Someone gave me a pair of swastikas as a wedding gift.
They were quite beautiful: delicate, pure gold swastika earrings, with subtle etchings along the front and edges. I wish I had taken a picture of them – and of my husband’s face when he opened the gift. I still don’t know who the giver was, but I suspect it was an older Auntie with superb taste and very few NRI relatives.
I’m almost certain it was Auntie since almost all of the single men at our wedding gave the simpler gift of money. Superb taste is certain, given the quality of the gift – similar to the other earrings I received, pictured above.
NRI stands for non-resident Indians – citizens who live in countries other than India. And an older person, with few family members who’ve lived in the West, would almost certainly give no thought to the swastika having any meaning other than the traditional.
You see, in Hinduism, the swastika is an ancient symbol for good luck. And while it’s known that Hitler co-opted the symbol for his own use, the first and primary connotation in India is the swastika’s Hindu meaning. Until they’ve lived in America, or another Western country, most Indians don’t realize that the swastika screams “Nazi, Nazi, Nazi” to those of us raised in the West.
Of course, Aditya, being born and raised in India (and a religious studies major to boot), knew of the true (aka Hindu) meaning of the swastika. The expression on his face was priceless not because he was taken back by the gift, but because my mother and uncle were in the room while we were opening the wedding presents, and it was now up to him to explain to these Americans why we had been given those earrings.
Luckily for him, they’d been traveling in India for a couple of weeks by that point and had already seen plenty of swastikas on the road:
I think it’s the little cultural things, like using swastikas as decorative items, that make you more aware of being in an intercultural relationship than any of the major things, such as food, clothing, or family practices. It’s that little unexpected jar to the system, a reminder that, hey, this person grew up in a fundamentally different culture from me. These little things, however, are the easiest to get used to, though they may look odd to an outsider (“Yes, that’s a swastika in the painting on the living room wall. No, we’re not planning a Blitzkrieg against France anytime in the near future.”).
The swastika earrings situation was easily resolved, like most little cultural things. Maa, having traveled to the US to visit both her sons*** already knew that, uh, difficulties might arise if I were to wear the earrings back home in D.C. She happily accepted the earrings, after checking to make sure I was fine with her regifting them to another young bride.
***Aditya’s older brother, whom we both call “Dada” (which means older brother in Bengali), lives only a few miles away from my dad’s house in California.
11. March 2008 at 10:16 pm
I have heard a similar story from someone who had an Indian grandmother; she gave him a beautiful bracelet decorated with swastikas to give to his fiancee and couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t want to give it to her. Very interesting how something can mean something very different in different cultures! Same thing with “bloody” and “bugger”– kinda quaint and cute “alternates-for-swears” in America but in England, horribly rude! My grandma is from England and my dad and his sibs say that she would say “s**t” all the time when mildly angry– but if she started in with the “bleedin’” and “bloody”, you ran.
11. March 2008 at 11:21 pm
It’s not at all surprising that the Indian grandmother sent over something with swastikas as a gift: it’s a very common symbol for marriage-related things, since it’s considered so auspicious. Of course, Aditya only remembered this *after* his father had had our wedding invitations printed up in India. Luckily, Baba chose a design without swastikas – we had a few moments of panic while examining them to make sure this was something we could safely send through the US mail system.
My sources (an Indian friend who’s still awake) tell me that “bloody” is a no-no word for kids in India, but doesn’t have that much bite among adults unless combined with a more, uh, expressive word. Also, there’s a faint “trying to sound British” and/or “mocking the British” connotation when it’s used.
8. April 2008 at 10:11 pm
This post was very amusing!(”Yes, that’s a swastika in the painting on the living room wall. No, we’re not planning a Blitzkrieg against France anytime in the near future.”)
lol
This subject also reminds me of the time my daughter say a friends rakhi with the swastika on it. Innocently and sweetly she asked “oh, did you used to be a nazi?”
9. April 2008 at 1:01 pm
Hi Mirchi – thanks for stopping by and sharing your cute story! Was your daughter just being mischievous, or did she not know the non-Nazi meaning of the swastika?
19. April 2008 at 7:11 am
We avoided swastikas at all costs for our wedding — it would have been especially uncouth with my very German maiden name! We used either little Ganesha outlines (on our invitations) or ohm symbols (on the anterpat) instead.
29. April 2008 at 1:40 pm
I just found your blog and found this entry hilarious. I, too, am a white American who got married to her Indian husband in India. And during the whole wedding, we stood on a giant drawing of a swastika. I also realized my in-laws painted them on top of each door in their apartment.
I, too, have a really long German surname, D, and my husband kept teasting me about this the whole time we were there…
29. April 2008 at 3:30 pm
I hadn’t even thought of the problems that might arise from a marriage where the white spouse had a German last name! Good thing that you were able to use other traditional auspicious symbols, D.
And Ana, thanks for stopping by! My inlaws don’t have many swastikas around the house – Baba prefers Ganeshas, I think. Did any of the (Indian) guests even notice the swastika at the wedding + German last name thing?
8. August 2009 at 10:52 pm
Isn't it ironic that the symbol Hitler chose originally came from a people he considered inferior? Symbols resembling swastikas were used for centuries even in Europe for good luck. But Hitler's version is just like the Hindu one except that it is reversed and rotated by 45 degrees. Even the word swastika is Sanskrit and not German. And actually the word Aryan itself is also Sanskrit and ancient India was known as Aryavarta (abode of the Aryans). When you really think about it it would all be really funny if the Nazis hadn't gone on to murder millions of people.
A relative of mine moved to the Bay Area for a short time, and on Diwali hangs some decorations from her door, which include swastikas, of course. She soon got a visit from her apartment manager asking her to take it down.
18. August 2009 at 12:44 pm
FI just had his thread ceremony yesterday and his parents, who are visiting from India, drew little swastikas on his threshold. I am terrified that they'll make an appearance at our upcoming US wedding! I've tried explaining it to fi, but he hasn't been here for that long and doesn't totally get it, so I'm not sure that the magnitude of it will be conveyed to his parents.
20. October 2009 at 4:47 am
Swastika, svasth means health, is the meaning of health embodied in the symbol?
Sometimes you see images of a swastika next to what to Westerners would be seen as a magen david or star or david together on a Hindu temple. Do you know what the 6 pointed star means symbolically in Hinduism?
Those dumb Aryan wannabes, the Nazis, totally misappropriated such an important symbol. You would still be wary of sporting one in the US though because you wouldn’t want to offend anyone, I mean, that symbol is very powerfully negative for many people…but it could be a good starting point for clearing up misconceptions of the true meaning of the swastika, like you have done here, I suppose.
20. October 2009 at 4:15 pm
“Swastika” in Hindi comes from “Svastika” in Sanskrit, which is an affirmative, difficult-to-translate word, according to Aditya. I’ve heard it translated as “all is well”, for instance, and this site mentions a few other possible translations into English.
The six-pointed star is a Shatkona and is a male-female unity symbol, sorta like the yin-yang symbol.
I don’t think I’d ever be comfortable wearing a swastika as a white person in the US – and I don’t think it’d really be a good idea for anyone who couldn’t be immediately identified as possibly Hindu (i.e. South Asians who look South Asian to an American eye). That’s because I feel there’s too many possibilities of people being offended but not being willing to engage the swastika-wearer – which means that there’s no opportunity to correct misconceptions, since there’d be no dialogue. I’m fine with showing swastikas around our house, tho, since presumably our household guests would be comfortable enough to discuss the issue if they didn’t know of the Hindu meaning of the symbol.
20. January 2010 at 11:35 am
Swastika is not a difficult-to-translate word. It is fairly accessible to anyone with a basic working knowledge of Sanskrit.
Swastika, is a Sanskrit construction or ‘samas’, which follows the following declension (according to pretty strict Paninian rules of Sanskrit grammar):
Swasti karoti iti Swastika .. lit. Swastika is that which makes Swasti …… (1)
Swasti is a phonetic compound or ‘sandhi’ of prefix Su- and verb Asti.
Su- is the Indo-European cognate of Greek Eu- and implies the state of being good, prosperity etc.
Asti is simply the third person sing. form of verb ‘as’ meaning to be or to exist. It is cognate with Germanic ist, Latin est, Farsi ast, Greek esti etc
So, Swasti literally means ‘goodness exists’ ……. (2)
Substituting (2) in (1), we have the complete literal meaning as:
Swastika is that which makes goodness exist.
21. January 2010 at 4:55 pm
But literal meanings and the actual usage of the word by current speakers are not the same thing. “Economics” literally means “the management or rules of the household” – but most people talking about economics don’t use the word in that manner.
5. February 2010 at 3:31 pm
“actual usage of the word by current speakers are not the same thing”
True. But that does not apply to the “swastika”, because, unlike “economics”, the word is neither commonplace in colloquial communication and nor is used for any other purpose except the one I mentioned .. not in India at least.
The word is a borrowing from Sanskrit in modern Indian languages and is nowhere near used like “economics” is in English. There are no other grammatical forms/inflections of “swastika” like “economise” or “economic” etc. This lack of flexibility implies that idiomatic usage of the word in any modern Indian language is non-existent.
Hence, it is merely used as a label for symbolising good will/good luck.
2. November 2009 at 4:14 am
Hitler picked the Swastika because it united Aryans, not whites (a white could be Aryan but not necessarily vice versa, as Hitler specified in the unabridged German Mein Kampf). Contrary to Anglo-American propaganda, Hitler didn’t consider Indian people as inferior. He was an Aryan supremacist (which included Hind Aryans and excluded Caucasian whites).
In case you are not aware, Hitler actually offered Subhash Chandra Bose to help India fight off the British. A bit of history which I believe, the present US-leaning Congress government isn’t very comfortable with.
It still is. In traditional Greek and Slavic cultures, Swastika is considered a symbol of fertility or “fireiness”.