Conceptualizing Gender and Religion as Art

Written by our 2014 India: Gender & Religion team.

We finished our India: Gender and Religion program in the beautiful town of Rishikesh, nestled in the Himalayan foothills from where the mighty, holy Ganga emerges from the mountains to drift slowly across the North Indian plains all the way past Varanasi to Calcutta. In true OG style, we reflected on all aspects of our program, including dramatic tales from our Independent Travel Time, the new light our experience cast on our Hopes, Goals, Fears and Expectations that we captured during our first days in Delhi, and a review of our learnings and discoveries regarding gender and religion in the cacophony of Northern India.

Gender and religion are two incredibly broad topics, which are hard to define, even though they define so many parts of us. It is near impossible to view these subjects completely objectively without having a position within them. The scope and scale of the program was as vast as it could be, but ultimately we all found a very personal journey within them. To cap off our time together, we settled on creating a large piece of group-created idea art.

It’s difficult to put into words what we experienced in the last 6 weeks but we’ve included here some images, some of the whole piece (4 x 4 Letter paper size), some close ups, and some even closer still. Hopefully it gives you an idea for the complexity and richness of our journey, for the wonderful individuals that made up our team, and for the much greater number of questions that we finished our journey with compared to how to we started.​