------------Two weeks ago, I went for a walk with my daughter to the Birla temple. It is not far from where I live; and I have seen it coming up for years, from a time when I did not actually live in Calcutta, but when, during long or short periods of transit, would look at it from the balcony of this flat. It was built – this plush Orientalist artefact – by the family after which it is named: the Birlas, whose forefather moved from Rajasthan to Calcutta and made his fortune here. I can’t say I unreservedly enjoy going to this temple; there are, however, only so many places to walk about in Calcutta. My daughter, though, does enjoy going there, without reservation; and this was both her second visit and mine. The first time must have been almost exactly a year ago; I remember the warm marble floor under our bare feet from that excursion, the floor that must have absorbed the heat all day to give it out in the evening. I can also remember my daughter, a year younger, running across the space before the main shrine; on our second visit, the marble was warm again beneath our feet.
--- On this visit, the precincts of the temple were more crowded than the first time I went there; it was a site of recreation – men and women, and some children, sat in the large space before the steps that led to the sanctum in which the arati (evening prayers offered to the deity) was being performed. They looked content, like people at the seaside. My daughter, easily frightened, was alarmed at the sound of the bell, and did not want to investigate the arati – the familiar tune, which one can hear these days even when certain domestic water filters are used, was being played on a tape – and so we roamed around the premises. A thought came to me: would these people condone, or at least defend, what was happening in Gujarat?
----The question was probably grossly unfair, but impossible to keep out of my head, or leave unasked. In the last ten years, gradually, the idea of the ‘peace-loving Hindu’ has been turned inside out. The most innocent-seeming of activities appear to be charged with unarticulated violence. To walk in the Birla temple was to sense – perhaps to imagine; but to imagine powerfully – that subterranean violence which Hinduism is now charged with in its totality: because you cannot isolate one kind of ‘religious’ activity from another.
Perhaps it was the location; perhaps I wouldn’t have felt this discomfort if these people had gathered at a more ancient, less ostentatious, place of worship. I have never really cared for the Birla temple, for its security guards who hover not very far from you once you enter, its marble floor and enormous chandelier, its expansive air of a lobby in a four star hotel, its spotless, garish, unimpeachable idols.
----This spectacle is part of the production of a version of Hinduism that has been a steadily developing enterprise in independent India: Hinduism as a rich man’s, a trader’s, religion. Although aggressive exhortations are made on behalf of Lord Ram, the principal deities of this religion are Ganesh and Lakshmi: not Ganesh, the wily and rapid transcriber of the Mahabharat, but the bringer of good fortune to the black marketeer; not Lakshmi, the agrarian goddess, but the goddess who presides over the urban dowry-system. As ever, our divinities bless their devotees indiscriminately. I have heard Hinduism celebrated for the resilience with which it, unlike other religions, has embraced capitalism; but perhaps it has embraced capitalism a little too well. It has left the Hindu with an importunate will to fit into the modern world, and without a social conscience.
----Hindutva – the BJP’s frequently used ontologically and culturally assertive term for ‘Hinduness’ -does not so much promote religion as it does material success for the followers of the Hindu religion. Success, in the Nineties, has been its key-word, but success for the majority only; it will not barter or share it with anyone else; it will even pretend no one else exists; if they do, it will see to it that they cease to. I presume it is not a coincidence that the extreme measures of ethnic cleansing in Gujarat should be undertaken by those who have been the most effective proponents of the new Hinduism’s mantra of material well being. Many of the sources that fund our new kitsch Hinduism are also those that fund, or quietly encourage, a government that has a chief minister who defends and protects murderers, and a prime minister who defends and protects that minister. Then there is the largesse that flows in from overseas, from businessmen in London, from expatriates in England and America. Does it only take an arati to keep our gods happy?
----Hinduism was never, in the past (unlike Christianity), at the heart of a revolutionary political movement, precisely because it was never an evangelical religion; it had no Word, or truth, to spread. The killings done in its name today are not part of a jihad, and nor are they the residue of a misguided evangelism; they are a brutal and calculated exercise of power in a moral vacuum: Hinduism as the punitive instrument of the powerful. Christianity has often had a quarrel with modernity, and the materialism it denotes in its eyes; Islam has a related quarrel with the West, modernity’s synecdoche. That is why Islamic militancy, even at its worst, has the dimensions of an ideology, albeit a distorted one. Hindutva, on the other hand, has no problem with modernity, or with the West; and it rushes to embrace the latter’s material benefits. This happy concordance, in Hindutva, of cultural extremism and materialism makes it less like a ‘fundamentalist’ religious movement than like fascism.

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