US university students protest kirtan singing by white woman
Tuesday, 26/04/2016
http://epaper.dailypostindia.com/Details.aspx?id=155369&boxid=62704&uid=&dat=2016-04-26
New York: Singing of kirtans at an Ivy League university has drawn protests from a multi-racial group of students there. Unlike in the protests against yoga, the demonstrators this time were not religious fundamentalists, but students spewing leftist rhetoric at Brown University.
They protested a non-Indian white woman singing kirtans, asserting that only those born Hindu should sing the religious hymns, according to media reports. The performance by Carrie Grossman, who has adopted the Hindu name Dayashila, was disrupted by protesters claiming that by singing kirtans she as a white person was wrongly “appropriating” elements of Hinduism.
They used radical leftist terminology like white privilege, structural change and “radical love” to oppose what they called “cultural appropriation” by a white person. “Cultural appropriation,” according to those who protest it, happens when people use or performs elements from a culture not their own.
Many in the audience confronted the protesters, who eventually left the event and staged a sit-in outside. “Several audience members turned around and asked them to be quiet,” The Brown Daily Herald reported. “In addition, some of the audience members stood up and moved to where the protesters were sitting to ask them to leave.”
Most of those in a picture published by Herald of the demonstration against the kirtan performance were white and African American, with few Indians. Rajan Zed, the president of US-based Universal Society of Hinduism, called the protests at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island state, “sad and inappropriate”. “Color of the person should not matter in devotional singing and anybody should be able pay respectful homage to Hindu deities through kirtan or other forms,” Zed said.
“Kirtan offered means to connect to the heart, to the divinity that lies within.” He asked Brown University president Christina H Paxson to “make sure that such unreasonable interruptions did not happen at the Hindu events on the campus in the future”.
