By Deepa S. Reddy
It is not unusual, particularly in the south of India, to wake up to the sounds of M. S. Subbulakshmi’s classic 1963 recording of Venkatesasuprabhatam, the chant to awaken Lord Venkateswara of Tirupati, playing in someone’s home, at a neighbourhood shrine, or on an early-morning devotional television programme. There was a time, Ramanujan (1989: 56) reminds us, when this chant could be heard only at a certain hour of the morning in Tirupati, but since M. S. ‘in her devotion cut a record of the chants, it wakes up not only the Lord, but anyone who tunes into All India Radio in far away places’. The exclusive mediating role of the officiating priests at the Tirupati Tirumala Devasthanam opened out first to state-controlled All India Radio, which in turn has ceded to even more diffuse systems of personal and market distribution, following the advent of cassette, then CD, then MP3 players and the growing accessibility and interactive possibilities of the Internet that allow individuals to become (re)broadcast sources in their own right. Contemporary Hindu devotional praxis is hardly identifiable any longer except as a phenomenon mediated—carried forward by commerce, dispersed by new technologies and in the process re-situated, reinterpreted and made public—in such evolving fashion (Anderson, 2003).
Much has been written about the ‘entanglement of religion and media’, the role of the media in imagining religious communities ‘both wider and narrower than the nation-state’ and the reconfiguring of the public sphere that invariably results (Meyer and Moors, 2006: 1–2). Writing of Muslim publics, Anderson takes the Internet to be an inherently diasporic ‘sphere of creole discourse and creole journeys, an intermediate space between more private worlds and those of public rituals’ (Anderson, 2003: 901; see also Anderson and Gonzalez-Quijano, 2004). Likewise, Eickelman and Anderson (1999: 1–2) note the emergence of new public spheres in tandem with new modes of communication, which ‘play a significant role in fragmenting and contesting political and religious authority’. ‘The asymmetries of the earlier mass media revolution’, they continue, ‘are being reversed by new media in new hands’. Even as established authorities go online with searchable databases of fatwas and other religious texts, Šisler (2007: 212) adds, marginalised or dissenting groups use the Internet to establish their own interpretive authority: ‘both minority and majority, compete for audiences’, enabling specific forms of knowledge production about Islamic jurisprudence.
The point here, however, is not just that new technologies facilitate the consolidation of new authorities, but that these allow religion to be ‘operationalised’, reinterpreted and strategically positioned to address a range of wider social, legal and political issues (Kelty, 2004). So, then, we ask: how is Hinduism operationalised via the layered processes of its mediation, and how, in the process of its mobilisation, does its operationalisation articulate divergent interests in a range of disparate fields and far-flung communities?
Commentators on mediated forms of Hinduism have tended to focus on visually heavy media, highlighting the processes by which these potently express and legitimise nationalist sentiment—new forms of political authority—both in colonial and contemporary India. Here, visual representations become important indices of the changing relationship between religion and politics; the performative role of the ‘religious and political procession that carved out a public sphere in colonial India’ is assumed by a proliferation of mass-produced chromolithographic prints produced from the 1870s onwards (drawing on Frietag, 2007a, 2007b; Pinney, 2004: 9). Even more recently, tele-serials like Sagar’s Ramayana, which aired in the late 1980s on the state-sponsored Doordarshan channel, for example, provides both context and vocabulary for the then-incipient Ramjanmabhumi movement which claimed the site of the Babri Masjid (Mosque) in Ayodhya to be Lord Rama’s birthplace (Farmer, 1996). Rajagopal’s important work on this subject argues that the ‘rhetoric of market reform and that of an insurgent cultural politics went public together, and interacted to express a new historical conjuncture’ (Rajagopal, 2001: 1–3). Communication, now at once personal and societal, offers multiple publics multiple modes of engagement in a retailed form of Hindutva that ropes together both the partial, shifting identifications of the ‘non-committed’ voter and the ideological commitment of ‘the dedicated convert’ (Rajagopal, 2001: 32, 2, 63–71). Brosius’ analyses of political videos make a far more direct connection between reorganised ways of seeing and ‘political mobilisation and ideological indoctrination’; video technologies are simply effective means by which to appropriate both traditional and popular ideas and icons and, by means of fetishised visions and hyperbolic spectacles, to monitor, control, ‘fix and standardise ways of seeing’ (Brosius, 2002: 268, 2005: 4; cf. also Davis, 1996).
Such ‘transposition of religious (and political) issues to new media’, write Eickelman and Anderson (1999: 14), ‘also changes the associative ecology of [religious] discourse, juxtaposing religious issues in innovative ways with commerce, entertainment, and the professions, and contributing to the greater pervasiveness of religious themes in an increasingly redefined public life’. Essays in this section variously explore the forms such ‘associative ecologies’ take, or the ways in which specific media produce interfaces between religion, on the one hand, and commerce, entertainment and the professions, on the other, each with consequences for the development of religion and/in public life. Bouillier’s essay (Chapter 27 in this volume), for example, provides an account of the ‘consumerism of religious performances’: the Amrit Mahotsav of the Nath Yogi sampradaya, which eclectically draws from multiple ancient traditions and contemporary practices such that a ‘profusion of ritual, devotional, and festive activities’ combines veneration of sacred ascetics with personal quests for salvation and even photo-fundraisers in order to cater to increasingly lay patrons and devotees. Clearly, such ‘mixed-media’ approaches allow the Nath Yogi sampradaya to benefit from the varied expertise of their devotees (in creating a sophisticated website, for example, or in taking portraits that can be sold to raise funds), thereby also reaching broader audiences.
Creative uses of media and new technologies do not merely offer retailed forms of religion reaching new consumers, however, but more and less actively engage multiple publics in the process. Anderson’s (1999: 50–51) distinction between the Internet as alternatingly a place of ‘publication’ and ‘conversation’ is useful here, as it draws attention to the manner in which media could be used to simply post information to now-virtual public bulletin boards or actively draw out conversations with different publics. Brosius’ essay (Chapter 31 in this volume) fleshes out the latter scenario, showing how the Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) Swaminarayan Sanstha creates media spectacles to educate and entertain devotees and outsiders alike on global scales, creating vast transnational networks while simultaneously cordoning off spaces of moral coherence built around ‘virtual ecumenes’ (see also Scheifinger, 2008). Quite counter-intuitively, even the Internet becomes an intimate space, for as BAPS reaches out to its publics via cultural, educational and public welfare activities, it also carefully modulates access to its sanctums. The result is a dispersed equivalent of a gated community: simultaneously inclusive and exclusive, concerned with addressing global audiences while always securing the integrity of spaces that morally and culturally cohere.
Brosius’ concern with BAPS’s mediatised modulation of its own devotional community finds a complement in Kim’s essay, which emphasises that devotees, near or far, are hardly the only group temples have to target anew. In its efforts towards institutional expansion, for example, BAPS in New Jersey is compelled to engage the ‘religious secularism’ of the American political landscape, therefore addressing everything from mundane queries about ‘traffic flow, building aesthetics, noise pollution, and even worries over cooking smells’ to more conceptual differences between ‘houses of worship’ and ‘religious centers’ in its conversations with Robinsville neighbourhood residents and town planning authorities (cf. also Gale, 2008; Gale and Naylor, 2002; and Nye, 2001). The cultural spectacle here gives way to more particular representations of Hinduism that speak to specific legal, religious and political realities. Thus, Kim underscores the fundamental situatedness of BAPS’s practices—its keen awareness of local compulsions by which it willingly modulates its practices, always with an eye to ensuring the stability of its own community and traditions.
Where BAPS associates itself with local environments by offering its proposed mandir as a space for religious and secular activities alike (youth camps, humanitarian work and as general green park-like environment besides), Warrier writes of how International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in the UK eschews some of its specific investment in the ‘universalism of Krishna Consciousness’ in order to teach about Hinduism, and therefore participate in Religious Education (RE) in UK schools. The 1988 Education Reform Act opens up an opportunity for ISKCON to simultaneously influence public opinion, fulfil social responsibility and significantly reposition itself—via a repositioning of Hinduism—as a legitimate voice on Hindu religiosity in a multiculturalist context now inclined to introduce ‘spiritual development’ to students in the public school system. Making Hinduism thus accessible means not only that it is systematised in specific ways, but also that it is tailored to suit both ISKCON’s agenda as well as that of RE educators in Britain.
Beckerlegge shows further that such strategies of here widening, there narrowing Hinduism so as to simultaneously address multiple publics have a history of their own. Swami Vivekananda’s use of photographic imagery contributed to creating a lasting ‘brand recognition’ for the Ramakrishna movement within India, while his representation of Ramakrishna’s teachings to audiences outside India carefully focused only on the most universalist themes, softening elements which ‘a more distant audience might find hard to comprehend or actually distasteful’. The movement has ever since been poised on the distinction between its two emphases: particular associations with Hindu traditions within India, and claims to universalism elsewhere. Seva as social welfare development becomes an operational paradigm elaborated in India, where museums and memorial houses celebrate Vivekananda as a national hero, whereas in the UK and the US seva is restricted largely to lectures and publications, the organisation’s activities otherwise taking the form of a cyber religion.
Taken as a group, the cases presented in this section lay bare the mechanisms by which the positioning, shape and objectives of the religious organisation mediate and manoeuvre, expand and contract Hinduism so as to render it a useful tool, a mediating force in its own right, within modern, local and global civic frameworks. Prevalent (mis)representations of Hindu belief and praxis prompt groups to self-consciously adopt vocabularies by which to communicate with the modern state and to establish definitive, legitimate presences in modern civic environments (see in this volume: Khanduri, Chapter 25; Reddy, Chapter 23). As Beckerlegge suggests has been the case since Vivekananda’s time, this capacity is enhanced by the deployment of the language of tolerance and universalism, as this is resonant in particular political contexts as the archetypal language of modern religion (Zavos, 2008, 2009; see also Aravamudan, 2006: 231–32). There is, then, a sense in which organisations are always in the process of seeking to reconstitute their authority in keeping with the requirements of particular, dominant public spheres (cf. Reddy and Zavos, 2009).
Such reformulations of religious authority invariably produce another, almost impossible association, pressing as they do against the dynamic boundary between the religious and the secular. Kakar’s examination of the chaat shop-turned-shrine dedicated to Madhuri Dixit in Tatanagar is a case in point, for it highlights the close association of fan adoration with Hindu devotionalism (bhakti), or the processes by which the one can be translated into the other (Chapter 8 in this volume). Krishna bhakti takes specific form because the beloved Telugu film star N. T. Rama Rao (NTR) played Krishna so effectively in the older mythological films; still images from the films themselves become the iconographic representations worshipped in family shrines. And even further, NTR rides this accumulated devotion to political victory in later years: cinema mediates expressions of adoration, which in turn enables particular sort of politics. Commenting on Bollywood films, Dwyer notes:
Very few films show an absence of the religious, and many that seem to have some ‘secular’ patterning of divine order through the operation of fate, virtue and redemption reshape these into meaningfulness by their divine or superhuman qualities, while also emphasising the spirituality of the individual. (Dwyer, 2006: 5)
This suggests a way of thinking about the mediation of Hinduism which pays attention to ritual inflections and discursive echoes, embodied practices of religiosities and spiritualities in shared popular cultural forms, in order to explore what Arvind Mandair (2006: 106) calls ‘religion-without-religion … beyond the over-determined distinction between church and state, or between religion and secularism’—the ‘secular imagination that Hinduism would produce’ (Dwyer, 2006: 136). The ‘intensely private space in the believer’s consciousness’ that Bharucha (1998: 40) writes about as being ‘activated during prayer, worship, meditation or ecstasy’ opens out to successive mediations of commerce, politics, cinema, printmaking and legal and other rhetorics of civic engagement, so much so that each is irrevocably transformed. The chapters in this section, as complements to and in conversation with others in this volume, draw out the processes by which such mutual transformations occur.
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