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.