KOLKATA, India — Sharoni and Swabnil had been shattering stereotypes since the day they met. They stayed with each other’s families, shared household responsibilities and dated while living in different cities — all uncommon characteristics of a Bengali relationship. And they were even married by Nandini Bhowmik — professor, mother and commonly referred to as West Bengal’s first female priest.
Inspired by her love of Hindu scripture, Bhowmik joined forces with three other women to form Shubhamastu. Together, they challenge the preconceived notion that only men can officiate Hindu ceremonies by reforming the way traditional Hindu ceremonies and rituals are performed.
Bhowmik and her team have spent over a decade helping couples, including Sharoni Goswami and Swabnil Day, who want to have a Hindu wedding without partaking in stereotypical rituals such as Kanyadaan — giving away the bride.
“We’ve been passionate about having equality in our relationship from day one,” Goswami said.
But reforming one of the world’s oldest religions didn’t happen overnight. Bhowmik founded Shubhamastu in 2009, yet they didn’t start to gain momentum until recent years. They forged through many years of rejection, resistance and uncertainty from traditional Hindu followers and priests before people slowly started to come around to the idea of a female priest.
Shubhamastu’s journey was “full of pushbacks [and] hurdles,” Bhowmik said. “Now, I dictate the terms.”
For Bhowmik, empowerment starts with education. She became interested in Sanskrit at a young age — inspiring her to study the language so she could not only read ancient Hindu scripture, but understand it.
Through her studies, Bhowmik learned that her ancient Indian culture wasn’t as classified by gender, religion and caste as it is today, she said, especially during the Vedic Age. “That struck me,” Bhowmik said.
The more Bhowmik learned, the more unsettled she became. She knew most followers of Hinduism did not know how to read, translate or interpret Sanskrit, but what she didn’t previously realize was the number of Hindu priests — the majority of them male — who did not understand the context of the hymns and rituals they performed.
“Most of the Indians are completely satisfied by only hearing the language. They don’t even ask what is there, what is written there [and] what is being told by the priests,” Bhowmik said. “And so the priests even hardly bother to make themselves educated in the subject. That is where I have stepped in.”
Bhowmik studied, applied and received her application in priesthood, alongside her college classmate, Ruma Roy. Together, they translated ancient Sanskrit hymns and rituals, discarding any that didn’t align with their mission of empowering women. The result — a collection of Hindu mantras and rituals representing both the religion and an equal partnership between two empowered individuals.
Over the next two years, Bhowmik and Roy gradually began officiating a handful of weddings beginning with Bhomik’s daughter, and continued to perfect their script.
After two years, the duo paired with musician Semoni Banerjee and singer Paulomi Chakraborty and began incorporating Bengali poems from nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore into the script as musical mantras.
“The whole thing is musical,” Bhowmik said.
Aside from the uncertainty surrounding women priestesses, one of Shubhamastu’s most difficult hurdles was overcoming the centuries-old tradition of Kanyadaan. ‘Kanya’ meaning daughter, and ‘daan’ meaning donation or giving away, Kanyadaan is a Hindu wedding ritual in which the bride is given away to the groom by her parents or in-laws.
The origins of Kanyadaan can be traced back to the 15th century when women needed their parents’ consent to marry — a time when women were barred from education, Bhowmik noted.
When Bhowmik and Roy first began officiating weddings, they still included a modified version of the Kanyadaan ritual to tailor to the Hindu couples who wanted to perform the ritual as a way to involve or honor their parents. But eventually, they got rid of it altogether.
“The daughter is not a possession of somebody,” Bhowmik said.
Bhowmik stressed the importance of learning about the traditions and rituals commonly practiced — in any religion.
“You can of course perform rituals, but you have to understand the explanation [and] the meaning of the rituals,” Bhowmik said. “And if that ritual and that explanation matches with this time, then we’ll take care of it. Otherwise, we’ll discard.”
Many young people, including newlyweds Goswami and Day, were thrilled to be a part of the movement reforming Hindu traditions and challenging social stigmas. They, alongside Shubhamastu, were unsure how the older generation of Hindu followers would perceive a female priest and if they would accept Shubhamastu’s revisions to the centuries-old script.
To Shubhamastu and Goswami’s surprise, many older followers were not only accepting of the movement, they were ready for it.
“We’ve had some skepticism about certain senior relatives, how they’d react to see a wedding like this,” Goswami said. “And the surprise has been that they have been the ones saying, ‘We want front-row seats.’”
Including Goswami and Day’s 85-year-old and 82-year-old grandmothers.
During a full-circle moment encapsulating everything special, unique and empowering about Goswami and Day’s relationship and the female-led ceremony, the couple’s elderly grandmothers were wheeled closer to the mandap (altar) to participate in a family blessing.
Goswami shared that both her and her husband’s grandmother’s had been unwell for the last few years. “It took a lot for them to be physically present that evening to bless us,” Goswami said. “It wasn’t easy.”
“What drove us to a lot of emotion is the amount of effort that culminated in that moment, individually [and] together,” Goswami said. “Socially, financially [and] health-wise, it’s not been easy. And the fact that we’ve reached that moment here, together, with our families blessing us, I think that is one which stood out for me, right through the whole thing.”
Goswami and Day’s wedding ceremony was everything they could have hoped for. They laughed, they joked, they cried, and they even argued, Goswami said. But most importantly, they did it together.
When Goswami reflects on the couple’s nearly eight-year relationship, she credits its success to the “intrinsic notion of women empowerment” present in their relationship from the very beginning.
“I know it’s too soon to comment, but given that it’s been one month of marriage and eight years before that, I think it’s fair to say that it’s been holding,” Goswami said. “And here’s hoping it holds in the years to come.”