Faith and pelf
"It is a mistake to regard modernity as something which is sounding the death knell of India's highly diverse religions," says William Dalrymple, as the din of traffic floats into the lawns of a hotel in downtown Delhi where we are sitting.
The 44-year-old historian-travel writer is promoting his new book Nine Lives, an Indian Canterbury Tales of sorts, where he tells the stories of the lives of nine ordinary people across the country - and in one case, across the border in Pakistan - to explore the power of the sacred in modern India.
"Faith is not dying in India even as people become more materialist," he says. I couldn't agree more: faith in India is changing and mutating. We are witnessing the rise and rise of cults, and a thriving, cosy co-existence of local deities with the big, pan-Indian ones.
Divine enterprise is also flourishing - religion is big business.
Some of the stories in Nine Lives - presented largely in reported speech - are stunning examples of how the quotidian makes for the most engaging material - an austere Jain monk who starves herself to death, a Buddhist monk who joins the Indian army to fight the Chinese and ends up fighting the Pakistanis, a tantric who is a fan of Test match cricket, a low-paid prison warden who plays God for two months a year. Some of the early story drafts date back six years; and Dalrymple says he whittled it down to "nine lives, nine moral universes" from a long list of 23 stories.
Some years ago, Mark Tully worried about "spiritual pollution" due to the unbridled rise of materialism in India. I thought Tully was worrying too much. Even Dalrymple wonders in Nine Lives: "Does India offer any sort of real spiritual alternative to materialism, or is it now just another fast-developing satrap of the wider capitalist world?" I lob the question back to him.
"There has always been materialism in India," he says. "And one of the reasons there have been so many great renouncers in the country was because they were reacting, in part, against the excesses of materialism". Dalrymple says that when he is quizzed by inquisitive readers on his book tours abroad about materialism in India, he says: "My Punjabi neighbours in Delhi are some of the most brutally material people I have ever seen in my life!" 
Dalrymple is correct. In a hierarchical and class conscious society like India, open display of wealth and a desire to hoard acquisitions has existed since time immemorial. Only the rich could afford the excesses once upon a time. Now as the middle class reaps the gains of liberalisation, it flaunts its riches too. The poor aspire equally. So when their representative, a poor, untouchable politician gains power, she splurges on birthday parties and jewels, builds her statues and shows off her new-found wealth. Her dirt-poor supporters say her ostentation inspires them to aspire for a better life. How much more materialistic can a people be?
A quarter-of-a-century's experience of travelling and living in India and writing on it has given Dalrymple the opportunity to avoid the "western gaze" and offer a deeper perspective of things. So he sets out, as he writes, to explore how religion and faith are coping with a fast-changing India. The non-fiction short stories, he hopes, will "have avoided many of the clichés about 'Mystic India' that blight so much Western writing on Indian religion".
I ask him about the "western gaze" that leads to a lot of such writing. Dalrymple says that by allowing his subjects to talk about themselves in these stories, he is trying to "reduce the danger of my own presence on the material". It works to a large extent and is reminiscent of the Naipaulean approach to non-fiction. "I want to be an insider and outsider," he says. He succeeds here as well, with a sort of semi-detached approach to the pithy narratives. The only thing that I am not sure about is whether the stories offer very powerful examples of how faith is trying to adapt to a fast-changing society.
An idol maker's son wants to study computer engineering. The prison warder who plays God worries whether his children will carry on the family tradition. A singer of epics bemoans that the younger people in his village are hooked to TV and prefer abridged versions of his work on CDs. The tantric at a cremation ground is hooked to Test match cricket. None of this is really unexceptional and entirely unexpected. None of them convey a sense of any intense battle between religion and modernity. So are there no such battles at all? I suspect a few are taking place - and is reflected in the way, say, a muddled Hindu nationalist party like BJP is fast losing ground in India. I hope Dalrymple will shine a light on some such tales one day.
Nine Lives is published by Bloomsbury
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Soutik is right - Indians are material and religious, and they seem to find no contradiction between the two. The West cannot really understand our contradictions!
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India materialistic?? I think it's not true. Yes, i agree lot of indians are materialistic now but they are in lot less numbers then the one's who are not. It's in India that when a shopkeeper runs out of his goods and he can borrow from the shop next door (who otherwise is his competitor)and gives it to the customer, People still borrow money on just good faith and lot of them do return the money back, People leave their families behind to be taken care by the neighbours, People vote for their leaders only in good faith not materilasticaly..and so many other things where people have just faith and nothing else. Do you hear such things in any other materialistic world??India lives on faith and trust.
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Sautik,
I am ardent follower & admirer of Indian media . Its immense contribution in the development of our country as a Fourth Estate from our freedom movement is proved time and again.
The recent trends in some of the sections of media is shocking & embarrassing for me ,who is a supporter of media. The below mention mentioned link tells the situation of the some parts of media .(I hope it is not true)
http://www.hindu.com/2009/10/26/stories/2009102651900800.htm
Please try to have a program on this topic.
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Soutik- Being materialistic is human nature. Upto a certain age that predominates our thoughts (generally….I am not talking about exceptional monks of some order) Why is so much corruption in the country? Where the money earned through corruption does go? Does it go to charity or to fulfil material wishes? The person who takes bribe, does not go to the temple to pray for themselves and their family? Why there are so many dowry related torture of woman by in laws? The underlying fact is that we always want to fulfil our material dream and show it off to our neighbours, our relatives, our friends, our foes and even to people whom we don't know. That has no contradiction with spirituality. Don't we maximise the fulfilment of our material wishes during the festive season? Now the question is where we shall stop or what's the limit of our material wishes? Does spirituality has any impact on that? Does our mind after some age or stage transforms from being predominantly materialistic to predominantly spiritualistic? I don’t know. I have no answer? May be as I grow older, I would get some indication on this.
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Vinoth Ramachandra address the effect which modernity has had on Hindu nationalism and Hinduism in his book “Faiths in Conflict”. His conlcusion (I think) is that modernity had shaped and intensified Hindu fundamentalism rather than weakened it.
Vinoth Ramachandra explores the complex nature of conflict among the major world religions , and also between them and the rising tide of secularism.
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There is materialism and there is captialism. Material wants and needs are human, captialism the acquiring of money to own or invest to make more money. India is a relatively new player in the modern captialistic world and is tempted by the flasing lights, cars and appliances. Look at the West and you can see the impact of captialism on spiritual sense in those societies. The religions of India have a deep root in the ideas of selflessness and captialism is rooted in selfishness. Captialism does not support giving money to charity as that is not a good investment as there is no material return. The new religion is money, the new God is wealth. In the end it is all left behind and that is what is forgotten.
The corruption in the West of the banking and financial services industries and corruption of the governments that facilitated this process should be a warning to India. The roots of philosophical and religious beliefs of the East have filtered to the West for over 50 years as many in the West see the emptiness of wealth and how it disrupts families, degrades culture and destroys ethics and morals. Return to yourself as that is the strength of any nation.
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What contradiction between material & spiritual ? Dont we recognize Artha (wealth) & Kama (pleasure) as duties along with Dharma (Ethics) & Moksha (Liberation) ? In fact, India had a perfected society long back. India found the right balance between Individualism & Collectivism; materialism & spiritualism; democracy & authoritarianism - Varnashrama Dharma. The highest person in the Indian class hierarchy is the Sannyasi. There is no class for a Sannyasi. This tradition had been honoured throughout the history of India. When Swami Vivekananda came back from the West, He was seated in a chariot & the local Maharaja (of Ramanathapuram ?), along with others, publicly pulled it. Such was the respect Sannyasis have commanded throughout our history. It is precisely this quality of India that has saved us countless times. ~500 BC, the priests were very corrupt. Buddha, a Sannyasi, saved India from the priests. ~800 AD, the Buddhists became very corrupt. Adi Shankara, another Sannyasi, revived Hinduism. ~1890, Indians have started to consider that Indian culture is inferior & western superior. Swami Vivekananda re-established the faith in Indian religion & culture. There are countless other Sannyasis who have always protected India.
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Indiablogger is correct: there is no contradiction between spirituality and materialism, at one level. Yet, our most spiritual people rejected material goods and renounced worldly pleasures. How do you explain that?
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Contradiction or conflict is only between 'Ego'/'Self'/'atma'/'psychological-image' ( or whatever can it be named) and that is 'actually' taking place right now. Hence there is no 'Right Action' or no 'Dharma'. This perpetuates conflict (and all the conflicts in the world).
Otherwise there is no contradiction as there is no psychological self to create the conflict. Then there is no such thing as rejecting anything, there is only 'right action'.
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"our *most* spiritual people rejected material goods and renounced worldly pleasures. How do you explain that? "
The answer lies in the question - "MOST". Renunciation is the highest ideal. Its like lifting 100 KG weight. Before you can attain that strength, you need to practice lifting lower weights. If you attempt to lift heavy weight without proper practice, you will end up breaking your arm ! Varnashrama is based on that principle. Only when the mind is saturated with world pleasures can it move on to the spiritual realm. Buddha's life is a great example.
Christianity, Buddhism & Hinduism converge at one point - they all believe that worldly renunciation is the highest ideal. The only difference is, Christianity & Buddhism IMPOSE it on all of population uniformly; Hinduism believes in gradual training of the human psyche to attain that level. Thats why we had separate social laws governing different groups of people. Christianity considers pride, greed & lust as cardinal sins. Hinduism accepts them as a phase of life, which must be experienced & then move on.
To give an analogy, Christianity & Buddhism are like elder brothers trying to guide the little brother - they have good intention, but not the maturity. Hinduism is like the Mother who understands that each kid is different & knows what is appropriate for them. Buddhism intended well, but inadvertently led to the downfall of India. Buddhism preached ahimsa & sannyasa to all. Ashoka imposed vegetarianism on all. Strong kings & warriors abandoned their duty & took up monkhood. They were replaced by weaklings. Indians became very elitist. We cut off ourselves from the happenings of the rest of the world. Mahmud of Ghazni can proudly say that he invaded India persistently & succeeded the 18th time. What we should note is how he was forgiven 17 times - here we see Buddhist "ahimsa on all circumstances" replacing Hindu Kshatriya dharma of protecting the nation.
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"...the opportunity to avoid the atypical "western gaze" and offer a deeper perspective of things."
erm, i think you meant to say "typical".
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