Religion is not only good for business…it is the best business of all: start-up costs are low, there are never any problems with supply or inventory and one receives tangible goods for intangible ones.
Lise McKean
Over 90 per cent of Hindus are religious. We will convert that religiosity into a Hindu vote bank.’
Praveen Togadia
Popular Hinduism is undergoing a great resurgence. As we described in the previous chapter, the rich and the poor alike are turning to gods and gurus; pujaris, astrologers, vastu shastris, spiritual advisers are all doing a thriving business.
What may seem like a paradox, the resurgence of popular Hinduism is happening not against the grain of Indian secularism, but because of it. The Indian brand of secularism has allowed the state to maintain an intimate and nurturing relationship with the majority religion. As the neo-liberal state has entered into a partnership with the private sector, a cosy triangular relationship has emerged between the state, the corporate sector, and the Hindu establishment.
The state–temple8211;corporate complex is creating new institutional spaces where Hinduism is renewing itself so as to remain relevant to the new social context created by the global political economy. But in the process of renewing itself, it is also taking on nationalistic overtones by turning rituals into politicized assertions of Hindu identity. This process of converting ritual spaces into politicized public spaces is so commonplace, so banal, and so much a part of our collective common sense that it passes unnoticed—and unchecked. This chapter will show how ordinary Hindu rituals end up merging the worship of god with the worship of the nation.
There are two broad areas where the state and the private sector are working together to promote Hinduism: education and tourism. Many of the newly minted English-speaking, computer-using pujaris, astrologers, vastu shastris, and other providers of religious services are products of new priest training schools and deemed universities that have benefited from the commercialization of higher education. Another sector where the state and the corporate sector are making a common cause with Hinduism is the rapidly growing and lucrative market for religious tourism. The seemingly innocent and perfectly secular agenda of promoting tourism has become a channel for pumping taxpayers’ money into promoting temples, ashrams, and pilgrimage spots.
In spite of the glaringly obvious examples of state and corporate sponsorship of the majority religion, many Hindus have come to believe that the ‘pseudo-secular’ state panders to the Muslim and Christian minorities at their cost. ‘Hinduism in danger’ and ‘protect our temples against government takeover’ have become popular slogans of the Hindu right. This chapter challenges these myths by showing how the state–temple8211;corporate complex works to the advantage of Hinduism.
Government spending on religion and related infrastructure is a politically sensitive issue and exact facts and figures are hard to come by. This chapter will piece together the evidence that is available in the public domain to make visible the hidden nexus between the state and temples.
The nexus between the state and the religious domain is a product of the peculiar nature of Indian secularism. Article 26 of the Constitution allows every religious denomination to ‘establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes’. But this freedom extends only to the religious aspects of these institutions. The state reserves the right to intervene in the secular affairs of all religious institutions of all faiths, if it deems it necessary to bring them in line with the relevant set of laws that equivalent non-religious institutions have to obey. Examples of secular affairs of religious institutions include such issues as: Who owns the cash and other material offerings devotees make to the deity? How is temple wealth to be spent? Who will hand out contracts for temple renovations and/or construction of temple properties? Who will decide temple policies regarding the qualification of the priests? On these kinds of issues, temples, ashrams, and other religious institutions of public nature are not allowed to hide behind any special privileges: they have to open themselves to the same level of scrutiny and auditing that is required of secular institutions. In nearly all the states of the republic, there is some kind of government bureaucracy which oversees Hindu temples that exist in that state. The Supreme Court has accepted the argument that temples are public trusts accountable to the state. The court has affirmed the legitimacy of government oversight bodies over temples in numerous cases, most notably in the well-known Shirur Mutt case in 1954 in which the head of the Shirur monastery had challenged the authority of the state’s intervention.
A brief historical elaboration may be useful here to understand why the Indian state got itself involved in this tricky business of overseeing temple affairs.
At the time when the Constitution was adopted, all religious communities were required to clean up the rampant corruption that existed in their places of worship, charities, and trusts. Sikh affairs were already covered by the Gurudwara Act of 1925, Muslim mosques and charities were brought under the Wakf Act of 1954, and Christian churches under the oversight of the National Council of Churches. Since Hindus lacked any single authority that was binding upon the thousands of sects and schools, the state was practically invited to step in by Hindu reformers themselves.
Hindu temples were so out of step with the times, and hereditary priests had become so entrenched in extortion and money-lending that Brahmins of the state of Madras (now Tamil Nadu) started an agitation for temple reforms in the early 20th century. According to Christopher Fuller, who has written extensively on this subject, a group of Brahmin lawyers led by S. Subramania Aiyar, a theosophist and an associate of Annie Besant, formed the Dharma Raksha Sabha in 1908. The Dharma Raksha Sabha brought lawsuits against corrupt temple priests and urged the British government for legislation to establish local bodies to oversee proper management of temple affairs. (The East India company, and later the British government, had managed temple endowments in the state from 1817 until 1888 when they had to retreat under pressure from the Christian critics at home.) The legislative council of Madras passed the first Hindu Religious Endowment Act in 1925, which took its final shape only in 1951 as the current Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowment (HRCE) Act. The HRCE Act put the management of temples’ endowments and religious services under a management body made up of career bureaucrats (IAS officers) and trustees, some of whom come from among the temple priests while others are appointed by the government. As the historian Franklin Presler describes it, people in Tamil Nadu welcomed the creation of the HRCE Act:
Temples desperately needed state’s protection…Without an active vigilant state, temples are corrupted, preyed on by unscrupulous trustees, priests, land tenants and politicians—all exploiting the temples for political gain. Only a centralized administration under the government can check this tendency.
The problems that plagued temples in Tamil Nadu were widespread throughout India. Not surprisingly, states all over the country have followed the model of Tamil Nadu’s HRCE Act and established their own regulatory bodies to oversee the affairs of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist temples. Consider some well-known examples:
• The fabled Jagannath temple in Puri in the state of Orissa, for example, was well known for theft and corruption, before it was brought under state control.
• The enormous wealth of Thirumala Tirupathi temple was completely controlled by 12 families of hereditary priests for centuries who were raking in as much as Rs 4.5 crore every year from the sale of laddoos sold as prasad, to say nothing of the cash donations. The Supreme Court in 1996 put its seal of approval on the abolition of the hereditary priesthood, opening the door to the formation of the Thirumala Thirupati Devasthanam which was entrusted with the task of managing the temple donations and professionalizing the priests.
• The enormous wealth of the Vaishno Devi temple, one of northern India’s most popular pilgrimage sites located in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, was shared by the 1000 families of priests, with nothing was left for the temple’s upkeep. The temple had fallen into disrepair and had come to stand for ‘superficial, soul-less, action-less and deed-less India at its worst’, in the words of Jagmohan, the then governor of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Governor Jagmohan pressed for the Mata Vaishno Devi Ordinance and the Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board was set up in August 1986. In 1988, the Supreme Court ratified the establishment of the Shrine Board.
• The success of the Vaishno Devi Shrine Board cleared the way for setting up a similar oversight body for another popular pilgrimage spot in Jammu and Kashmir, the Amarnath temple. Sri Amarnath Shrine Board was established in 2000 and took over the management of the pilgrimage to the shrine. In this case, the shrine board dislodged the descendants of Butta Malik, a Muslim shepherd who discovered the cave in 1850, who used to manage the shrine along with two Hindu organizations. The Muslim caretakers used to receive one-third of the offerings of the shrine.
Under the watchful eye of state-level religious endowment departments, temples are now required to use the wealth they acquire from the donations of the devotees to improve the quality of religious services they provide. The temples that do not have sufficient income from donations are supposed to be subsidized by the richer temples.
There are two main areas of concern when it comes to improving the quality of religious services. The first has to do with the education and training of priests. The second has to do with acquiring land for building facilities for the worshippers and charitable institutions for the lay public, including dharmashalas, public reading rooms, schools, dispensaries, hospitals, etc.
In both of these areas, the interests of the state, big businesses, and temples are becoming one and the same. This is turning temples into profit-making centres for the state economy and private businesses, and turning the state and businesses into accessories of the cultural–political agenda of the temples. The usual pattern of collaboration between the three partners seems to be this: the government provides land either as a gift or at a throwaway price for temples’ investments in schools, universities, hospitals, and other charities, and/or directs its infrastructure projects to suit the needs of temple properties. At this stage, industrialists and business houses step in: they make donations to build and sustain these religious institutions headed by the holy man/ guru they may happen to revere. The state in turn, makes the investment worthwhile by providing modern credentials by creating ‘deemed universities’, funding training and refresher courses, starting new academic programmes, recognizing new degrees etc. The net result is deeper penetration of distinctively Hindu institutions into the public sphere where they end up substituting for secular educational and health services which the state is obligated to provide for all its citizens.
There are three types of Hindu traditionalist institutions that are the main beneficiaries of this three-sided nexus:
• The first category is dedicated to propagating priestcraft (karmakanda) and ‘Vedic sciences’. The variety of priest training schools (variously referred to as gurukuls, rishikuls, or Vedic or Agamic pathshalas) that are mushrooming around the country fall in this category.
• The second category straddles the secular–religion divide. Here one would have to look at the many deemed universities established by tax-exempt ashrams and temples which offer degrees in conventional science, engineering, and other secular subjects.
• The third category includes outright grants to temples. This category also includes cases of open diversion of public sector infrastructure projects to suit the needs of temples, religious festivals, and pilgrimages.
Prominent examples of each case will be provided in this chapter. But first we have to deal with a serious objection to our thesis.
We have argued that there is a nexus between the state and temples which is proving to be good for the temples. But many Hindu right organizations and activists have taken the exactly opposite position. They see the ‘takeover’ of temples by state-managed shrine boards as ‘anti-Hindu’. The US-based Global Hindu Heritage Foundation, for example, seeks the abolition of all versions of the HRCE Act adopted by different states, which it calls a ploy to ‘drive Hinduism out of India’. Organizations like the Bharat Jagran Forum accuse the Indian state of a ‘conspiracy to de-Hinduize India’. The forum claims that government control over Hindu institutions has ‘seriously interfered with spiritual and cultural activities, violated religious sentiments, suppressed Hindus’ human rights of religious freedom, demolish[ed] ancient religious infrastructure by gross government mismanagement and sale of endowment lands, and stopped the essential activities of sewa and dharma prachar’. The idea that temples need to be ‘saved’ has taken an ominous turn as it is one of the demands of the Hindu Janjagruti Samiti, a Maharashtra-based group that has been implicated in the recent terrorist attacks against Muslims. These critics protest too much. They completely fail to acknowledge the great solicitousness and deference the state agencies routinely show for the orthodoxy of temple priests in matters relating to temple rituals and worship. They also fail to notice how the material interests of the government oversight bodies for revenue and status end up coinciding with the interests of temple priests in increasing the wealth and prestige of their institutions. The state bureaucracies have only encouraged—often with public funds coming from tourism and other cultural-educational activities of the state—pilgrimages and other expressions of devotional religiosity. A bit of history might be useful to dispel the idea that the government-appointed oversight agencies are ‘anti-Hindu’. Deference to the authority of priests and their orthodox and often superstitious interpretation of Hindu scriptures was built into the state policy for temple management right from the beginning. The 1962 Report of the Hindu Religious Endowment Commission, which served as the basis of state-level oversight agencies for Hindu temples, provided a justification for unquestioning obedience of scriptural authority. Members of the National Commission on Religious Endowments toured 150 Hindu religious institutions in north India, and 82 in the south in about a year, interviewed a large number of priests, circulated 12,000 questionnaires, and offered a detailed analysis of the state of the temples in the country. The members of this commission report great disappointment over the ‘ignorance and incompetence’ of the priests, combined with their efficiency in ‘extorting money’.
The commission issued recommendations for improvements which became the basis of nationwide reform of temples’ secular affairs. These recommendations were modelled after the policies that already existed in the state of Tamil Nadu. Basically what the commission recommended was this: the temples should try to improve the education of priests by making them experts in carrying out rituals exactly as prescribed in the ancient texts. In other words, ‘improvement’ meant going back to the Vedas, Agamas, and other holy books and following their directions literally and faithfully. Here is the relevant excerpt from the commission’s 1962 report, quoted here from the renowned scholar of religious law in India, Duncan Derrett:
Temples may be defined as occult laboratories where certain physical acts of adoration coupled with certain systematized prayers, psalms, mantras, and musical invocations can yield certain physical and psychological results as a matter of course. And if these physical processes are properly conducted, the results will accrue provided the persons who perform them are properly equipped. One of the essentials for the proper conduct of rituals is the proper ordaining of the priest. Also, the efficacy of prayers, poojas, archanas, abhisekas, festivals, etc., very much depends upon the expertness of the priestly agents employed in the physical process and ritualistic details. It is therefore essential that the correct approach and proper conditions should be rigidly followed to enable the temples to fulfill their purposes… And if these physical processes [of worship] are properly conducted, the results will accrue’. (emphasis added)
This is a statement only the most orthodox believers in the efficacy of temple rituals can make. The government commission of highly educated, well-known public servants assumed, without any equivocation, that delivering ‘physical results’ in ‘occult laboratories’ constitutes a legitimate and essential function of religion which the state must protect and encourage (by recommending that the priests should rigidly follow the ritual tradition). As Derrett wryly observed, the commissioners wanted better trained priests because they ‘themselves may at any time visit the temple and wish to make offerings’. Clearly, policymakers approached the temples as devotees, and not as officials of a secular state with an interest in creating a secular public culture, equally removed from all religions as was the intent of the Constitution.
Over time, state-level temple management agencies/ departments/ministries seem to have moved closer to the worl-dview and the sensibilities of the priesthood. As Joanne Waghorne observed after an exhaustive study of religious revival in Tamil Nadu, ‘the executive officers [appointed by the HRCE Board] appeared to work in tandem with the trustees in a mutual project to enhance and direct the growing interest in temple culture in the city…the officer’s home values were closer to those of the temple trustees and devotees. No officer or devotee whom I met devalued ritual, or tried to spiritualize worship.’ The same sentiment is expressed today by the spokesmen of state oversight agencies who assure their critics that they are respectful of all ‘traditional rights of pujaris’ and are only trying to improve the quality of services. One can say with some confidence that the state-appointed overseers share the religious world view of the temple trustees, priests, and worshippers.
Over and above the shared belief, there is a shared material interest between the state oversight agencies and temples: both want to increase the temples’ revenues and prestige. Thus it is quite common to see temple management departments actively trying to turn some remote temple into a pilgrimage spot by inventing a ‘pracheen itihas’ (ancient history) for it, and actively involving the state-funded tourism departments to create roads and hotels to make pilgrimage easier. Some of the newly-invented temple rituals described in the previous chapter—the gold car in temples in Tamil Nadu, the re-enactment of the Shiva and Parvati wedding—are pure money the spinners put in place with full knowledge of the government overseers. These rituals fade in comparison with the massive fraud that the Devaswom board of the Sabarimala temple in Kerala, in full complicity with the Communist government of the state, has been perpetuating for many years. Every year, millions of pilgrims turn out to witness the ‘divine light’ (called Makravilakku) that is actually lit by the officials of the temple, the Devaswom board, and the Kerala State Electricity Board in connivance with forest officials and the police. In 2008, the temple made Rs 72.52 crore in the pilgrimage season, a good chunk of it on the day of ‘divine’ lights. Involvement of the state authorities in inventing new traditions and encouraging people to participate in them is nothing new. Writing in 1982, Franklin Presler described how Tamil Nadu’s HRCE tried to ‘turn several temples in the state into pilgrim centres by publicizing them and making it easier to travel to them’. (Presler was however, critical of the politicization of the HRCE.) Likewise, in his study of the Chandi temple in Cuttack, Orissa, James Preston found out that the temple priests, local merchants, and the state endowment commission worked together to ‘maximize the temple’s margin of profit’, so that more land could be purchased to set up the temple’s expanding charities. The revenue of the Chandi temple went up from 100,000 in 1968 to Rs 350,000 in 1972 after it was brought under the control of the Endowment Commission of the state of Orissa.
If more evidence is needed, consider how major pilgrimage spots are thriving today under the state-appointed management boards:
• The oversight of the famous Tirupati temple in Andhra Pradesh by a joint state–temple management committee has by no means hurt the temple’s fortunes. On the contrary, reports suggest that Tirupati has overtaken the Vatican as the wealthiest and the most popular religious institution in the world. The temple has grown substantially in its reach into the society: it runs 12 colleges, with 30,000 students, churns out 600 priests in its Veda schools every year, and runs a string of charitable hospitals.
• As in the case of Tirupati, the state-appointed shrine board has done wonders for the Vaishno Devi shrine: the number of pilgrims has gone up from 1.3 million in 1986 to 6 million in 2004, and nearly 7 million in 2007. The numbers are expected to cross 8 million in 2009.
• Under the solicitous care of the Sri Amarnath Shrine Board, Amarnath has emerged from a little-known temple drawing barely 12,000 pilgrims in 1989 to a major pilgrimage spot attracting 400,000 pilgrims in 2007.
• The Shiv Khori temple in Jammu which was little known till about fifty years ago has now become one of the most popular temples in Jammu, second only to Vaishno Devi. In just two years since it was brought under the control of the Shri Shiv Khori Shrine Board modelled after the Vaishno Devi and Amarnath shrine boards, the number of pilgrims to Shiv Khori crossed the 500,000 mark in 2008. Incidentally, all the growth is not self-sustained from the temple’s coffers: the Ministry of Tourism of the state of Jammu and Kashmir has approved a project plan for Shiv Khori at a cost of Rs 5 crore.
Such government intervention has been so successful that many temples are clamouring for more of it. There are calls to replicate the success of pilgrimages to the Vaishno Devi and Amarnath temples by creating new government boards for additional temples and indeed, for all the temples of Kahsmiri Pandits. Indeed, even L.K. Advani is on record defending the need for government intervention in temple affairs. He told Hinduism Today that ‘there can come a stage when degradation of institutions makes it obligatory for the government to step in. The actual experience of Vaishno Devi is that government intervention has certainly helped the pilgrims’.
The critics’ objections out of the way, it is time to examine the details of how the state–temple8211;corporate complex works in the three categories mentioned above: namely, priest training and ‘Vedic science’ schools, ‘secular’ institutions affiliated with Hindu temples and ashrams, and direct subsidies to temples.
Given that ‘ignorance and incompetence’ of temple priests was one of the motivating forces for temple reforms, it is not surprising that priest training schools have been at the leading edge of modernization and renewal of Hinduism.
Today there is literally an explosion of all kinds of gurukuls, ‘rishikuls’, and Vedic pathshalas which take in young boys of all castes (even though some still prefer Brahmins). After about 12 years of memorizing Sanskrit mantras for doing pujas, yagnas, and mastering the physical performance of rituals, they are certified to enter the booming market for priests.
Overall, these schools have remained true to the conservative philosophy that informed the 1962 national commission on temple reforms, that is, to improve the education of priests by making them experts in carrying out the rituals exactly as prescribed in the ancient texts. But at the same time, the graduates of these schools have at least the trappings of modern education, especially English language skills, and the use of computers. Some modern gurukuls have started offering regular school subjects in the sciences and mathematics as well, but it is a safe bet that science is being taught more to affirm the traditional Vedic sciences than inculcate habits of critical thinking among the priests-in-training. When the University Grants Commission, the highest educational policy making body of the land, can propose ‘focused research in occult sciences’, right alongside biotechnology and genomics, one cannot expect gurukuls not to treat occult as a legitimate science. These schools are producing, to use Chris Fuller’s words, ‘professionally trained guardians of tradition’, an oxymoron, if ever there was one. Their aim is to produce a new crop of priests who can speak in the preferred language (English) and idiom (‘science’) of the new middle classes.
The Government of India has put in place all the regulatory mechanisms that ensure financial support for, and official recognition of, suitably ‘modern’ priests. The process started in February 2001 when the University Grants Commission decided to introduce college-level courses in Jyotir Vigyan (astrology) and Purohitya (karmakanda or priest craft). The UGC, with the support of the BJP-led government, and the blessings of the Supreme Court, succeeded in institutionalizing astrology courses in higher education. But for Purohitya degrees, the institutional infrastructure already existed in the form of the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan and Maharishi Sandipani Rashtriya Veda Vidya Pratishthan.
The BJP-led NDA government gave the status of full-fledged ‘deemed university’ to three institutions which specialize in offering advanced degrees in Sanskrit, yoga, and ‘Vedic sciences’. These institutions don’t directly train priests, but serve as affiliating institutions for gurukuls and Vedic pathshalas which train pujaris and practitioners of Vedic sciences like yoga and astrology, but are not authorized to offer degrees.
The most well known and important of the three is the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan. This institute was established in 1970 as an autonomous organization for the development, preservation, and promotion of Sanskrit. In May 2002, the Sansthan, along with eight of its campuses—in Allahabad, Garli (Himachal Pradesh), Jaipur, Jammu, Lucknow, Puri, Sringeri, and Trichur—were deemed as full-fledged universities, with complete freedom to set their own curricula and the authority to confer degrees. In addition, two Kendriya Vidyapeeths associated with the Sansthan, one in Delhi and the other in Tirupati, have been converted into deemed universities.
The Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan and institutions affiliated with it are entrusted with the task of propagation of Sanskrit learning—undoubtedly a worthy task. But a part of their curricula involves training in Purohitya as well. These institutions offer courses and degrees equivalent to degrees in secular subjects: the title Shastri is equivalent to having a Bachelor’s degree, Acharya a Master’s degree, while Vidya Varidhi means a doctorate. Apart from receiving instructions in Sanskrit grammar and the six traditional darshanas, students receive hands-on training in carrying out the rituals prescribed by the shastras. According to the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan’s website, institutions affiliated with it receive ‘financial assistance (from the government’s Human Resource Development department) for organizing short-term vocational training to students of Sanskrit in jyotish, karmakanda, paleography, cataloguing, Sanskrit shorthand, typewriting, etc.’ Training in astrology, karmakanda, and other traditional sciences have always been impatted as a part of a college-level degree in Sanskrit. Giving the status of universities to Sanskrit teaching institutions did not start new courses geared exclusively at priest training.
Two other newly ‘deemed universities’ are attracting priests-in-training from gurukuls and Vedic pathshalas: Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana (SVYAS) in Bangalore, which was given the status of a university in 2001; and Bihar Yoga Bharati in Fort Munger in Bihar, deemed in 2000. Both of these universities offer advanced degrees, all the way to Ph.D.s in ‘yogic sciences’. Gurukuls and pathshalas which take in young school-age children to become pujaris and priests channel their students to these universities, or any of the other Sanskrit Sansthan institutions, to round off their purohitya training with a course in yoga and allied sciences. A degree from these universities enhances the professional profile of the pujari.
But government money and resources are also used more directly in training priests, who may or may not go for an advanced degree in yoga or Sanskrit. Purohitya is funded by the Maharishi Sandipani Rashtriya Veda Vidya Pratishthan based in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh. Established in 1987 as an autonomous organization of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the Sandipani Pratishthan funds gurukuls all across the country and serves as their accrediting body. Media reports suggest that funding and accreditation from the Pratishthan has become a selling point for new priest training schools that are cropping up all across the country. A good example is Navi Mandal Veda Vidya Mandir in Ujjain which takes in about 80 boys, between 8 and 18 years of age, and trains them in Yajurveda, the Veda that specializes in ritual arts. The school receives grants from the government through the Sandipani Pratishthan and the degree it awards is considered equivalent to a standard high school degree so that a graduate of purohit school can enter a college if he so chooses. A similar Vedic school in Palakkad in Kerala gets funds and accreditation through the Sandipani Pratishthan. The exact number of priest training schools that receive government money through the Pratishthan is not known.
In addition, a number of state governments have started funding Vedic gurukuls directly out of their own funds without going through central government agencies like Sandipani. Under the reign of the BJP chief minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia, the state government of Rajasthan set aside Rs 260 million (Rs 26 crore) for temple renovations and training 600 Hindu priests. It organized training camps for priests in order to ‘enable them to conduct temple rituals in accordance with the Shastras’, and providing them with the right equipment to conduct these rituals. The state of Andhra Pradesh has recently announced creation of 8 new Vedic schools which will provide free training of temple priests drawn from all castes. The state has promised to release Rs 60 crore to the religious endowment department for the welfare of temple priests in the state. The BJP government of Gujarat routinely allows funds marked for infrastructure development to be used for training priests and paying their salaries. (More on Gujarat’s initiatives below.)
In what can be described as a progressive development, training for priesthood is now being offered as a part of social welfare, especially for Dalits. But linking priestly education with social welfare has further legitimized the idea of the state spending public money on teaching mantras and yagnas. A case in point is Tamil Nadu. After the Supreme Court decided in 2002 that Dalits had a right to officiate over pujas in temples, M. Karunanidhi’s government in 2006 decided to open 6 priest training institutes with a mandate to admit Dalits and people from the backward castes. The state opened two Vaishnava and four Shaivite schools. Some 207 students were trained in all methods of temple worship and rituals and given a certificate in Agama shastras. All told, there are at least 22 priest training schools, most of which are run by temples and charitable endowments but at least part of the money comes from the state’s coffers. According to the official report for 2006–07, the state gives out Rs 7,500,000 every year to the state’s Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments department. The official report for 2008–09 shows that the government increased the grant it gives for temple renovations from Rs 45 lakh per year to Rs 3 crore per year. It is not unreasonable to expect that at least a part of these grants finds it way into schools for priests.
The commercial/industrial elite are key partners in at least some of these priest training enterprises. As an example, consider the magnificent sandstone temple called Shri Hari Mandir that opened in 2006 in the city of Porbandar, Gujarat. Attached to the temple is a priest school (a ‘rishikul’, a school for rishis or sages) called Sandipani Vidyaniketan. As for the land grant, the website of Sandipani Vidyaniketan (http://www.sandipani.org/trusts/index.asp) contains the following information: ‘The Shree Bharatiya Sanskruti Samvardhak Trust (the parent trust of Sandipani) then set out to acquire the existing piece of land. A request was made to the government of Gujarat who very generously granted 85 acres of land close to the Porbandar airport.’ The temple and the school are founded by Ramesh Bhai Oza, a well-known kathakar, a singer-preacher of the Bhagvat Purana, Ramayana, and Bhagvat Gita. His other claim to fame is that he is the personal guru of the Ambani family, India’s richest and best-known business dynasty.
This is how the triangular relationship between the guru, the government, and the industrialist works, at least in this case. The temple and the priest school stand upon the 85 acres of land gifted to Oza by Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi. The late Dhirubhai Ambani, the founding patriarch of the Ambani business empire, provided the financial resources for building the temple-‘rishikul’ complex.
Other examples of such triangular relationships are not hard to come by. Swami Ramdev, the popular tele-yogi, who has created a massive Rs 4000 million empire selling yoga and Ayurvedic medicines, is building two universities on land gifted to him by the state governments of Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The state of Jharkhand has gifted him another 100 acres of land recently. Despite the fact that the medical claims he makes for the medicines he sells have not been scientifically tested in appropriate double-blind studies, his Patanjali Yog Peeth has been granted the status of a university with Ramdev being appointed as its ‘vice-chancellor for life’. The business elite, in India and abroad, including big names like Lakshmi Mittal, the Hinduja brothers, and Anil Agarwal of the Vedanta group, have been generous patrons and promoters of Ramdev’s yoga peeth. Ramdev’s yoga–Ayurveda empire is a paradigm case of the seamless merging of state, business, and religious-cultural elites and the openly communalist, xenophobic Hindu right. (Ramdev is a frequent and honoured guest of the RSS and was part of the core group of VHP’s Dharma Raksha Manch that tried, without much success, to grow the size of the Hindu vote bank in the 2009 elections.)
Modernization of priesthood has been a fond dream of the VHP, one of the leading members of the Hindutva family. Setting up short-term priest training camps is a common practice of both the VHP and the RSS. Ominously, heads of mainstream religious ashrams and mutts show up to bless priesthood camps run by the Sangh Parivar, showing the close ideological congruence between the two. Reports in The Organiser, the weekly newspaper of the RSS, reveal that the Kanchi Shankaracharya, Sri Shankara Vijayendra Saraswati, himself came to bless the trainees at a village priest training camp organized by the VHP. The popular Bangaru Adigalar Shakti ‘Amma’ who we encountered earlier in our discussion of gentrification of gods, was also well represented at the VHP priest training camps in Tamil Nadu.
Special attention must be paid to the teaching style and content of these schools for priestcraft and Vedic sciences. After all, these institutions are responsible for producing the crop of household priests, astrologers, yoga teachers, vastu shastris, and peddlers of all kinds of dubious Ayurvedic drugs.
Overall, priest training schools offer an orthodox and conservative curriculum which emphasizes two virtues above all—rote learning and unquestioning obedience. The best description of how these schools function comes from Christopher Fuller’s 2003 monograph The Renewal of Priesthood, which provides a detailed look at the modernization of priestly education in the state of Tamil Nadu. What follows here is based upon Fuller’s work, supplemented with reports from the US-based magazine Hinduism Today, and news reports in the Indian media.
Vedic schools admit only boys and young men, preferably but not always Brahmins. Young boys, 12–14 year-olds, go through the traditional gurukul training which requires that they accept their guru’s word as God’s command. (‘There is only duty of the disciple: Obey your guru! Obey your guru! Obey your guru!’ This was the advice given by Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, the American-Hindu founder of Hinduism Today, to the monks of the Sarangpur sadhu school in Gujarat.) The emphasis is on correct memorization and the correct reproduction of the sound of Sanskrit verses, because the sound is supposed to carry ‘divine vibrations’ which have been ricocheting around the cosmos since the beginning of time. The future priests learn the correct words and the correct hand gestures that go with the words. Some of them learn the meanings of these gestures, but many don’t. The entire programme is one long exercise in rote learning, with no room for critical reflection on the validity of the metaphysical presuppositions behind the hand gestures and the mantras. Training in astrology is considered an essential part of training for priesthood. Agamic education, Fuller concludes:
has helped to strengthen the priests’ traditionalism, so that compared with twenty years ago, they more forcefully express their ideological commitment to the authority and legitimacy of the tradition, as embodied in Agamic texts and also vested in the Temple’s [Meenakshi temple in Madurai] ancient customs and their own hereditary rights.
Fuller’s description of the state of priest education in Tamil Nadu is fully corroborated by independent accounts of other gurukuls. According to G.K. Ramamurthy, the ‘head principal’ of Sri Venkateshwara Veda Pathshala in Dharmagiri near Tirumala, which is considered one of the finest priest training centres in India, the priests-in-training are ‘not taught philosophy, although they do learn all about worship and its practice and cultivation of personal devotion…The students are also taught astrology, Sanskrit, and the Dharmashastra.’ The only concession to ‘modernity’ is teaching how to speak in English: ‘A few years back, English was introduced as a part of the curriculum. We are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of English as a second language. Specifically we are teaching students how to read, write, and speak in English (as well as in Sanskrit).’ This pathshala (school) operates on the principle of hereditary priesthood and innate priestly samskaras (subconscious impressions) which are encouraged through rituals performed on babies still in their mothers’ wombs: ‘A priest at Balaji’s temple must be born the son of…a priest who is himself fully trained in the Vaikhansa Agama. He must also be taught certain priestly samskaras while still in the mother’s womb. This is accomplished through a ritual called the “Vishnu Bali”.’ This school proudly produces 35 students each year, all of whom find solid middle-class employment in temples in India or in the mushrooming Hindu temples among the diaspora in the West.
Another priest training school in Pillaiyarpatti in Tamil Nadu is run by K. Pitchai Gurukkal, and with 250 students, it is considered the largest in the country. Both Fuller and other commentators describe hands-on training in rituals, combined with training in astrology, Sanskrit grammar, and devotional singing. The special feature of this school is the emphasis on practical training from early on. The students, even the youngest among them, earn their tuition by assisting the teachers in conducting yagnas and prayers in temples and private homes. Priest-students are trained in re-enacting the fire rituals exactly, literally, and in the same detail as they are prescribed in the Vedas. The popular Ganpati homa (yagna for Ganesha) performed by the priests-in-training involves 21 people, 16 to recite the correct number of mantras and five for adding oblations to the fire. Rather than simplifying the ceremonies, the emphasis is on ‘flawless execution’ of elaborate details.
This section looks at how distinctly Hindu teachings, rituals, and so-called ‘Vedic sciences’, coded as universal spiritual and moral values, are riding piggy-back on private sector investments into higher education.
Hindu charitable trusts have a long history of providing education, either in gurukuls or in state-aided schools and colleges. What seems to be new is that they are now entering the lucrative market for higher education among the urban elite. Charitable endowments of temples or foundations established by gurus are opening state-of-the-art educational facilities that purport to blend Western science and technology with Hindu wisdom. They offer degrees in sought-after subjects like management, media studies, information technology and engineering, all of them infused with moral and spiritual values explicitly derived from Hindu sacred texts and traditions. Even those who welcome these ‘swamiji schools’ admit that these schools are nurseries of soft Hindutva:
Even though trustees and managers as well as liberal citizens who enroll their offspring in the new age swamiji schools tend to stress that these institutions promote Indian cultural and spiritual values, it is self evident that these schools promote Hindutva and are essentially Hindu revivalist institutions. But it is also patent that their promoter saints and seers have been influenced by Nehruvian legacy of secularism, and at best promote soft, liberal Hindutva which is becoming universally popular.
There is no definite accounting of how many such swamji colleges and universities exist in the country. There is a general consensus that their growth has been dramatic. For example, the Sri Adichunchanagiri Mahasamsthana math or trust has moved from rural education into urban and technical education in the states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra. Today it operates 375 educational institutions in several states with 40,000 students on their rolls. Its institutions range from Veda and Agama colleges for training priests and training Ayurvedic doctors to colleges of modern medicine, nursing, pharmacy, engineering, and management. The crown jewel of this math is the thoroughly contemporary BGS International Residential School in Bangalore with branches in Delhi and Mangalore. The school is not for ordinary folks: its annual tuition runs over Rs 100,000. The Chinmaya Mission runs another successful chain of schools. Founded by the same Swami Chinmayananda who was one of the founding members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Mission runs 75 schools, including the International Baccalaureate programme offered at the five-star Chinmaya International Residential School in Coimbatore.
What interests us here are those distinctively Hindu educational institutions which enjoy the largesse of the state and the corporate world. Some prominent examples are given below.
The Art of Living Foundation of Siri Siri Ravi Shankar, the favourite guru of the ‘techies’, is a huge beneficiary of government largesse. His multi-million dollar ashram sits atop a hill 40 km from Bangalore on lease from the Karnataka government for 99 years. According to Edward Luce, the author of In Spite of the Gods, ‘the funding for this extravagant construction had come from the software companies in nearby Bangalore and the revenues the foundation earns from its hugely popular courses in breathing technique and meditation’. Here again, we encounter the familiar triangular relationship—the guru, government, and corporate deep-pockets.
But the Bangalore operation of the AOL is not the end of the story. In 2006, the Orissa government gave the AOL Foundation 200 acres of land on the outskirts of the capital Bhubaneswar at an undisclosed concessional rate to set up a Sri Sri University of Art of Living. The university plans to blend traditional subjects like Ayurveda, yoga, and Vedic studies into its regular curricula of modern science and engineering. The land on which the university will be built comes from three existing villages. The fate of those who will have to be parted from their land is not known.
The AOL deal is puny compared to the 8000 acres of prime land that the government of Orissa has promised to make available to Vedanta University, along with promises of providing the most up-to-date infrastructure, including an airport and a four-lane highway. This university is bankrolled by Anil Agarwal, an Indian-born billionaire, who owns Vedanta Resources, a metals and mining group headquartered in the UK with mining operations in aluminium, copper, zinc, and lead, principally in India and a number of other countries. Vedanta University plans to become a modern institution of higher learning supposedly at par with Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard. But going by the past record of the Anil Agarwal Foundation, it is not clear how secular his Indian venture will really be. This foundation is deeply involved in creating the Krishna-Avanti school, the first government-funded Hindu school in the UK, which is seen by many as having a strong traditionalist flavour imparted by the Hare Krishnas (or the International Society for Krishna Consciousness) who have a leading role in deciding who qualifies as a ‘practising Hindu’. Anil Agarwal is an adviser to the I-Foundation, an ISKCON charity based in the UK which describes itself as:
a charity that aims to establish sustainable projects that promote and advance Vedic culture and philosophy in the modern world. The culture and the philosophy of the Vedas, which originate in ancient India, bring with them a depth and richness to life, as well as a wholesome approach to living in harmony with nature.
To take another prominent example, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has been able to headquarter his ‘university’ (a complete misnomer in this case) in his native state of Madhya Pradesh, with full support from the state government. In 1995, the government of Digvijay Singh, the Congress party chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, unanimously voted to grant the status of a state university to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Vedic Vishwavidyalaya (MMYVV). According to its own promotional materials, the MMYVV ‘has been established as a statutory university like any other UGC recognized university. It is an affiliating university with jurisdiction spread over entire Madhya Pradesh. Hon’ble Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Ji is the first Chancellor of the University.’ In 2002, a sister institute, Maharishi University of Management and Technology, was established by a decree from the state government in Chhattisgarh.
It is safe to assume that having been established as ‘statutory universities like any other UGC recognized university’, Maharishi’s institutions are eligible for all the benefits, funds, and grants that all other public universities receive from the UGC. And yet, the nature of education offered by them scarcely qualifies for the label of ‘higher education’ that universities are mandated to provide. The MMYVV offers education based upon the Vedic science of natural law as taught by Mahesh Yogi. Anyone with a high school diploma, with sufficient money to pay the fees, can receive graduate and postgraduate degrees, including a doctorate, in the following subjects: ‘Maharishi Ved Vigyan, Jyotish (astrology), Yog, Sthaptya Ved Vastu Vidya (Vastu shastra), and Vedic Swasthya Vidhan.’ According to the MMYVV’s own data, ‘thousands of students have been awarded degrees’ and many of the alumni of this school are establishing their own businesses and centres for teaching astrology and vastu. Career advisers in the magazine Education World would agree: they rate the Maharishi University among the top eight institutions that offer diplomas, degrees, and doctorate-level courses in astrology.
While institutions like the AOL and MMYVV at least make an attempt to appear non-communal and even ‘secular’, or ‘scientific’, a university run by the RSS can have no such fig leaf. And yet, that has not prevented the state of Rajasthan from making 2300 acres of land and infrastructure available to the proposed Keshav Vidyapeeth Vishwavidyalaya. This RSS-affiliated university promises to propagate cultural nationalism and offer college-level courses in ‘Vedic sciences’. It got the green light from the Rajasthan government in March 2006 and it is only a matter of time before we begin to encounter new college graduates with their minds imprinted with the Sangh ideology.
In this category, state funds and resources are used to fund the construction of new temples, pay salaries for temple priests, promote pilgrimages and religious tourism, and even promote open Hindukaran, or Hindu proselytization.
Take the example of Akshardham temple, a grand sandstone structure occupying 100 acres of prime land on the banks of the Yamuna in Delhi, which was inaugurated with much fanfare in 2005. To build a temple in Delhi was apparently a long-standing desire of the late Yogiji Maharaj, the preceptor of BAPS Swaminarayan Samstha who wrote in 1969:
Delhi is the throne. The flag [of Swaminarayan] should fly high in Delhi. Now Yamuna is waiting. She has become restless. With certain surety, land on the banks of Yamuna ji will be acquired. The Lord will fulfill this in His divine way.
The ‘Lord’s divine way’ led through Jagmohan, the same Jagmohan who had earlier involved himself in Vaishno Devi temple management, and who served as the Union Cabinet Minister for Urban Development from 1999 to 2001 under the NDA-government led by the BJP. Yogiji Maharaj advised his followers to cultivate Jagmohan: ‘Garland the Saheb, the land will be granted.’
The land was, indeed, granted. The Delhi administration under Jagmohan altered the master plan of Delhi, rezoned parts of the Yamuna riverbed to allow commercial development, demolished the Yamuna Pushta slum dislocating thousands of poor people, and allotted 30 acres of land to the temple at a reportedly ‘throwaway price’. (Secular buildings like the Commonwealth and an IT park were also allowed to be built.) That was not all: the temple managed to acquire another 50 acres of land—and get all environmental clearances—in an ecologically sensitive area managed by the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh. Serious concerns regarding recharge of groundwater were set aside by the state government and the courts to allow the temple to be constructed. The state clearly bent backward, broke its own laws, and sold public land at below the market price to a Hindu sect.
In addition to facilitating temple building, public funds are being used in some states for directly paying the salaries of Hindu priests.
In the state of Rajasthan, 390 of the state’s less famous and poorer temples fall under the ‘direct control of the government, all expenses paid from the state budget’, to cite the state’s Devasthan department report. The report further states that the Devasthan department ‘spends Rs 63.65 per day, per government temple (total 390) on puja, bhog-rag, utsav, deity dress, electricity, and water bills’.
In the state of Gujarat, to take another example, Hindu priests have been on the government payroll since 2001. The BJP-led government of the state announced in 2001 that it will pay a monthly salary of Rs 1 200 to all the priests working in the 354 temples that are under the care of the state’s temple management, or Devasthan, department.
In the state of Madhya Pradesh, the government has decided to make pujaris employees of the state. According to media reports, ‘Madhya Pradesh will soon be the first state to have government appointed priests (pujaris) to conduct worship and supervise the affairs of thousands of Hindu temples.’ Apparently, this scheme was initiated on the behest of priests who wanted to be ‘brought under the government’s umbrella to secure their future and ensure the upkeep of temples, the majority of which are crumbling with neglect’.
In the state of Tamil Nadu, the HRCE department runs the Oru kala puja (one prayer a day) scheme for temples that cannot afford it. Anyone wishing to have pujas done in the temple of his or her choice can send in a cheque for Rs 2500, to which the HRCE department promises to add a ‘matching grant’ of Rs 20,500. (It is not clear if the matching grants come from the government or from the temple funds.)
All these initiatives are pale as compared to the level of state involvement in religious tourism. With grants from the central government, states like Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal, and Punjab are rushing to create new ‘pilgrimage circuits’. To take just one representative example, the state of Himachal Pradesh has received a grant of Rs 7.8 crore from the central government to promote pilgrimages to the well-known mountain temples that exist in the state. The state aims to replicate the success of Vaishno Devi in Jammu and Kashmir. These kinds of pilgrimage circuits are typically very attractive to the private sector as well. Notable examples include the Ford Motor Company’s involvement in building the Hare Krishna temple in Mayapur in West Bengal and the TVS Group’s involvement in temple renovations in Tamil Nadu.
Public funding of religious tourism is generally justified on economic grounds. Often, purely pragmatic considerations of providing basic facilities to millions of pilgrims are cited to make a case for government spending. Public funds, however, are used not just to take care of the existing demand, but also for actively encouraging people to participate in religious festivals and pilgrimages. Traditional festivals are being reinvented and popularized with full involvement of the state with an express purpose of encouraging pilgrimage and religious tourism.
The state of Jammu and Kashmir, for example, gives out hefty matching grants to the Vaishno Devi temple to organize and popularize Navratra festivals held during the peak of the pilgrimage season. Thus, at the 2004 pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi, the state governor S.K. Sinha officiated over a yagna, offered puja, and led the pilgrims for the first sighting of the goddess before announcing a matching grant of Rs 850,000 from the state government to the temple board. With the funds from the state, the Navratra festival is being promoted as a tourist attraction in its own right, separate from the pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi: the state agencies put up a cultural show complete with classical dances, folk dances, poetry recitals, and even wrestling matches, and ‘Maha car loan melas’.
But this case is far from unique. The state of Gujarat officially sponsors Navratri and Makar Sankranti festivities as a part of its ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ programme. According to media reports, major corporations including Reliance, Birla, and Essar make big donations to the state government for these festivals. The notorious case of the Communist government of Kerala participating in lighting the so-called divine light at the Sabarimala temple has already been mentioned.
The state of Jammu and Kashmir has been especially aggressive in promoting temple tourism in this politically and ecologically sensitive state. As mentioned earlier, the state government is trying to replicate the success of Vaishno Devi and Amarnath temples by pouring in money into the Shiv Khori temple complex. Going completely against the recommendations of environmental groups worried about the carrying capacity of this ecologically sensitive region, the state and central governments went out of the way to promote the pilgrimage to the Amarnath temple. In 2006–07, the central government offered to spend Rs 7 crore on infrastructure development for the Amarnath pilgrimage route. In addition, the pilgrimage was extended from one to two months with new facilities like helicopter flights to the shrine added. In the summer of 2008, the shrine board tried to divert 40 hectares of forest land to build temporary shelters for pilgrims, leading to political unrest all over the state.
The final example comes from the state of Gujarat where state funds were made available for what can only be called Hindu proselytization or Hindukaran. Groups affiliated with the BJP and the RSS organized a massive gathering at a newly invented ‘pilgrimage’ (the so-called ‘Shabri Kumbh’) in the adivasi area of the Dangs. The temple of Shabri (and Ram) was built on land acquired by dubious means and the bathing ghat for the pseudo-Kumbh was built with check dams and other infrastructure provided by the Gujarat government. As the Citizens’ Inquiry Committee that visited the area found out, ‘even the pretense of distance between the state apparatus and the Sangh [was] abandoned’.
The near-complete merging of the state machinery with forces of ‘Hindukaran’ has been going on for some time. The infamous Ekatmata yagna (sacrifice for unanimity) organized by the VHP in 1983, for example, was marked by enthusiastic participation and encouragement by state functionaries, including district magistrates and high-ranking police officials who presided over the yatra and religious ceremonies.
To sum up: the actual practice of secularism in India seems to be replicating the pre-modern, pre-Mughal Hindu model of the state–temple relationship. Elected ministers and bureaucrats see themselves in the mould of Hindu kings of yesteryears who considered it their duty to protect dharma. The temple priests and gurus, in turn, think nothing of treating elected officials as VIPs, if not literally as gods. The seamless partnership of faith and politics continues under the thin veneer of secularism.
On the face of it, contemporary popular Hinduism appears to be the very epitome of a dynamic and inventive religious tradition which is changing to keep pace with the changing time. Clearly, all the new gods, god-men/women, new temples, and rituals add up to an impressive inventory of creative innovations that are allowing men and women to take their gods with them as they step into the heady, though unsettling, world dominated by global corporate capitalism.
But there is an underside: the same innovations in religious ritual and dogmas that are enabling the so-called Great Indian Middle Class to adjust to global capitalism, are also deepening a sense of Hindu chauvinism, and widening the chasm between Hindus and non-Hindu minorities. The banal, everyday Hindu religiosity is simultaneously breeding a banal, everyday kind of Hindu nationalism. This kind of nationalism is not openly proclaimed in fatwas, nor does it appear on the election manifestos of political parties. Its power lies in structuring the common sense of ordinary people.
The idea of banal nationalism is from Michael Billig’s 1995 book with the same title. Billig argues convincingly that nationalism is not merely an ideology of peripheral movements of separatists, ultra-nationalist fascists, and the extreme right. There is also the nationalism of the already well-established nations whose states have confidence in their own continuity—nation-states like the US, which is Billig’s paradigmatic example. In these countries where the existence or continuity of the nation-state is not in doubt, symbols celebrating the nation nevertheless provide a continual background for making sense of everyday political discourse. As Billig puts it:
In many little ways, the citizenry are daily reminded of their national place in the world of nations. However, this reminding is so familiar, so continual, that it is not consciously registered as reminding. The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is being waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building. (emphasis added)
Gods are to India what the red-white-and-blue flag its to America. In India, public worship of Hindu gods and the public performance of distinctively Hindu rituals serve the role of ‘flagging’ the national identity of the citizenry as Indians. Whereas the ‘religions of the book’, that is, Islam and Christianity, bind the faithful by demanding obedience to the letter and the spirit of their revealed dogmas, Hinduism deploys familiar rituals, festivals, myths, and observances—the kind of things children learn on their mothers’ knees—to knit a many-stranded rope that binds the faithful to the faith with so many little ties, at so many different points that one loses sight of the ideological indoctrination that is going on. Ordinary worshippers and the three partners described above—the state, the temples, and the corporate or business interests—perform a choreographed dance, as it were, in which each element merges into another smoothly and effortlessly. The net result is a new kind of political and nationalistic Hinduism which is invented out of old customs and traditions that people are fond of, and familiar with. Because it builds upon the deeply felt religiosity, it sucks in even those who are not particularly anti-Muslim or anti-Christian. Religious festivals, temple rituals, and religious discourses become so many ways of ‘flagging’ India as a Hindu nation, and India’s cultural superiority as due to its Hindu spirituality.
The best way to describe the banality of Hindu nationalism and the role of religion in it is to show how it works.
The example comes from the recent inauguration of Shri Hari Mandir, a new temple that opened in Porbandar in Gujarat on February 4, 2006. As described in a previous section, this grand sandstone temple and priest training school called Sandipani Vidyaniketan attached to it is a joint venture of the Gujarat government, the business house of the Ambanis, and the charismatic kathakar, Ramesh Bhai Oza. The inauguration ceremony of this temple–gurukul complex provides a good example of how Hindu gods end up serving as props for Hindu nationalism and Hindu supremacy.
According to the description provided by the organizers themselves, the temple was inaugurated by Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the then vice president of the country, with the chief minister Narendra Modi, in attendance. Also in attendance were the widow of Dhirubhai Ambani and the rest of the Ambani clan whose generous financial donations had built the temple. Some 50,000 well-heeled devotees of Oza from India and abroad crowded into the temple precincts to watch the event.
The elected representatives of ‘secular’ India, in their official capacity, prayed before the temple idols—something so routine that it hardly evokes a response from anyone any more. The prayer was followed by the national anthem sung before the gods, followed by a recital of the Vedas by the student-priests, followed by Gujarati folk dances. This was followed by speeches that liberally mixed up the gods with the nation, with quite a bit of rhetoric about the greatness of Hindu ‘science’ thrown in for good measure. Modi, under whose regime Gujarat witnessed the worst-ever communal riots, spoke glowingly of the ‘tolerance’ and ‘secularism’ of Hinduism. He went on to recommend that yagnas and religious recitals be held all over the country before undertaking any new construction because Hinduism is ‘inherently ecological’. Next came Mrs Kokila Ambani, who, using her late husband as an example, urged mixing spirituality with work ethic and industry. The vice president, in his turn, spoke of how modern and scientific Hindu traditions were, comparing the gods’ weapons with modern missiles and their vehicles to modern-day helicopters.
The theme of the superiority of ancient Hindu science was taken up a week later when the president of India, Abdul Kalam, came down to the temple-ashram complex to inaugurate its ‘science museum’ which highlights ancient Hindu discoveries in astronomy/astrology, medicine (Ayurveda), architecture (vastu), and so on. Without ever questioning what validity the earth-at-the-centre astronomy/ astrology of Aryabhatta has in the modern world, the nuclear physicist president went on to claim not only the greatness of antiquity but also the continued relevance of the ancients for ‘enriching’ modern astronomy. The ancients—regardless of the fact that their cosmology has been falsified by modern science—were smoothly turned into the guiding lights of modern science.
This is a representative sample of how India’s state–temple8211;corporate complex works: the gods become the backdrop, and the traditional puja becomes the medium, for asserting the Hinduness of India and the greatness of both. Worship of the gods becomes indistinguishable from the worship of Hindu culture and the Indian nation. Devotees come to sing hymns to gods, but end up singing hymns to mother India—and cannot tell the difference. The cult of the nation, furthermore, is simultaneously turned into a cult of ‘reason’ and ‘science’, but without the critical and empirical spirit of science.
Once the beloved and popular gods become identified with the land and its culture, Hindu nationalism becomes a banal, everyday affair. No one has to pass fatwas and there is no need to launch a militant battle against the West. Hindu nationalists have no use for such crude tools. They would rather turn the worship of gods into the worship of the nation and they would rather beat the West by appropriating the West’s strengths in empirical sciences and other advances for their own gods. The tragedy is that the religiosity of ordinary believers provides the building blocks for this banal, but far from benign, Hindu nationalism.
This is the more polite, urban, and urbane face of everyday Hindu nationalism.
Economie globalization and neo-liberal reforms have created the material and ideological conditions in which a popular and ritualistic Hindu religiosity is growing. The three-sided partnership between the state, the temples, and the corporate interests is working in harmony to promote Hinduism in the public sphere. Popular religiosity, in turn, is being directed into a mass ideology of Hindu supremacy and Hindu nationalism.
This trend is a symptom of a deeper, more fundamental malaise, namely, the failure of secularism. For all its professions of secularism, the Indian state has developed neither a stance of equal indifference, nor of equal respect, for all the many religions of India. It has instead treated Hinduism, the religion of the majority, as the civic religion of the Indian nation itself. The result is a deep and widespread Hinduization of the public sphere, which is only growing under the conditions of globalization.