India's Changing Religious Landscape

March 4, 2015
India's Changing Religious Landscape

What does the religious landscape look like in an emerging India with a rapidly growing middle class? Is better prosperity giving rise to a new form of spirituality, in which new-age Gurus are occupying an increasingly central role?

These were among the questions discussed at this week’s CSWR café by Kalpana Jain, a CSWR resident.  Jain described her own experience of observing an obscure spot in a neighboring park grow into a thriving temple after some people set up a small idol and started praying there daily.  The experience is part of larger picture of India today, where the number of places of worship, far exceed the number of schools, or the number of hospitals.

There are 2.5 million places of worship in India, whereas there are only 1.5 million schools and 75,000 hospitals in comparison. Some recent surveys suggest that Indians are becoming more religious.  A 2007 survey, jointly conducted by an English daily newspaper, the Hindustan Times and a popular news channel, CNN-IBN, showed that 30 per cent of Indians had become more religious in the past five years.

In this environment have entered spiritual gurus, many of whom, in recent times, have acquired a mass following, wealth and power, not quite seen in the past. With powerful political connections, corporate support and deft media management, the gurus are offering advice from mundane daily problems, to health advice and even management expertise.

How far unchecked power, wealth and connections could go was illustrated in a recent case, when the arrest of a guru, Rampal ji Maharaj, resulted in a pitched battle between his army of supporters and the police.

As historian and writer William Dalrymple says: “During the early 20th century, educated, urban Hindu reformers moved away from ritualised expressions of faith, and early leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and B R Ambedkar constitutionally formed India as a model secular state with no official faith: this was to be a nation where, in the words of Nehru, “dams would be the new temples.” But over the past 20 years, just as India has freed itself from the shackles of Nehruvian socialism, so India has also gone a long way to try to shake off Nehruvian secularism, too.”

—By Kalpana Jain