NEW DELHI, INDIA, October 18, 2007: Hidden in a tightly packed neighborhood of middle-class condominiums, Chinese restaurants and garment sweatshops is a thriving 3,500-year-old Hindu tradition. It is a residential school that teaches young boys the art of chanting Hindu verses in classical Sanskrit and trains them to become Hindu priests. For eight years, they study religious rituals without material distractions. The day begins for these 27 boys at 4:45 a.m., when the lights are switched on in the basement, where they sleep on jute mats.
Sriram Sharma, a 13-year-old, has lived at the school for more than two years, memorizing and reciting the hymns for the Hindu religion’s oldest texts, called the Vedas. After six more years of training at the School of Vedas, he will become a Hindu priest who can perform prayer rituals involving fire worship and rhythmic incantations. He also studies math, English and Hindi for an hour each day. “The Vedas contain the sacred knowledge of Hindu religion and were passed down orally by sages,” Sriram says. He wears a white wraparound but is bare-chested and barefoot. White threads hang diagonally from his bare shoulder like a sash, and a tiny tuft of hair is knotted at the back of his shaved head. Sriram is part of the old, unbroken chanting tradition that UNESCO, in 2003, proclaimed a masterpiece of “the oral and intangible heritage of humanity.”
The boys follow a grueling routine of do’s and don’ts–they cook and eat only vegetarian food, wash their own clothes by hand, cannot call or visit their families, cannot take medicine except for a physical injury, and cannot watch television. Parents cannot bring any gifts. The teacher, a bearded middle-age man, set up the school 11 years ago. “The boys are not allowed to go out. I keep them away from the world of illusions and desires. They lead pure, austere lives,” says G.K. Sitaram, respectfully called “Guruji” “This school runs in an orthodox way, like thousands of years ago. The only difference is that we are no longer in the jungles.”
Each class begins with the students prostrate on the floor before the teacher. Sitaraman turns to the boys and says: “The knowledge of the Vedas is the only education that cannot be erased. Everything else is impermanent in this world.” The older boys say they are eager to start their work in the real world and earn the social status that comes with knowledge of the Vedas.