It was nearly midnight, on a summer night in 2017, when I first stumbled across the poem that has become one of my biggest inspirations for interfaith work. I was back home in Seattle after my second year of college. Browsing the internet, I somehow came across a website of Urdu poetry. I was intrigued to find a long poem titled “Krishn Kanhaiya,” about the Hindu god Krishna:
“In his flute is a melody
that is neither intoxication nor wine;
it’s something beyond…”
What’s more, I was stunned to see that the author of this poem had a Muslim name: Hafeez Jalandhari. A Muslim poet writing about a Hindu god? That itself surprised me. But that wasn’t all: this was the same poet who, a few decades later, wrote the national anthem of Pakistan.
As a Hindu and Indian-American, Jalandhari’s poem forced me to question the stereotypes and notions I had been told about Pakistanis, and Muslims in general. Growing up in the suburbs of Seattle, my family’s social network was almost entirely made up of people who were just like us: Hindu, dominant-caste, immigrant families from southern India. It wasn’t until I went to college in Chicago that I started to meet and befriend South Asians from other ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds.
I was blown away by the way Jalandhari freely mixed Hindu and Muslim metaphors in his poem, and called on Krishna to free colonial India from British rule. This poem opened my eyes to the power of art to inspire social change and break down barriers between religious communities – a theme that has shaped much of my interfaith work since then.
In 2019, a few years after finding Jalandhari’s poem, I started Voices of Bhakti (@voicesofbhakti on Instagram), a digital archive that showcases South Asian poetry and art on the themes of religion, caste, and gender. So far, I have featured translations of over 500 poems from 40 different languages. The poems I share intentionally challenge hate, exclusion, and religious nationalism. Just as my mind was opened by Hafeez Jalandhari’s poem on Krishna, I had hoped that other young South Asians might similarly question their own unconscious biases after reading a Hindu poet’s praise of a Sufi Muslim saint or a Zoroastrian (Parsi) poet’s poem inspired by a Hindu goddess.
For my Sacred Journey Fellowship project, I knew I wanted to build on my work attempting to build interfaith solidarity in South Asian American communities. My friend Dr. Preethi Ramaprasad (a Bharatanatyam dancer and scholar) and I had already begun working with South Asian artists to create original works inspired by the poems featured in Voices of Bhakti. For my Sacred Journey project, we decided to launch an interfaith arts fellowship for South Asian artists in the San Francisco Bay Area to create works inspired by poems in the Voices of Bhakti archive.
We decided to focus our fellowship on the Bay Area because it is one of the largest concentrations of South Asians in the United States. According to 2019 data, South Asians make up nearly one-fifth of the Bay Area’s population. This is a religiously diverse community, composed of Baha’is, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Ravidassis, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, non-religious people, and others. In recent years, South Asians in the Bay Area and beyond have seen rising polarization along political and religious lines, largely driven by rising religious nationalism and anti-minority violence in India. Preethi and I felt that by launching this fellowship, we could support South Asian artists in the Bay Area who were worried by the polarization they were seeing in our community, and were searching for an opportunity to create art that could bridge these divides.
After launching an open call for applications, Preethi and I were blown away by the response we received from a wide range of South Asian artists across the Bay Area, from dancers to documentary filmmakers. We eventually selected six artists for this inaugural fellowship. These artists came from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds within the South Asian community, including Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and nonreligious artists.
Each of our six artists selected at least one poem from the Voices of Bhakti archive that inspired them, and created an original work inspired by that poem:
- Akhil Joondeph created a short film critiquing contemporary religious violence in India, inspired by a Tibetan verse by Tsangyang Gyatso, the 6th Dalai Lama (1683-1706 CE).
- Ardaas created a silk painting inspired by a Sindhi verse by the 18th-century Sufi Muslim poet, Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, whose poetry is celebrated by both Sindhi Hindus and Muslims alike.
- Balakrishnan Raghavan created a music video singing poems by the 8th-century Tamil poet-saint Nammalvar and the 15th-century poet-saint Ravidas, who came from a caste-oppressed community and is revered by multiple religious communities today (Hindus, Ravidassias, Sikhs).
- Felix Naim created a work of Persian calligraphy depicting a Persian verse in praise of the Hindu god Krishna. This verse came from an 18th-century Persian translation of a section of the Bhagavata Purana, a Hindu sacred text.
- Leia Devadason created a short film inspired by the Marathi poems of Janabai, a 13th-century poet-saint who was born into a caste-oppressed community and worked as a domestic worker.
- Violet Alexis Bea created a comic inspired by a Kannada poem by the 11th-century poet-saint Madara Chennayya. Violet’s comic showcases past and present icons from South Asian history who have fought against the injustice of the caste system, which affects the lives of South Asians to this day.
Each of these original works provide modern interpretations of centuries-old poetry, highlighting the plurality and diversity that lies at the heart of South Asian histories and identities.
At a time when South Asian Americans in the Bay Area and beyond are seeing increasing religious and political divides, it is our hope that these pieces will spark important conversations about religious identity, history, and nationalism. So far, these pieces have been viewed over 20,000 times on Instagram, and we hope this engagement will continue into the future. We will be working with a new cohort for the second year of the Sacred Journey Fellowship, and I’m excited to see what kind of boundary-breaking art we can help create.
Fellowship in Prayer is a grantmaking organization based in Princeton, New Jersey. It was founded in 1949 and has been awarding Sacred Journey grants since 2015.
