Prachi Patankar is a community activist and educator. She is a member of many cultural organizations in the greater New York City area, primarily non-profit organizations. She is also known for her work with organizations that revitalize education systems, both in the United States as well as on an international level. She has extensive experience in building communities for the purpose of art and culture. She is most notable for founding and organizing the South Asia Solidarity Initiative, as well as co-founding 3rd I New York. Patankar is also a published writer: much of her writing deals with issues of cultural appropriation, foreign policy, and international conflict.
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Early Life and Education
Prachi Patankar was born in Maharashtra, a rural state in the western region of India. At the age of sixteen, she moved to the United States. Patankar received her B.A. from Swarthmore College in 2000. She returned to India to establish a school for students whose homes were displaced by dams in Maharashtra. Patankar went on to receive her M.A. from New York University in 2007.
Career
Prachi Patankar has primarily worked for non-profit organizations that fortify communities in the greater New York City area, particularly arts, culture, and community-based organizations. Currently she serves on the Board of Directors for the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence and Senior Program Officer for the Brooklyn Community Foundation. Additionally, she works as a Program Manager for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC).
She is one of the founding members of 3rd I New York, an organization that hosted a monthly showcase for film, video, and media presentations to advertise the diverse images of South and Central Asians, and, later, members of the Middle Eastern community. She also co-founded the South Asia Solidarity Initiative, an organization dedicated to educating and advocating about social justice issues related to South Asia.
On the 2011 Occupy Wall Street Movement, Patankar noted, "I have never seen such commitment anytime before... Each day more and more people are joining the protests not only in New York but in many cities in America and Europe. People who were hardly activists are now finding themselves energized."
Publications and Activism
Prachi Patankar has written numerous articles and papers that have been published in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Women's Studies Quarterly, and many others. She has been particularly outspoken about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In an article she wrote for Al Jazeera, she states that many of the social movements she has been associated with, which promote "a democratic, inclusive India," clash with Prime Minister Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s beliefs. Patankar also spoke at a rally in 2014 held at Madison Square Garden in New York, stating, "(Modi's) victory of Prime Minister-ship with a paltry less than one third of the vote does not wash away his complicity in the killings, rape and displacement of thousands. The rise of Narendra Modi is the result of the anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, casteist, and hateful ideology that propaganda has tried to sanitize with the false rhetoric of development and economic progress, which advances the super-rich while betraying the poor and toiling billion."
Patankar has also spoken out against issues of cultural appropriation, most notably in an article she wrote for jadaliyya.com. She mentions that the popularity of the practice of yoga in the United States has led the Hindu American Foundation to create a campaign entitled "Take Back Yoga," which dictates that yoga must be credited to Hinduism. Patankar notes how this is an Islamophobic sentiment, stating that "Neither contemporary 'yoga' nor 'Hinduism' is age-old or homogenous. Actually, both were assembled in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in interaction with British colonial realities." She brings the article to an important point on the topic of appropriation at large: "Of course, there is then anger about that too... about 'white people' assuming that a South Asian-looking person knows how to pronounce these Sanskrit words. But aren’t many privileged South Asian Americans culturally appropriating and 'colonizing' the culture of peoples who actually live in South Asia?"