R. V. PATWARDHAN,
HINDU PRIEST WITH NEW YORK VERVE,
DIES AT 79
His wife, Tara, said the cause was congestive heart failure.
For the better part of three decades, Mr. Patwardhan was an indispensable figure in New York’s Hindu community, the man in the dhoti and turban who by virtue of his priestly birth and his religious training could do what no other Hindu in New York could do, officiate at the elaborate wedding and other ceremonies that have been the hallmark of Hinduism for 2,500 years.
It may seem surprising now, but despite the city’s reputation as a melting pot, the entire Indian presence in New York consisted of just a handful of journalists, diplomats and students on temporary visas when Mr. Patwardhan arrived from India in 1947 to study international law at New York University. The race-based immigration laws of the era simply precluded significant migration from the Asian subcontinent.
Mr. Patwardhan, himself a native of Pandharpur who had studied law and practiced with his father, had fully expected to return to India, but in the aftermath of the country’s independence from Britain in 1947, he accepted a job at the Indian consulate, summoned his wife, who also worked at the consulate, and took an apartment on Perry Street that became his home for almost 50 years.
Mr. Patwardhan, who explored his adopted city during daily five-mile walks, quickly realized there were drawbacks to being a member of a tiny minority in an alien culture, among them the inability to practice his religion in a city where the few Hindu residents included no priests.
As a Brahmin, or member of the priestly caste, and one who had also mastered Sanskrit and Hinduism’s Vedic texts, Mr. Patwardhan needed no other qualifications to become a priest, so he decided to fill the void.
The first wedding ceremony he performed, in 1956, was considered such an exotic novelty that it was broadcast live on television. Indeed, a Hindu priest was such a rarity in the United States that Mr. Patwardhan was soon traveling all over the country to perform weddings.
For a while there were so few Hindus in New York that he performed only the occasional wedding, but after the immigration laws were liberalized in the 1960’s, touching off a flood of migration from India, Mr. Patwardhan was in such demand that he quit his job in 1968.
In time, the wave of immigration brought other Hindu priests to the city, but Mr. Patwardhan remained a favorite, partly because the man known as Nana, Panditji or simply Pat had become a venerated figure and partly because he had virtually patented the New York–style Hindu wedding ceremony.
In India, weddings sometimes last for days, but Mr. Patwardhan, mindful of the peculiar pace of life in New York, streamlined the ceremony, distilling it to its essence, and in an innovation that would have shocked the sometimes austere and rigid priests in India, he interlaced the service with English explanations that kept the children in attendance enthralled and provided many young Hindu-Americans with their only training in their ancestral religion.
Mr. Patwardhan sometimes had to provide similar instruction to the elders. After a couple had set a date, it was not uncommon for a grandmother, armed with astrological tables, to protest that the time was not auspicious. Mr. Patwardhan would gently explain that the eternal truths of the Veda were stronger than superstition and most certainly did not depend on thecoincidental alignment of the stars, and then the wedding would proceed on schedule.
Perhaps his most inspired New York innovation concerned the heart of the Hindu wedding ceremony, fire, the sacred witness to whom the priestly hymns and chants and the couple’s vows are addressed. In India the intricate arrangement of mighty logs precisely specified by the Veda can sometimes produce quite a conflagration, so the ceremonies are often performed outdoors.
Mr. Patwardhan, who performed most of his ceremonies in small apartments and was as respectful of the city’s fire laws as he was disdainful of superstition, simply created a symbolic wedding fire by arranging tiny strips of wood in a small brazier and setting them alight.
His wife is his only survivor.
June 23, 1996