Hindu American organizations adopt a new short film on anti-Hindu ignorance

(RNS) — In the new short film “Namaste Yoga,” a 10-year-old Indian boy named Shiv faces a choice after getting into a fight with the school bully: Get suspended or attend yoga classes during lunch.

Shiv, whose parents taught yoga before his mother’s recent death, sees right through Miss Blanche, the well-meaning but ignorant yoga “guru” at the school, but the class is still an epiphany. The boy can finally take pride in his parents’ devotion to the practice, and he’s able to draw closer to his ancestors while embracing the Western world where he wants badly to belong.

The film’s director, Ravi Chand, says this moment is taken from his own journey as a Hindu boy, a transplant from Fiji, growing up in Australia. At a recent virtual screening of the film, Chand explained that, much like Shiv, he spent his early years being ashamed of his culture. Bullies seemed to sense it, picking on him for everything from his dark skin to his family’s religious practices.

“When you’re facing racism as a young kid, you don’t have the language to fight back,” said Chand. “I really beat myself up over it. I was like, ‘Why am I so stupid? Why can’t I say something?’”

After Chand’s mother died in a car accident days before his 11th birthday, he said, he lost “all sense of purpose, identity and belonging. My assimilation went into overdrive.”

Actors Ravi Chand, left, and Emil Jayan in “Namaste Yoga.” (Photo © Warrior Tribe Films)

The 22-minute film, which debuted on Australian television before a successful run at international festivals, is now being released worldwide. Chand hopes that it will give young Hindus in his situation “the knowledge to rise above the noise like the lotus flower above the muck.”

“We’re trying to create an ecosystem to be able to communicate directly with our Hindu community and to have that autonomy to be able to speak directly to our children,” said Chand, who also acts in the film. He portrays Shiv’s father, Gopal.  

The film has been championed by several Hindu American organizations that work against Hinduphobia, particularly the kind of bullying that Shiv experiences and that the groups say is common in the United States.

Actors Emil Jayan, left, and Ellora Iris in “Namaste Yoga.” (Photo © Warrior Tribe Films)

Vijay Satnarine, director of education for the Hindu American Foundation, said it is critical for Hindu parents to reach their children before they are exposed to misrepresentation of their own beliefs, such as the appropriation of yoga that is depicted in “Namaste Yoga.”

The Hindu American Foundation held a special seminar on Sunday (Feb. 25) for Hindu parents with students going off to college. The group planned to hold a similar webinar Wednesday in partnership with the U.S. Department of Education.

Film poster for “Namaste Yoga.” (© Warrior Tribe Films)

“Students have to understand that, unlike the other parents in the United States, their parents haven’t been given an education that includes enough information about their own traditions,” said Satnarine. “With the political landscape as it is, I think more Hindus are locking on to the fact that they need to be a bit more informed.”

The Hindu Parents Network, a project of the Coalition of Hindus of North America, is also working to equip parents with ways to engage their kids in discussions about the misinformation they say is prevalent in grade schools and higher education, where they say Hinduism is often boiled down to “caste, cows and curry.”

The group called Chand’s film a “must watch for Hindu families.”

Satnarine said a “sizable majority” of youth are tempted to fit in to the broader Western norms or to erase their heritage entirely. Chand’s film “does a really good job of showing how we internalize the envy and we start to deride our own traditions just because we see the sparkling bits of the other people in the other traditions,” he said. 

Those in Hindu advocacy circles, he said, have been working to popularize the term “Hinduphobia” to put a name on the targeted harm that children face and so they can have a language to fight back.

Zarna Joshi, a Hindu author and activist based in Seattle who was the film’s cultural consultant and whose family members were twice refugees from India to Uganda, said the film will show Westerners how Hindus “have literally suffered centuries and centuries of colonial trauma that never actually ended.”

“If a Hindu person speaks up to say, ‘This is my experience,’ we’re automatically shut down and taught that we have a bias, and only Westerners can actually tell us what the experience of Hindus are,” she added.

Satnarine echoed the sense that Hindus need to step up and take charge of their image.

Director Ravi Chand. (Video screen grab)

“We should stop making excuses for other people’s ignorance,” he said, adding that Hindus should deal with racism and Hinduphobia by channeling the energy of the Hindu god Hanuman, represented as a crafty half-monkey half-man, who saves Lord Ram’s wife from an evildoer. “Like Hanuman ji did, cleverly with wit, with humor, with candor, with compassion, we will change the way that these negative stereotypes are used against us.”

For his part, Chand said his movie was the result of his “channeling” the gods Kali and Shiva, who represent the feminine divine. It ends with Shiv and his sister, Kali, performing a classical Bharatanatyam dance for their peers for their school’s Harmony Day, during which they honor their namesake gods and their late mother, a Bharatanatyam dancer. Their awed classmates cheer.

While a happy ending, Chand wants to make sure people of all backgrounds take away the right lessons. The indigenous Hindu community, he said, is the true “stewards of the knowledge,” and although allyship from people like Miss Blanche’s character is necessary, they should not be the ones taking up the spotlight.

“This may not be solved in our lifetime, but that’s part of our Hindu dharma: We’re the vehicles to get this message out,” said Chand. “And then our children and our younger generations will continue this work.”

Chand says he is heartened by how Hindu youth have responded to the movie, which he says has given them a “resurgence of energy” to move forward in their path to deconstructing harmful stereotypes.

“Imagine if our entire community was proud of being indigenous,” he added. “That would be quite extraordinary.”

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