Vaiṣṇava · Śaiva · Śākta

Pandit Sahadev

A Vedic priest serving Hindu families across Europe, formed in three streams of the tradition and shaped by twenty-five years of service at the altar.

I am Pandit Sahadev. For families across Europe who wish to mark the passages of their lives in the way their forebears did, I conduct the rites of the Vedic and Āgamic tradition: weddings, the consecration of homes, the naming and the rites of childhood, the worship and the fire offerings, the readings of the chart, and, when the time comes, the rites that close a life and remember the dead. I write this page so that those who consider entrusting such moments to me may know something of who I am and how I came to this work, for in our tradition a priest is rightly known before he is engaged.

What there is to know is, in the end, simple, and it is not a matter of credentials. It is a matter of where one stands: in which line one has received the tradition, and how faithfully one has kept it. Let me tell you, then, of the streams I was initiated into, and of the years that followed.

Three Streams, One Practice

The Sanātana tradition is not a single river but a confluence of several, and I have been given the rare blessing of initiation in three of them. Each came from a different teacher, in a different place, and each formed a different faculty in me. I do not hold them as rivals or as a collection of techniques. They meet in one practice, the way three rivers meet and flow on as one water.

My first and root initiation is in the Vaiṣṇava tradition, received from my Gurudeva, Śrī Śrīmad Bhakti Vaibhava Purī Gosvāmī Mahārāja of Odisha. From this stream I received what I regard as the ground of everything else: Bhakti, devotion, the understanding that the rites are not mechanisms to be operated but offerings to be made with love, and that the heart of the officiant is as much a part of the rite as his hands and his voice. Whatever else I have learned, I learned first to offer it in this spirit.

My second initiation is in the Śaiva tradition, in the line of Ādi Śaṅkarācārya‘s Govardhana Pīṭha at Jagannath Puri, the seat established by Bhagavatpāda himself on the eastern shore. If the Vaiṣṇava stream gave me devotion, this one gave me discipline and the clear metaphysical vision behind the forms: the understanding of the one reality that the many rites and names point toward, and the austerity of mind that keeps a priest honest about what he is doing and why. It is the stream that asks, behind every ceremony, what is true.

My third initiation is in the Śākta tradition, in the discipline of Śrī Vidyā, received from three gurus in the South of India whose lineage descends unbroken from Durvāsā Muni. From this stream I received the sense of the living power within the rite, the recognition that the sacred is not a distant abstraction but a present and active presence, the Mother who is invoked and who responds. It is the stream that keeps the worship from becoming a dry recitation and remembers that the deity is real to the one who calls.

Devotion from the first, clarity from the second, living power from the third: three gifts, carried into one altar.

I say this not to impress but to be exact about what I bring, because these three formations are the truest description of my qualification, far more than any number of years. A family that engages me engages a priest who approaches their rite with a Vaiṣṇava’s devotion, a Śaiva’s discipline of meaning, and a Śākta’s sense of the deity’s living presence. That convergence is the whole of what I have to offer, and it is the work of more than half my life to have received it.

The Years and the Temples

For some twenty-five years I have served as a pujari, and that service has carried me across many countries. I have stood at the altar in temples in Germany, in Italy, in Austria, in Croatia, in Ireland, and in the United States, conducting daily worship and the festivals of the year, and serving the Hindu communities that have made their homes in those places. Temple service is a particular discipline. It is daily, it is exacting, and it is largely unseen; one rises before the community, prepares the worship, and offers it whether many are watching or none. Those years at the altar are where the training received from my teachers became, through repetition, a second nature.

Serving families in their homes is a different work from serving a temple, and the years of both have taught me how each completes the other. The temple gives the steadiness and the standard; the home brings the intimacy, the particular family with its own lineage and its own customs, the rite shaped to a single household’s life. I am grateful to have been given long practice in both, and to have served communities in so many countries, because it has shown me, again and again, that the tradition holds wherever it is carried with care. A glimpse of some of these ceremonies may be found in the gallery of ceremonies.

What the Diaspora Has Taught Me

Most of those I serve live far from where their tradition grew, and over the years I have come to understand the particular weight that distance carries. A family in a European city is often the only one for streets around who keeps these observances; their children grow up amid languages and customs that know nothing of them; and the sacred places, the rivers and temples of home, exist for them mostly in memory. There is a longing in this that I have felt in many homes, the wish to give one’s children what one received, in a land that does not make it easy.

What I have learned is that the answer to that longing is not to recreate India, which cannot be done, but to carry the tradition itself, which can. The rite performed correctly in a flat in Vienna or a hall in Dublin is the rite; the child named there is named as fully as any child anywhere. My task, as I have come to see it, is partly to perform the ceremonies and partly to reassure the families that what they are doing is whole, that they have not been given a lesser version because they live abroad. I explain as I go, in the languages people understand, so that a ceremony is not an opaque performance but something the family and their guests can follow and own. The fuller account of how the tradition travels, and why it remains valid far from its source, I have set down in the page on the Vedic pandit serving Europe.

How a Ceremony Takes Shape

Every engagement begins the same way: I listen. Each family carries its own tradition, the customs of its region, the deity its line has long held dear, the way its elders remember the rite being done. Before anything is planned, I ask about these things, because the ceremony I conduct for you should be recognizably yours, not a standard performance repeated identically in every home. From what the family tells me, I shape the rite: the essential acts kept whole and in their proper order, the Mantras spoken fully and accurately, and the surrounding arrangements fitted to the venue, the hours available, and the people who will be present.

During the ceremony itself, I explain as we go. A grandmother who has seen the rite a hundred times and a colleague attending their first Hindu ceremony should both be able to follow what is happening and why it matters. This explanation takes nothing away from the sanctity of the rite; it opens the rite to those living through it, which is what the rite is for.

Where I Serve

I serve Croatian and Austrian communities directly, Italy and its lake country lie just across the Alps, and Germany, France, Switzerland, Greece, Spain, and Portugal are each a brief flight away. Over the years the ceremonies have taken me to all of these and beyond, to island weddings in the Aegean, house blessings in the Alpine valleys, and Nāmakaraṇa ceremonies in the great cities of the north.

For the family, the arrangement is simple. We speak first about the occasion, the place, and the family’s own tradition; from that conversation come the practical matters, the date weighed where the family wishes it, the venue’s circumstances considered, and the materials arranged, whether sourced locally or carried with me. By the day of the ceremony nothing is left uncertain, and the family is free to live the occasion rather than manage it. Distance has never yet kept a rite from a family who asked for it.

I keep this verse close, because it holds the three streams of my own formation in a single image. The Vaiṣṇava devotion, the Śaiva clarity, the Śākta power: these are not three destinations but three waters of one ocean, and a priest who has been given all three is asked only to carry them faithfully, without confusion and without pride, to the families who need them.

If you are considering a ceremony for your family, a wedding, a naming, the blessing of a home, the worship of a festival, or the rites for one who has passed, an unhurried conversation about what the rite requires is where the work properly begins. I will tell you honestly what the rite asks and whether I am the right person to perform it for you.

I was given this tradition by my teachers. What remains of my work is to give it on, faithfully, to those who ask.

The traditions named on this page are the subject of sustained academic study, notably through the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, with the primary Vedic texts available in translation at WisdomLib.