “Currently, direct contact with infected poultry, or surfaces and objects contaminated by their feces, is presently considered the main route of human infection.” In response to a question about whether children should visit zoos, the website warns: “Yes, but it is recommended that they do not visit the aviary sections.”

Dr. Kumar assures, “Since the bird flu we’ve taken extra precautions and care with migratory birds. No poultry.” After the outbreak of the avian H5N1 influenza virus in mid-February in Navapur, a city in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, the government ordered the culling of hundreds of thousands of birds.

Some expected the Jains, a small, but often wealthy minority group, to publicly oppose the cullings. While they have yet to galvanize their voices, the issue personifies the group’s struggle to gain a steady, political foothold in India. As millions of birds are being slaughtered worldwide to squelch a possible epidemic, some Jains are contemplating how or if to voice their dissent.

“If a human being is suffering from HIV or AIDS, would you kill them?” asks Vinod Daryapurkar, creator of Jainworld.com, one of the most comprehensive websites on Jainism. “If you wouldn’t kill humans, why would you kill the birds?” As a Jain, Daryapurkar does not distinguish between animals and birds. He views both as living, equal beings. “A lot of people talk of compassion and then go and eat animals,” Daryapurkar explains, “The compassion is false.”

Many Jains attempt to manage their lives in a way that causes the least amount of harm to others. When asked whether the Jain community might organize a public response, Daryapurkar says, “The Jain community is small, tiny. Our sphere of influence is very limited.”

Anne Monius, professor of South Asian religions at the Harvard Divinity School, who specializes in the religious traditions of India, mentions the fact that religiously- organized social movements are relatively new in India. “Jains have not responded perhaps because of their deep commitment to the idea that our own human condition can only be cured by one person at a time.” Monius further articulated that historically, Jains needed to establish themselves as a separate, specifically not Hindu community.

“Now to be not Hindu is to invite the kind of unwanted political attention by the BJP,” she explains, referring to the Bharatiya Janata Party, the powerful Hindu nationalist party. “By not putting themselves out there, the Jains are trying hard to melt into the Hindu woodwork and not backpedaling on 150 years of trying to differentiate themselves.”

Dr. Dilip Mukhtyar, former chairman and current trustee of the Jain Temple in Elmhurst, Queens, questions why, if only a handful of birds are infected, hundreds of thousands are sacrificed. “Suppose tomorrow one cow got sick, would you kill 100,000 cows next week?” Mukhtyar advocates for more humane ways of dealing with the possible epidemic and questions to what extent the current practices will actually be effective.

A Jain lobby, according to Mukhtyar, was not effective in their recent opposition to Indian slaughterhouses. “They weren’t that successful,” he says, “Because the people who were running the slaughterhouses were more concerned by the profits.”

Spiritual leader Gurudev Shree Chitrabhanuji, who is the founder of the Jain Meditation International Center in Manhattan, considers the cullings emblematic of a larger problem. “Inconvenience bothers us more than the injustice we do to others,” Chitrabhanuji said last week in New York at a talk aimed at Jain youth, “What you give to the world, it is going to come back sooner or later.” When the issue of the bird flu came up, Chitrabhanuji questioned, “And now you are warned about the disease, but why do you eat them?” he paused and then smiled. “Their vibrations may just eat you some time.”

Toward the end of the evening, Chitrabhanuji handed out a series of cartoon advertisements promoting vegetarianism. Included was a chicken saying, “The one thing I hate is to end up on your plate.”

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Bicycle rickshaws squeeze through the narrow Delhi road leading to the Jama Masjid. (Mariana Martinez Estens)

Delhi is a city in perpetual motion. Early in the morning, monkeys parade along the walls of government buildings like people, and young children dressed in rags handspring and somersault across the sidewalks as nimble as little monkeys. Bicycle driven rickshaws compete for space on the roads with honking motorcycles.

India’s capital city was built eight times and destroyed six, leaving Old and New Delhi as the two surviving remnants of the many dynasties come and gone. As tour guide Muzaffar Shah said, the city holds a curse: No one will own Delhi forever. The one constant in the city’s history, its streets and its culture, is that it never seems to stand still.

After arriving at the hotel at 2 a.m. the previous morning, the group of jet lagged Columbia journalism students began our first day in India with a tour of New Delhi. Having been warned of overcrowding, we were pleasantly surprised to see the spacious yards and manicured gardens that surrounded the diplomats’ bungalows and the former viceroy’s palace, a benefit of the eight million trees bequeathed to Delhi by the British colonizers. But even at the India Gate war memorial, where army officers in orange and gold turbans formally laid a garland to commemorate the country’s fallen soldiers, there were signs of the other, poorer side of the city. A little beggar girl twisted herself into a human pretzel. Elsewhere, men and women swept the streets with brooms; a man tried to sell slingshots propelling whirling plastic toys.

L.K. Advani, the controversial leader of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), spoke to the group at his home about the intersection of politics and religion in India’s secular democracy.

But, like so much else in Delhi, politics and religion shift depending on who is speaking. Explaining Advani’s remarks, journalist and member of parliament Chandan Mitra talked about the Muslims as a voting bloc, often economically disadvantaged, who comprise 16 to 17 percent of India’s population. Later in the day, Sohail Hashmi, a Delhi-based documentarian, expert on Islam and our guide at Old Delhi’s principle mosque, Jama Masjid, stressed that Muslims are far from a monolithic group-they have class and cultural distinctions that outweigh their religious commonality. “If the Imam said vote for this candidate, I’d be surprised if anyone pays attention,” he said.

After Advani’s talk, the group headed to Old Delhi and finally found the bustling city streets about which we had been warned. Motorcycles cut off rickshaws, which formed lanes in each direction. Smells of food and spice from local shops filled the air. Children pushed carts of cardboard boxes and begged at the windows of the bus.

Even in Jama Masjid, a 1,200-square-meter courtyard with majestic domes, archways and minarets, it was hard to find a still spot. Worshippers waiting on the red sandstone terrace for prayers overlooked a bustling bazaar, as pigeons flew around eating the seed left for them by tourists and devotees.

In the area around the mosque stands the Red Fort. With its red sandstone wall 2.4 kilometers in circumference, the fort, visible from Jama Masjid, is a power center. Whichever empire’s flag flew from the fort controlled the city. Its story of kings, saints and violence, retold by Hashmi, are a reminder of the power struggles that have caused Delhi to rise and fall over the centuries. The Fort is a testimony to the story of this ever-changing city, a story that continues to unfold each and every day.

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Families gather for weekly worship at the Jain Temple in Queens. The men are draped in tangerine cloth; the women are festooned in saris of magenta and turquoise. Small children dance in circles, knocking into each other as their fathers bathe each idol in boiled water and their mothers chant and sway in time to the tambourine beat.

The children scuttle across the hall for Paathshala—religious study for Jains—with their teacher, Shilpa Pandya, while their parents practice pooja until lunchtime.

“What are the kinds of worldly beings?” Pandya asks her students, who number nearly two dozen, assembled around a large conference table.

An eager student jolts his hand into the air, excitedly waving it back and forth. “There are five,” he explains proudly, “One, two, three, four and five sense organisms.”

During the week, Pandya, 20, studies economics and south Asian studies at Columbia University and commutes home each evening to her family on Staten Island. On Sundays, she teaches Paathshala at the Jain Temple on 43-11 Ithaca St. in Elmhurst. A new program of instruction that formally began last fall, Pandya reasons if the temple can draw in the kids, entire families will follow. Weekly lessons typically focus on their reasons for ahimsa, or non-violence: All living beings possess consciousness; consuming or harming them in any way is forbidden.

“Open your reader and let’s review,” says Pandya, referring to the pink Jainism reader made of photocopied pages bound by three staples, “Turn to page six and let’s take turns reading it aloud together.”

The voices alternate: “One sense organisms have only one touch sense: plants, earth, water and fire; Two sense organisms have touch and taste senses: worms, shells; Three sense organisms have touch, taste and smell senses: ants, snails; Four sense organisms have touch, taste, smell and vision: butterflies, bees. Five sense organisms have touch, taste, smell, vision and sound: birds, animals, humans.”

“Do all living beings feel pain? All souls feel pain,” Pandya says, answering her own question, “Are humans always five-sense organisms?”

The question lingers in the air. “But what about if you’re deaf?” wonders 10-year-old Abhishek Sambaria.

“If you’re deaf, you still have ears,” Pandya explains, “They just don’t work.”
“Butterflies don’t have ears,” says Aneri Doshi, eight, practically falling out of her chair, “They feel pain even though they don’t have ears.”

“What about non-living things? Let’s review that,” offers Pandya.

Reading from the book, Sambaria says: “Non-living things do not have consciousness. They do not have sense organs.” Pictured below the text is a picture of a yellow Porsche, tennis racket and table.

“A dead person is not living,” yells out Doshi, still fidgety.

“It hurts when you pull out your hair because the root is alive but the bottom of your hair doesn’t hurt when you get a haircut because it’s non-living,” says Pandya, “It’s dead. Or diamonds that are living when they’re inside and attached to the earth, but not after they’re mined.”

Looking confused, Doshi wonders, “How come in India they shave their heads?”

“It’s cultural,” explains their teacher.

Unsatisfied, she persists, “I think it’s weird.”

Lining up the students to assemble for aarti, commensuration of the pooja, Pandya reminds them: “Next week’s homework is true and false questions. Tell me if things are living or non-living.”

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