On a rainy night two years ago, Haley Knapp helped pick up 1,500 luminaries placed all around the Shaw Quadrangle. This fall, the senior music history and cultures major spent four hours on those same lights to assure this year’s Diwali celebration is just as special.

“It was backbreaking work,” Knapp recalled. “But I could see what we had done, and I hope people stopped and wondered what it was.”

Syracuse University’s Department of Art and Music Histories is celebrating the Festival of Lights this Thursday by placing luminaries, battery-operated lights lodged in sand inside a recyclable paper bowl or bag, in the Sculpture Garden. Volunteers will assemble the luminaries from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The luminaries will light up the garden till 10 p.m.

Knapp first learned about Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, in an art and architecture class taught by Romita Ray, a professor in the Department of Art and Music Histories and the person leading the celebration this Thursday.

Ray unveiled the lighting in 2015 as both a way for her students to immerse themselves in the culture they were studying and get “a little bit of the wonder of India.” It was also a way for the campus-wide community to learn about a different festival.

“It’s a 5,000-year look at history; it’s a living heritage question,” Ray said about her class. “It’s not something that’s buried way back in the past, you see it constantly through time. Festivals are a great way to understand the living arts of India.”

In 2015, Ray set out to celebrate the festival on a grand scale by assembling and placing on the Quad 1,500 luminaries. She was determined to celebrate Diwali with the “magnitude it deserved.”

Choosing the Quad as the campus center to light up was a no-brainer. The professor felt that as a central part of campus and student life, it was the perfect place for a celebration of culture.

But the art and music histories department is not working alone to bring Diwali to campus; the campus South Asia Center and Hendricks Chapel are co-sponsoring the event.

Carol Babiracki, an associate professor of music history and cultures and director of the South Asia Center, looks back on the last two celebrations fondly, remembering the students from India taking pictures of the lights and sending them to their families back home.

“It just transformed the whole landscape of the Quad,” she said. “Making that connection between here and there across thousands of miles — that was very special and really put a smile on my face.”

A sari is a traditional garment worn by Hindu women made from a long piece of cotton or silk and wrapped around the body. Alexandra Moreo | Photo Editor

Babiracki has spent many years doing research in the state of Jharkhand in India, and is no stranger to the holiday and the significance that light holds in Indian culture.

“It’s that idea of bringing light to everything,” she said. “It’s happening at a time when the days are getting shorter, so it’s a reminder that that even in the darkness, there will be light.”

Diwali is traditionally celebrated on a new-moon night to bring out the brightness of the lamps. But Babiracki explained that beyond the significance of hope in light, it also represents the passage of time. As the fall season progresses and the days become shorter, the celebrations of passage and time begin to wait for “the return of light.”

After the luminary lighting in the Sculpture Garden, volunteers can head to Bowne Hall for samosas and masala chai.

“We have food, we have to have food,” Professor Ray said, laughing.

Ray said Diwali, and festivals of Hindu and Muslim cultures, are not part of the regular festival repertoire in the country. With the lighting this Thursday, she hopes to cross national boundaries and bring a sense of camaraderie and community in celebrating a different festival.

“We’re sequestered away in classes, studying away,” she said. “So this is an opportunity to come together to breathe, enjoy and also understand in some ways that different cultures have different festivals that are represented in the broader framework of American culture.”

Published on October 17, 2017 at 7:41 pm

Contact: dmurthy@syr.edu