Diana Eck

Professor of Hindu Religion Diana L. Eck didn't "want to go to Paris with the Smith girls that to go to Paris" for her junior year abroad. Intead, she chose the Third World, and her junior year in Banaras. India started the Montana native on a trip that went halfway around the world and ended in a Harvard Faculty chair last fall.

"India is such a vibrantly visual culture." Eck says now, adding. "One reason I'm interested in the gods is because you see that in India--there's a careening life of the streets because it's a temperate climate."

Eck says her central interest is popular religion--what people do--including pilgrimages and rituals.

"I'm fascinated with pilgrimage places--they've collected the hope, faith and love for so many generations," she says. Currently Eck is writing a book on pilgrimage in India and planning another on rituals.

Eck taught Foreign Cultures 12, "Sources of Indian Civilization," and Religion 12 this past semester and will teach a seminar on Mohandas K.Gandhi this spring. She says that students responded strongly to the section on Gandhi in Foreign Cultures 12 because he raised issues which are crucial for people today--non-violence, the transcendence of truth, and consumer restraint.

Eck has climbed step-by-step up the Harvard ladder from graduate student to teaching follow to 20th tenured woman professor. She says that although she has not felt discrimination as a woman, "I do feel the same sort of frustration that any woman feels when they are working in largely male contexts."

"You come up with an idea, you think it's pretty good but it's not until a man says the same idea that people make note of it," she explains.

Eck began her study of Indian culture and religion in her sophomore year at Smith College, with a course on Modern Indian Thinkers. That summer she studied Hindu at the University of Wisconsin and then in the fall of 1965 left for Banaras, despite the continuing war between India and Pakistan.

Eck returned to Banaras, a traditional city on the Ganges River, for research on her dissertation "It's one of the oldest cities in the world, probably 3000 years old or more and a very sacred one for Hindus," she says.

Eck studied at Banaras University and conducted a field work projection "Hinduism and the Indian Intellectual." She went out on her bicycle with 20 letters of introduction to the intelligentiz of Banaras to ask them which were the primary gods in their home and whether they believe in reincarnation and karma.

"It was a fairly crude questionnaire," Eck says in retrospect.

Eck says her field work was a tremendous education since she met "a lot of very good people and Indians on a whole love to talk about religion," adding that because she studied there before the Hippie phenomena hit India, her group had a lot of interaction and were very welcome to the community.

After her year abroad, Eck graduated from Smith and spent a year on a Fulbright Scholarship to the University of London at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

But with just her M.A. She couldn't find a job and ended up working as a secretary in Harvard Square. "I decided that it was not for me though I did enjoy it, and if I was going to be sitting in a chair all day, I might as well be doing graduate work," Eck therefore enrolled in graduate school at Harvard to study comparative religion.

She started studying Sanskrit only during her doctoral studies at Harvard in Comparative Religion, "It's vital to opening up a culture and especially crucial for reading texts, "she says.

After returning several times to Banaras, Eck finished her dissertation, a study of its history, mythology and sacred signification for the Hindus. "It's written in a way that is somewhat an introduction to Indian religious culture, its temples Hindu--all 330 million of them," she quips.

Eck says that her interest in the relationship between religion and several issues was shaped some what from her religious childhood. When she had worked on a work camp in Mexico and on an Indian reservation in Montana.

"I also think there's a lot between my love of the landscape in Montana, where we knew all the mountains by nature and interest in symbolic landscape," she says.

Besides the pilgrimages Eck loves the sense of intimacy in Indian culture because of the life in the streets. "Going through the streets of Cambridge, you have no idea what goes on in people's lives," she says.

In Banaras, however, as elsewhere in India people spend a lot of their lives outside their houses, buying and selling in the street and just sitting around with their neighbors, Eck says.

In fact, Eck sometimes finds herself reluctant to return to America "I like India I like living here. I like the personal quality of life and the pace of things," she explains. Coming home, she says she is always shocked by "stuff like the STAR Market."

"You step on the doormat and it opens automatically. And then here's just vast quanties of food so much of the same thing--one whole aisle of pet food and an aisle of cereal and I hate it," Eck says. Contrasting the "gluttony of consumerism" in America with India's ecological ethic that comes in part from a country where resources are scarce.

Furthermore, Eck enjoys the bustle in the streets in India without the West's telephones, Xerox machines, or computers to speed the pace of life.

"In our culture now you don't have to leave your work behind anywhere, there's just this incredible sense that you should always be productive," she says. "I like living in India where I don't have a telephone and the most I have is a mail service."

"I'm not being romantic--it's just a much more humane way to live," she says.

Darryl Catarine'86, who took Foreign Cultures 12 last semester, says that Eck "adds an air of respect to things that would otherwise be abstract. she is a very warm, accessible person...I think a lot of her."