Swastika

When I visited India the summer I turned 9 years old, my grandmother took my siblings and me to a jeweler so we could each select a pendant to bring back with us to the US. My brother and sister both chose the gold-tipped tiger claws (still available easily and guilt-free in India in the 1970s, before there was real awareness or protection of endangered Asian species). But I found the tiger claws too "gee whiz;" I wanted something with meaning. 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 to look at, 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 on that day: Growing up in a strongly practicing Hindu household in the US, I felt an emotional dissonance around the symbol, which I associated on the one hand with something like serenity, nurturance, or even "divine love," and at the same time in another corner of my mind, with "evil," hatred, and genocide.

As many readers of this blog will know, the word "swastika" means something like "well being" (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) is—and has long been—associated with well being and good luck. In South Asia the swastika is found on artifacts dating back 5,000 years to the time of the Harappan Civilization, where it occurs as a character in their symbol system. Even as the rest of Harappan culture faded into obscurity, the swastika was carried forward, becoming strongly associated with Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist religious traditions, an association which persists to the present time throughout Asia. Especially in India, the swastika is the most ubiquitous of religious symbols.

The swastika appeared in ancient Europe, Africa, and the Americas, too, whether by diffusion from Asia or having arisen on its own as a symbol of good luck. It's to be found on excavated artifacts from ancient Troy in Greece and those preserved for hundreds of years in the peat bogs of Denmark. It appears as a design on gold coin originating from Ghana, now disseminated throughout Africa. In the Americas, the swastika has been used as a motif in indigenous designs, from the Aztecs to the Hopi; today, the national flag of the Cuna (Kuna) Indians of Panama is a large black swastika in a yellow field.

In Europe and North America, the swastika enjoyed rediscovery as a good luck symbol during the early 1900s. In America, greeting cards, prints, and cookie tins from this time commonly sported the symbol, including a key fob designed with the Coca-Cola logo on its face. Residents of a town founded in Ontario, Canada, in 1908, chose Swastika for their town's name (decades later they would firmly and successfully resist government pressure to change the name). US and Finnish Air Force pilots wore swastikas for good luck from the early days of flight into the 1930s, and the Order of the White Rose of Finland, a chivalric order founded in 1919, headed by the President of Finland, used a swastika as its insignia until 1963. The swastika has purely auspicious connotations in all of these contexts. And there are many more such, as the links scattered throughout this page will show.

In Germany the swastika had been variously employed as a symbol for different populist movements until the 1920s when, for a certain Adolf Hitler, the popular symbol took on another layer of meaning: According to his simplified and distorted theories of human migrations, progress, and "racial" descent, he believed the swastika was a symbol of the Aryan people and that modern Germans were directly descended from those ancient Aryans. Thus, to him, the swastika was the ideal centerpiece for the symbol of his racialist political party, the National Socialists, aka Nazis. Hitler painstakingly designed the precise colors and proportions of the black swastika in a white circle on a red field, all by himself, stating, "As National Socialists, we see our program in our flag. In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work, which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic."

After the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the horrifying crimes of its reign, culminating in the events of World War II, the idea of the swastika as a good luck symbol was quickly and thoroughly swept out of the cultural consciousness of Europe, North America, and Australia. But not so for much of the world, for whom this foreign war, with its mad villains and their attendant ideology were short-lived, far away, and culturally distant, unrelated to local systems of meaning (indeed, there are many, many people worldwide who wouldn't even be aware of the whole episode, especially the detail about the use of the swastika--yes, even today; think about it). Thus, in much of the world, the ancient and dear connotations of the swastika were not undermined by the Nazi party's brief hijacking of the symbol.

A few years ago, angered by the tasteless humor of Britain's young Prince Harry who dressed up as a Nazi to attend a theme party, the EU moved to ban the swastika from Europe. So far the movement has failed, instead generating something of a backlash of Europeans and North Americans who took it upon themselves to educate (remind) their countryfolk about the history and meaning of the swastika, attempting to reclaim it from its degradation in the service of Nazi ideology. Even more surprising, those hoping to reclaim the swastika do not appear to be predominantly of Asian heritage, as I would have expected. Particularly in North America, the drive is spearheaded by Pagans, New Age spiritualists, and such. (Some are attempting to reclaim it by insisting "good" swastikas can only face in one direction; but in the wider world and through history, the direction of the swastika is irrelevant.)

Indeed, it's long been conspicuous to me that I've never seen a Desi in the US exhibit a swastika or even mention the word in a religious or cultural context. It's as though the meaning of the symbol is very neatly compartmentalized for Desis depending on which continent they are standing on at the moment. To be clear, this duality no longer troubles me, but I do find it curious. How is it that no swastika ever seems to make it back to the US, innocently, as a religious emblem on some random South Asian chachka: a plastic Ganesh, a sari print, a cardboard box of "pure desi ghee" sweets? —or does it happen? And are there consequences: a moment of awkwardness or anger from one's co-workers and acquaintances? One goes to India and is surrounded by swastikas; back in the States, they drop silently and completely out of Desi life, seemingly without discussion or even a conscious decision to leave them behind.

Recently, when I was in India, a dear friend who visited me was quite disturbed by the presence of, and references to, swastikas everywhere. Though I explained its meaning and history to her, I think she had a difficult time accepting this information and I sensed that she felt assaulted by the ubiquity of the symbol. While I wasn't surprised by her reaction and I certainly appreciate her struggle with the point, especially since she identifies as a Jewish American, I was also saddened by this tragically deep cross-cultural misunderstanding: how unfortunate that what to some is a powerfully, mystically, and even beautifully positive symbol is to others the most vile, despicable, and horrifying—for completely unrelated reasons. With all the Israeli and German tourists in India, too, I wonder what tends to be their take on the matter.
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From top to bottom the swastikas shown on this page come from:

On the left: India, Iran, Finland (Air Force c 1930s), Korea (temple)
On the right: Panama (2x), India (stupa, c 100 CE), Alamanni (c 100 CE?)

Comments

[vp]

Thoughtful and interesting.

One guess about why desis in the US don't particularly display the swastika is that its significance in ritual is limited - it is one symbol among many. The Om, on the other hand, has far more importance - it is the first utterance in many mantras and shlokas. It is also supposed to have deep spiritual and mystical significance, at least according to the claims of promotional material I have seen.

I agree that the discomfort with the Nazi associations of the swastika is probably a strong reason as well.

[Ruchira Paul]

About a six months ago, I got a phone call from one of the board members of our homeowners' association, seeking advice. This gentleman knows me personally and called to enquire about the "Hindu Swastika" signs on the sides of the front entrance of an Indian household in our neighborhood. I hadn't seen the markings but it seems a neighbor had called the board for clarification. I explained as best as I could. I don't know how the board resolved the issue with the nervous neighbor.

[Usha]

That's a very interesting story, Ruchira. Exactly the kind of thing I was wondering about. It would be interesting to hear how it turned out in the end.

VP: I think you're right that Om has a more specific ritual significance and meaning, but my sense is that if you look around, the swastika is actually more commonly drawn on objects during pujas or used as a design element on all manner of things.

[Sujatha]

When I used to work in a regular office environment some years ago, I had as a PC background a tiled mini-kolam that looked very pretty. Or so I thought, until my colleague stopped by startled at my PC screen and asked "What are all those swastika's doing on the screen?" It wasn't obvious to me, but the underlying base of the rather florally swirled ends of the kolam was a swastika. I explained about the older significance of the symbol to him, nothing to do with the Nazi version, and promptly changed the kolam to another without the swastika base, just to avoid more curious inquiries like that one.

[Amit]

I have heard a similar story from a Jewish friend who was startled to see the swastika in Indian movies.

-Amit