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Magazine
RIPPLE EFFECTS
Look out! Darshana ahead
RANJIT HOSKOTE
K. GAJENDRAN
THE Mumbai suburb that has always been my home was described, in the 1920s, as a garden suburb: a pleasant retreat from the city's core districts, where people could build small bungalows, set in their own grounds. Its railway station, of 1930s vintage, was meant to suggest a hill resort. Its streets, planned along a sensible grid that yields gracefully to pre-existing features of landscape, are tree-lined; they were, until recently, numbered rather than named, in sequence from the tracks to the seaside. The bungalows, with their Art Deco stained glass and ornamental mouldings, have fallen to the inexorable metronome of the 1990s. Developers have moved in, working their jejune sorcery of glass facades, strips of lawn, artificial fountains and foyer cascades. The shrubbery no longer casts lavender shadows, bathed as it is in the night-long neon glare of fashion stores and speciality restaurants. Fortunately, almost every lane and avenue remains arched over with green, bordered by banyan, coconut, peepal, mango, gulmohur and copper-pod. But the old landmarks are vanishing, and with them, the assurance that one is at home in a specific, familiar environment.
As houses have collapsed in avalanches of rubble, and crisp street numbers been replaced by vainglorious names, a novel series of signposts have come to punctuate the lanes, roundabouts and intersections, embodying an informal cartography of belief. Not surprisingly, and in consonance with the boom in Mumbai's religious economy during the last decade, my area too has borne witness to a proliferation of streetside shrines. These structures are improvised around black or tide-marked stones, swiftly promoted to the status of Shivalingams or shaligramas. Or they might burgeon around icons of the Sai Baba, Ganesha-Vinayaka or the multiform Devi: each of these nuclei soon gathers a cultus, with the neighbourhood devising elaborate festivities and observances around it. In some cases, these developments have taken place around (and taken the place of) wayside shrines that had occupied their sites since the dawn of local memory: typically, an aniconic image embedded at the foot of a tree, regularly adorned with vermilion and venerated with an earthen oil-lamp by a hawker or domestic help.
The 1990s streetside shrines follow a standard evolutionary graph: first the platform, then the parapet; in due course, an archway, this additive process culminating in the consecration of a miniature temple, rendered in grey-veined marble, complete with grille-guarded, white-tiled sanctum, bells, saffron pennant, and that vital basis of the shrine's financial model, a collection box. This formalisation is soon recognised by the arrival of flower-sellers and alms-seekers; loudspeakers are installed, to play shrill devotional music, and pedestrians are exiled from their rightful estate. Acting on cue, a "social worker" props up the notice-board of the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Shiv Sena, announcing the sacrosanct prejudices of the moment.
Events at pavement level echo the frenzied developer-driven recasting of the built environment. Within a decade, simple shrines that had been the refuge of the suburb's floating population, its domestics, gardeners, watchmen, cobblers and vegetable-sellers, have been taken over by entrepreneurial spirits such as the street-corner idli-dosai man, tea-stall owner or florist, and turned into the preserve of the bourgeoisie. The older residents find solace here, perhaps, from the bewildering transformation of their habitat by the processes of global hyper-urbanisation; the newer ones have imported the residual anxieties of upward mobility along with their flashy cars and deafening music systems.
Piquant ironies are at play here. For one, the situation presents an entertaining lesson in market economics. Consider the manner in which some of the denizens of the pavement, engaged in unlicensed commercial enterprises, have repositioned themselves as religious entrepreneurs: they have risen in life, establishing equally unlicensed operations that block walkways, but which are protected by the aura of the sacred, and the local branches of the majoritarian parties. Consider, also, the gift for survival that these religious entrepreneurs display in a potentially, often actively, hostile ambience. These catalytic agents, who play on localised religious identifications, are rarely "local" by birth or residence; usually, they are relatively recent migrants from deepest Andhra Pradesh or Tamil Nadu, coastal Karnataka or Kerala, or the foothills of northern Bihar.
The proliferation of streetside shrines is part of the larger phenomenon of popular religiosity in epicentres of mortal anguish such as Mumbai. It finds place in a catalogue that includes the preachers who run successful enterprises of faith in the metropolis, and the self-proclaimed specialists in dubious Tantric arts, their cell-phone numbers prominently pasted in local train compartments, who advertise relief from life's thorniest problems. Marx, who understood the role of religion as consolation intimately, summed up the case in one of his most moving, most misquoted, passages: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
Are pavement temples the latest manifestation of the simple yaksha and naga shrines that form the substratum of organised worship in South Asia? The proposition mistakes situational analogy for historical continuity. My readings are considerably less benign. Could it be an Ayodhya, unachieved, that has assumed these myriad kerbside incarnations? And surely the streetside shrine stands to the established temple, as video does to the cinema hall: why bother with travelling and standing in long queues for darshana, when you can have the experience on your own terms of space and time?
Three months ago, Mumbai's municipal authorities launched a campaign to demolish the streetside shrines, undeterred by tumultuous protest. Walking past what has been a Sai Baba shrine for the last six years, I saw that the temple had vanished, leaving behind its marble paving and canny flower-sellers. A portrait of the saint, an ecumenical Sufi-Yogi figure now claimed by Hindu monopolists, hangs on a corrugated-metal wall.
The faithful still pause, dolefully, at this remnant; my father, a cheerful agnostic, refers to it as the "Wailing Wall". The great banyan that the shrine had eclipsed has emerged again, in its hooded, many-rooted glory.
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