by USHA ALEXANDER
When I visited India the summer I turned 9, my grandmother took my siblings and me to a jeweler to select pendants to bring back to the US. My brother and sister chose the gold-tipped tiger claws, still available easily and guilt-free in India in the 1970s. But I found the tiger claws too “gee whiz”; I wanted something that was meaningfully Indian. So the jeweler trotted out his line of large, bright silver pendants shaped either as Om or swastika. I was drawn to the pleasing aesthetics of the swastika designs, with their symmetry and regularity of line; the Om was alright, but it didn’t do much for me. Still, I had a difficult time deciding to bring home the swastika, waffling on the matter until it grew late and even the jeweler was losing patience with me. In the end, I came away with the Om, which languished never-worn in my dresser drawer for years until I simply lost track of it. Something about the entire episode never sat quite right with me, but as a child I couldn’t puzzle out why.
I was probably in high school before it first dawned on me just what it was that kept me from the swastika that day: Growing up in an observant Brahmin household in the US (from which I’ve long since recovered), I felt an emotional dissonance around the symbol, which I associated with something like serenity, nurturance, and cosmic benevolence, and at the same time with “evil,” hatred, and genocide.
The word swastika can be translated as wellbeing (from the Sanskrit su, meaning good, and asti, meaning to be, plus the diminutive suffix, ka) and in most of the world the identical symbol (by whatever name) has long been associated with wellbeing and good luck. In South Asia, the swastika is found on artifacts dating back 4,500 years to the time of the Harappan Civilization, where it frequently occurs as a character in their symbol system. Even as Harappan culture faded into obscurity, the swastika was carried forward, becoming strongly associated with Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist religious traditions, an association that persists to this day throughout Asia. Especially in India, the swastika is the most ubiquitous of religious symbols.
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