Also cool trivia: the face of Ganesh forms the aum symbol unless his trunk is backwards in which case he represents the trickster Ganesh and it is unwise to pray to him when he is in such a state.
anu, whose parents own 100+ Ganesh statues and counting.
Huh! Fascinating stuff, all. Yes, I’m afraid my research was done a few years back, and I had become a little muddied on the prefix/suffix of the gana.
It’s really a wonderful myth; the version I read was that he was not even created of clay, but of the oils and unguents (sp) that Parvati scraped from her legs in preperation of her bath. I think that’s actually nicer that simply “clay,” as it makes Ganesh still the fruit of her loins, albeit in a decidedly external sense.
Now, having proved my memory decidedly faulty, am I recalling correctly: Shiva could not give Parvati a child because no-one can contain his seed? I seem to recall a god being depicted as having 12 arms (or was it heads?), due to the fact that he was raised by stars, he having been passed from female to female, none able to carry him for long?
I gott go back and study this stuff.
I’ve got a little Ganesha stuck to the top of one of my Macs! The trunk is curled to the left ot right when He’s in trickster mode?
I like to think of Parvati as using pink French clay, used as a masque to make the skin extra-smooth and soft. It would explain Ganesha’s pink complexion. Except that in India, they don’t use clay, they use a paste of ground chickpeas. Mixed with sesame oil and rosewater, spread on the skin and then rinsed off with water, it cleanses and softens the skin without drying it the way soap does. A classic Ayurvedic beauty treatment.
The Hindu god with the six faces is Shiva’s other son, Skanda, also known as Karttikeya and Shanmukha. The story goes that the six women of the Pleiades (Krittika) all wanted to be the baby Skanda’s nursemaids. So he grew six faces so that he could suckle from the breasts of all six of them at once, to avoid disappointing any of them. The name Karttikeya relates him to the Krttika, and Shanmukha means ‘six-faced’. In Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka he is known as Murukan, the most popular deity in Tamil culture. He has a divine spear that defeats evil.
I find it interesting that you say this. Because I would call myself a Telugu person even though I don’t even speak Telugu. It evokes a culture associated with a language, not merely the language they speak.
To me, calling someone by the language they speak is quite OK. It’s seems for that reason, that a lot of countries and their respective language (at least the major one) have the same name (e.g. The French People, the French Language). It’s the same reason why I get asked all the time: Do you speak * Indian?* Because often a language is tied up with the culture of a particular country.
It just so happens that India is “a lot of little countries” in one big one. So I find myself using phrases like: “Oh, he’s a Gujarati” or “She’s Tamil” all the time.
Maybe Hindi is a bit different because it’s much more widespread and a “national language”?
Yeah, I’ll refer to myself as Marathi or Konkani, really the names of the languages associated with two different states (Maharashtra & Goa). I think Hindi gets differentiated b/c it’s spoken through a good part of the North and they’re not all the same culture.
That said, my parents specifically use “Hindi” (or as they say Hindi lokh) to refer to people from Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh (is that still a state or did they dump it in Uttaranchal?). A bunch of states that have Hindi as their primary language. But Kashmiris, Punjabis, Bengalis are all differentiated.
My sister and I play a game with Indian states the way people do with US license plates. We only have Nagaland left (yeah, we went to highschool with someone who was part Nicobar, Part Andaman and part Chinese so we got those smaller territories crossed off).
The rights of Sikh’s to carry the kirpan is facing several legal challenges, most recently in Canada:
http://www.pluralism.org/news/intl/index.php?xref=Quebec+Court+Bans+Kirpan+from+Schools&sort=DESC
http://www.acjnet.org/teacher/freekey.htm
http://www.canadianchristianity.com/cgi-bin/bc.cgi?bc/bccn/0299/courts
When I was in India, an Indian dude started chatting me up. Friendly though he was, it annoyed me that he kept calling me “English.” I kept pointing out I was American, without a drop of English ancestry. He ignored this and kept calling me “English” until I gave up. Why? Just because I spoke English.
I’ve noticed the same trend here with Indians calling our Central American neighbors “Spanish.” It doesn’t help to point out that Spain is a different country. No, language equals nationality, and that’s all there is to it.
Unless this map is outdated, Himachal Pradesh is still a state. An alphabetical list of the states and Union Territories, plus their capitals, can be found here. There were many more states at one time – some were lost or divided as a result of the partitioning of British India into what became the nations of India and Pakistan (from the latter of which East Pakistan later broke away and became Bangladesh). Other states were simply absorbed into the current ones – there were hundreds of these smaller princely states, which were actually ruled by kings (rajahs) but were referred to as “princely” by the British, who felt the monarch who reigned in London was the only “king”* to whom the Indians owed any respect.
*and, of course, there was no king in England when Queen Victoria was Empress of India
Tris, I just want to say, you rock. The cultural questions seem to have been covered by everyone else here, so I won’t add any more on that front.