Berkley Center

Background: Proshanti Banerjee, a member of the School of Foreign Service’s class of 2013, interviewed Sivagami Subbaraman, director of the LGBTQ Resource Center at Georgetown University, on December 8, 2011. In this conversation Subbaraman reflects on the role of the Catholic Church in her early life and education in India, the challenges that arise in discussing the spiritual dimension of LGBTQ issues, an expansive understanding of interfaith dialogue, and the importance of embracing spiritual diversity within the Georgetown community.

How has your personal journey brought you to your work today and how were you drawn to these particular issues?

So, I was born and brought up in India, brought up as a Hindu but I went to Catholic schools all my life because Catholic schools were very popular at home, so all my schooling was Catholic as well as my five years of college. But you know India is a country where religion is all around you, it’s not something you separate out, so from when I was a kid I was always interested in both religion as institution but also had a great sense of irreverence about it (if you like) and questions about it. That came because I used to bicycle to my school, and this I’m talking in the mid-60s India (66-68) and it was rare for young girls to be bicycling to school and all that, and I used to pass the Ramakrishna ashram. I used to read Swami Vivekananda a lot and I thought, “I want to be a sanyasi like him.”

So I went to the Ramkrishna ashram and I went to the sanyasin and said “I want to be a priest, I want to be a Sanyasi,” and so he looked at me and said “Oh you can’t be that.” I said, “Why not?” and he responded “Oh, because you are a woman.” And so I said, “What does that mean? Who said I can’t be a sanyasi if I am a woman?” And he said, “Oh well, the Ramakrishna temple does not allow women. You can come in to pray and do all that but you can’t really have spiritual powers.”

Of course the Catholic Church was also very patriarchal and had no place for women either, and at the same time I noticed that all around me there were women spiritual leaders that were a pretty big part of Indian landscape so I think my own quest through the years was to understand. It came from also a need to understand injustice, and I had felt really deeply that I want to understand what the root cause of suffering and pain are, which are mostly created by us. When I came to the U.S. to do my work here, when I came to graduate school to study English and Women’s Studies, I went to public universities, I taught at public universities, and in the 25 years of being here, what I realized is that church and state were separate, and therefore there was no space for me as an educator to talk about issues of the spirit, to talk about spirituality or religion whether one was a believer or not. So, when I had the opportunity to work at a Catholic school that is what brought me to this work. So, there were two things: one of course was the challenge of talking about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender issues in a Catholic campus, but really for me the broader issue was that this was an opportunity for me to examine the place of religion and spirituality in the role of higher education, and what it means for us to be involved in an enterprise where we can ask of our students that they need to be critical thinkers around this piece of their identity as much as they are about other aspects of their identities (race, ethnicity, etc.).

What are the most challenging obstacles you think young people face in terms of tolerance/acceptance, and that can be specific to the LGBTQ community or anything in general, and what are their faith dimensions?

When it comes to LGBTQ issues, I think there a few reasons why there is still so much fear and anxiety on campuses. One is that being gay is still seen as behavior and not identity; it is still seen as about whom I sleep with and about whom I have sex with; it is not about who I am as a person. 1) The first question most gay people are asked is “How do you know you’re gay? Did you sleep with someone? Is that how you know?” And my response has always been… “Well how do you know you’re straight if you have never had sex with someone of the opposite gender?” Because people do not see this as a piece of who you are, but they still see it as behavior, it also follows that it can then be changed, or that you can grow out of it. That is the language we are still using, so I think that I want people to see this as really about how people journey through this world. The particular challenge for gay people is the fact that religion does not only prohibit homosexuality (many of the major religions), but it also deprives gay people of the right of access to their own spiritual selves, so gay people often struggle with the realization that when they come out, they have to leave the church, the temple, the mosque, it doesn’t matter. They have no more belonging there. I think that is a very high price for people to pay for being who they are.

But then, who gets the right to decide that we have no access to God, or our spiritual selves? It has not only deprived LGBT people the right to their own spiritual growth, it has also deprived religious institutions of a whole constituent group of people who could be brilliantly spiritual people or religious leaders just because of who they are…so it seems completely bizarre that we would do that. So to me, that would be the biggest challenge, the biggest obstacle, both to educate the community around the question of homosexuality and religion but also to educate other gay people of their right to a spiritual and/or religious self. In terms of youth, I think what has happened is and I think it is the result of the previous generation too, that we are not providing critical thinking skills, and critical language around the public discourse of religion, I think people fall into two different groups. Either they are great believers and they are very literal about their belief systems, or there are those who have checked out completely….you don’t have anyone in the middle anymore, and that didn’t used to be true. I think that actually most people are in the middle, so right now what has happened is that all discussion about religion is very polarized. So you have the extreme right and you have the extreme left, and the moderates have no voice, because the moderates have left others to the field. I think that part of the challenge for the younger generation would be to really find a way to participate in that public discourse.

I don’t think I see younger people as not being spiritual, I think they are, but many of them have left the institutions. Even just the other day, a couple students came to see me to talk about LGBT issues and church stuff, and they said “Oh we never go to church.” And I said, “Does that matter? Why don’t you go to church?” and they said, “Oh well it has no meaning for us even as straight people, I can’t see the value of it for gay people.” So I think for most people they don’t see the value of those things. Now, if you take a temple which I know a lot about, a temple even in the U.S. is not just about religious gathering spaces, they are also social spaces: so that is where you go to eat your food, meet other people, who look like you and talk like you and share common cultural norms; it is also a way of building community, socializing, a place to meet family, and friends. Churches used to perform that important function; they were social spaces. I don’t think young people are seeing these as viable social spaces anymore, and I think it is also the church’s loss. And for young people here, even for temples, I don’t know if they see it as much as a social space, only if they come from certain families.

How do you feel about the importance of interfaith work and/or service and was it something you thought about early on in life or later?

You can’t live in India and not have interfaith issues. People think we are very rigid, but there are numerically more Muslims in India than in Pakistan, and the fact that we have communal violence is a different issue. True we have violence, there is no getting around that, but the point is that we live with, go to school with, and know people from other religions as children. I am Hindu, but I went to a Catholic school; there were hardly any Christians in that school. There were some Christians, but there were lots of Sikhs, lots of Muslims, so interfaith is not an American idea. Americans think that interfaith is what Americans do, and I’m like “No…a lot of people in lots of parts of the world do this.” And I think when a lot of people say interfaith here they only mean Abrahamic religions, and that has been a big problem for me because Hinduism let alone Buddhism, Sikhism, or anything else is not even part of the conversational landscape here, and there is not much public knowledge or awareness about them.

So when they talk about interfaith, a lot of the time they only talk about Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and the fact that Islam and Christianity both have huge homes in places like India, or Indonesia, or China, or Africa is rarely talked about. We also have little understanding that the Christianity that is practiced in India is very different than how it is here. Christianity in India has adapted to the local culture; they have drawn from Hinduism to do a lot of their stuff, so there is a lot more synergy there and a lot more syncretism there. For example if you go to the Vellankanni Church in Chennai, which is the temple to Mother Mary, she is in a sari, and they break coconuts to her and they have made her a part of our [Hindu] pantheon of Goddesses. She is one among other Goddesses that we have, and I think that is what it keeps it vibrant.

When we talk about interfaith here, I would say that is the biggest challenge and biggest critique I have, because they have left out a religion that is practiced by more than a billion people in the world. A lot of people’s understanding of world politics or the communal violence in India or whatever it may be gets completely left out of that equation or understanding. The fact is that Hindus and Christians have had far less communal violence than Hindus and Muslims, but we don’t know why, we don’t really think about that. Christians did come to India to convert us “heathens,” and so most Christians in India are converted Hindus, as are Muslims. Man of those people who got converted are from lower castes, because this was their passport out of the caste system, but ironically the caste system holds: people know, people still treat Christians very differently because they are from a different caste, not because they are Christian but because we know who they are. However, that whole dimension of understanding of Christianity is absent for the people here, they still talk about it as a very Western European religion and it isn’t. It is in Asia, it’s in Africa; it is everywhere. In fact, we have more Jesuits now in India and China and Africa than we do in the U.S.

What do you think about the President’s Interfaith Challenge?

I think it’s great that he has put that out there for us, as part of the U.S. religious landscape. I think I can safely say that he is the only president that I know that has at least mentioned Hinduism and at least recognizes that we celebrate different festivals, and has made a concerted effort to observe them, and talk about them. Clinton had his own initiatives around this, I can’t remember if they were as big as this, probably not, because his focus was more on race. I think that by taking the leadership to do this and modeling it in the White House by having celebrations for Diwali or iftar, President Obama is putting out a different message certainly. The fact that the President Interfaith Challenge is happening at Georgetown is great, but it is not remarkable because where else would it happen? You know it’s already happening for us, regardless of the White House initiative, those are the reasons students come here and have those conversations anyway. I am more aware that what his initiative is doing is to say all students in all universities that we should be having this conversation: yes we have separation of church and state in public universities, but that has nothing to do with educating our students about it, what religion is, but also about why we have separated these two things. I don’t think most students articulate that, they just say oh we can’t talk about religion in a public university and oh we are secular, but they don’t understand that what secular means is that you can follow any religion without persecution, it doesn’t mean absence of religion.

What is your message to the average Hoya?

Who is the average Hoya? Well, my message to the average Hoya is that you need to get over the fact that there is no average Hoya. Hoyas come in all stripes, all shapes, and all sizes and in great diversity. The problem is that we don’t recognize them as Hoyas, we still cling to this myth of average Jane and Joe Hoya who don’t look like me, act like me, think like me, who come from worlds I know nothing about, right? So when we did this visibility campaign, for LGBT Hoyas, we created this logo where we have the inverted triangle in place of the “O” because I wanted to say we are part of Hoya, and I think that is what I would have to say to the Hoya out there. I would ask all Hoyas to consider, where their sense of understanding of what it means to be a Hoya come from? And what have you done in your own journey to interrogate really who the Hoya is? I think the word Hoya is like the word “American;” Who is an American? And when we say American, for most people it still conjures up the image of a white Christian; so the fact that we are more than 50 percent people of color in this country, that one in 10 is born to immigrants, etc. none of that registers in a visual or emotional way. still have images and people tend to cling to those images, so a lot of time people who don’t fit those images sometimes do what I have said before, they check out and they don’t enter the conversation at all; they don’t participate in that conversation. So for me I think the challenge would be two things: one is for the average Hoya to stop thinking they are the average Hoya, and two, it would be very important for other people not to leave the conversation, to stay in the conversation however hard it may be for them to participate.