Hindu Wedding Rituals: ONE HOUR MAIN CEREMONY

By Amrutur V SRINIVASAN

One hour ceremony in Vedic Sanskrit with full translation and transliteration. Mantras can be played and practiced so the ceremony can be performed. Appendix includes Family Data Form, Materials List, Sample Program.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Periplus Line LLC
• Release date: Jan 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781649213754

Book preview

Dedicated to the second and subsequent generations of Hindus growing up in the West

← On the cover

Photo credit: Studio KSD. StudioKSD.com

© A. V. Srinivasan

ISBN:

ISBN:

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to

Permissions Department

Periplus line LLC

P.O. Box 56

East Glastonbury, CT 06025-0056

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2023949010

Kamla Srinivasan, Editor

Illustrations by Bapu

Photographs from weddings performed by the author

Author’s Preface

In the early 80s I was in the middle of the extraordinarily complex project of planning to build a Hindu Temple in Middletown, CT. As part of that activity I had started conducting pujas and ceremonies in homes of our membership to get the community involved as well as to raise money for the project. I continued this activity later at the basement of our temple under construction, and the attendance at these events increased especially when we performed the elaborate Satyanarayana Puja on every Poornima (full moon) night. It was clear to me that we had met a need of Hindu families and I could see the appreciative response to my chanting of the Sanskrit mantras with the proper pronunciation and intonation I had mastered from my eight years of Sanskrit education in India.

One day in 1987, the Raghuvir family, who were regular attendees at the pujas asked if I would be interested in conducting their daughter’s wedding! I was touched by their confidence in my ability and without hesitation I agreed! This is how my involvement into conducting Hindu wedding ceremonies began. As I began an intensive research into the subject I learned much about our rich tradition, and was amazed to find the details of the ceremony covered in the 10th Mandala of the Rg Veda. This got me in deeper and deeper and, with the insistence of my wife Kamla, I wrote a book on the subject. This is how the now out-of-print book: The Vedic Wedding: Origins, Tradition and Practice came about much later in 2006.

Not only did I perform the Raghuvir daughter’s interfaith wedding in 1988 but also finally, nearly hundred weddings around the country. An additional incentive came about when I learned that my book was shown to the audience by Professor Jeff Long of Elizabeth College in Pennsylvania when he performed the wedding of Mahatma Gandhi’s great grandson!

The rest is history as they say. The out-of-print book is in great demand and a search on Amazon will show some sellers charging close to $300 for a copy. This was the driver, again with my wife’s encouragement, to write a book providing the details of a main ceremony that can be performed in one hour.

It is my hope that more and more families buy this book, read it and enjoy listening to the audio file of mantras which I have chanted. This is a treasure we have inherited from our ancestors and which we need to continue to preserve.

Foreword

By

Swami Tyagananda

Head of the Vedanta Society in Boston and also the Hindu chaplain

at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Encountering the immense diversity in Hinduism can be bewildering even to those who identify as Hindus, what to speak of those who are not so familiar with the tradition. A great contribution of Swami Vivekananda was to help us discover what he called the common bases of Hinduism. Among the things that unquestionably unite Hindus is their acceptance of the supremacy of the Vedas, the divine revelations that have no human authorship (apauruṣeya).

It is to that sacred source that Dr. Srinivasan turns to bring the essentials of a Hindu wedding ceremony to a twenty-first century community. He makes the process accessible, relatable and intelligible through lucid explanations, the transliteration