LEARN NC

K–12 teaching and learning · from the UNC School of Education

Hiking near the Himalayas: Hindu prayer

About this recording

Creator
Kristin Post
Date created
October 17, 2000
Duration
1:43
Location
Ghorapani Loop, Nepal
File
MP3
License
This recording copyright ©2000. Terms of use

Related media

Learn more

In the classroom

Please upgrade your Flash Player and/or enable JavaScript in your browser to listen to this audio file.

Download audio file (Right-click or option-click)

In this recording, you can hear some male priests saying a prayer, and the village women are with them participating in the ceremony. After a short pause, you can hear our guide, Devi, explain the meaning of the ceremony we’ve just witnessed.

A “tikka” ceremony is when men and women receive a red dot on the forehead, a bit like the Catholic or Christian practice of receiving a mark on Ash Wednesday. Sometimes women in Nepal or India wear a bindi, which is more akin to beautification, like wearing nail polish; however it can be used to signify the woman is married. The tikka has many meanings in many South Asian cultures.

From my journal:

There are many villages along the way, and the trial is made entirely of stone slabs. We have to go uphill after lunch. We come across a tikka ceremony I record.

[next day]

Rest of trek is uphill. It’s beautiful. These terraced hills, and the rivers- with the color of the glacier — and all the little waterfalls that highlight the mountainside.

Transcript

[priest and villagers speaking in Nepali]

Devi
[asks questions in Nepali. Then a silence] Yeah, it’s kind of a Hindus…Hindus woman. The religion on Hindus. We call (Sunday, Monday) Tuesday it’s “mongol baht,” we call “mongol baht” and [speaks in Nepali] is called fourth of “mongol.” So they just collect all together and they just pray each other. And there are two priests over here, and they just give some tikka. First they give flower, and they just remember all the gods. Then after, they just put the tikka on and then they say…the guy who speaking now…he say “god bless you” and this and that thing, and this kind of string they put on. That’s what they do.
Kristin
Yeah, the red string.
Devi
Yeah. They doing like that.
Kristin

That’s…that’s neat. Every Tuesday of the…

Devi
Yeah, every Tuesday, but it’s different…it’s a kind of date. They need to have a special date. For Tuesday, and a special date, and then they put this.