Tradition in Transition: Globalisation, Priests, and Ritual Innovation in Neighbourhood Temples in Bangalore Tulasi Srinivas * Abstract This paper focuses upon the nature and function of ritual in neighbourhood temples in Bangalore city in South India. The paper examines how modified rituals are created by entrepreneur priests as ‘strategies of engagement’ ostensibly to make Hinduism more accessible to an emergent class of devotee. I analyze three distinct ‘strategies’: the incorporation of technology into forms of worship in neighbourhood temples, and the meaning both of the acquisition and use of the technology; the use of new international and national imagery in traditional alankara (dressing of the deity), and the construction of a nationalist/cosmopolitan imagery; and the ‘recycling’ of traditional folk village deities to cater to the new demands of the contemporary urban middle class devotee base. “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in flats. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.” William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Introduction Significant economic and social changes have occurred in the past decade in India, largely due to the policy of economic liberalization pursued by the Government of India.1 This paper examines how Hindu priests in urban temples navigate these socio- economic changes, focusing upon the changing nature of the temple ritual. This paper is based on data drawn from a 23-month-long ethnographic study of three ‘neighbourhood’2 Hindu temples in the Malleswaram area of Bangalore city. Studies of Hindu ritual have been limited to the study of the important pilgrimage temples3 (periya kovil, devasthanam) (Appadurai 1981; Fuller 1992, 1979; Eck: 1981; Babb 1975; Waghorne 1999), where the maintenance of traditional * Senior Fellow, Institute for the Study of Religion, Culture and World Affairs, Boston University, Boston. E-mail: [email protected] 58 Journal of Social and Economic Development Jan. - June 2004 ritual is a central reason for the temples’ significance. It appears from the literature that scholars have assumed such an adherence to tradition as the norm in temples all over India. Further there has been a textual bias that has ‘anchored studies of Hinduism in the West’ (Waghorne 1999:649) and many, if not all, of the studies of Hinduism emphasize the links with the long durée structures of Hindu society (Babb 1975, Appadurai;1981, Dumont; 1970, Fuller;1979, and Parry;1979, 1994). So the established view that ritual is linked to caste, purity, and hierarchy, has so dominated the understanding of Hindu ritual, that changes in the rituals have rarely, if ever, been studied.4 However, as the data in this paper indicates, ritual is changing. This changing nature of ritual points to5 several changes within the embedded and experiential world of Hinduism – the changing nature of the priesthood and the community they serve; ‘function’ of ritual in everyday life of modern Hindus, ‘authenticity’ of the ritual form for the devotees, adaptation of traditional ritual to the new socio-economic terrain of urban India, and the larger relationship of modernity and tradition in a rapidly globalizing India. Setting the rituals and the priests who perform them against new circles of global economic change allows us to explore some counterintuitive currents that priests, who are usually associated with protecting tradition against change appear to instigate, or at least, to welcome change. Hindu Brahmin priests, most often associated with retaining and protecting existing hierarchies, seem to deal creatively with urban situations where differential knowledge can create conflict. Therefore, it needs to be emphasized at the outset, this is not a description of a passive local reaction to forces of globalization that sweep into India, but an analysis of the indigenous agency of the priests who act as ‘religious entrepreneurs’ (Moore 1994: 91) in a service arena (Srinivas: 2001), competing for clientele, using social (particularly kin) networks to ‘get ahead’, and appropriating the new technologies that economic liberalization brings to them in unique and effective ways. I argue that the priests engage a ‘new cultural grammar’ that enables them to reinterpret and contextualize the language of traditional ritual to suit the problems of devotees in an ‘era of capitalism’ (Jameson: 1991). Not only is religion complicit in mechanisms of market exchange as Moore suggests (1994: 117), but the priests are at the forefront of religious innovation6. The study of ritual is not new to anthropology (Turner 1974; Van Gennep 1910, 1960; Evans-Pritchard 1974; Geertz 1960; Bell 1997). This paper adds one additional dimension, that of “organic” flexibility within which various religious and political forces form and dissipate, and over time these religious styles themselves mutate. I have attempted to tease out descriptions of a very different community form than traditional villages or traditional urban structures built around kin-based or caste-based temples. Linked to these new urban communities are new Vol. VI, No.1 Srinivas: Tradition in Transition 59 concepts of competition, recruitment, status, gender, mobility and culture. To extend the argument, one can claim that the essential fluidity of everyday Hinduism provides the matrix within which such changes can be imagined and negotiated. I document changes in ritual (Geertz 1960) through, what I call, three ‘strategies of competitive engagement’, regularly employed by the ‘entrepreneur priests’ of Bangalore; (a) incorporating technology of various types within ritual, and creating ritual to accommodate new technology; (b) the creation of new religious spectacles and decoration of the deity (alankara) based on the concept of the nation state; and (c) the recycling of traditional deities and their functions to make them relevant to the modern devotee. I suggest that the ‘locus of accretions’ of change that Geertz defines in his path breaking study of a funeral in Java, occur in situations where traditional ritual faces the forces of change. The changes in ritual speak to set of questions — What is authenticity in ritual? How is it recognized? What are the ‘essential’ elements to make a ritual ‘traditional’, ‘authentic’, and therefore, in the devotees’ mind, efficacious? What are the elements that can be transposed? I wish to suggest a theoretical framework in which participants’ understandings of what is important and significant in a ritual are taken seriously. The need to retake and integrate aspects of the pure and the past in the lives of contemporary people has also located the high culture or what is ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ in rituals. They epitomize for the new Indian middle class both a nostalgic return to an unbroken past, and an important marker of status. The need for such an image within India is part of the fallout from globalism - both the kind that sends Indians out of India and the kind that brings the world to India. This exploration, will locate ideas of locality, nation, and tradition, in the changing rituals. This paper is a counterpoint to the recent spate of work on Hindu fundamentalism that is a key area of emerging new theory (Vanaik ;1997, van der Veer; 1994) on Indian religion. I suggest that the theoretical waters have been muddied by a focus on ‘Hindu fundamentalism’, as it is called. While I do not make a political analysis of the relative power in the public sphere between different religious styles in India, it is important for outsiders as well as commentators within India not to allow fundamentalist stands to obscure other narratives. I argue that a return to an ethnographically driven understanding of religion is paramount to examine the complex role of religion in post-modern India. Finally, I see this paper as exploratory where I raise more questions than I can answer. However, I hope that an awareness of the connections and the interplay between socio-economic change, and the evolution of ritual, will inform future studies of modern Hinduism,7 and lead to a greater understanding of how religion continues to remain dynamic and relevant in devotees’ lives in urban India. 60 Journal of Social and Economic Development Jan. - June 2004 Neighbourhood Temples, Entrepreneur Priests and a New Class of Devotees Bangalore has emerged in India as the ‘cutting edge’ city for technology. The Indian economy suffered a crisis in 1989 and Mr. Manmohan Singh, the then Finance minister, took the decision to ‘liberalise’ the Indian economy. Perhaps by design or perhaps coincidentally, since then the Indian economy has seen significant growth rising from 2 per cent in 1990 to 7.8 per cent in 20018. As a result of the economic spurt and increased monetisation, a significant and growing Indian middle class9 with access to sudden large reserves of capital, Bangalore became one of the ‘hot zones’ (Friedman: 2000) of technology and developed as a ‘global city’ in the past decade. The inherited structure of modernity theory implies that along with increasing modernization, India would become increasingly secular (Berger 1997; Luckmann 1967; Wilson 1966). In Bangalore, it appears that increasing entry into capitalism has been met with a corresponding increase in religiosity. Temples are constantly filled with devotees performing rituals, the priests’ calendars are crammed with requests