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| Sunil Sethi: Marketing the gifts of gods |
| Sunil Sethi / New Delhi Oct 03, 2009, 00:46 IST |
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Happy Daughter’s Day. This landmark event, in case you hadn’t noticed, has just gone by on September 27 and was being tom-tommed in shops crammed with advance cargoes of festival goodies. Coming up are a host of other happys—Happy Friendship Day, Happy Mother’s Day and the famous lovers’ tryst in February, under the patronage of St Valentine, that continues to raise the hackles of ultra-conservative Indians.
If you live in America, the Valhalla of capitalism where corporate retail feeds on mawkish emotion, there is also Teacher’s Day, Daddy’s Day, Secretary’s Day and even a Take-Your-Daughter-to-Work Day. This last event, American friends say, is when working moms drag their babes, from toddlers to teenagers, and lure them with gifts, to demonstrate what the postmodern female workforce is capable of. The Indian market is just learning the tricks of the trade. A family culture like ours will soon be celebrating Nana-Nani and Dada-Dadi days.
And why not, social analysts may argue, when the pace and pressures of urban life are a strain on family ties and other relationships. The odd part, though, is that these celebrations did not exist a generation ago. My parents would have bridled at the thoughtless expenditure that now comes coated in the spiritual saccharine of kinship. But then they were the kind of people who disliked any form of outward display, even at birthdays, in the firm belief that all anniversaries were purely family events. (“Holiday from what?” my father would ask quizzically if one of said how badly we needed one.)
New research, however, shows that Indians are not only taking to new-fangled western celebrations like ducks to water but also enthusiastically reinventing and propagating traditional rituals. In her recent book The God Market: How Globalization is Making India More Hindu, Meera Nanda, a philosopher of science based in the US, offers a gamut of argument and example to show how urbanisation, economic liberation and prosperity are making middle-class Indians more devout. Educated Indians in cities and small towns are becoming more religious than the less educated in villages; according to the 2001 census the number of places of religious worship in the country (2.5 million) far outstrips schools (1.5 million) and hospitals (75,000). In Delhi alone, the number of registered religious buildings has shot up from 560 in 1980 to 2,000 in 1987.
The rising religiosity is reflected in the growing number of pilgrimages. A recent NCAER study showed that “religious trips account for more than 50 per cent of all package tours, much higher than leisure tour packages at 28 per cent.” In 2004 more than 23 million people visited Tirupati and 17.25 million trekked to the mountain shrine of Vaishno Devi.
Yagnas, mahurats and pujas, new gods and goddesses, vaastu masters, healers, religious cults and rituals dominate urban landscape, with the “service providers” of the spirit bringing succour to the alienation, insecurity and frustrations of a prosperous middle class. In some ways the everyday manifestations are visible around us, from examples of blatant land grab in the setting up of wayside shrines, all-night jagrans set to Bollywood item numbers and the fashionably hip faces of global gurudom (Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Deepak Chopra etc) and their gentrified empires of godliness.
More intriguing is what Meera Nanda describes as a state-political-corporate nexus in promoting the surge of religiosity. National and regional parties have been unabashed in employing religion as a vote-catching mechanism but, increasingly, state subsidies and corporate management support is channelled into temple-building and running religious institutions. The Delhi and UP government gave away 100 acres at throwaway prices to build Akshardham temple. The Art of Living ashram in Bangalore is built on 99 acres of government land, and Gujarat and Rajasthan have spent fortunes of taxpayers’ money in land gifts, temple renovations and training of priests. Just think of the gifts, new and old, that God has in store for you in a season of conspicuous spending.
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