India had its own ‘why do they hate us?’ moment after the city of Mumbai came under attack in November 2008 by a bunch of gunmen with links to terrorist outfits in Pakistan. Many in India answered the question much the same way George Bush famously explained the 9/11 attacks on the United States: Islamic terrorists hate us because we are good and they are evil; we are free and democratic and they hate freedom and democracy.
This ‘us–them’ divide was further linked to globalization, a word that got bandied about a great deal in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks. Pakistanis hate us, many argued in India, because we are winning in the global economy race, while they are a bunch of sore losers bent upon dimming the bright glow of our economic miracle. The terror attacks were seen as a conspiracy meant to destroy the confidence of global investors, slow down the outsourcing of IT and other jobs to India, and stop foreign tourists from coming.
India is seen as winning the globalization race not only on the economic front, but on the civilizational front as well. As Robert Kaplan, a well-known foreign policy expert, wrote in The New York Times shortly after the Mumbai attacks, globalization has led Indians to look for roots of their ‘vibrantly free’ democracy in Hinduism, while Muslims of India and Pakistan are looking for roots in the ‘Islamic world community… and withdrawing into beards, skull-caps and burqas in some cases; and self-segregating into ghettos in other cases’. A similar sentiment was echoed in India as well. M.V. Kamath, a commentator well known for his strong Hindutva views, wrote in The Organiser that while ‘indestructible India, wearing a cheerful smile and forgiving countenance is busy sending rockets to the moon’, its ‘sick’ Muslim neighbour and many Indian Muslims are bent upon isolating themselves by ‘wearing skull-caps, forcing women to wear burqas, and otherwise refusing to join the mainstream’.
Something rather strange is going on here. The extreme conservatism of some Muslims, who are indeed withdrawing into traditional attire and symbols of their faith, is made to stand for the entire ‘Islamic world community’. But on the other hand, the accomplishments of India—of all Indians, belonging to all of India’s many faiths and creeds—are happily claimed for the glory of Hinduism. India, with its Hindu civilization, is presented as the bright, forward-facing side of globalization, while Pakistan—and indeed, Islam itself —becomes its dark, demonic, and backward-facing underside. The world gets divided into two: the winners who have the right kind of civilizational resources to play and win in the global economy, and the rest who are deemed to be laggards, if not total losers.
This book challenges this ‘us’ and ‘them’ narrative. It sets out to show that India is not free from the forces of politicized religiosity which expresses itself in a growing sense of Hindu majoritarianism.
Indeed, politicized religiosity seems to be the order of the day everywhere. Globalization is making the whole world more religious—and all religions more political. Even as they are drawing closer economically, people all over the world are becoming more self-conscious of their religious and civilizational heritage. One can say that globalization has been good for the gods—and often, sadly, for gods’ warriors as well who incite conflict and violence in the name of their faith.
India is no exception to this global trend.
This book aims to explore the changing religious landscape of India as it globalizes. It not only describes the changing trends and texture of everyday expressions of Hinduism, it connects these trends to the larger political, economic, and institutional shifts that the country is experiencing as it emerges as a major player in the global economy and world affairs. The overall aim of this book is to describe how modern Hindus are taking their gods with them into the brave new world and how Hindu institutions are making use of the new opportunities opened up by neo-liberalism and globalization.
The following, in broad brushstrokes, is the picture this book presents:
• As India is liberalizing and globalizing its economy, the country is experiencing a rising tide of popular Hinduism which is leaving no social segment and no public institution untouched. There is a surge in popular religiosity among the burgeoning and largely Hindu middle classes, as is evident from a boom in pilgrimage and invention of new and more ostentatious rituals.
• This religiosity is being cultivated by the emerging state temple–corporate complex that is replacing the more secular public institutions of the Nehruvian era. In other words, the deregulatory regime put in place to encourage a neo-liberal market economy is also boosting the demand and the supply for religious services in India’s God market.
• Aided by the new political economy, a new Hindu religiosity is getting ever more deeply embedded in the everyday life, both in the public and the private spheres. Use of explicitly Hindu rituals and symbols in the routine affairs of the state and electoral politics has become so commonplace that Hinduism has become the de facto religion of the ‘secular’ Indian state which is constitutionally bound to have no official religion.
• Given India’s growing visibility in the global economy, Hindu religiosity is getting fused with feelings of national pride and dreams of becoming a superpower. The country’s economic success is being attributed to the superiority of Hindu values, and India is seen as entitled to the Great Power status because of its ancient Hindu civilization. Thus the hard-won achievements of all of India’s many diverse religious traditions and cultures are being absorbed into the religion of the majority community.
• This new culture of political Hinduism is both triumphalist and intolerant in equal measures: while it wants the entire world to admire the superior tolerance and non-violence of the Hindu civilization, it tolerates intolerance and even violence against religious minorities at home.
This, in short, is the case this book will make.
Two caveats need to be added right away so that the readers don’t have unrealistic expectations. This book will focus exclusively on the changing trends in popular Hinduism, the majority religion of the country. Changes in India’s minority religions will be acknowledged where and when needed, but not investigated in any detail.
The other point to keep in mind is that this book is about Hinduism and not about organized movements for Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism. The trends in popular and public religiosity it describes cut across the secular–communal and left–right divides in the political domain. The cultural habit of imaging India in explicitly religious symbols of the majority community is not the exclusive preserve of the Sangh Parivar, even though the latter uses it more explicitly and more often for communal and electoral purposes.
At the end of it all this book poses this question: What room does this India that dreams saffron-tinged superpower dreams have for non-Hindu minorities? What happens to the India that Muslims, Christians, non-believers, and other non-Hindus also call home as the country begins to see itself as India@superpower.OM? Can the country deliver on the promise of secularism without cultivating a secular culture and a secular polity?
This book is not an academic report on a specific research project. But neither is it a book of polemics or ideological argumentation. Rather, this book combines political analysis and philosophical reflection with hard data, painstakingly collected from a vast variety of sources available in the public domain. The idea is to present the reader with the most cutting-edge social theories about globalization and resurgence of religion, backed with the best available facts and figures about everyday Hindu religiosity from the ground up. It is an attempt to breach the walls between the Ivory Tower of academic social sciences and the home, the street, the café, and wherever else non-academic intelligent readers live, work, and read. In short, this is a work of honest and rigorous scholarship meant to enlighten the reader and to make her think.
Like any work of contemporary social history, this book tries to connect the dots between many diverse sources of information. It uses material obtained from the mass media, opinion polls, scholarly studies, government reports, research reports of think tanks, and websites of temples/ashrams. This data will show that:
• The newly prosperous middle classes are turning away from the more philosophical, neo-Vedantic form of religiosity and embracing a more ritualistic and superstitious form of popular Hinduism centred on temples, pilgrimages, and popular saints or god-men/women. The signs of the rising religiosity are all around us: there is a boom in construction of temples and mega temples, some of which house gentrified gods and goddesses, while others offer newly invented ‘ancient’ rituals. The number of people undertaking pilgrimages is rising, as is the fellowship of gurus and god-men.
• This religiosity is becoming more and more public and political. Religious observances like homas (or yagnas), jagrans, and kathas that used to be relatively simple domestic affairs are becoming more and more ostentatious, expensive, and public. In addition, religious rituals like yagnas and yatras (pilgrimages) are becoming mobilizing tools for political causes of all sorts, from benign ones like protecting the environment and preventing AIDS to the more sinister shobha yatras and samaj mahotsavas (social festivals) which are meant to consolidate a majority Hindu consciousness.
• The rise in religiosity has the support of the leading institutions of the state, the temples, and the business sector, often working in a three-sided partnership.
The last issue brings us to the task of explaining the rising Hindu religiosity. There are some who say that Indians are innately more other-worldly and that Hinduism is a ‘total way of life’ in which the spiritual motive cannot be separated from other spheres of life. While the rest of the world might be expected to become less religious with modernity, India will always be religious.
This book will steer clear of these we-are-like-that-only kinds of theories. Instead, it will treat religiosity as any other cultural phenomenon which ebbs and flows, and changes with changing time. This book argues that the rise in Hindu religiosity can be explained by the emergence of the ‘state–temple–corporate complex’ that is filling the space that the ‘socialist’ state of the Nehruvian era has ceded to the private sector.
In one sense, the existence of the nexus between the state, temples, and the private sector is nothing new. The supposedly secular state of India has never shied away from celebrating Hindu religious symbols in the public sphere—all in the name of propagating Indian culture. Merchants and business houses, too, have a long history, going back many centuries, of sponsoring temples and monasteries devoted to their own chosen god or gurus.
But the current neo-liberal economic regime, this book will argue, is bringing the state, the religious establishment, and the business/corporate elite in a much closer relationship than ever before. As the Indian state is withdrawing from its public sector obligations, it is actively seeking partnership with the private sector and the Hindu establishment to run schools, universities, tourist facilities, and other social services. As a result, public funds earmarked for creating public goods are increasingly being diverted into facilitating the work of these private charitable institutions which bear a distinctly Hindu traditionalist bias. This, in turn, is helping to ‘modernize’ Hinduism: many of the newly minted, English-speaking, and computer-savvy priests, astrologers, vastu shastris, and yoga teachers who service the middle classes’ insatiable appetite for religious ritual, are products of this nexus between the state, the corporate sector, and the temples.
The book opens and closes with two big ideas, namely, globalization and secularism. Sandwiched between these bookends are three chapters the contents of which are described below:
The opening chapter is titled ‘India and the Global Economy: A Very Brief Introduction’. This chapter provides an extended introduction to the phenomenon of globalization as it pertains to India. It provides a brief economic history of post-Independence India and charts its path to market reforms and integration into global markets. It pays special attention to the stark socio-economic inequalities which are worsening under the new economy. It also provides fair amount of detail regarding the privatization of higher education which has opened up fresh opportunities for religious institutions to enter the education market. This chapter is meant to set the stage for the rest of the book.
Chapter 2 is titled ‘The Rush Hour of the Gods: Globalization and Middle-Class Religiosity’. This chapter examines the ‘rush hour of the gods’ in contemporary India. Piecing together media reports, opinion polls, and academic studies, this chapter describes the many ways in which the new Hindu middle classes are becoming more religious and how the texture of the public sphere is becoming more distinctively Hindu than ever before.
Chapter 3 is titled ‘The State–Temple–Corporate Complex and the Banality of Hindu Nationalism’. This chapter looks at the institutional underpinnings of the rising Hindu religiosity and Hindu nationalism. It describes the nexus between the state, the temples, and the private sector in three broad areas: training of Hindu priests, creation of ‘deemed universities’ by religious endowments, and religious tourism. This chapter also looks at the phenomenon of banal or ordinary, everyday Hindu nationalism. It describes how the worship of the nation is becoming indistinct from the worship of Hindu gods and goddesses.
Chapter 4 is titled ‘India@superpower.com: How We See Ourselves. It describes how India’s success in the global economy is being ascribed to the Great Hindu Mind. It examines the dark side of this triumphalism which shows up as prejudice against non-Hindu minorities, especially Muslims, and, to a lesser extent, Christians. This chapter also examines the role of Voice of India, a New Delhi-based publishing house that specializes in producing Hindu triumphalist literature that openly derides the god of monotheistic religions.
Chapter 5 is titled Rethinking Secularization (with India in mind). It looks at India’s experience of secularism through the prism of social theories of secularization and de-secularization. It tries to understand why the god market has continued to boom under the peculiarly Indian brand of secularism and why it is flourishing under neo-liberal economic reforms.
This book is an unplanned by-product of a much bigger enterprise that I have been engaged with for the last few years. But precisely because it emerged so unexpectedly, and yet made a lot of sense when it did come together, this book is all the more dear to me.
In 2005, I was awarded a fellowship by the John Templeton Foundation to work on a book-length study of the relationship between modern science and Hinduism in contemporary India. I was especially keen to explore the career of ‘scientific temper’—an idea which was dear to Jawaharlal Nehru, Bhim Rao Ambedkar, and other secular humanists among the founding fathers of independent India. Indeed, to cultivate the temper of science is one of the fundamental duties of citizens laid out in the Constitution of India.
Like anyone trying to understand the cultural impact of modern science in India, I was immediately confronted with a paradox: there is ‘science’ everywhere, but hardly any sign of the critical spirit of science. India is practically drowning in ‘science’: gurus in their ashrams and on TV, and even professors in government-aided colleges and universities, have honed the art of casting every conceivable superstition, from astrology to vastu, as ‘science’.
Since it is the educated, English-speaking, urban moneyed classes who are the biggest consumers of Hindu pseudoscience, I naturally wanted to understand the cultural and religious world-view of this growing section of the Indian population. My attempt to understand the religious beliefs and practices of middle-class Indians resulted in a long essay I called ‘The Rush Hour of the Gods’. This essay became the nucleus for the present book.
Once I started focusing on middle-class religiosity, I had no choice but to look at the growing globalization of the Indian economy. It is impossible to understand the mindset of Indian middle classes today without first understanding the quantum leap in their aspirations and dreams brought about by market reforms and trade liberalization that India embraced in the early 1990s.
Well, once I began to place religiosity in the changing political economic context, one bit of evidence led to another discovery and soon a picture began to emerge. I began to understand better how liberalization had increased both the demand and the supply of religious services in the private and the public sphere. Before I knew it, I had developed a thesis that could stand on its own.
I took leave of absence from my original research project. The research and writing of this book was done entirely on my own time and without any financial support from the Templeton Foundation. The Templeton Foundation bears no responsibility either for the existence of this book or for the ideas it expresses.
With this book in print, I look forward to returning to where I started from. My original project is nearing completion and will soon appear in print under the title Tryst with Destiny: Scientific Temper and Secularization in India.