Swatantra Lata Sharma

Knotty at 80: The priestess who has blessed 1,600 weddings
To be or not to be was the Hamletian dilemma that Swatantra Lata Sharma faced back in 1962. A male priest who was supposed to solemnise a wedding was out of town and a friend asked her to step in. Her answer? Knot to be!

Lata practised the chants for a fortnight and learnt their meanings before she conducted the wedding. Word spread like fire and since then, the now 81-year-old priestess has solemnised 1,600 marriages not just in Bangalore, but in Mumbai, Kolkata, Goa, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Pune and other cities.

Born in Burma in 1931 and brought up in Chennai, Lata was greatly influenced by her father’s association with the Arya Samaj during her growing years. After her marriage in 1961, she came to live in Bangalore. That’s how her association with Arya Samaj in Indiranagar began.
The fact that Lata conducts weddings from the heart makes all the difference. She not only chants mantras and conducts rituals, but also decodes them in Hindi or English.

“People come to me asking for explanations in English. It makes them value the ceremony more and feel more attached to it,” she said.
Didn’t anyone oppose her role as a priestess? Lata said: “When I first started, somebody wrote a letter to Arya Samaj secretary, asking how a woman could conduct a wedding. I was worried for a while that I may have done something wrong. But with the Samaj’s help, I found scriptures from the Vedas that supported my action. I wrote back to him quoting the scriptures that I’d done nothing wrong.”

That was not the first time that Lata has had to deal with so-called taboos concerning women. Once, a widow wanted to give away her daughter (kanyadaan), but her family and the Bhat community to which she belonged were dead against it. Even the priests refused to conduct the wedding if she were to give her daughter away. But her daughter was adamant about her mother giving her away. “When she came to me in distress, I told her that she had the first right over her child and nobody is connected to her the way she was. She was very tense on the wedding day, fearing her friends and relatives would walk away,” Lata said. Instead, the woman got kudos for creating history for not only being the first woman to give her daughter away, but also for the fact that a widow had done so – it opened the doors for other women.

Not stopping at weddings, Lata also went on to conduct funeral rites. “One day, a neighbour came running to me saying she had been summoned by cops to identify a body. A young man known to her was coming to the city to join an engineering college. However, he fell from a moving train and died. I went with her and ended up performing the last rites. That was the first time I performed the cremation ceremony. I did around 30 after that and stopped,” she said.

But there are no stops when it comes to weddings.

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