{"id":2170,"date":"2002-07-14T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2002-07-14T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2002\/07\/14\/2002-07-14-dalits-and-women-training-as-priests\/"},"modified":"2002-07-14T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2002-07-14T12:00:00","slug":"2002-07-14-dalits-and-women-training-as-priests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2002\/07\/14\/2002-07-14-dalits-and-women-training-as-priests\/","title":{"rendered":"Dalits and Women Training as Priests"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.the-week.com\/22jul14\/life6.htm\">GO TO SOURCE<\/A><\/P><br \/>\n<P><\/p>\n<p>LUCKNOW, INDIA, JULY 14, 2002: Recently the Union Human Resource Development Ministry felt that the standards of conducting Hindu rituals were declining. The answer, the &#8220;Karma Kand Kriya,&#8221; a three-month training course for students aspiring to become priests conducted by the Uttar Pradesh Sanskrit Sansthan, opened to Hindus, including the Dalits (&#8220;outcastes). &#8220;I had 24 Dalit students in a class of 30,&#8221; said Avdesh Kumar Shukla, an instructor in Unnao near Lucknow. &#8220;They were all deeply interested in the religion. If caste Hindu society moderates its attitude, conversions will not take place.&#8221; Instructors from Banaras Hindu University and Sanskrit Vidyapeeth trained 2,500 aspirants-more than half of them Dalits and women-in 60 districts of Uttar Pradesh. &#8220;The Indian way of life has high regard for rituals and we wanted to preserve this in the spirit in which it was intended,&#8221; said Dr Sachidanand Pathak, chairman of the Sanskrit Sansthan. &#8220;Nothing in the scriptures stops casteless from becoming priests. When we are born, all of us are casteless. According to the Vedas, only a person who dedicates himself to knowledge becomes a Brahmin.&#8221;<br \/>\n<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>GO TO SOURCE LUCKNOW, INDIA, JULY 14, 2002: Recently the Union Human Resource Development Ministry felt that the standards of,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}