A 10th-century sandstone sculpture of the Hindu god Rama returned to Cambodia decades after it was stolen from a temple during the kingdom’s civil war.

Denver Art Museum had acquired the 62-inch-tall torso from the Doris Weiner Gallery in 1986, which was stolen in the 1970s from the Koh Ker temple site. The museum says, at the time, it had no idea that the statue had been stolen. That only came from discussions with delegates from Cambodia.

Getting ready for the start of the handover ceremony of the Torso of Rama returned to Cambodia by @DenverArtMuseum. pic.twitter.com/rwikqspV8x

— Jay Raman (@ramanjr) March 28, 2016

The quiver on the statue’s back suggested that it had resided in the eastern gopura of the temple site. This section of the temple was home to two ferocious monkey kings, Valin and Sugriva, now in the National Museum of Cambodia.

But it still misses its head and other body parts. The kingdom of Cambodia continues to appeal to international art galleries and museums to return the missing limbs.

Documents sent to the Denver museum with measurements of the feet in a pedestal matched the legs of the torso. This confirmed that the statue had not left Cambodia legally. A chainsaw and hammer had detached the feet.

Cambodia’s Secretary of State, Chan Thani, thanked the Denver Museum of Art for voluntarily returning the Rama sculpture. And for its sensitivity towards Cambodian culture.

The statue dates back to the Khmer Empire, a Buddhist-Hindu dynasty famous for its temples and cities, including Cambodia’s Angkor Wat complex.

Authorities had located the pedestal which matched the Torso of Rama at Koh Ker’s Prasat Chen temple in 2012.

The Torso of Rama is the seventh statue to return to Cambodia from abroad.

On May 3, 2013, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced that two statues would return to Cambodia. The “Kneeling Attendants” – also called Pandavas – had been a feature of the museum’s Asian Wing for almost 20 years.

Mahabharata is a Sanskrit epic which depicts a wrestling match. Four other brothers, the Pandavas, had teamed with Duryodhana to wrestle Bhima. Observing the wrestling was the god Krishna and his brother, Balarama.

Like the Torso of Rama, thieves had severed the feet from their pedestals.

A year later and the Norton Simon Museum in California had agreed to return a looted statue to the kingdom of Cambodia. The 10th-century sandstone statue known as the “Temple Wrestler” or “Bhima” had been on display since 1976.

Archaeologist Tess Davies wrote a vivid and compelling account about the return of the Duryodhana statue to Cambodia in 2014.

The French protectorate absorbed Cambodia in 1863 and lasted until 1953. Colonialism shaped and dominated the scholarship of Cambodia’s history and culture. Academic classes on Cambodian architecture and history were taught by French professors. The French also helped establish the National Museum of Cambodia. Others argue that the looting of Cambodia’s cultural history began in this period. The civil war had served to extend an ongoing problem.

Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, civil war and  political coups,  the  Communist  Party  of  Kampuchea (CPK),  also  known as Khmer  Rouge, seized power in 1975.

Pol Pot’s utopianism resulted in the murder of almost two million Cambodians in just three years. Under the ‘Year Zero’ directive, schools closed, religion was banned and money became worthless. Executions in the ‘killing fields’ involved torture, starvation and disease.

The Cleveland Museum of Art returned a statue of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman to Cambodia last year. It acquired the statue in 1982 from a now deceased New York art dealer.

A French museum returned the head of a 7th century  statue to Cambodia in January 2016. The statue which depicts the Hindu gods Vishnu and Shiva had its head stolen in 1886. It had stood in the Phnom Da temple in southern Takeo province prior to the theft. In Phnom Penh, a lavish ceremony saw the stolen head reattached.

The Norwegian collector Morten Bosterud returned two stone statues from the Angkor period to Cambodia in October 2015. Both statues were looted during the civil war and spent the past three decades in Europe. A ceremony in Phnom Penh saw Bosterud return a ninth century head of the god Shiva and a late 12th to early 13th century male divinity head.

The post US art museum returns stolen Hindu statue to Cambodia appeared first on Religious Reader.

A Maryland county will allow Muslim and Hindu students a day off from school to celebrate Diwali and Eid al-Adha.

The Howard County Board of Education faced a tough decision: to foster inclusion by removing all religious holidays from the academic calender; Or add extra days to include non-Abrahamic celebrations.

A unanimous decision in favour of the latter will result in school closings or professional development days for staff in the 2016/17 academic year. The board also voted to allow staff to take a professional development day off for Lunar News Years Eve, after requests from the local Chinese and Korean communities. As it falls on a Saturday, students remain unaffected.

Schools in the county have shut during Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  But a recent motion threatened to end this  tradition. It proved controversial enough to attract more than 300 people to a public hearing in December.

State and federal laws prevent schools from closing on religious holidays (unless mandated otherwise). Adjusting academic calendars requires a secular reason. Baltimore County had recorded a large levels of absenteeism during these Jewish holidays.

Art Abramson, Executive Director of Baltimore’s Jewish Council, welcomed changes to academic calendars on the condition that students would avoid punishment if they took a day off for religious holidays. He had also noted how schools with large Jewish communities faced an added economic burden to open during holidays like Rosh Hashanah. So it required a discretionary approach for individual schools to open or close on such days. A point missing in Breitbart’s reporting.

This was the case when Anne Arundel County voted to keep schools open during Rosh Hashanah in the next academic year. A move that has not happened since 2003. Students could still celebrate the holiday with a day of absence, but staff could not take a day off.

Within this framework,  Howard County rejected this similar motion in favour of diversity.

The school system in the area does not count the religious affiliation of students, but it does for race. Howard County has 74 public schools that serve 51,366 students. Enrollment from black and Asian communities stands at 56 per cent. And the schools in Howard County have a greater diversity of students when compared to other parts of Missouri.

State-mandated holidays do fall on Christian holidays, like Christmas and Easter. Any decision to increase days off rests on the shoulders of local schools.

Last July, the Baltimore County Policy Review Committee recommended that schools not close during Eid. It did, however, stress that students and staff could take time off to celebrate Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. In nearby Montgomery County, the school board voted to allow students and staff to take a day off for Eid al-Adha.

A private firm surveys communities to gauge the impact cultural and religious holidays have on absenteeism levels. This information could help bring greater diversity to the academic calender in 2017/18.

The 2017-2018 Academic Calendar Committee has already begun to meet. And it includes representatives from the Jewish Federation of Howard County, the Howard County Muslim Council, the Hindu community, and the Chinese American Parent Association.

Students will begin the 2016/17 academic year on August 29. It ends on June 13, 2017.

The post Asian, Muslim and Hindu holidays added to school calendars in Howard County, Maryland appeared first on Religious Reader.

Some of India’s most prominent scientists have signed a petition and returned awards to draw attention to India’s growing intolerance.

The petition accuses the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of curtailing free speech and stoking Hindu nationalism.

Signatories include Ashoke Sen, who won the Fundamental Physics Prize, the world’s most lucrative academic award in 2012. Pushpa Bhargava who founded the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad. D Balasubramanian, former president of the Indian Academy of Science. And Dr Vineeta Bal of the National Institute of Immunology in New Delhi.

The statement reads: “It is the same climate of intolerance, and rejection of reason that has led to the lynching in Dadri of Mohammad Akhlaq Saifi and the assassinations of Prof Kalburgi, Dr Narendra Dabholkar and Shri Govind Pansare.”

Professor Malleshappa Kalburgi’s murder shocked India. Who would murder a “straight-talking, rationalist researcher of ancient Kannada literature”? As local media described him. One theory is that Hindu nationalists murdered him in response to his criticisms of idol worship.

The founder of the right-wing Hindu group Sri Rama Sene, Pramod Muthalik, rejected any links to Kalburgi’s murder. He also threatened to cut off the tongues of writers if they continue to “insult” Hindu gods.

In February, Communist and rationalist Govind Pansare died from gunshot wounds near his home in Kolhapur, in the state of Maharashtra. The main suspect in Pansare’s murder is Samir Gaikwad, a member of the Hindu nationalist group Sanatan Sanstha. In the past, members of Sanatan Sanstha took part in a bombing campaign in Thane and Vashi in Maharashtra and Madgaon in Goa.

In 2013, unknown individuals murdered rationalist campaigner Narendra Dabholkar. It took two years to identify any suspects.

More worrying, however, is the possibility that all three murders are linked.

Critics point to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence on the issue and interpret it as tacit approval – as he shares their ideology of Hindutva. A product of this ideology is anti-Muslim prejudice. It fuses cultural norms and the trauma of partition in north India and Bengal. The misuse of history allows these groups to reconfigure the frustrations of the Hindu middle classes. As Pankaj Mishra noted, Modi stokes this false sense of victimhood and chauvinism with the “old Hindu rage-and-shame over what he calls more than a thousand years of slavery under Muslim and British rule“.

Jyoti Punwani accused Modi of stoking anti-Muslim tensions during a recent assembly election rally. In his speech, Modi made various references to beef export figures and Bangladeshi ‘infiltration’.

Turning Islamophobia into a normalised, everyday prejudice is nothing new. Sumanta Banerjee highlighted this in 1991. For Banerjee, Hindu nationalists need this external enemy to justify their Hindu superiority and support base.

For the BJP, Hindutva has “awakened the Hindus to the new world order where nations represented the aspirations of people united in history, culture, philosophy, and heroes.

Hindutva successfully took the Indian idol of Israel and made Hindus realize that their India could be just as great and could do the same for them also“. The logic is also peppered with numerous anti-Islamic refrences.

Mohammad Akhlaq’s murder, on the belief that he and his Muslim family had consumed beef, in early October made global headlines.

Some Hindu nationalists came close to justifying Akhlaq’s murder. Sadhvi Prachi, a leader of the extremist Vishwa Hindu Parishad, told local press that “those who consume beef deserve such actions against them”. It took days for Modi to break his silence on the murder and call for religious tolerance.

Mahesh Sharma, India’s culture minister and a local MP, told the Guardian that Akhlaq’s murder was a ‘misunderstanding‘. Sharma is no stranger to controversy. Last month he told India Today that the Bible and Qur’an are not central to India’s soul. Yet there are 172,245,158 Muslims (14.23 per cent) and 27,819,588 Christians (2.3 per cent) in India. Nor has India been immume from Islamisation conspiracies.

The furore over beef (though banned from export) risks damaging the profitable buffalo meat trade. Hindu mobs have attacked suppliers of buffalo meat on suspicion of possessing cow carcasses in recent weeks.

Graffiti advocating the hanging of beef eaters recently appeared in a Mumbai suburb. Within the state of Maharashtra, where Mumbai resides, a ban on the slaughter and consumption of beef has existed since March. This caused tensions during the Islamic celebration of Eid-al-adha. To breach this ban in Maharashtra can result in a 5 year prison term or a fine of 10,000 rupees. A minority of states permit cow slaughter – including Kerala – which had its own recent beef scandal.

On a cultural note, organisers of a film festival faced government pressure to drop a documentary on the beef industry. The documentary, Caste on the Menu Card, was the only film the Information and Broadcasting Ministry did not clear.

Critics like Amartya Sen have accused the BJP of filling public and cultural institutions with party loyalists. Though the reasons are a little more complex. Other Hindu nationalists have lobbied to ban Muslims and other religious minorities from participating in festivals like Navratri.

More than 40 Indian writers have also returned their literary awards or written letters of protest in response to the “rising intolerance and growing assault on free speech”.

In a statement, the poet Surjit Patar said: “The practice of killing writers and thinkers in our multilingual, multicultural and multi-religious country is disheartening”.

The post Why Hindu nationalism threatens India’s free speech and secularism appeared first on Religious Reader.

The festival of Navratri (nine nights) celebrates the triumph of good over evil. Navaratri begins around harvest time in October, and, celebrations last for nine days.

Navarati sits within the wider festival of Durga Puja, which honours the mother goddess Durga. In one retelling of the triumph of good, a demon named Mahisha, who took the form of a buffalo, threatened the gods. To meet this threat, the gods pleaded with Durga to do what they could not – kill the demon Mahisha.

Bestowed with the weapons and strength of the gods, including Shiva’s trident, Vishnu’s disc, Yama’s iron rod, and Indra’s thunderbolt, Durga took on this mission. But it did not prove an easy victory. For the demon Mahisha’s blood created new demons to attack Durga. A prolonged battle ended with the demon’s decapitation.

Another popular story in northern India concerns the slaying of the ten-headed demon King Ravana. In a final and epic battle with Rama, who pursued Ravana in his chariot. Rama’s golden arrows, which transformed into serpents as they reached the demon King. The arrows had decapitated Ravana’s many heads but they regrew in an instant. This prolonged the conflict for many nights as Rama fired hundreds of arrows.

Matali, Rama’s charioteer, advised that he use the divine arrow to end this battle. The ‘dreaded arrow of Brahma’ was a gift presented to Rama by Agastya. Its divinity stems from its capacity to never miss its target. That divine arrow, powered by the gods, pierced the demon King’s heart and killed him. Ravana’s ten heads represent the ten days of the festival. And Hindus use the each day to remove bad characteristics – such as jealousy and lust.

Motherhood is an important festival theme. Stories allude to Shiva’s decision to allow Durga to visit her mother for nine days of the year. Families attempt to follow this tradition and return on the tenth day.

To propitiate the nine planets and harvest season, nine different kinds of food grain seeds are grown in small containers and then offered to the goddesses.

Some devotees fast and offer prayers relating to health and prosperity. Others seek introspection. In Tamil Nadu, celebrations extend to the goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswati.

Durgashtami, Mahanavami and Vijayadasami are the names of the final three days of Navarathri. In Kerala, those celebrating worship Saraswathi as the goddess of knowledge. The deity of Gayathri represents the fountain of fine arts and science.

Diverse celebrations take place across India.

Vijayadasami marks the end of the nine-day festival. Across India, effigies are burnt and idols are cast into rivers in the hope of rekindling of the soil’s fertility.

The spectre of a growing Hindu nationalism continues to haunt parts of India. It morphed into a paroxysm of anti-Muslim anger and violence last year. Police had arrested 140 people after violence between Muslims and Hindus broke out in the state of Gujarat.

That violence came in a climate where radical Hindus, spurred on by the success of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), lobbied to ban Muslims and other religious minorities from participating festivals like Navratri.

Before his electoral success, the United States had denied him entry in 2005. The State Department can deny foreign dignitaries visas on grounds of “severe violations of religious freedom”. Narendra Modi remains the only person ever denied entry to the United States under this provision.

Modi faced allegations that he failed to stop deadly riots by Hindus against the Muslim minority in the state of Gujarat in 2002. At least 1,000 people died as a result of the riots that lasted a matter of days.  Though the courts later found that Modi had no case to answer.

A reminder of the faultlines of exploited religious tensions appeared in Bishara, near Delhi last week. A mob murdered Mohammed Akhlaq, a 50-year-old labourer, on the belief that he and his Muslim family had consumed beef, an animal considered sacred in Hinduism.

The seductive narrative of religious nationalism can undermine religious cohesion, even in times of celebration.

The post What is the Hindu festival of Navratri? appeared first on Religious Reader.

The harvest festival of Onam is a moveable feast: it colours the landscape of Kerala in South West India in a rhythm of elaborate dances, music, sports and banquets.

A festival of secular tradition, where different faiths and castes celebrate. It falls on the Malayee month of Chingnam, which coincides with Shavan Masa of the Indian calender. This ten day celebration falls between August and September 15.

It honours the homecoming of the beloved King Mahabali, who makes a yearly return to Kerala. Legend dictates that the jealous king of the gods, Indra, hatched a plan to oust Mahabali. Indra begged Lord Vishnu for protection who then transformed into a Brahmin boy, or dwarf, named Vamana. The people of Kerala adorded the wisdom and generosity of King Mahabali; Vamana sought to exploit the latter. He approached King Mahabali and asked for as much land as his feet could cover in three steps.

Upon granting what appeared a simple and humble request; Vamana grew at an exponential rate; one footstep covered the sky and the stars. The second step covered the netherworld. Vamana then turned to King Mahabli, who came to realise that a third step would destroy the Earth. To prevent this calamity, Mahabli offered his head. Before disappearing, Vishnu granted the King’s request  to return to the Earth once a year.

Preparations for the festival begin with a cleaning and decorating of the house. Onam presents an opportunity for family members to wear new clothes. For women, the traditional outfit is the kesav saree (a white saree with golden border), for men, it is the mundu (a white dhoti with golden border).

Outside of houses, rests the pookalam (athapookalam), or flower mat. This is a symbol of welcoming King Mahabali.

Mahabali visits his kingdom on the second day of Onam, the most important day of the festival. Mounds of earth representing Mahabali and Vishnu rest in courtyards, decorated with flowers.

The Thrikkakara Temple, in Thrikkakara, two kilometers east of Idapally near Cochi in Kerala, remains one of the few Indian temples dedicated to Lord Vamana (the fifth incarnation of Lord Vishnu). Thrikkakara means ‘the holy place where Lord placed his foot’.

Other celebrations incorporate traditional Kathakali dances and parades with fireworks and elephants. The Vallamkali (boat race) sees around one hundred oarsman take to the water in spectacular boats. Others sing traditional songs, called Onappatt.

In Thrissur, artists paint their bodies in the likeness of tigers to perform the annual ‘Pulikali‘ or tiger dance. This folk art performance settles on the theme of tiger hunting to entertain during Onam. Others in Thrissur began celebrations with a tug-of-war.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, retired cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi, and some Bollywood celebrities wished individuals a happy Onam.

The post Happy Onam! But what is this festival about? appeared first on Religious Reader.

Oxford University digitised more than one hundred 19th Century Kalighat paintings depicting Hindu deities. The digitisation is part of a wider project at the university’s Bodleian library to make thousands of rare manuscripts and images accessible to the public.

Religious statesman, Rajan Zed, took to Twitter to heap praise on the university:

We commend #OxfordUniversity for digitizing 110 19th-century #KalighatPaintings of #Hindu deities & others & posting on new #OnlinePortal.

— Rajan Zed (@rajanzed) August 1, 2015

Sir Monier Monier-Williams acquired the Kalighat paintings for the Indian Institute Library following his third fund-raising trip to India in 1883.

You can trace the history of the Kalighat art to a Kali Temple on the bank of the Buri Ganga (a canal diverging from the Ganges River) in southern Kolkata (Calcutta).

This form of Bengali folk art, created between 1800 and 1930, was a product sold to tourists and pilgrims as souvenirs.

The sprawling metropolitan success of 18th-century Kolkata attracted a wealth of creative talents. Others moved to the city due to the economic grip of The East India Company in the region. Among them were the trained artists of Murshidabad and folk painters (patuas). A patua depicted mythologies, religious figures, popular proverbs, and contemporary events with vegetable and mineral dyes. These pictures were a patchwork of sequential images. Patua families travelled to rural villages to sing or recite these stories.

Artists and craftsman found a living by selling inexpensive products at holy sites.  Kalighat artists began to make smaller, single icon paintings, and Hindu deities proved popular. The cheap paper and quick brushstrokes soon turned the paintings into cheap commodities. This inexpensive product allowed more individuals to worship deities at home altars. In spite of the commodification, depictions reflected three characteristics (gunas): essence (satva), power and action (rajas), and chaotic power (tamas). Only a correct depiction meant a person could meditate in divinity. That sense of divinity relied upon the artist using correct colours. Saraswati, Goddess of learning is white, Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth is reddish gold. Whilst depictions of Kali, with her power to dissolve the cosmos, reflected dark tones.

Yet, the inescapable impacts of colonialism meant some artists depicted goddesses in Victorian crowns, their poses reflected English nobility, and violins replaced the traditional veenas (a stringed instrument associated with Saraswati). In Hinduism, Kali embodies the female active principle of the faith, or power (shakti). Artists inverted the approaches of potential suitors into lapdogs or charlatans. Depicting women as Saraswati, goddesses of the arts, though westernised, reflected a broader social change: in 1849, the first female school opened under the banner of the Bethune College (and replacing an earlier Hindu female school), to be followed by a college in 1879.

A desire for female education spread to other parts of India. The social reformer Durgaram Mehta (1809-1876), opened a school for girls in Surat in 1851. In Ahmedabad, a school for girls opened in 1849, under the banner of the Gujarat Vernacular Society, founded on Boxing Day, 1857 by Alexander Kinloch Forbes, a British administrator with the East India Company. The Gujarat Vernacular Society’s original aim of ‘civilising the natives’ evolved towards social change.  Forbes’ society administered a school for girls founded by Harkor Shethani, the widow of businessman and philanthropist Hutheesingh Kesarisingh, and established an all women’s library.

Others lampooned the hypocrisies of the upper-classes. To avoid libel, a cat painted with ritual stripes upon its forehead represented hypocritical holy men (sadhu).

But the artists made sure to reflect the religious diversity of Kolkata; a small number of painting depicted the celebration of Muharram, an important month in the Islamic calendar. A further example included a painting of “Duldul Horse” on which Husain, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was killed in the battle of Karbala. The number of Christian missionaries in Kolkata, including the Baptist William Carey (1761-1834) meant the occasional Kalighat paintings depicted Christian mythologies or iconographies.

Towards the end of the 19th Century, Kalighat artists used their skills to highlight tales of scandal, including a high-profile murder in 1873.

Today the rich traditions of this art form exist in Bengal villages.

The post Oxford University digitises depictions of Hindu deities appeared first on Religious Reader.