Across four states in western and southern India, I saw a trail of saffron flags and posters featuring Lord Ram, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and local BJP leaders. And in almost every home we visited, the excitement about the Pran Pratishtha ceremony in Ayodhya was tangible. In whatever form one expresses the incredible, overwhelming mood of this time in Indian history—or dissents from it as some are doing—I must begin with a story of a different pran pratishtha ceremony that seems to teach me something about life, tradition, and existence, even though this one took place about 49 years ago in a small village in Andhra Pradesh.
A shrine in Duggirala
In July 1975, my mother—the multilingual actress and former Lok Sabha member Jamuna—and father came to Duggirala near Vijayawada, to participate in the pran pratishtha ceremonies for a small Navagraha shrine they had helped make possible. Being a child, I had no clue that it happened at all.
But a few days ago, as I went to Duggirala to meet my late mother’s childhood best friend and show my family her childhood home and school, I ended up seeing this shrine. I had been to Duggirala once before with my mother. It was an insightful trip then, but nothing more.
But this time, it was different. Now, neither my mother nor father are here. However, their names are still standing on a small plaque by the wall of the shrine. More importantly, though, it wasn’t just the cement and stone that told me something about them. My mother’s childhood friend, now well into her 80s, said that my mother stepped up to pay for the Navagrahas and participate in the pran pratishtha ceremony because other donors had some “sentiments” that prevented them from donating money for deities of the “less auspicious” planets.
I had no idea my parents were progressives or rationalists. They probably weren’t. But they did something which has become a part of the village they wanted to show their love to.
Hospitals, schools, school equipment? Sure, that’s important too. My mother helped a little with “secular” things too. And her friend has built a school, college, hospital, and now a small meditation centre. That’s what some people do.
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False dichotomy of divine and human
Now, much as I admire the generosity of these people and what we may call the humanitarian instinct, I have to raise a critical question about why our modern sensibilities and supposed “scientific temper” make us so loathe to see the work of those who build temples and fund the consecration and worship of deities as non-useful, wasteful, or even regressive.
From a practical perspective, all it takes is a moment’s imagination to recognise that my parents’ contribution to a small temple in Duggirala is the centre of thousands of lives in some small way; the unemployed worshipping a planet for that job offer, the sick placing offerings to another planet, parents hoping their children will marry good people, young couples and their parents hoping the next generation will come— a yearning which so many have and only gods and planets (and of course, science) can help.
But then it is not just the utilitarian level of this that moves me now. My parents, after all, made an effort to go all the way there in 1975 and see the ceremony through. That is what aunty told me, emphatically. My parents may be gone, but the conviction of their faith in the rituals and the deities stands firm as a rock, firm as a deity.
Conviction. Faith. A sense of trust inherited from the lives and deeds of those who lived long before us passed on, one generation after another. And now, a nation, or civilisation, or a big part of it, feels energised, enthused, exuberant about the Pran Pratishtha of Ram the same way. What this energy will be used for, in the larger scheme of things, no one can quite know entirely. Will political figures get mileage? Of course. But who isn’t building monuments and statues these days with that goal in mind?
Sacred landscapes
My last few days have taken me through some of the Telugu land’s most sacred and sometimes less widely known temples and punya kshetras.
The goddesses, gods, traditions, all of these are strong here. In every place, the crowds come, very few are “privileged” or elite. They chant and do all that the deity’s customs ask fervently, while having a picnic and selfie moment about it. Standing before the ancient Undavalli Caves near Vijayawada, a young man was striking excellent poses with his majestic, soaring, saffron Jai Shri Ram flag. I asked him if I could borrow it for a photo. He made me wave it and shout “Jai Shri Ram!” while he took a video. “Imagined communities”? The “delusion of crowds”? Social science concepts come and go. But beyond them and standing tall are the gods.
Punya kshetras, sacred sites, remnants of an earth whose dominant species once culturally kept alive, in intergenerational memory, as places of gratitude and reverence to nature. Someone on American X recently commented that Western youth no longer learn about “Nature,” (with all the sensitive implications of the term) but only about “the Environment,” a seemingly sterile, inorganic, machine-like “system.” Indigenous cultures will not forget the specificity of place, nor the sanctity of natural time. Muhurtam, vastu, all the things mocked by “scientific temper” zealots, these were the ways of the whole world (by different names perhaps) before the brute dominionism of the intolerant expansionist monotheisms. In some small way, the Ram ecstasy of our time is a yearning for that very ancient memory even as it is denuded every day.
Why that yearning? The answer isn’t only about mystical things or some psychological explanation. India is reaching for the gods because we are in the most peculiar phase of our bizarre, lethal—culturally and ecologically—toxic modernity; we live, or at least our elites do, in a strange phenomenon that can be succinctly described as iconoclasm towards the gods and idolatry towards humans.
Why do I say this, at a time when god-mania seems to fill the country?
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Gods versus statues
The truth is that in every village I passed these past few days, the statues that dominate are not those of the traditional gods, local, or pan-Indian, but that of political leaders. As we sat in the courtyard of the Shiva temple where my parents had built the Navagraha shrine, I could see the head and shoulders of a life-size silver-coloured MK Gandhi statue with a stick outside the gate. Beside him was the statue of another leader. Across the villages of this region, statues of former Chief Minister (and father of current Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy) YS Rajasekhar Reddy, and actor-politician NT Rama Rao, colour the landscape. In between, there are of course many statues also of BR Ambedkar in his blue coat.
I have yet to see the giant statue of Vallabhai Patel in Gujarat, but I have seen the statue of Ambedkar in Hyderabad, and saw the imposing statue of Ambedkar pointing a powerful finger at the River Krishna in Vijayawada. Interestingly enough, on the evening of the inauguration of the Ambedkar statue, the traffic on the Guntur-Vijayawada highway was held up presumably so supporters could attend the important historical event.
Of course, the practice of traffic being stopped, or sometimes even trees and foliage being cut, to make way for the fleeting movement of VIPs tells us something about the real “religion” of our times. We worship the God of Democracy by making sacrifices to His anointed representatives here on earth every day. And of course, the representatives usually are pretty good at playing God themselves.
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Monotheistic monomania
I recently passed by the monumental new Secretariat complex in Hyderabad. A small group of people stood at the gates. If this was a temple, the first thing someone would have thought is that the Brahmin priests were shutting them out. Because it is the palace of the God of Democracy, no one thinks that way. What lies behind the gates is equally perplexing; a vast, open, empty yard with a long driveway going straight from the gate to the building. India, where citizens struggle to find the next spot of unbroken pavement to step on while walking, while the Priests of Democracy raze whole acres of trees to have that grand entrance playing out in their heads.
The crazy thing, though, is that everybody knows this is very crazy. So we all go along with it. We can’t rock the boat. Kiss the steps of the Temple of Democracy, sure. Compulsory national anthem, sure. Round up the welfare scheme beneficiaries in your ward or village to vote for your leader or attend his rallies, of course. We will do it all.
But the one thing which we know is not crazy though, not crazy at all, is that Ram, Krishna, Ganesh, Hanuman, Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswati, our million gods, famous and little-known, are those who rule the entirety of our existence.
How do we know this? Simply because our ancestors said so.
Colonisers, bullies, fools, tyrants, megalomaniacs, kleptomaniacs, they will come and go. But a mother will still walk around the Navagrahas for her children. A father will still bear the sacred irumudi on his head to go to Sabarimala. A software engineer will give up his American job to serve his mother and then retire to an ancient hilltop shrine to serve Lord Narasimha.
For centuries, they have screamed in sword, blood, print, law, fire, and stone; they have screamed that the gods have no place in this modern world, that only One True God must prevail, by whatever name, “religious” or “secular”.
Ram, and the last polytheistic land still standing, have just rejected that maniacal presumption yet one more time.
Your Constitution, your Democracy, your new Holy Book, none of it is bigger than our Ram. We will work with these if we have to. But that’s exactly what it is.
Vamsee Juluri @vamseejuluri is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)