Varanu Sahabir serves as first woman pandit at Liberty Ave. Hindu temple.
Posted: Thursday, November 1, 2018 10:30 am
Liberty Avenue is full of rare things. A mash-up Guyanese-Chinese restaurant, rare tropical-bird places, coconut buns.
But it’s never seen anything like Varanu Sahabir.
She is 33 years old, a St. John’s University-trained lawyer and the first woman to serve as a Hindu priest — a pandit, in the language of the temple — for a mainstream congregation in Richmond Hill.
“It was never a case of me saying. ‘I want to be a spiritual leader,’” she says. “That was never in the scope of what my potential career could be.”
Sahabir, born in Trinidad and raised in East Elmhurst, serves at the Shri Lakshmi Narayan Mandir, a stucco-front temple at Liberty Avenue at 128th Street in the heart of Little Guyana. It has been there for 34 years and, until now, has always had a man conducting Sunday services. Same as all the other temples in the neighborhood.
The limited role of women in the religion has been dictated more by culture and tradition than by any religious teaching, Sahabir explains. Nothing said women couldn’t be clergy. As in other religions, the times are catching up to and overtaking the church.
“I just happened,” she said. “We would schedule priests and they would cancel last minute. What are we going to do?” The congregation would press her to stand in.
“I knew all the madras. I grew up in a temple. When the book was in front of me, I was, ‘Wow I don’t even need to look at these words. I know what I’m saying because I grew up hearing it. And when the time came for me to step into the role, everybody said. ‘Do it. We need you to do this.’”
From there, it was a short step to giving up law (“I told my dad this is not for me, I don’t think this is my path,” Sahabir says) and beginning the arduous studies to become a pandit.
In India, the first religious academy to train women priests opened seven years ago. It is no longer a news story there.
But in the West Indian branch of the religion — which, among the descendants of Indians who immigrated to the Caribbean 150 years ago, differs significantly — women priests are all but unheard of.
“It meant breaking a lot of gender norms, a lot of conceptions off what I thought was going to be acceptable in the community,” she said. “I never thought this was going to be possible.”
The idea of a woman pandit is still unsettling along Liberty Avenue. Sahabir has not been invited yet to lecture — the term she uses for sermons — at other temples in the borough, as is customary.
And her father — an operating engineer with Local 30 and a devout Hindu who played music in the temple and raised his daughters there — waited nearly a year before showing up at the Liberty Avenue temple to see his daughter conduct a service.
He did not approve of a joke she told during her sermon, she recalls.
This is new territory for many men in Little Guyana, she admits.
“I never wanted to be the one who forced the issue,” she says. “I’m big on this. I figure, when the time is right, things happen. Doors open for you.
“I always believed in the same sort of predetermination, like ‘God will guide me.’”
Where this corhee Nehru deh? 
