The world today is as furiously religious as it ever was… Experiments with secularized religions have generally failed; religious movements with beliefs and practices dripping with reactionary supernaturalism have widely succeeded.
Peter Berger
Indians have never been, and will never be “other worldly”. Their spiritualism, though lofty in its metaphysics, is mostly a means to harness divine support for power and pelf.
Pavan Varma
Those looking for evidence to back Peter Berger’s verdict cited above that ‘the world today is as furiously religious as it ever was…[and that] beliefs and practices dripping with reactionary supernaturalism have widely succeeded’, can do no better than to take a closer look at the religious landscape of India, the crouching tiger of the 21st century global capitalism.
India today is teeming with millions of educated, relatively well-to-do men and women who enthusiastically participate in global networks of science and technology. The Indian economy is betting its fortunes, at least in part, on advanced research in biotechnology and te drug industry, whose very existence is a testament to a thoroughly materialistic understanding of the natural world. And yet, a vast majority of these middle-class beneficiaries of modern science and technology continue to believe in supernatural powers supposedly embodied in idols, divine men and women, stars and planets, rivers, trees, and sacred animals. By all indications, they treat supernatural beings and powers with utmost earnestness and reverence and go to great lengths to please them in the hope of achieving their desires. Hindus are not the only ones who are becoming more religious —data shows that all the many religious communities of India are showing signs of growing religiosity. But since this book is about Hindus who make up the majority, we will be looking mostly at how the expressions of Hindu religiosity are changing.
That a great many Indians of all religious faiths are taking their gods with them into the new economy is hardly surprising. In this, Indians are no different from people in other fast growing economies like Brazil, China, and Russia: all of these countries are experiencing an explosion of religiosity. Besides, there are industrially advanced countries like the US which have always been highly religious. Contrary to classical theories of secularization, scientific, technological, and economic development does not invariably lead to a decline of religiosity. (We will look at these theories of secularization in the last chapter of this book and see if they help us explain the Indian experience of juggling with religion as it modernizes.)
However, what is noteworthy about the new religiosity of middle-class Indians is how openly ritualistic, ostentatious, and nationalistic it is. Unlike the previous generations that grew up on a mixture of Nehruvian exhortations for cultivating scientific thinking and the neo-Vedantic preference for a more cerebral, philosophical Hinduism, the new Hindu elite and middle classes revel in ritualism, idolworship, fasts, pilgrimages, and other routines of popular, theistic Hinduism, sometimes mixed with new age spirituality. It is not that these more ritualistic expressions of popular Hinduism were entirely absent from the cultural milieu of the educated, middle to upper classes of the generations that came of age in the earlier, more ‘socialist’ and secular era. What has changed is that the ritualistic aspects have moved from the privacy of the home and family, to the public sphere, the domain of pride and prejudice, politics, and profits. What has also changed is that the educated elite don’t feel that they have to defend their practices and beliefs against secularist finger-wagging (which has almost completely disappeared anyway). There is a new, unapologetic, and open embrace of religiosity in India today which wasn’t there in, say, the first half of our sixty plus years as a republic.
Overall, it seems fair to say that economic prosperity is bringing with it a new ‘rush hour of the gods’ in India. The expression ‘rush hour of the gods’ was first used by H. Neill MacFarland back in 1967, in a book bearing this title, to describe the proliferation of new expressions of religiosity in Japan in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It was a time when ‘new religions rose like mushrooms after a rainfall’, attracting millions of Japanese who were left battered after the war. The term ‘rush hour’ was supposed to signify the ‘frenetic quality’ of the mass-based, media-savvy popular religious movements that promised fulfilment of worldly goals through spiritual means to ordinary people.
Today’s India is obviously very different from post-war Japan. The Japanese rush hour, moreover, referred more to new religious cults rather than revival or reinvention of the traditional Shinto or Buddhist faith of the Japanese. Yet, one can legitimately speak of a rush hour of the gods in India, for the new religiosity displays that rather frenzied search for spiritual remedies for material concerns that characterized the Japanese case. Just like the Japanese religious movements were a response to turbulent and traumatic social change, the new Indian religiosity is in part a response to India’s headlong rush into the global economy with all the attendant social and cultural dislocations. Moreover, the new middle-class religiosity in India bears distinct undercurrents of the kind of muscular cultural nationalism that the Japanese displayed before the Second World War that left them defeated, and in despair.
There is no doubt that growing religiosity is, at least in part, a response to new socio-psychological needs created by neo-liberalism and globalization. But this turn to gods and faith was not inevitable, or unavoidable. It is not an unalterable law that all societies undergoing rapid change have to become more religious, for there are societies (especially in Europe) that cope with change in relatively secular ways. Nor is it the case that Indians are innately more religious than any other people, for what often passes as religion in India is a cover for ‘power and pelf’, to use Pavan Varma’s words cited above.
Far from being inevitable, public expressions of Hindu religiosity are growing because they are being facilitated by the Indian state and corporate interests, often in a close partnership. Despite the periodic panics about ‘Hinduism in danger’, and despite the often heard complaint that the Hindus face reverse discrimination in their own country, Hinduism is doing very well. The Indian state and its functionaries operate on the unstated assumption that Hinduism is not merely one religion among other religions of the Indian people, but rather the national ethos, or the way of life, that all Indians must learn to appreciate, if not actually live by. As a result, politicians and policymakers of all political persuasions think nothing of spending taxpayers’ money and deploying public infrastructure for promoting Hinduism in the guise of promoting Indian culture at home and abroad. In recent years, direct state and corporate sponsorship of expressly religious elements of Hinduism (as opposed to artistic and cultural aspects) has become more blatant, as is evident from provision of public funding for yagnas, kathas, and yoga camps; matching grants for organizing religious festivals and pilgrimages; promotion of temple tourism and pilgrimage circuits; providing land and state-financed infrastructure for temples, ashrams and priest training schools; providing funds, physical infrastructure, and official credentials for training in Vedic astrology, vastu, and other elements of Hindu priestcraft; and in some states, even directly paying the salaries of temple priests. In addition, many of India’s well-known family- owned business and industrial houses have a long history of contributing handsomely to building new temples and ashrams, and sponsoring religious events. In the absence of strong enough countervailing institutions and agencies that can offer secular alternatives to these well-funded initiatives, the public sphere in modern India has remained thoroughly intertwined with religious symbols and rituals of the majority religion.
We will unravel the workings of the state–temple–corporate partnership as we move along in this book. But this chapter has a rather modest aim: to describe the changing trends in popular everyday Hinduism. Too often these days, it is the radical religious-political or fundamentalist movements that get the bulk of attention, while the faith of ordinary believers who are not active participants of such movements remains unexamined. The chapter will try to fill the lacuna and focus on the religiosity of the emerging middle classes in India. Why the middle classes? They are the major beneficiaries of the neo-liberal reforms discussed in the previous chapter, and they are setting a new tone for the rest of the country when it comes to cultural trends and patterns of consumption. How their relationship with God and organized religion is changing as their socio-economic status is changing can tell us a great deal about the religious landscape of the rest of the country.
Nearly a quarter century of neo-liberal economic policies have swelled the ranks—and bank balances—of a new middle class made up of white-collar workers in the new Internet enabled global service industry (IT business office processing [BOP]), banking, accounting, insurance, hotels, tourism, etc.) Although numerically still much smaller than the old or traditional middle class of shopkeepers, businessmen, government officials, teachers, journalists, and landowning farmers, the new middle class is much admired for putting India on the global map as an emerging world power.
In one sense, India does not have a middle class, new or old. It is simply misleading to call 200 million or so buyers of Western-style consumer durables ‘middle class’ because they do not represent the statistical middle of the population. They are instead what Achin Vanaik calls ‘an elite of mass proportion’—the top 20–30 per cent of the population surrounded by a sea of utter poverty.
How big is this so-called middle class? Estimates vary. But the two most cited surveys put the numbers anywhere between 60 million and 300 million. According to the Indian National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), the term ‘middle class’ applies to those earning between Rs 200,000 and Rs 1,000,000 annually. By this definition, about 6 per cent of 1 billion Indians—about 60 million people—were middle class in the year 2000–01, while close to 22 per cent ‘aspiring classes’ were expected to catch up in a decade or so. But if middle class-ness is measured by ownership of middle-class goods—telephones, motor vehicles (cars or two-wheelers), and colour TV—close to one-fifth of India was already middle class in 2007, as the State of the Nation Survey by CNN-IBN revealed.
Over and above income and assets, class is a matter of taste and style. The new Indian middle classes hold Europe, the US States, Japan, and Australia as the benchmark for their taste in consumer goods and fashions. The very wealthy and the upper middle classes already have access to these lifestyles, while the lower middle classes aspire to get there. The older, more traditional segment of the middle classes, made up of government bureaucrats, public sector employees, family businesses, landed elite, on the other hand, is somewhat more ambivalent about Western fashions.
In matters of political beliefs and cultural values, the middle classes have decidedly said ‘No’ to the socialist and rationalist elements of the Nehruvian legacy. But they have yet to formulate an alternative vision of a good society. The result is a somewhat confused and contradictory mishmash of professed ideals and actual values and deeds.
Going by the recent Pew Global Attitudes Survey, the new middle class in India is overwhelmingly pro free market: a solid 89 per cent of Indian respondents supported free trade, 73 per cent welcomed foreign companies, and a solid 76 per cent were in favour of free markets ‘even though some people are rich and some are poor’. (Comparable figures for the US, the bastion of unrestrained capitalism, are 59, 45, and 70 per cent respectively.)
These pro-market views, however, are not matched by a strong sense of citizenship and social responsibility. The idea that their own prosperity is linked to the well-being of the rest of society is accepted in theory, but belied in practice every day. Indian elite and middle classes display an exceptionally high degree of tolerance for the inhuman levels of poverty and deprivation all around them, a trait that could well derive from the Hindu conception of karmic justice and the individualistic conception of salvation or moksha in Hinduism. To be sure, when asked, an overwhelming proportion—92 per cent in the Pew poll—say they want the state to step in and help the poor. But in reality, Indian upper and middle classes have always preferred privatized services in schools, hospitals, transportation, garbage collection, and, down the list, over public goods that the poor can also benefit from. Economists have shown that one sign of the overall apathy towards public goods is the relatively low contribution taxes made towards the total government revenue in India, even when compared to poorer neighbours like Pakistan and Sri Lanka. As Chakravarti Ram-Prasad observed recently:
[The haves in India]…do not, on the whole, extend a sense of solidarity to the poor; they often do not acknowledge the role of the state in their own rise or its capacity to solve any of the country’s problems; and they are in general, politically apathetic.
The irony is that the majority of the fresh entrants to the new economy—software engineers, doctors, biologists, MBAs, and others—owe their success in large part to the highly subsidized higher education made available by the same Nehruvian public sector undertakings that they now condemn. The new rich, in other words, are perfectly willing to kick the ladder they have clambered up on to get to where they are.
The new middle classes are ready to jettison another plank of the Nehruvian project—namely, secularism. An overwhelming majority—92 per cent in the Pew Global Attitudes survey mentioned earlier—claims that religion is very important to them. What is more, an overwhelming majority (90 per cent) claim that they want to keep God out of government. But their actions do not match their words: secularism as separation of state and the temple has never had much currency in India. The educated and privileged segments of Indian society have never shown even the faintest sign of resistance to the close involvement of elected leaders and government functionaries, in their official capacity, sponsoring and celebrating religious rituals in public. There is no sign of public protest against using government funds to support denominational schools, pilgrimages, yoga camps, yagnas, and kathas. The only time anyone gets agitated about state support for religion is when the religion in question is someone else’s religion, especially the supposedly ‘non-Indian’ religions like Islam and Christianity. The many direct and indirect subsidies to the faith of the majority are accepted—and expected—as business-as-usual. Given its comfort with open expressions of Hinduism in the public sphere, it is not surprising that the middle-class share of votes for the BJP and its NDA allies has been growing through the 1990s, while its support for the Congress has been declining. Analysis of election data shows that both in 1998 and in 1999, the combined middle-class vote received by the BJP and its allies was more than what the Congress received from the same class.
Another cultural trait of Indian middle classes that is relevant to understanding their religiosity is their view of modernity and science. By and large, Indian middle classes see themselves as modern in the sense of having seen through and rejected blind faith. In this milieu, you are expected to at least appear to be scientifically correct, and reject the superstitions of the unlettered and the mumbo-jumbo of priests. But the scientific correctness of the new middle classes turns out to be the exact opposite of what the advocates of rationalism —or ‘scientific temper’ as it is called in India—have in mind. Rather than cultivate a habit of critical thinking which subjects metaphysical assumptions of inherited traditions to a scientific challenge, educated Indians have shown a huge appetite for the pseudo-scientism being taught by neo-Hindu philosophers, modern gurus, and the peddlers of new age spiritualism. All the metaphysical concepts of traditional Hinduism—the existence of an all-pervasive, disembodied consciousness variously called atman, shakti, or prana; survival of the soul after death; reincarnation of the eternal soul in a new body; the existence of humours and innate essences in nature, or gunas; efficacy of yagnas in aligning human affairs with laws of nature; correspondences between the macrocosm (stars, planets, metals, directions, etc.), and the microcosm of human life—are accepted as if they are backed by scientific evidence. This kind of Vedic/Hindu scientism seems to have a wide appeal for those who consider themselves to be educated and modern.
The available survey data supports the general impression that globalization is proving to be good for the gods in India.
• According to the 2007 State of the Nation Survey conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) for IBN-CNN-Hindustan Times, Among Indians, the level of religiosity has gone up considerably during the last five years. While 30 per cent said they had become more religious during the last five years, only 5 per cent mentioned in negative.’
• The same survey poll also found that education and exposure to modern urban life seems to make Indians more, not less religious: ‘urban educated Indians are more religious than their rural and illiterate counterparts… religiosity has increased more in small towns and cities than in villages.’
• Hindus are not the only ones becoming more religious. The 2007 State of the Nation Survey shows that 38 per cent of Indian Muslims, 47 per cent of Christians, and 33 per cent of Sikhs, as compared to 27 per cent Hindus, claim to have become more religious in the last five years.
• Based upon the National Election Survey of 2004, the CSDS team reported the following: ‘We asked our respondents if their involvement with religious activity had increased in terms of attending religious functions, regular participation in prayers, temple going, etc. Over one-third respondents said that religiosity had increased among their family members…Among the educated, particularly among those educated above secondary level, the proportion of highly religious is higher. Among upper castes (27 per cent) and peasant proprietary castes (25 per cent) the highly religious are in high proportions (24 per cent). Both among Hindus and Muslims, the upper class persons are more religious than the poor (26 per cent Muslim rich and 25 per cent Hindu rich are highly religious.) So religiosity may be a pastime of the high and the rich!’
• The number of registered religious buildings in Delhi grew from a mere 560 in 1980 to 2000 in 1987, with similar trends reported from other parts of the country.
• In his much-acclaimed book, Being Indian (2004), Pavan Varma reports that around the turn of the millennium, the country had 2.5 million places of worship, but only 1.5 million schools and barely 75,000 hospitals. He bases this observation on the data from the 2001 census.
• Another measurable indicator of rising religiosity is the tremendous rise in pilgrimages. According to a recent study by the NCAER, ‘religious trips account for more 50 per cent of all package tours, much higher than leisure tour packages at 28 per cent’. The most recent figures show that in 2004, more than 23 million people visited the Balaji temple at Tirupati, while 17.25 million trekked to the mountain shrine of Vaishno Devi.
The phenomenon of rising religiosity in times of rapid technological modernization and economic growth is neither particularly new nor uniquely Indian: religions everywhere learn to adapt to, and coexist with, the infrastructure of modernity. But Indians are well known for being harmonious schizophrenics who live in many different worlds at the same time. Most educated Indians seem to switch effortlessly from the profane to the sacred, from the lab to the temple and back, without being troubled by the contradictions between the operative beliefs in the two spheres. As a scientist from the Indian Institute of Science described the situation some years ago, ‘many of us are double people. As scientists we are rational. But when we leave the laboratory and go home, we behave differently.’
This is the phenomenon of compartmentalization made famous in the Indian context by Milton Singer in his influential 1972 book, When a Great Tradition Modernizes. Singer admired the country’s unique ‘cultural metabolism’ that allowed Indians to keep religion and science/industry in two separate boxes, each with its own norms and its own objectives. Indians are supposed to be exceptionally good at compartmentalizing, thanks to what Alan Roland calls their ‘radar sensibility’ which makes them extraordinarily sensitive to what is expected of them in different contexts. Growing up in a society where different jatis have their own gods and their own cultural norms, the Indian way of thinking is supposed to be far more context sensitive and attuned to the particulars of any given situation than the universalizing tendencies of Judaeo-Christian religions and modern science. For many educated Indians, science classrooms and laboratories make up just one more particular context with its own peculiar rules and assumptions, which is supposed to coexist with other contexts with their equally valid rules and assumptions. Singer and his generation of India watchers were awestruck by modern Indians’ ability to take whatever they liked from the modern scientific world, and retrofit it into their ‘Great Tradition’, without disturbing the latter’s core axioms. Compartmentalization, followed by selective hybridization, was the key to India’s ‘modernization without secularization’—a development that Singer and other self-identified ‘critical traditionalists’ greatly admired.
So this phenomenon of keeping modern ideas and religious traditions in two separate compartments and mixing them as and when needed to basically validate and uphold the superiority of tradition is not new. What is new is how the contents of the compartment marked the ‘Great Tradition’ of Hinduism are being re-ritualized and re-enchanted.
The earlier generation of Indian elites was keen on redefining the essence of Hinduism in neo-Vedantic terms which de-emphasized rituals and temple worship in favour of a ‘rational’ mysticism centred on philosophical reflection and meditative contemplation of the impersonal Brahman. The rituals, the pujas, the pilgrimages, etc., were mostly left for the domestic sphere of wives and daughters and generally reduced in the time and energy they demanded. In Singer’s words:
[the captains of industry in Madras circa 1960 tended to]… downgrade the ritual observations, with a concurrent upgrading of devotional faith and a reformulation of philosophical and ethical tenets [of karma, dharma, and moksha]… for them, the ‘essentials of Hinduism’ consist in a set of beliefs and a code of ethical conduct than in a set of ritual observances…
This tendency to downgrade the popular, or laukik, in favour of the scriptural, or shastric, is a legacy of the Hindu renaissance that started in the 18th century but continued well into the 20th. Encouraged by the British and German Orientalists’ discovery and translations of the Rig Veda, the Upanishads, the Bhagvat Gita, and other Sanskrit texts, Hindu reformers began to use the scriptural texts as the standard for judging the worth and validity of folk rituals and beliefs. In addition, spiritualist currents in the West served as inspiration for neo-Hindu thinkers and reformers like Swami Vivekananda who declared yoga and meditation as the essence of Hinduism. Finally, there were the powerful voices of secular humanists and rationalists like Jawaharlal Nehru, B.R. Ambedkar, Periyar, M.N. Roy, Bhagat Singh, and others who called for a critical stance towards supernaturalism and mystical knowledge.
This de-ritualized, slimmed-down, philosophized, or secular-humanist version of Hinduism that appealed to the earlier generation of elites does not seem to satisfy the religious cravings of contemporary middle and upper classes. They are instead looking for jagrit (or awake) gods who respond to their prayers and who fulfil their wishes —the kind of gods who are personal, caring, and loving. The textual or philosophical aspects of Sanskritic Hinduism have by no means diminished in cultural prestige: they continue to serve as the backdrop of ‘Vedic sciences’ and new age spiritualism, and continue to attract a loyal following of spiritual seekers from India and abroad. But what is changing is simply that it is becoming fashionable to be religious in the theistic (saguna bhakti) tradition of popular Hinduism and to be seen as being religious in this manner. The new elites are shedding their earlier reticence about openly participating in religious rituals in temples and in public ceremonies like kathas, jagratas, and yagnas. If anything, the ritual dimension is becoming more public and more ostentatious.
India is simply too vast, varied, and complex for any one author, however industrious, to provide an exhaustive survey of changing religious practices all over the country. But the representative examples provided below will show a complex religious landscape where new rituals and even new gods are being invented, old gods are getting a facelift, and new gurus are mixing up spiritualism with capitalism, consumerism, and often with blatant Hindu chauvinism.
All societies have traditions, a set of myths, symbols, and practices passed down from generation to generation, which provide a certain degree of comfort that comes from familiarity. Societies undergoing rapid change, however, do not have the luxury of enjoying the psychological comfort that real traditions can provide because the social patterns for which the tradition made sense no longer exist. These societies end up inventing ‘traditions’, quite like museum shops manufacture ‘antiques’. Invented traditions are new symbols and rituals grafted on to the old ones, or are crafted afresh out of the store of ancient materials stored in the cultural memory of a society. But what is unique about all invented traditions, according to Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, is that not only the symbols and the rituals have to be invented afresh, but a ‘historic continuity has to be invented’ for them. In order to function as traditions, the invented symbols and practices have to establish a lineage with the older tradition. Something like this seems to be happening in the creation of new gods and new religious rituals in India today.
Christopher Fuller’s 2003 monograph, Renewal of Priesthood, is a good place to start our investigation of how temples are inventing new traditions to cater to the worshippers with a growing disposable income.
Fuller describes the installation of ‘golden cars’ in the famous Meenakshi temple in Madurai which the devotees can rent—for a fairly hefty fee—for ceremonial processions in the temple. These ‘cars’ are gold-and-silver plated chariotlike structures in which the idol of the goddess Meenakshi is taken around the temple perimeter in a procession led by priests, musicians, elephants, etc., all expenses paid for by the sponsoring party. The golden car at the Meenakshi temple has been a great hit: it used to be sponsored on alternate days in 1994–95, but by 2001 it was being taken out in a procession every day. The state government’s latest figures show that twenty five temples across the state have installed golden cars and ten more are working on it.
Two other invented rituals are drawing huge crowds. The first involves re-enactment of the divine Meenakshi–Sundareshwara wedding. At the fabled Meenakshi temple in Madurai, devotees can sponsor, for a fee, a re-enactment of the wedding of the goddess Meenakshi with Sundareshwara, a form of Lord Shiva. They can, for an additional fee, also worship the newly installed image of another god, Kalyanasundara. For yet another fee, devotees can also buy the privilege of placing a diamond crown and golden body plates on the idol of Meenakshi. These rituals largely attract women devotees, for they are supposed to help young women find husbands. These newly invented rituals were being requested at least ten times per month in 1994–95. Five years later, the wedding ritual had become so popular that two or three parties had to share one ritual by co-sponsoring it.
There was some concern among politicians and temple priests that these pay-for-prayer schemes might turn off the faithful and cause resentment among those who cannot afford them. But these schemes—especially the golden cars, the wedding re-enactment, and the placing of the diamond crown—have been hugely popular perhaps because they provide the better-offs with new opportunities to distinguish themselves from the less fortunate through more splendid and more ostentatious expression of devotion. The exclusivity of the new rituals apparently adds to their attraction.
In Tamil Nadu—a state for which such data exists—the demand for Sanskrit-and English-speaking priests with expertise in Agamic rituals, preferably with a degree from priest training schools, is outstripping the supply. This is a fairly good indicator of rising religiosity. Starting around 1980, temple priests began to be hired for performing Ganpati homa rituals for homes, shops, and other workplaces, including ultra-modern industries that are opening up in the state of Tamil Nadu. Ganpati homa consists of worship of Ganesh, together with a fire sacrifice carried out by a group of priests and chanters. The service lasts a couple of hours and is generally performed on an astrologically auspicious day and time. Other popular rituals include homas for Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. Astrologers often recommend the so-called navagraha homa to propitiate the malevolent Saturn, providing more work for the priests.
Another ritual that is gaining ground among politicians and businesses is the elaborate religious ceremony of kumbhabhisheka (or consecration) for temple renovations. Political parties compete against each other to fund temple renovations, while business houses make generous contributions. Jayalalitha, who served as the chief minister of Tamil Nadu from 1991 to 1996 and again from 2001 until 2006, took credit for personally raising millions of rupees for renovating hundreds of temples. Jayalalitha ran the state as if Brahminical Hinduism was the official religion of the state.
This practice of elected government officials participating in worship ceremonies for consecration of new temples is not limited to Tamil Nadu but takes place all over the country. It is commonplace for elected officials, from presidents and prime ministers to the members of state legislative assemblies, to participate in religious ceremonies for consecration of temples, birthdays of gurus, and other special occasions of religious significance. Without consciously intending to, secular India’s elected rulers seem to be re-enacting the pre-modern Hindu political system in which it was the duty of the king to sponsor temples and protect dharma.
All temple building and kumbhabhishekas are not political, however. Joanne Punzo Waghorne describes a great surge of consecrations of new temples in the middle-class colonies of Chennai. Temples have become sites for ‘educated people, intellectual people, to retain the old values’, as a devotee explained to Waghorne. This attachment to tradition, however, does not rule out innovation within it. Waghorne describes the installation ceremony of a unique idol in the Madhya Kailash temple in Adyar, an affluent colony close to the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai and patronized by the faculty, staff, and students. The idol represents a brand new hybrid god, half Ganesha, with his familiar elephant head, and half Hanuman, with his familiar ape-like features. The consecration ritual was equally innovative: unlike the traditional ceremony, the devotees consecrated the idol themselves without the help of the priests. The devotees saw it as an affirmation of democracy and equality.
At a more trivial level, many old religious observances are fmding new, more modern, and consumerist uses. For example, Akshay Trithiya, a day in early May considered astrologically auspicious for marriages and other new ventures, is now being celebrated as auspicious for buying gold. Traditionally, Akshay Trithiya was linked to child marriages. Even today, in many villages and small towns, young boys and girls are married off on this day because the alignment of the sun and the moon is supposed to bring exceptionally good karma for the parents. Among the more educated and urban people, however, the presumed auspiciousness of this day is getting a corporate makeover: The World Gold Council has declared Akshay Trithiya as auspicious for buying gold coins and ornaments. Thanks to relentless advertisement and special sales, phenomenal amounts of gold is bought and sold on this day every year. According to media reports, in the year 2006–07, ‘a very conservative estimate’ puts gold purchases on that day at 38 tons, compared with a daily average sale of 2 tons. Thus, the world view that reads human significance in the stars is not only surviving, it is finding new uses for the era of hyper-consumerism that is dawning on India.
And then there is the growing popularity of redesigned fire sacrifices, yagnas, or homas. A simply domestic homa or yagna was made the centrepiece of religious ceremony by the Arya Samaj in the nineteenth century. Over the last two decades or so, yagnas have become fashionable in a wide variety of religious organizations, selling everything from ‘scientific spirituality’ to prayers for rains and protection from diseases. Not surprisingly, politicians and political parties have caught on and these ‘ancient’ Vedic ceremonies have become political spectacles for electioneering or, worse, communal agitations.
The growing popularity of public-political yagnas is not really a revival, because they have always been a part of modern India’s public sphere. There are newspaper accounts of spectacular Vedic yagnas with ‘thousands of pandits reciting millions of Vedic mantras for weeks and weeks’ in February 1962 when the country was in a panic over astagraha, a particular conjunction of earth, sun, moon, and five planets. In 1970, there were even reports of the Jan Sangh (the predecessor of the BJP) organizing a Vedic sacrifice with the intent of killing Indira Gandhi through spells. But it turned out that the priest who was hired to carry out his deadly yagna himself died through electrocution while performing the ritual! Even though public yagnas are not entirely new, they have definitely become far more frequent, popular, and politicized.
A case in point is the worldwide popularity of the Gayatri Parivar, a Haridwar-based organization which teaches ‘scientific spirituality’ through the recitation of the Gayatri mantra, accompanied by collective performance of yagnas, often on a truly massive scale involving many thousands making oblations to 1008 fires simultaneously. Started by Shriram Sharma in 1953 and now headed by his son-in-law, Pranav Pandya, a medical doctor, the Parivar now runs a research institute and a deemed university in Haridwar, meditation and research centres in Mathura and Noida, and has branches in the US, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand and claims more than 70 million members worldwide. The members are largely professionals like doctors, engineers, lawyers, and corporate CEOs in India and abroad.
The crafty genius of the Gayatri Parivar lies in redesigning ancient Vedic mantras and rituals—like the famous asvwamedha yagna—for the twenty first century by smuggling in scientific-sounding language. Take, for example, the Parivar’s definition of yagna—which it calls ‘yagyopathy’—reproduced here from its website:
Yagna, a scientific method aimed at the finest utilization of the subtle properties of sacrificed matter with the help of thermal energy of fire and the sonic vibrations of the mantras…Slow combustion, sublimation and most prominently, transformation into vapour phase of the sacrificed herbal and plant medicinal and nutritious substances takes place in the yagya-fire. Inhalation therapy and environmental purification are the paramount applications of yagna apart from the enormous sublime impact and auspicious spiritual effects called with reverence in the Shastric literature.
In other words, yagnas are really about vaporizing and inhaling the beneficial chemicals from the burnt offerings.
Similarly, the Gayatri mantra’s ‘astonishing power’ becomes a matter of ‘sonic vibrations’ and ‘energy-fields in the subtle sphere’. As Dr Pranav Pandya, the spiritual head of the Gayatri Parivar explains, the Gayatri mantra is supposed to have supernatural properties because the ‘ultrasonic wave patterns’ of the 24 syllables of the mantra are supposed to ‘positively affect the subtle centres of human body’. What is more, just reciting the mantra is supposed to connect you to the ‘energy field’ created by millions upon millions of pious people who have been chanting this mantra since Vedic times.
The Gayatri Parivar has made this energy-based metaphysic concrete in its very popular, horse-free recreation of the famous horse sacrifice or asvamedha yagna. In its unique and original interpretation of this ancient and rather gory ritual in which a sanctified horse was killed, the Gayatri Parivar has declared that the asva, or horse, in asvamedha actually means ‘demon animals of evil tendencies’ within your heart and soul which the yagna, accompanied by chants of the Gayatri mantra, is supposed to tame. This novel interpretation is combined with another rather democratic innovation: as many as 1008 yagna fires are burned simultaneously and hundreds and thousands of people, regardless of caste and class, are invited to pour ghee, herbs, grains, and other sanctified material into the fires while chanting the Gayatri mantra. Considering that the Gayatri mantra was meant to be imparted only to the twice-born boys at the time of the upanayana (initiation) ceremony, using it on a mass scale without consideration of caste and gender is undoubtedly democratic in its spirit. While the yagna is going on, priests are at hand for performing life-cycle rituals like namkaran (naming ceremony) and even marriages. The collective chanting and vaporizing of ghee, herbs, and grains is supposed to release massive amounts of ‘spiritual energy’ which gets stored in the ‘energy field’ that can be accessed by others later.
These mass yagnas are spreading from the north into the rest of the country. The temple town of Tirupati hosted an asvamedha, as did the state of West Bengal. The Gayatri Parivar’s centrepiece, the asvamedha, is also spreading into other countries with significant NRI communities: the yagna has been performed in Chicago and Los Angeles in the US, and more recently in New Zealand.
Who participates in these mammoth rituals? The Gayatri Parivar attracts the professional middle classes and the well-to-do NRI community. Along with its central theme of popularizing the Gayatri mantra and yagnas, the Parivar also offers courses in ‘moral upliftment and stress management’ to government and private sector professionals. The Gayatri Parivar’s clients include well-known public sector enterprises like Bharat Heavy Electricals, inuted the National Thermal Power Corporation, Sales tax department, labour department, Department of Education, and a number of national banks.
The Gayatri Parivar’s utterly novel and scientific interpretation of the Gayatri mantra and the horse yagna is clearly an invented tradition. It invents a whole new way of explaining the significance of a ritual with an ancient lineage in a language borrowed from modern science.
The other notable re designing of Vedic rituals is happening in Maharashtra, where the more complex rauta ritual is being revived. In 1992, Timothy Lubin, an American scholar of Hinduism, observed—and inadvertently became the chief guest of!—a month—long Vedic ritual performed by a holy man, Ranganath Selukar Maharaj, in a small town called Gangakhed in rural Maharashtra. The yagna was an expensive and complex affair, involving 17 priests working together and performing an assortment of complex ceremonies prescribed by classical Sanskrit ritual rulebooks or sutras. These rituals have become something of an institution in Maharashtra where Selukar has been hosting them every year since 1980. In recent years, Selukar and his followers have held similar yagnas in Pune, Delhi, and Haridwar as well. Selukar hosted a year-long yagna from April 1999 to May 2000. These yagnas seem to attract the educated and relatively well to do in small towns and rural areas, mostly shopkeepers, clerks, teachers, and landowning farmers.
Even though these yagnas are themselves not explicitly communal, Selukar belongs to the Ananda Sampraday of the Dattatreya sect which, for historical reasons, has had adversarial relations with Muslims. A very brief summary of these historical antagonisms may be useful here. Dattatreya is considered an avatar of Vishnu, along with portions of Shiva and Brahma, popular in Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Gujarat. The worshippers of Dattatreya admit five forms of Vishnu-Datta. Two of these forms are historical Maratha foes of Muslims: Ramdas Swami (1606–82) is claimed by his followers to be the guru of Shivaji, the Maratha warrior king who successfully defied Mughal rule to establish an independent Maratha kingdom in the Deccan; and Ranganath Swami (1612–84), the founder of the Anand Sampraday who also has a reputation for militant advocacy of the Hindu cause against the Mughal rule. Selukar himself comes from a family who fought for the freedom of Marathwada from the Nizam of Hyderabad around the time of freedom. These communal undercurrents are coming to surface in Karnataka where, as we will see below, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bajrang Dal and the BJP are demanding a Sufi shrine to be turned into a temple to Dattatreya.
The growing popularity of elaborate yagnas in the private and public sphere is matched by political uses of these rituals. Elaborate fire rituals have become popular tools for appealing to Hindu voters and for mass mobilizations for communal and political causes.
Yagnas with elected representatives acting as the jajman, or the sponsor, have become so routine that hardly anyone objects any more to the open sponsorship of a majority religion by elected representatives of a secular state. A culture of political darshan is emerging in the country in which public displays of spiritualism have come to constitute a new form of statecraft. When the BJP–JD government in Karnataka wanted to showcase its ‘pro-poor’ initiatives even as it was giving subsidies to private enterprises, it organized a massive public yagna. Even more blatant was the utterly opportunistic use of yagnas and pujas at taxpayers’ expense by Digvijay Singh, the Congress chief minister of Madhya Pradesh (1993 to 2003). When locked in a fierce election battle in 2003 against Uma Bharati, the firebrand Hindutva leader, Digvijay Singh, thought nothing of ordering his 50 cabinet ministers to hold yagnas and Bhagvat Gita recitations in their constituencies, followed by pujas during the ten day Ram Navmi festival. Not to be left behind, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, vice president of India (2002 to 2007), is known to have a fondness for yagnas. He is reported to have participated in many high-profile yagnas for rain and for general advancement of Vedic culture in his capacity as the vice president.
Because the rituals of yagnas are familiar and because a whole lot of people, from the highly educated to the unlettered, are drawn to them out of their faith, they have become a handy tool for political mobilizations. Take, for example, the VHP–Bajrang Dal agitation to ‘liberate’ the Guru Dattatreya Baba Bundan Dargah, a Sufi–Hindu place of worship in Chikmagalur, Karnataka. For centuries, this shrine has been a place of common worship for both Hindus and Muslims. But for the last decade or so, the Sangh Parivar has been trying to do an Ayodhya in Karnataka: it claims that the shrine is built on the very same spot where Lord Dattatreya did his penance. The VHP and the Bajrang Dal have been demanding that the shrine be handed over to Hindus and idols of Dattatreya be installed. Perhaps through the influence of Selukar on the Dattatreya sect, massive yagnas, attended by thousands of saffron-clad men and women, have been the major mode of mass mobilization in this trouble spot in Karnataka.
In the run-up to the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, yagnas have replaced yatras as the preferred mode of mobilization for the Hindu right. In the communally sensitive state of Karnataka, for example, the VHP organized a hundred yagnas in temples all across the state where ‘those gathered will be administered oaths to fight for Hindu religion’. In Orissa, where thousands of Christians have been displaced by violent attacks by Hindus in December 2008, Ashok Sahu, the BJP candidate for the Lok Sabha elections, is ‘conducting mahayagnas in all the villages he visits, forcing the Kondh tribals to observe rituals they have never performed before’.
Even the Left social movements, including even the Communists, are not beyond using religious rituals for political use. In one of the most shameful examples of political exploitation of religion, top-ranking representatives of the Left Front government of West Bengal, including the district magistrate, police superintendent, and the director of the state’s industrial development corporation, participated in a bhoomi puja ceremony for blessing the land that had been forcibly acquired and leased to the Tatas.
Political parties of all stripes find public display of ‘spiritualism’ useful, and both indulge in them to suit their own purposes. The net loser is often the public exchequer, for many of these religious ceremonies are funded at least in part by state and local governments. But an even bigger loser is the public sphere which continues to get more mired than ever in public displays of religiosity.
Obviously not all of those who participate in public yagnas have any political axe to grind, and not all yagnas have communal overtones. Just because the BJP and the VHP use yagnas as a tool for communalization does not mean that all yagnas are communal, or that the good, honest believers who volunteer their time and money to groups like the Gayatri Parivar support Hindutva causes. Likewise, those who throng to Selukar’s elaborate performances will not necessarily agree with the VHP–Bajrang Dal agitation over the shrine in Karnataka. Religious behaviour does not line up so cleanly either with class interests or with political views. But by so uncritically accepting the fantastic interpretations of modern gurus, and by not taking a stand against the open use of religious rituals by the representatives of the state, the educated classes have allowed these rituals to saturate the public sphere. Indeed, participation by the elite classes, many with advanced degrees in most advanced sciences, only adds to the legitimacy of these rituals.
Not only are new rituals being fashioned out of the old, but gods and goddesses are getting a makeover as well. Local gods and goddesses, which until recently were associated with the more plebeian masses, are finding new homes in swanky new suburbs with malls and multiplexes. In the southern part of the country, village goddesses or Ammas, that once protected the health of the people and the fertility of the soil, are being adopted by the middle classes—a process that has been dubbed ‘gentrification of gods’. In the northern part of the country, there has been a tremendous growth in pilgrimage to Mata temples, or shakti peeths (sacred spots where various parts of the body of the goddess Sati are supposed to have fallen).
A recent study of roadside temples by U. Kalpagam in the city of Chennai brings out the dynamics of gentrification of Mariamman, the southern version of Shitala Mata, the smallpox goddess. The history of one particular roadside temple, the Sri Nagakanniamman temple in the Mylapore–Mandaveli area of South Chennai, is illustrative. Nearly 30 years ago, a flower seller, a woman by the name of Kanniamma, put a stone under the sacred peepul tree to create a small shrine for the goddess. Over the years, the stone has grown into a multi-temple complex which is an ‘amalgam of tribal, Dalit, and Vedic gods and goddesses’, with Amma’s shrine coexisting with a shrine for Hanuman and shrines for Ganesha and Ayyappan. The day-to-day affairs of the temple are managed by a neighbourhood association made up of local businessmen, shopkeepers, and residents. Through this process of gentrification, the gods of Dalits and backward castes are brought within a style of worship acceptable to the educated middle classes, which includes hiring Brahmin priests, making only vegetarian offerings, and conducting Vedic and Agamic consecration ceremonies.
A very similar process of gentrification is going on in the middle-class Mylapore neighbourhood of Chennai. Joanne Waghorne describes the renovation, sanctification, and reconsecration of the famous Kolavizhi Amman temple with Vedic rites by Brahmin priests. Like the gentrification of the Amman shrine above, in this case, too, there was an old ‘Mundakakkanni Amman who sat under a holy tree for two centuries in a simple stone body’, and who now has a ‘solid silver face, covering her conical stone body. Her tree and thatched hut [have been] incorporated into a brightly painted mandapa, walled and marked by two ornate gopuras’. The village goddess, who used to protect the fertility of the land in villages, is moving to chic new suburbs. To quote Joanne Waghorne:
Many old seats of feminine power of goddesses attracted ardent new patrons among the middle classes…Open adherence to such forms of worship and such deities in south India once marked the religious divide between the ‘educated’ and ‘uneducated’…yet in the 1990s, she appears to unify a new middle class world. The former village shakti pithas flourish in neighbourhoods where the middle classes have built their own homes.
The process of gentrification has clear elements of Sanskritization—Agamic mantras and vegetarian offerings, for example—by which the village goddess is made more acceptable to the religious sensibilities of the middle-class urbanites. Yet, there are also glimmers of a new, more democratic culture in which the differences between the elite and non-elite gods, classes, and castes are not strictly adhered to in temple rituals and festivals.
The fast growing cult of Adi Para Shakti at Melmaruvatur, close to Chennai, is another case of an upwardly mobile village goddess described in great detail by Vasudha Narayanan, a well-known scholar of contemporary Hinduism. This temple complex is visited by tens of thousands of pilgrims all clad in red, who believe that the mother goddess has incarnated herself into the body of the temple’s male oracle, Bangaru Adigalar, who they call ‘mother’ or Amma. Speaking through her incarnation/oracle, the goddess addresses contemporary issues of caste, ecology, and world peace. Women devotees run many of its spiritual fellowships and associations; taboos against menstruating women and widows are not observed; and all distinctions of caste are set aside as all worshippers wear red (meant to signify the colour of blood common to all humanity) and address each other as ‘shakti’, implying all have divinity within them. The goddess is ‘conscious of social and global problems’, and frequently directs her oracle to conduct elaborate yagnas and other religious rituals for ‘drought-stricken areas, for increasing natural resources, and for world peace’. Starting with a miracle of a neem tree in 1966, the temple has grown into a major pilgrim complex complete with prayer halls, ashrams, schools, and hospitals.
Another phenomenon worthy of note is the reincarnation of old gods and goddesses in new forms. Mariamman, who was once venerated as the goddess of smallpox, has been reinvented as the AIDS-Amman, or the ‘mother who will cure AIDS’, in the state of Karnataka. This new goddess is an invention of H.N. Girish, a high school science teacher who invented the goddess presumably to teach people about the causes and precautions against HIV-AIDS. (What does a goddess have to do with the AIDS virus is not a question that this particular science teacher cared to ask!) It has been argued by those sympathetic to mobilizing religious beliefs for secular purposes that this goddess will serve only educational purposes. But reports from the field belie the expectation that a goddess can be so easily divested of her supernatural and sacred dimension, or a temple so easily turned into a science classroom. Those who come to the temple are not looking for medical information. Rather, they come to beseech the goddess for protection and good health.
While the AIDS-Amman temple is a simple affair and does not seem to be drawing too many visitors, many gentrification projects are carried out at a truly stupendous scale and involve huge contributions from big businesses. A case in point is the gentrification of the Mariamman temple in the small urban centre of Pudukkottai through the largesse of TVS Motors. The TVS Group is a major benefactor of the Indian Culture and Heritage Trust, which is undertaking major temple renovations in Tamil Nadu. The TVS family, who are Iyengar Brahmins, see themselves as restorers of the tradition in the face of growing materialism and that perhaps explains their interest in temple restorations in the state.
The contemporary boom in the construction and renovation of Hanuman shrines has also been attributed to middle-class patronage. Philip Lutgendorf, who has studied the growing popularity of Hanuman across the nation, reports that there are ‘more shrines to Hanuman than to his exalted master (Ram)’. Hanuman has not only become wildly popular, but there is also a rush to install ever bigger idols of the monkey god, including the gigantic 70 foot Hanuman gracing the ashram of Sai Baba in Puttparthi in Andhra Pradesh. Sai Baba’s Hanuman, however, now stands dwarfed by two even bigger Hanumans in Delhi measuring 91 and 108 feet.
Signs of the growing popularity of Hanuman are easy to spot. The long winding lines of devotees outside the Hanuman temple in Connaught Place, the upscale downtown of New Delhi, gives a pretty good idea of Hanuman’s popularity among the relatively well heeled. Keeping in mind the pressures of time, the Connaught Place temple has become a one-stop, full-service temple where devotees can pray to other popular divinities—Durga and Lakshmi, and the wish granting Santoshi Ma being the most popular, along with the perennial favourite, Ganesha. Given that Hanuman is traditionally considered a men’s deity (because of his celibacy and physical strength), it is quite remarkable that his popularity is growing among women. According to Lutgendorf, women think of him as a god who is responsive to their wishes for sons and the material welfare of their families. The appeal of Hanuman cuts across gender as well as class. Another Hanuman temple in a less affluent area close to the cremation grounds draws equally large crowds of the less well-off devotees from the suburbs of Delhi and even the neighbouring states.
The natural question is why? What is fuelling this middle-class devotion to less elite gods? Devotees themselves provide a pretty cogent explanation: they see these local gods as being far more intimately familiar with the needs and desires of ordinary people than the ‘great gods’ who live up there in the celestial sphere. As Chris Fuller puts it:
There is no doubt that the great deities, especially Vishnu and Shiva, are generally held to be unresponsive and even angered by futile efforts to persuade them to act in specific ways. Many little deities, by contrast, are thought to be open to the more or less direct bargaining about what they will do if such and such offering is made during worship.
In a similar vein, deities like Hanuman are described as ‘made to order middle class gods’ because they serve as middlemen, or messengers, between the worldly affairs of men and women and the celestial beings. As they confront old and new afflictions (sankat) in their lives, the middle classes are drawn to gods who can serve as ‘middlemen who can expedite access to the required persons and sources’—someone, in other words, who can put in a sifarish (a recommendation) on their behalf to the higher-up gods.
Rather than retiring their gods, as the secularization theory expected, Hindus are remaking their gods as they modernize. The local deities who were once considered guardians of the village, and who protected against scourges like smallpox and other illnesses, are now being beseeched for blessings for success and sanctity in an increasingly competitive, urban environment.
There has always been a great affinity between the well-heeled Indians and miracle working gurus, many of them self-proclaimed avatars of God. All the well-known modern gurus fish for followers in the same fish bowl of upwardly mobile Indians, non-resident Indians, and Western seekers. It is only to be expected that as Indian middle classes come to acquire the lifestyle of their NRI and Western counterparts, they will come to share their taste in new age-ish spirituality —only more so, as so much of the new age in the West has borrowed heavily from Hindu and Buddhist traditions in the first place.
The modern gurus, who are practically CEOs of huge business empires, know that they operate in a highly competitive spiritualism market and try to differentiate their products and services accordingly. Spiritual seekers, too, shop around for just the right guru, often trying out many before settling on one. Depending upon their bent of mind and their spiritual needs, they go for one of the three main types of gurus: type I, the miracle making gurus; type II, the philosophical gurus who specialize in expounding on Vedic wisdom; and type III, the yoga–meditation–alternative-medicine gurus who may or may not combine yogic postures and breathing techniques with new age techniques of astrology/tarot, vastu/ feng shui, reiki, pranic healing, aromatherapy, etc. The three categories are not watertight: gurus offering miracles will also offer philosophical discourses and new age techniques; those into Vedic heritage will not shy away from astrology, yagnas, and stories of miracles of their own gurus; while those offering yoga and alternative medicine will also offer reiki, acupuncture, biorhythms, colon irrigation, and the like. For their part, spiritual seekers also mix and match their gurus, and sometimes they move from one type to another, depending upon the need. On top of it, doing meditation in an ashram does not prevent anyone from visiting a temple or attending a yagna. India’s religious supermarket is spiritual seekers’ dream come true: it gives them an enormous choice of ways of exploring and expressing their religiosity.
While Satya Sai Baba is the very archetype of the miracle working guru, he faces fierce competition from Mata Amritanandamayi, the famous ‘hugging guru’. Unlike Sai Baba who actually materializes physical objects through his supernatural powers (or is it magic?), Amritanandamayi encourages her followers to think she is making everyday miracles happen on their behalf. Either way, miracles— extraordinary happenings that defy all known laws of nature —are of huge importance to those who seek deity-saints. Miracles serve as the visiting card of God in the human body of the guru. Indeed tangible, physically observable miracles —and not just a promise of spiritual transformation—serve as the evidence which seems to prove the godliness of their chosen. As a result, the devotees end up convinced that their faith is rational, because they have actually seen the miracle with their own eyes.
Mata Amritanandamayi, or Amma as she is called by her followers, is a self-proclaimed avatar, an incarnation of shakti, or female divine energy. Her fame rests on the power of her embrace: devotees describe great spiritual, emotional, and material benefits from being embraced by Amma. But on special occasions, Amma ‘sheds her human form’, dons the regalia of a goddess, and reveals her ‘divine aspects’ to her devotees. Devotees come for the motherly embrace, but often stay for the miracles which seem to cement their faith.
The devotees see Amma as a ‘divine stage manager’ who takes care of their well-being and safety, while liberating them from their bad karma accumulated from indulging in Western-style consumerism. Indeed, Amma actively encourages them to trust her as a helpless infant trusts her mother. She urges her followers:
[to cultivate] an attitude of complete surrender, profound love for the deity [i.e., herself, because she is supposed to be ‘identical’ with Krishna, Devi and Brahman] and extreme humility. She urges them to achieve an emotional state of helplessness, where they cry out in utter longing and despair, and plaintively seek divine help to see them through the travails of this life…
Amma’s followers take this advice seriously. They ascribe every little lucky break they get—finding a gas station when the car is running low on gas, for example, or making a train reservation—to their guru’s grace. But how is this relationship of dependence and the illusion of miracles created and sustained? The simple answer is through old-fashioned supernaturalism, complete with pujas and astrology. Amritanandamayi teaches the traditional Hindu philosophy of karma and rebirth and explains the travails of her followers as a result of the karmic burden they have accumulated from previous births and from excessive consumerism and the excessive reliance on reason and intellect that comes with modernity. She offers them a menu of ritual prayers and observances which promise to burn off all the negative karmic residues. Her embrace itself is supposed to transfer her karma-destroying ‘energy’ to the devotees. But beyond the hug, she prescribes a whole number of pujas, the most popular of them being the grahadosha nivarana puja, intended to counter the influence of malevolent planets on one’s horoscope. For those who may not care for pujas, Mata Anandamayi prescribes mantra chanting and meditation. There is something for everyone, without anything fixed for everyone.
Regardless of the competition, India’s best-known living God–Satya Sai Baba–continues to have a devoted following. Miracles, wrapped up in deeply conservative and nationalistic Hinduism, make up the bulk of the substance of Satya Sai Baba’s teaching. To the faithful, however, Sai Baba’s magic is evidence of his divinity. Through his magic, Sai Baba both sanctifies consumerism and, at the same time, brings it under the moral guidance of the spiritually superior Hinduism.
While many are content to accept miracle working gurus, others in the same socio-economic class hanker for more philosophy and less magic. Those with a more philosophical bent may still consult their astrologers and their vastu shastris, do their obeisance to miracle making god-men/women and may even host an occasional yagna or go on a pilgrimage. But all that doesn’t satisfy them entirely and they want more philosophical depth to their spiritual experiences. For these believers, there are the type II gurus, the ones who can talk about the intricacies of the Vedas, Vedanta, and Bhagvat Gita in an idiom that the seekers are comfortable with.
Swami Dayananda Saraswati—not the Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj, but the founder of the more recent Hindu mission headquartered in the US—is the very model of a type II guru. Swami Dayananda Saraswati started out as a missionary of the Chinmaya Mission, but later took off on his own. He runs a gurukul called Arsha Vidya in the rolling hills of Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, USA, which advertises itself as a centre for ‘traditional study of Advaita Vedanta, Sanskrit, Yoga, Ayurveda, Astrology, and other classical Indian disciplines’. Arsha Vidya has established two branches in India, one in Coimbatore and the other in Rishikesh. With a growing cohort of disciples associated with his American and Indian operations, Swami Dayananda Saraswati has emerged as an influential preacher of ancient wisdom both in India and the US.
Swami Dayananda has a substantial following among the industrialists of Chennai. The Swami and the representatives of his Indian mission speak before packed halls of well-to-do business folks and professionals. Chris Fuller and John Harriss, two British sociologists, followed the guru and had intensive conversations with his followers in order to understand the attraction. What they found is a very good description of the widespread appeal of the so-called ‘karma capitalism’ to the captains of capitalist enterprises in India and abroad.
What attracted the Chennai capitalists to the guru the most was his demeanour: a pious and learned man, well versed in the scriptures, and yet fully at ease in the modern boardrooms. His teachings, especially his interpretations of the Bhagvad Gita, resonate well with their own belief in selfmade men and women. Dayananda interprets the Vedic heritage to mean that success or failure are not social but individual problems, and that individuals alone, through their own karma, can achieve moksha in this life, here and now, by freeing themselves from a sense of inadequacy. He interprets the teachings of Lord Krishna in the Gita to mean that desires are a ‘manifestation of divinity’ which should not be renounced but brought under control. Dayananda thus turns the Bhagvad Gita into a ‘plan for living’ which sanctifies desire for this-worldly success and riches. Incidentally, Swami Dayananda is but one of the many Indian gurus who have taken Indian philosophy to business schools and corporate boardrooms abroad, a trend that has been dubbed ‘karma capitalism’.
Another feature that seems to attract businessmen to gurus like Dayananda is their insistence on a consonance between modern science and ancient Hindu wisdom. Hinduism, in this perspective which is repeated endlessly by each and every modern guru, is as scientific and as universally valid within its own axioms as Newtonian physics is within its own parameters. The presumed scientificity of Hinduism is a source of much pride for modern Hindus as it sets their faith apart from that of the religions of the book which appear more dogmatic.
Finally, there is the message of return to traditions in order to become fully modern that resonates powerfully with those who want to beat the West without themselves becoming westernized. Dayananda insists that by becoming more truly and more fully Hindu, Indians can best tackle the problems of the modern world: tradition is modernity and to go forward, Indians must face backward. That conservative message is very attractive to many upper-class Indians who have never been at the receiving end of the kind of restrictions tradition can impose.
But it is neither the miracle making, reason defying type I, nor the Veda expounding type II, but the yoga–meditation type III gurus who have taken the country by storm in recent years. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Swami Ramdev top the list of type III gurus.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has built a global spirituality programme which goes by the happy name of Art of Living, popularly known as AOL. The core of Art of Living is sudarshan kriya, a technique for rapid and rhythmic breathing which is supposed to bring the breather in contact with his/her spiritual self which, following the Vedantic axiom, is simultaneously the cosmic self. This contact with the cosmic self (or cosmic energy as it is also called) is supposed to ensure success in worldly ventures while bringing mental peace. The Art of Living claims 20 million members and a teaching staff of 5000 in 140 countries around the world. It is a highly profitable enterprise with a yearly income running into tens of millions of dollars, most of it from the fees it charges for teaching the breathing technique to people with high incomes and stressful jobs in India and abroad. Corporations like Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Cisco Systems hire AOL teachers to conduct seminars at $150 per person. Fees in India range from Rs 1500 for a basic course to Rs 2,00 for an advanced course.
This focus on turning the body into a conduit to the Cosmic Self is pretty much in the tradition of transcendental meditation of Mahesh Yogi and his famous disciple, Deepak Chopra. (Ravi Shankar and Deepak Chopra are guru bhais: both received their training under Mahesh Yogi.) Together, they represent the cutting edge of the new age phenomenon in India. They have managed to reinterpret Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Vedanta, and the Bhagvat Gita as manuals of material success in the modern world. (Deepak Chopra even calls his interpretation of the Yoga Sutras Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.) Cultivation of inner spirituality becomes the means for attaining and enjoying the best of the material world.
What sets AOL apart is its popularity with generation next: reportedly 60 to 70 per cent of its members are below 30 years of age, and most them work in the IT industry. Part of the attraction is simply stress relief: the disciples report that Sri Sri’s approach to yogic breathing eases tension and relieves the pressures of their tension-filled professional lives. The ‘rock satsangs’ in a Bangalore ashram are very popular as well and draw a crowd of nearly 3000 people every evening after work where they sing along with and dance to devotional songs. Another reason that followers themselves offer for their attraction to AOL is that it places very few demands on them: ‘There is no reading of scriptures. It’s very practical,’ as one follower explained. The only question is, as another member put it, ‘are you happy?’
Finally, mention must be made of the enormous popularity of Swami Ramdev, the yoga teacher and Ayurvedic doctor. His yoga camps draw tens of thousands who pay to attend his lecture-demonstrations and millions more watch him on TV. In his many discourses on TV, he offers ‘complete cure’ in ‘weeks, if not in days’, of ‘diseases from A to Z’, from ‘common cold to cancers’, including cholera, diabetes, glaucoma, heart disease, kidney disease, leprosy, liver disease, so on and so forth. There is practically nothing that his method of Divya Yoga, alone, or in combination with his own Ayurvedic formulations, cannot cure. He claims that all his ‘miraculous’ cures are not merely ‘confirmed by science’, but are claimed to be ‘science in its purest form’. When examined objectively, the quality of his medicines and the claims he makes for yogic cures are highly dubious. But that has not deterred him from developing a huge following in big cities and small towns in India. He is now in the process of establishing a presence among the NRI communities in Britain and the US.
Regardless of their styles, the prominent gurus of all three types have one thing in common: their soft Hindutva. While using the language of universalism, tolerance, good health, and peace, they very clearly propagate a world view of India as a Hindu nation, Hinduism as a superior religion, and the need to make India (indeed the whole world) more Hindu. Given their underlying Hindu nationalism, it is not a surprise that the Sangh Parivar counts on them to use their charisma to bring moderate Hindus into the Hindutva camp.
Take the case of Swami Dayananda Saraswati. He seems to be equally at home in supposedly secular gatherings organized by chambers of commerce in Indian metropolises, as in the gatherings organized by the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh in New Jersey. As reported by Christopher Fuller and John Harriss who attended his lectures to the Chennai elite, Swami Dayananda has openly mocked Christianity, declared the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya as a non-negotiable demand of the Hindu majority, and supported the Tamil Nadu government’s ban on conversions. On all these hot-button issues, his position is no different from that of the Sangh Parivar. Yet, he has successfully cultivated the persona of a teacher of traditional wisdom and Vedic heritage.
Likewise, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar hides a Hindu nationalist passion behind the carefully cultivated image of playfulness, love, and joy. He has repeatedly displayed his Hindutva colours on matters of the Ram mandir and minorities. The British magazine The Economist described his politics quite accurately: Art of Living is open to people of all faiths. But, in fact, discussing the Ram temple, its guru starts to sound less like a spiritual leader and more like a politician, talking of the long history of “appeasement of the minority community”, and of the unfairness of a system that subsidizes Muslims to go on the haj to Mecca.’
Given Sri Sri’s underlying Hindutva, it is not surprising that Indian techies, who make up the biggest chunk of the followers, also show a distinct affinity towards Hindu nationalist parties. (This is not to say that their guru has directly caused these sympathies, but only that those with Hindutva biases can feel quite at home with Sri Sri and his organization.) In recent years, the open saffronization of IT workers has become large enough to constitute a trend in its own right. In an effort to mobilize IT and IT-enabled service providers, the RSS has been organizing IT-milans (meets) which are basically RSS shakhas exclusively meant for IT workers (only men are invited to join). According to media reports, these milans have started to become more common over the last three years. They started in Bangalore but have now spread to all the major cities with a substantial concentration of IT-related businesses. The milans are proving to be a great success for both sides: the Sangh Parivar gets its websites and databases updated, while the saffron techies get to meet like-minded people and get a sense of participating in something bigger than just punching keyboards all day.
Finally, consider the open Hindutva of Swami Ramdev. Ramdev’s admirers and followers get more than medical advice: they also get a lesson in Hindu traditionalism and Hindu pride. Interspersed with yogic postures and medical virtues of herbs and food items, Ramdev offers a steady harangue against Western culture, Western medicine, and Western corporations. He equates the promotion of the physical health and well-being of Indians with the promotion of desh ka swabhiman (national self-pride) through a revival of its ‘ancient sciences’. He has made no secret of his association with the Sangh Parivar: a picture of him doing the RSS salute at a convention of the women’s wing of the RSS is available in the RSS weekly, the Organiser. But Ramdev’s open embrace of Hindu right wing ideas has not diminished the enthusiasm of the masses, which is a strong indication of how normal and ordinary the world view of Hindu supremacy and revival has become.
Supporters of Hindutva, incidentally, are fully aware of the usefulness of the new gurus for their cause. They realize, in the words of Swapan Dasgupta, an ex-Trotskyite historian who now supports Hindu nationalist causes, ‘the real energy of contemporary Hinduism does not lie in Brahmanical institutions like the Shankaracharya of Kanchi’. What drives Hindus are either venerated temples or individual preachers and ‘living saints’. They are to Hinduism what evangelical preachers are to Christianity and Dasgupta urges the leaders of the Sangh Parivar to invite them to lead the Hindutva cause:
There is a thriving tradition of what can be loosely called evangelical Hinduism. It comprises the likes of Asaram Bapu, Murari Bapu, Swami Ramdev, Amma, Satya Sai Baba, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and many others who feature on the various religious channels on TV. They are the Pat Robertsons and the Billy Grahams of modern Hinduism. They are able to inspire and motivate individual Hindus far more successfully than purohits and pontiffs. The failure of organized Hindu nationalism lies in not being able to link the congregations of individual evangelists with bodies like the Hindu Acharya Sabha. (emphasis added)
It seems as if the Sangh Parivar has paid heed to this advice. There were reports that the VHP enlisted Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Baba Ramdev, Murari Bapu, Asaram Bapu, and Pranav Pandya of the Gayatri Parivar to create an alliance that would marry political, religious, and environmental causes in the run-up to the 2009 elections. (Indeed, all of these gurus, except Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, were members of the VHP’s Dharma Raksha Manch which campaigned for a Hindu vote bank and the BJP in the 2009 elections.) Rather than embark upon communally charged yatras over the Ram temple and other hotspots, they engaged in ‘constructive agitations’ around issues of cleaning the Ganga, saving Adam’s Bridge and ‘saving’ temples from government interference. The idea is to use the goodwill these gurus have among the middle classes to reach out to moderate Hindus who may be fed up with the Ram temple but may be more open to concerns about the environment and temple affairs in general.
One conclusion that can be safely drawn from the survey of new religiosity is this: education and upward mobility has not led to any serious questioning of the reality of supernatural beings / powers, the possibility of miracles, or the efficacy of rituals and prayers. Indian middle classes are proving Max Weber wrong who thought that being modern—above all —meant believing that:
The world is disenchanted. That one need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means.
The Indian middle class is showing that one can very well make a good living out of mastering ‘technical means and calculations’, and continue to have ‘recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits’.
How to explain this phenomenon? What motivates educated, well-to-do urban sophisticates who continue to believe in miracles and supernatural beings?
Social theory has only two standard answers, neither of which fits the Indian data very well.
The first answer has to do with economic well-being. As has been shown with great sophistication and care by two Harvard sociologists, Pippa Norris and Roland Inglehart, the level of belief in modern, post-industrial societies bears a strong correlation with the level of ‘existential insecurity’. On mapping religiosity against income data from societies in North America, Europe, and Japan, Norris and Inglehart found that the higher the income level, the lower the religiosity as measured by frequency of prayer: in aggregate terms, the poor turn out to be twice as religious as the rich. The data from the US, for example, shows that 67 per cent of the least well-off prayed, compared to 47 per cent of the highest income group. According to this view, religiosity falls off and people generally become more secular in modern industrial economies, except when they are caught in the lower rungs of the economy in those societies that do not provide for public welfare.
This explanation does not adequately explain the Indian data. Here we have the case of rising religiosity among the already wealthy and the upwardly mobile, whose level of material well-being is fairly decent even by Western standards. Clearly, the gains in existential security from improved material well-being are not translating into a decline in religiosity in India.
The second explanation is that the growing religiosity is a defensive reaction to modernization and westernization. Pavan Varma, the author of the much cited The Great Indian Middle Class, for example, treats religion as a refuge for the alienated and lonely urbanites, uprooted from the old, warm little communities they left behind in villages. Varma simply assumes that the transition to modern life in the cities must be traumatic and drive the new middle classes to seek out the consolation of God in the company of fellow believers. Even the otherwise astute Achin Vanaik accepts the basic idea that those who are receptive to Hindu preachers are in need of a ‘balm’ for the ‘social despair…due to loss of dignity and typically male self-respect’ which comes with neo-liberalism.
But ‘social despair’ is not the first thing one thinks of when one looks at the Indian middle classes. There is anxiety and insecurity among the newly well-to-do as they face an increasingly competitive economy with declining job security. But there is also a sense of expanding horizons and multiplying opportunities. The upwardly mobile in urban India have, as Maya Warrier puts it quite accurately:
…have done well for themselves by seizing the educational and career opportunities that came their way. Their experience of the unprecedented pace and scale of change had resulted not so much in a sense of despair and alienation as in a sense of optimism about multiple opportunities in most spheres of life.
It is not despair or alienation, but rather ambivalence over their new-found wealth that seems to be a more plausible explanation of the growing religiosity. Like in other religions, there are many contradictions between Hindu theology and the actual social practice. While Hindu textual and philosophical traditions tend to demote materialism in favour of renunciation, popular Hindu traditions worship wealth and material riches. Even when Indians are acquiring wealth at an unprecedented pace, they seem to be doing it with a bad conscience, as if they are breaking the cardinal virtue of their culture, namely, to renounce and to extricate themselves from the illusions created by the material world. Middle-class respondents in Baroda used the word ‘good’ to describe someone who they saw as ‘simple’, ‘non-modern’, and someone who ‘lives frugally and seeks neither enjoyment nor status through consumption’. Even though they do not live by Gandhian philosophy, they still uphold Gandhian simplicity as a cultural ideal.
As we have seen above, modern gurus seem to ease this ambivalence by giving new wealth a divine stamp of approval. ‘To be rich is divine’, seems to be the message coming from modern gurus who minister to the upper crust. The Bhagvad Gita and the Yoga Sutras have been turned into self-help manuals for making money and achieving success.
While they bless worldly desires and pleasures, modern gurus also seem to help to take away the edge of guilt or bad conscience by teaching how to balance them with spiritual pursuits. Gurus like Mata Amritanandamayi teach that Western’ consumerism creates bad karmic burden which can be negated, or at least ‘balanced’, by performing some of the rituals and pujas she prescribes. To put it somewhat flippantly, the cure for shopping is more shopping—this time for spiritual products and services of gurus and priests. Surely a win-win situation for all involved!
There is, however, another factor that is making public expressions of religiosity fashionable, namely, the rising levels of triumphalism and nationalism among the upwardly mobile. Indians top the list of all nations when it comes to a sense of cultural superiority: the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Survey revealed that as many as 93 per cent of Indian respondents —highest in the world—agreed with the question ‘our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others’. In comparison, the Chinese, Japanese, and American public opinion was far more self-critical and ambiguous over the superiority of their cultures. (More on the triumphalism of the middle classes in Chapter 4.)
Having grown up on a steady diet of religious, media, and other cultural discourses that constantly package Hindu signs and symbols as the essence of Indian culture, it has become almost second nature for educated Indians to conflate the two. Now that India is becoming an important player in the global market, many are beginning to ascribe the country’s success to the superiority of ‘Hindu values’. This sentiment is being aggressively promoted by gurus and tele-yogis whose work we have examined above. Indeed, the public sphere is replete with these messages of becoming more Hindu in order to become more successful in the global race for money and power.
This chapter has tried to provide representative samples of three different dimensions of middle-class Hindu religiosity, namely, invention of new rituals, gentrification of gods, and the booming guru culture.
It is clear that popular Hinduism is extremely innovative in how it is adapting to India’s fast changing economy and society. Temples are getting renovated and together with worshippers, they are remaking old gods and rituals and inventing entirely new ones altogether. The local deities who were once considered guardians of the village, and who protected against scourges like smallpox and other illnesses, are now being beseeched for blessings for success and sanctity in an increasingly competitive, urban environment. Old and new god-men and gurus are doing thriving business in India’s spiritual supermarket. They offer a theology of prosperity which combines fashionable new age spirituality with discourses on the Bhagvad Gita and Vedanta, all suitably reinterpreted as successful management tools.
It would be a mistake, however, to interpret the picture presented here as one more proof that Hindu Indians are ‘naturally’ or ‘innately’ more spiritual than other people. On the contrary, the explosion of popular Hindu religiosity is the result of years of the open and often hidden support Hinduism has received—and continues to receive—from the supposedly secular Indian government and India’s corporate elite. The next chapter provides a closer look at this state–temple–corporate complex.