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IOWA, USA, March 6, 2005: In this news release V.V. Ganeshanathan, a freelance journalist and graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, shares her religious experiences growing up in the Sri Lankan Hindu community in Bethesda, Maryland. V.V. Ganeshanathan recalls, “We sang traditional thevaram, prayers in Tamil and Sanskrit, and listened to legends of the gods recounted in English. For the children, the stories were the best part; we sat through an hour of prayers that most of us did not understand in order to hear them. Cross-legged on someone’s living room carpet, we passed the time by studying the pictures of various gods–Siva, Murugan, Ganesh–propped up against a fireplace, with flowers, incense, and prasatham, an offering of food, before them. To some, the scene might have looked like a conflict: prayers and thoughts directed to (essentially) one God; pictures of many.”



At school Ganeshanathan tried to resolve the apparent contradiction where Western religious textbooks described Hindus as polytheists but inside she felt Hinduism was also monotheist. Ganeshanathan explains, “Polytheism and monotheism are the religious categories that everyone knows, the ones everyone thinks matter. But there are religions that are neither, and to me, Hinduism is one of them–not as easily explained, perhaps, as the binary-inclined Western world would like it to be. Hinduism is not unique in falling outside of the polytheistic/monotheistic binary model that most people and textbooks use. I have Buddhist friends who are irritated by the idea of even being classified as a religion–they consider Buddhism a philosophy, not a religion. But Hinduism is unique, at least in the scope of my own knowledge about religion, in the way it presents its “monotheistic” and “polytheistic” facets. One enfolds the other. A prayer directed to Ganesh often asks for welcome–at other times, it requests blessings on studies. To process a world in which everything is one, a Hindu separates out parts of God for different purposes.” Ganeshanathan offers further elucidation, “This multiplicity of truth is a pillar of the Hinduism I know. To categorize is not just impossible, it’s irrelevant. Just as, throughout life, we discover parts of ourselves we had not known, we discover more faces of God. Just as a mother is also a daughter, God will always exist both in one face and beyond that face. A Hindu praying for something specific simply underlines the request by directing it to the facet of the deity whose business that is. My God has different faces; he does not explain them. He simply has the ability to be both One and Many.”

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