Miracle moments, virtual shrines
RANJIT HOSKOTE
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What drives large numbers of people in urban India to find solace in the idea of supernatural forces that can intercede in daily life?
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Perhaps the popular imagination needs to counterbalance a universe weighted in favour of disaster and peril with inexplicable explosions of comfort and blessedness.
Manifestations of popular religiosity: Belief has been translated from the physical to the virtual realm. Photo: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar
IN one of his most profoundly moving yet most maligned and misunderstood passages, Marx wrote that "religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the soul of soulless conditions... it is the opiate of the people." As a rebel against his family's rabbinical tradition and the polite Christianity that his father had adopted, Marx understood the psychology and the social compensations of religion intimately well.
Mass phenomena
An opiate, in the mid-19th century, was not solely associated with the illicit pleasures of the lotus-eater. More typically, it referred to the lesser of two evils: a dangerous but effective means of coping with persistent malady and spasmodic pain, with the anxiety of an uncertain politics and the anguish of a life gone unaccountably wrong. Marx's account of religion may be hostile to the possibilities of self-perfection and transcendence that religious practice holds out, but it remains pertinent to mass-religious phenomena. It certainly applies to the occasional upsurge of cultic madness, the regular fixation of crowds on the latest charismatic guru to arrive on the scene, or the periodic eruption of miracle narratives in metropolitan India.
This August, just over a year after the catastrophic July 26, 2005, flood in Mumbai, vast numbers of people congregated at the Mahim beachfront to drink or collect gallons of seawater that had supposedly turned sweet. This is where the Mithi, once a river and now a gigantic sewer blocked by pollution and reclamation, spills its toxic freight of chemical-and-garbage-heavy water into the sea. The brutally abused Mithi had risen to flood the metropolis last monsoon; but this monsoon, its waters seemed blessed. Even to people harrowed by the controversy over the possible pesticide content in their Coke and Pepsi bottles. The municipal authorities warned of an epidemic, which fortunately did not break out; rumour, it appears, was the only fast-travelling virus they had to contend with. Soon after, it was reported that a range of idols across the country, whether Sai Baba statuettes in shrines or Ganesha and Durga icons on festival platforms, had begun to accept offerings of milk. The media treatment of these events varied between breathless wonderment and maladroit comedy.
Psychic atmosphere
The sceptics among us may well ridicule these manifestations of popular religiosity as continuing evidence of the gullibility of the masses, the power of superstition, the mobility of rumour, and the self-fulfilling dynamic of unscientific explanations. All the same, it is surely worth asking why so many individuals, who otherwise inhabit a contemporary technosphere and understand its workings reasonably well, invest happenstance and aberration with mysterious, even life-transforming significance. What drives large numbers of people in metropolitan India to find solace in the idea of the miracle? If the psychic atmosphere of metropolitan India is fraught with anxiety and despair, it is also richly coloured by credulity and a desperate need to escape from the straitjacket of adverse circumstances. The word `hope' is almost too serene to convey the extremity of this emotional state.
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Like its residential architecture, the religious architecture of metropolitan India is changing to accommodate the semblance of plural influences. If more and more urban Indians live in buildings adorned with Corinthian elements and Art Deco motifs, many urban Indians also worship at simulacra of shrines or temples situated elsewhere. If Vaishnodevi is too far away and too dangerous to journey to, a religious developer can recreate this celebrated focus of pilgrimage for you, closer to home. If Akshardham is too far away, why then, that holy site, too, can be presented in architectural facsimile to those who cannot make the trip to the original. Belief has been translated, also, from the physical to the virtual realm. Temples such as Mumbai's legendary Sri Siddhivinayak Mandir have, for some years now, offered a species of cyber-darshan, by which the customary experience of being blessed by the presence of the Divine is now conducted across a server. It is not entirely facetious to imagine a future in which the religious theme park will not be an anomaly, but a necessity. Think of a vast property that houses full-scale replicas of diverse shrines and sites of worship, a sort of mall of belief with an outlet for every persuasion: religious practice reformatted for the consumerist society, premised on ease of access rather than the merit traditionally acquired by making a pilgrimage.
Growth of shrines
The economy of religious life is flourishing in metropolitan India. The interweave of the physical spaces occupied by various classes ensures that the elite, though secure behind their guarded gates, are not far removed from the masses who shape the protocols of public space. In Mumbai, the vertical growth of the glass canyons of Mall City is matched by the horizontal profusion of informal shrines: the statuette of a saint at the base of a tree, or the print of a mythic hero tacked to a plank. In Hyderabad's Banjara Hills, where the natural marvel of boulders balancing on pinpoints is being overshadowed by the confections of developer architecture, we find a fecundity of temples devoted to a variety of deities and guardian figures. And the urban expansionist's paradise of South Delhi is South in more ways than one: here, we find the whitewashed edifices of ashrams and the polychrome quasi-gopurams of temples dedicated to divinities of peninsular Indian origin.
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What do these miracle moments, simulacral shrines and virtual sancta tell us about the way in which individuals are inventing selves to work out of, and communities in which to integrate their new selves? A few speculations about migrancy, identity shifts and economic mobility may not be out of place.
Metropolitan India is immigrant territory and has always been. In each generation, immigrants to the city have re-invented themselves, attempting to preserve elements of what they have left behind while assimilating enthusiastically into urbanity. But each generation has had to contend with a different set of pressures and opportunities.
Some of the initiatives of contemporary popular religiosity in metropolitan India may originate in a migrant's desire to recreate a lost group identity or sense of locality. Soon enough, the initiative attracts a new constituency and develops into a new, an invented system of belief and worship.
Another factor informing this scenario is the sense of dislocation and the awareness of constantly being a counter in an unpredictable game of snakes and ladders can impel the individual to seek spiritual anchorage or the assurance of community. Resentful youth may gravitate openly to an aggressively majoritarian ideology such as the BJP's, but a silent majority flocks to itinerant preachers and emergent shrines, with their promise of empathy and healing.
Yet another syndrome that may account for the boom in faith is the pervasive unease and threat perception that attends life in India's embattled cities. Perhaps the popular imagination needs to counterbalance a universe weighted in favour of disaster and peril with inexplicable explosions of comfort and blessedness. Terror travels across borders as easily as capital does, in the age of globalisation. Metropolitan India is subject, as never before, to unseen forces that can act with terrifying effectiveness at a distance. The global jihad menaces our life, our liberty and our pursuit of happiness. The march of global capital transforms the ready familiarities of our neighbourhoods, estranging us from our habits and memories. Many metropolitan Indians must think that, if demons can move among us, planting bombs on trains and in prayer meetings, surely angels can turn our seawater into syrup?
If the sheer, soaring tinted-glass and concrete surfaces of new enclaves shut us out with their aloofness, surely the gods will respond to our overtures with compassion? Perhaps the belief in larger-than-life protector figures persists beyond the comic-book phase. And perhaps our unacknowledged need for such compassionate guardians is exacerbated by the fact that those mandated by the modern, secular nation-state to safeguard our interests have so signally failed us.
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