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 the 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, idol worship, 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 embracing 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.
~~The God Market: How Globalization is Making India More Hindu -by- Meera Nanda
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