The Harvard Brand Is Not for Sale

In August, Sanders Theatre was booked for nine days straight. Not for a class or student performance, but for a devotional marathon dedicated to the Hindu god Ram.

After two years of effort, entrepreneur Paavan Popat booked Sanders Theatre for a nine-day Hindu recitation led by his guru, Morari Bapu. Attached to the recitation was an academic conference on the Ramayana, initially facilitated by Harvard’s Mittal Institute on South Asia.

As the event neared, the Institute withdrew its support after faculty raised last-minute concerns that the event violated institutional neutrality. The Institute deaffiliated from the event and scrambled to remove the Harvard name from its promotion. But the event proceeded anyway. Popat’s organization contracted directly with Sanders, paying a higher rate for the venue after it lost institutional sponsorship.

But Harvard spaces — especially iconic locations like Sanders — should not be venues open to anyone who can afford them.

The University should welcome lectures, performances, and cultural gatherings organized by Harvard affiliates and by members of the Cambridge community. Indeed, Harvard’s own religious communities should be able to gather for worship.

There would be nothing wrong with a Harvard Hindu organization hosting a devotional event for its community, just as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other groups at Harvard hold services of their own.

The question is why a nine-day devotional event, initiated by overseas organizers and aimed primarily at followers of an outside spiritual leader, belonged in Sanders Theatre.

The organizers’ conduct tells us their answer: Harvard’s brand. Popat spent two years approaching roughly a dozen Harvard professors and administrators. An event website briefly included “atHarvard” in its URL. Lord Dolar Popat called the katha “history-making,” and on the final day, Morari Bapu dedicated the entire recitation to Harvard University.

These are unlikely to be the actions of organizers who merely saw a convenient auditorium in Sanders. Instead, they seem to have spent two years pursuing the University’s legitimacy and prestige. Indian news outlets placed Harvard at the center of their coverage, as a prominent spiritual leader addressed roughly 1,000 followers each day from one of Harvard’s most recognizable stages.

Institute leaders did little to clarify the separation between the event and the University. Hitesh Hathi, the Institute’s executive director, and Diana Eck, its interim faculty director, still spoke during the opening session, even if in personal capacities. Though they have the right to attend, they should have thought twice about how their presence blurred the separation the Institute was trying to establish, after helping the event happen in the first place.

We believe this confusion was especially irresponsible given the place of Ram worship in contemporary Indian politics — and we expect better of these faculty.

Devotion to Ram should not be conflated with Hindu nationalism. But Morari Bapu contributed at least 11.3 crore rupees — over $1 million — toward the construction of a temple in Ayodhya, where many Hindus believe Ram was born. The temple stands on the site of a 16th-century mosque destroyed by a Hindu nationalist mob in 1992. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the temple in 2024, a construction some have touted as a defining victory for India’s Hindu nationalist movement.

Thus, the large recitation carried outsized political significance that the University should not have staged in its largest campus theatre.

Basic due diligence into the event’s purpose, funding, and political context — along with a simple question about why its organizers were so determined to hold it at Harvard — should have occurred before the Institute helped secure Sanders.

Harvard has always been generous with its grounds, welcoming thousands of tourists every day, allowing Girl Scouts to sell cookies in the Science Center, and hosting farmers’ markets at the Science Center Plaza. All of these activities should continue. But by allowing the recitation to be held in Sanders, the University may have let the Harvard brand be used as a pawn in an overseas political game.

A Harvard venue is never just a venue. Next time, Harvard should think twice before handing over its keys.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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