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Divine Markets: Ethnographic Notes on
Postnationalism and Moral Consumption
in India
Sanjay Srivastava, Institute of Economic Growth,
Delhi University
This chapter explores the connections between contemporary practices of
religiosity and one of the most sociologically signiicant processes of contemporary Indian life: consumerism. The chapter builds upon other discussions
that explore this relationship in different parts of the world (Stambach 2000;
Eickelman and Anderson 2003; Oosterbaan 2009), as well as those which
address India speciically (e.g., T. Srinivas 2010; Srivastava 2011). The discussion will proceed through outlining two ethnographic vignettes that illustrate the particular ways in which consumerism and religiosity are intertwined,
while not being reducible to each other. In this way, the chapter seeks to interrogate two approaches to the study of religion, custom, and social and cultural
transformation in India. The irst of these concerns the so-called ‘Hindutva’
project of ‘restoration’ and purity that have formed staple topics in analyses
of religious fundamentalism in India (see, e.g., Blom Hansen 1999; Bacchetta
2004). In these works, the idea of a return to a pure and untainted past is frequently represented as a reaction to processes of intense social and economic
change. Hence, as Blom Hansen puts it, “To human beings experiencing social
mobility, or a loss of socioeconomic and cultural status produced by urbanization or ‘minoritization’ the issue of identity–the urge to eradicate the doubt that
splits the subjects – becomes more acute than in situations of relative social
stability” (1999: 212). Indeed, the idea that an ‘inner’ Indian self is sought
to be protected during times of change has become scholarly commonsense
in a wide variety of studies. These include the contexts of ‘colonial modernity’ (Chatterjee 1993), postcolonial life (Singer 1972) and emotional life
(Desjarlais and Wilce 2003). The ethnographic examples of this chapter seek
to outline broader trends within Indian society where consumerism itself is
the grounds for religiosity, rather than the latter providing a ‘refuge’ from the
processes of social and cultural change. Further, the chapter suggests that that
this produces a context that is not signiicantly about a search for a pure and
singular self. Rather, it points in the direction of a split subject, where splitting
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is not an act of enfeeblement but, rather, a strategy of engaging with a wide
range of economic and social processes.
The second, related, perspective I seek to problematize is that which suggests
that the relationship between old and new can be captured through discourses
of denunciation regarding the decline of bonds of community and family life in
the wake of rampant consumerism (e.g., van Wessel 2004). I will suggest that
consumerism and its antitheses (however these are imagined) are easily reconciled in everyday life through recourse to consumerist discourses themselves.
My argument that religious and consumerist activities are intertwined –
and that this, in turn, produces a market morality, such that markets become
spiritualized and spirituality cannot be disentangled from the market – can be
usefully discussed through comparison with an African example. Addressing
Christian evangelism in northern Tanzania, Amy Stambach reports that they
“today openly comment on the global ‘culture industry,’ and on the interconnections of religion and the world economy, with greater consideration than
colonial missionaries ever did” (Stambach 2000: 171). Thus, during the twentieth century and continuing through the present, goods introduced to Tanzania
by missionaries “held an attraction as signs of the free market and liberalizing economy” (Stambach 2000: 173). Even while Tanzanian youth used
goods associated with Christianity in their daily lives, missionary activity that
targeted them as objects of ‘reform’ articulated the message that “conversion
could help revival participants manage consumerism and social strife” (175).
However, the young believed that “by being called Born Again. . .they would
become part of a global world of schooled and ‘church-educated people’ ”
(175) and were keen to demonstrate their Born Again status through the use
of consumer goods: T-shirts with religious messages, running shoes distributed by the churches, and similar commodities. This, as Stambach suggests,
was the context of an unbridgeable divide between leaders of the evangelical
movements and their young congregation. Consumption by converts “deies
universal consumerist logic of rejection and participation and instead relects a
qualiied, cultural involvement in commodity consumption” (2000: 177). That
is to say, converts do not assign completely opposed meanings to spirituality
and consumerism. As I will later point out, there are both similarities as well
as differences between the situations Stambach describes and those discussed
in this chapter. What is signiicant in each case is the intertwined nature of the
relationship between consumerism and religiosity.
I wish to broach the relationship between consumerism and religiosity
through two speciic ideas. These are ‘postnationalism’ and ‘moral consumption.’ These concepts – on which see the next section – allow me to both make
connections between the worlds of religiosity and consumerism, as well as
position the relationship within wider contexts where the meanings of such
terms as ‘state’, ‘citizen’, ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ are contested. The two
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concepts also seek to encapsulate certain perspectives that are present in a
growing body of scholarship that tracks the relationship between relatively new
engagements with the market among groups that have historically had limited
access to the ‘world of goods’ (Douglas and Isherwood 1979). Speaking of a
segment of Kolkata’s self-identiied middle-class population, Donner (2011)
points out that “amidst the excitement that the triumphant media coverage of
the new ‘markets’ for the growing middle class suggested, the actual transformation of middle-class lifestyles was always evaluated in markedly ambiguous
terms” (Donner 2011: 60). And, Geert de Neve suggests that newly afluent
industrialists in the garment manufacturing town of Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu,
even as they have plunged headlong into the processes of consumerism, “seek
to locate themselves at the heart of what is locally constructed as an integrated
and moral Tamil society” (de Neve 2011: 75; emphasis added).
This chapter focuses, then, on the relay between the desires and pleasures of
consumerism, and those perspectives where it is positioned in an anxious relationship to its putative antitheses, religiosity and ‘tradition’. The relationship
between religiosity, ‘community life’ and consumerism and “the construction of religious identity during a period of intense globalization” (T. Srinivas
2010: 329) concern multiple contexts such as changes in urban life and aspirations to engage with globalized identity projects (see also S. Srinivas 2001,
2008). I investigate some of these contexts through multi-sited ethnographic
vignettes and connect these sites using the frameworks of ‘postnationalism’
and ‘moral consumption.’ In this way, I wish to demonstrate the wider applicability of these terms in explaining contemporary religiosity in India as it rubs
against traditional forms of sociality, such as the family, and newer aspirations
to be part of a consumerist world in the making. The argument I present here
is similar to the one made by Jacob Copeman and Aya Ikegame who, in their
discussion of the relationship between religiosity and the media, write that
“despite the prediction of modernization theory that as mediating technologies of reproduction developed religiosity would lose its intensity and diffuse
into modern secular sensitivities, many scholars of religion recognize. . .that
the opposite has been the case” (Copeman and Ikegame 2012: 312).
Postnationalism and Moral Consumption
In this section, I provide a discussion of the two concepts I wish to employ as
connecting threads between the different ethnographic contexts of this chapter. To begin with, the term postnational does not mean to suggest that the
nation-state is insigniicant as a context of analysis, or that we now live in a
“post-patriotic” age where the most signiicant units of analysis are certain
“post-national social formations” (Appadurai 1993: 411) – such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) – that putatively problematize nationalist
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and statist perspectives. Further, my deployment is also different from another
recent usage, which posits postnationalism as “a distinct ethico-political horizon and a position of critique” and a concept “that can be instantiated by
suspending the idea of the nation as a prior theoretical-political horizon, and
thinking through its impossibility, even while located uncomfortably within
its bounds” (de Alwis et al. 2009: 35). I use postnationalism to refer to the
articulation of nationalist emotion with the robust desires engendered through
new practices of consumerism and their associated cultures of privatization and
individuation. I refer to it as postnationalismto refer to a phenomenon that is
both different from classical descriptions of nationalism (e.g., Anderson 1983;
Gellner 1997) but is, nevertheless, about sentiments that gather around the idea
of the nation. It is a form of nationalism that comes after the period when the
sentiment was elaborated through the vocabularies of personal and collective
sacriice, duty and valour. As I explain later, postnationalism grows out of a
location within cultures of consumerism.
A fruitful way of approaching the topic – and providing concrete illustrative
examples – is through an exploration of the contemporary politics of urban
spaces in Delhi. I hope, through this brief digression, to not only establish
the relevance of the idea of postnationalism to the discussion of this chapter,
but also point to the wider contexts within which the theme ‘religion and the
morality of markets’ is embedded. The following discussion seeks, then, to
illuminate a context in which newer relations with the nation-state are being
formed through changes wrought by the market and its effects.
In 1999, soon after being elected to ofice, Delhi’s erstwhile chief minister, Sheila Dikshit, “called for an active participation of Residents Welfare
Associations [RWAs] in governance” (Ojha 1999: 1). The rationale for this
was the “failure” of civic agencies to carry out their normal tasks. The chief
minister’s secretary noted that the call to actively involve RWAs in urban governance heralded a new era, marking “the irst step towards a responsive management of the city” (Ojha 1999: 1). Positing a distinction between the state
and the ‘community’, the secretary further noted that the failure of civic agencies meant that “it’s really time for the community to be given direct control
of managing the affairs of the city” (Ojha 1999: 1). Subsequently, the government decided to ‘empower’ RWAs to “take certain decisions on their own.” It
was proposed that RWAs be given control over the management of resources
such as parks, community halls, parking places, sanitation facilities and local
roads. A more direct relationship between the state and RWAs was also mooted
through the idea of joint surveys of ‘encroached’ land – that is, land that had
been ‘illegally’ occupied, usually by slum-dwellers – with the possibility that
all illegal structures would “then be demolished in a non-discriminatory manner” (Ojha 1999: 1). Finally, it was proposed that RWAs be allowed to impose
ines on government agencies that failed to carry out their assigned tasks.
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In 2005, the Delhi state government announced that it would raise the electricity tariff by 10 percent. A body known as the Delhi Residents Welfare
Association Joint Front (RWAJF) was formed in the same year to agitate
against the measure. The Front consisted of 195 separate member RWAs from
around the city. The increase in power rates for domestic consumers was the
second one since the state-owned electricity body was ‘unbundled’ in June
2002 as part of power sector ‘reforms’. As a result, three privately owned
companies secured contracts for electricity distribution (Sethi 2005).1 There
was vigorous protest over the price increase and, in addition to the RWAJF,
NGOs such as People’s Action and another group known as Campaign
Against Power Tariff Hike (CAPTH) joined the campaign. Individual RWAs
asked their members to refuse payment of the extra amount, while the RWAJF
lobbied the government and organized city-wide protests. These gained wide
coverage in both print and electronic media and, echoing Gandhian anticolonial strategies, the organizers were reported to have deployed “the ideas
of ‘civil disobedience’ and ‘people’s power’ ” (Sethi 2005: 5). The parallels
drawn between the Gandhian anticolonial moment and the present were even
more explicit with the Convener of the RWAJF referring to the protests as
“non-violent Satyagraha [resistance]” (Sirari 2006: 5). Eventually, the Delhi
government backed down and the price rise was shelved. According to Sanjay
Kaul, president of the People’s Action NGO, the success of the protest heralded the making of a “middle-class revolution” (Sirari 2006: 5). Kaul is
one of many who has rediscovered and deployed anticolonial vocabulary on
behalf of the ‘people’ at a time when the colonial era itself has become integrated into consumerist discourses through marketing strategies that invoke it
as an era of genteel living and tastes. More recently, in the wake of the 2011
anticorruption movement led by the activist Anna Hazare, popular yoga guru
Swami Ramdev invoked “Gandhi in calling for a ‘satyagrah against corruption’ ” (Copeman and Ikegame 2012: 318).
The circulation of the ideas of ‘civil disobedience,’ ‘Satyagrah’ and ‘revolution’, and the consolidation of the notion of a ‘people’ contesting the state,
index a situation of classical nationalism, but there are signiicant differences
that lead me to characterize this context as postnationalism. By this, I mean
a situation in which the original moral frisson of these terms – provided by
anticolonial sentiment – no longer holds. Indeed, in an era of post-Nehruvian
economic liberalization characterized by consumerist modernity (Mazzarella
2003; Fernandes 2006; Osella and Osella 2009), the moral universe of the
anticolonial struggle is no longer part of popular public discourse. As noted
earlier, a colonial ambience is now the stuff of popular marketing strategies.
For instance, the Spencer’s department store in the privately developed DLF
City that borders Delhi (see Srivastava 2012) outlines its history through a
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series of billboard-size sepia photographs placed at the entrance. The photographs – of fashionable European ladies shopping for ine goods at Spencer’s –
are from the colonial period and represent an eflorescence of colonial chic in
the Indian public sphere. Other contiguous sites include the ive-star Imperial
Hotel in central Delhi, its corridors liberally decorated with early twentieth
century photographs from an imperial gathering to commemorate the coronation of King George V, and themed restaurants such as Days of the Raj and
Sola Topee (the pith helmet that came to characterize Englishness), also in
Delhi. The postnational context does not have a hostile relation to colonialism,
and the earlier emphases on the ethics of saving and delayed gratiication for
the ‘national good’ – indispensable ideological accompaniments to nationalist
‘civil disobedience’ and ‘satyagrah’ – do not ind any resonance in popular
discourses on the role of the state or the duties of citizens. Given this background, postnationalism also refers to the changing relationship between the
state and the middle classes. Hence, with regard to the RWAs, postnationalism indicates an era of the ‘gentriication’ and ‘re-spatialization’ of the state
(Ghertner 2011: 526) such that the consumer-citizen becomes the key focus of
policy debates. This is a signiicant shift from the ideologies of the Nehruvianera developmentalist state that succeeded the colonial one, with the poor as
its key focus (Gupta 1998). It may not be adequate to summarize what I have
described so far as neoliberalism, as this concept is unable to account for the
speciic national histories that transform into postnational ones. Further, as
my examples will demonstrate, it is unclear that the ‘enterprising’ subject of
neoliberalism (Gooptu 2013) is the same everywhere and that the issue of
agency can be transparently captured through speaking of a universal neoliberal moment.
The most signiicant manner in which the postnational moment resonates
within the politics of urban space concerns the repositioning of the language
of anticolonial nationalism from the national sphere to the suburban one. This,
in turn, also indexes the move from the ‘national family’ – an abstraction that
sought to overwrite actually existing social and economic differences – to the
nuclear and middle-class family as the object of state interest, and the translation of the notion of nationalist solidarity across classes to middle-class
solidarity. Manifestations of a new consciousness of middle-classness can be
found across a number of contexts including ‘urban beautiication’ and slum
demolitions (Baviskar 2006; Ghertner 2011; Arabindoo 2011), forms of leisure
(Brosius 2010; Donner 2011) and marriage (Uberoi 2008). It is in this context
that new urban forms that are key to notions of middle-classness – such as
gated residential communities – require attention. The rapid proliferation of
gated communities across India (Brosius 2010; Srivastava 2014) signiies not
only major topographical changes but also broader discursive transformations
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relating to family life, state, nation and citizenship. So, for example, gated
communities in India have created a speciic relationship between gender, consumerism and the morality of the markets. It is a relationship that – as I will
discuss in the next section – speaks to the long history of anxiety about women
in public through the question: How can the public woman belong both to the
world as well as the home?
By moral consumption I refer to the context in which consumerist activity
is glossed by explicit and implicit discourses on the possibility of exercising
control over it. This is different from viewing it as a threat to established
life-ways (van Wessel 2004). That is to suggest that contemporary contexts
of consumerism indicate that long-standing cultural discourses of, say, the
sacriicing and nurturing mother that proscribe ‘indulgent’ consumption are
encompassed within acts of consumerism by women (see Donner 2011).
Hence, female visitors to the Disneyied (and hyperconsumerist) Akshardham
temple complex in Delhi can move seamlessly between roles as consumers
and devoutly religious persons precisely because the same space provides
opportunities for both (Srivastava 2011). Masculine anxieties over female
consumption at the complex are assuaged through a process of moral consumption whereby women take part in hyperconsumerism and are also
able to withdraw to the realms of its putative antithesis, namely religiosity.
Though these domains interpenetrate, each is imagined as separate. At the
Akshardham temple complex – built along the lines of Florida’s Disney World
and Hollywood’s Universal Studios theme park – religiosity is located on the
grounds of consumerism and makes possible the relay between the two, in
turn naturalizing the relationship between and consolidating the discourse of
moral consumption.
I have explored this idea in relation to the contiguous publication of remarkably explicit articles on sex and sexuality with those on religious festivals
and rituals in a variety of Hindi-language magazines geared toward women
(Srivastava 2007). There I suggested that the magazines address a readership
that views itself as taking part in moral consumption inasmuch as it can imagine itself as being able to move between modernity and tradition, rather than be
determined by the former.
Postnationalism and moral consumption redeine the representation of the
‘people’ in a time of consumerist modernity.2 They are relevant for this discussion on the relationships between religiosity and the market inasmuch as they
constitute the grounds on which these relationships are naturalized, through the
igure of the consumer-citizen. Just as the latter is able to recast the relationship with the state through consumerist discourses, he or she also reconigures
engagements with religion. The concept ‘divine markets’ seeks to capture the
relationship with commodities “produced through an articulation between economic and religious practices” (Osella and Osella 2009: 215).
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Gated Religiosity: Janmashtami Celebrations at Birmingham
Garden in DLF City
The 3,000-acre, privately developed DLF City is located south of Delhi,
immediately across the border in the Gurgaon district of the state of Haryana.
DLF City was constructed by the Delhi Land and Finance (DLF) corporation,
beginning in the mid-1980s. Its hypermalls, gated residential communities and
corporate ofices (occupied, among others, by call centres, business processes
outsourcing companies and prominent multinational corporations) speak of
an urban transformation that is also the making of a new, modern, middleclass, Indian self. DLF was established in 1946 by Chaudhury Raghvendra
Singh, a civil servant and landowner. Until the mid-1950s, DLF had a signiicant presence in the private real estate market in Delhi. However, following
the 1951 publication of a highly critical report of an inquiry into the functioning of the state-run Delhi Improvement Trust (established 1937), the government promulgated the Control of Building Operations Ordinance of 1955,
leading to the establishment of the Delhi Development Provisional Authority.
The Provisional Authority was, in turn, succeeded by the Delhi Development
Authority (DDA) in 1957.3 With the establishment of the DDA, opportunities
for private real estate activity were severely restricted; even “while the DDA
was in the process of preparing a Master Plan for the city, the government
announced a freeze on all vacant undeveloped land within the urbanizable [sic]
limits. . . . Establishing itself as the sole agency legally authorized to develop
and dispose of land, the State [sic] left little, or no role for the private land
developer” (Dasappa Kacker 2005: 72).
From the early 1980s, DLF began to acquire land in Gurgaon district in
the bordering state of Haryana to re-invigorate its real estate business. After
some initial hiccups (Gurgaon was considered too far away; there was much
termite infestation; the local, largely rural populations were considered ‘threatening’),4 DLF’s townships, gated communities and ofice complexes proved an
unprecedented success. Within a span of two decades, fuelled by changes in
the economy since the 1980s, farming lands were turned into spaces of global
commerce, malls and gated communities. The rapid expansion of the retail
banking sector, which made it relatively easy to obtain home loans, was a signiicant component of the changes in the housing sector. Aggressive market
forays by both state-owned and new private entrants (including foreign banks)
sought to target “young and highly educated professionals who began their
careers through the 1980s, [but] could not afford to own their own homes”
(Khanna 2007: 107).
According to a recent report, the areas falling under the recently (2008) constituted Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon (that includes DLF City as well
as several other privately developed residential enclaves) contained roughly
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1.2 million inhabitants.5 DLF City itself is divided into ive ‘phases’ that contain independent housing; corporate ofices; shopping malls; leisure facilities
such as theme parks, food plazas and a golf course and, of course, gated residential enclaves. It also has a privately built metro rail system owned by DLF.
DLF City is regarded in both scholarly (King 2004; Dupont 2005) as well as
popular works (Jain 2001) as a key site for the making of contemporary cultures of transnational urbanism in India. Birgit Meyer notes in her discussion
of religion in a mediatized transnational world that “in order to [be] experienced as real, imaginations are required to become tangible outside the realm
of the mind, by creating a social environment that materializes through the
structuring of space, architecture, ritual performance, and by inducing bodily
sensations. . . [and further that] in order to become experienced as real, imagined communities need to be materialized as in the concrete lived environment
and be felt in the bones” (Meyer 2009: 5). This section explores the relationship between religiosity and new contexts of urban life through focusing on
concrete practices of everyday life as it unfolds in one particular gated community in DLF City.
Birmingham Garden (name changed) is one of the most prominent gated residential enclaves in DLF City. It has an active Residents Welfare Association
(RWA) that organizes a variety of social and cultural functions. These include
events relating to Republic Day (January 26), Independence Day (August 15),
popular religious festivals such as Diwali and Holi, dance competitions, sporting
events, consumer-goods fairs and a variety of religious rituals focused on women
(such as karva-chauth) that have been popularized by Bollywood cinema. Apart
from Christmas, which has taken on the form of a secular festival, no non-Hindu
festivals are celebrated. Different kinds of worlds – religious, national and transnational – lie within the gates, and women are visibly a part of it.
The Janmashtami festival that celebrates the birth of the god Krishna is a
popular event at Birmingham Garden. Celebrated “on the eighth day of the waning half of the lunar month of bhadrapad” (Hawley and Goswami 1981: 62),
which falls during August and September, the festival has elaborate local roots
that draw on kinship networks, relationships in the neighbourhood and religious ties. In the north Indian city of Brindavan (famed as the place where
Krishna spent a great deal of his childhood), Janmashtami celebrations involve
a variety of priests, performing artists (who enact ‘nativity’ plays) and lay worshippers, each group drawing on localized myths and resources. Janmashtami
celebrations at Brindavan (similar to those in other parts of India) are also
organized around acts of commensality – feasts and fasts – that further institutionalize community bonds through residents’ participation in a nonmonetized
ritual activity (Hawley and Goswami 1981).
Since 2008 the festival at Birmingham Garden has been organized by the
International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), founded in
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New York in 1966 by Srila Prabhupada. Members of ISKCON who live within
the complex took an active part in convincing the RWA to allow the organization to take over the festival from residents. In 2012, the celebrations began
with a bhajan (prayer song) by a group of ISKCON devotees who sat on a
large stage that faced several rows of chairs. A powerful sound system ensured
that the singing reached all parts of the complex. To the right of the stage, there
was a large screen. A laptop and video projector were used to project swirling
colour images onto the screen. As the lead singer repeatedly requested that
residents join the gathering, the crowd built to around a hundred, and a group
of women, including one from a Birmingham Garden family that belongs to
ISKCON, began to dance in an empty space in front of the stage. It was an
improvised performance that followed the ISKCON ‘street dance’ pattern seen
in many Western cities. The dancers exhorted others in the audience to join,
and a few, all women, did so.
Soon after, two male ISKCON devotees joined the dancing. However, they
danced to the right of the stage, away from the women. Then some other male
residents from the complex also began a slow dance with this group. While the
women danced in front of the jharokha (a tableau depicting Krishna as a child)
in gestures of bliss and devotion – hands and faces raised to the sky – the men,
perhaps appropriately, given the association between masculinity and technology, danced in front of the laptop and the video projector. Two specially attired
girls came forward to dance to verses recited from the Gita, and an ISKCON
devotee offered a discourse on the text. By then, the cinema screen was displaying graphics of lying machines, laming arrows, a twirling globe and a variety of psychedelic animation. The ceremony was building to a crescendo. The
women dancing improvised and also did Indian dances such as the garba and
gidda popularized by Bollywood. The ceremony concluded with an arti (lamp)
ceremony and the cutting of a ‘Krishna birthday cake’, which was then offered
as prasad (sanctiied food). The screen now showed scenes from cities in the
United States where white American bhakts (devotees) danced, sang and spoke
about their lives as ‘Krishna bhakts’. The ceremony lasted three hours, during
which the laptop united the Birmingham Garden space with an American one.
The ‘West’ was in Birmingham Garden via a conident cosmopolitanism that
could include within it a broader tableau of Indian culture. Especially notable
was that this situation was unmarked by anxiety and angst regarding ‘cultural
imperialism’ or India’s colonial legacy. We ate our cake and dispersed.
The suffusion of local space with cultures of transnationalism also happens in other, more obvious, circumstances. One of the most common ways in
which group interaction takes place at Birmingham Garden is around promotional stalls for consumer goods manufacturers. Every other week, a mobile
van or a portable tent promoting a variety of goods can be found at different places within the complex. In August 2011, Honda advertised its newly
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launched Jazz model by inviting residents to inspect the car, which had been
parked next to a mobile information booth within the condominium complex.
A young woman exhorted adults to “come down and see for yourself”, while
children took part in dancing competitions and were rewarded for composing
songs about the vehicle. Some days before, an electronic goods company had
displayed its wares at the same spot.
A relationship with the market is fundamental to – even though it does not
exhaust – the senses of space and community at Birmingham Garden. It generates speciic types of sociality: of a space where women may publicly dance
with men at Bacardi-sponsored Holi (the festival of colours) celebrations without encountering the risks of the sexual economy that is common in Holi celebrations. It is imagined as a liberal space where women may drink alcohol
provided by Bacardi in public, conjuring a new public that is ensconced within
a private space that is liberated from the dangers and ‘uncivilized’ nature of the
old (Pow 2007). Expressions of the female body are a signiicant aspect of life
within the gates (whether during Holi, Janmashtami, morning walks or other
rituals, the female body is allowed considerable visibility in the public spaces
of the enclave). In these spaces, children and adults sing, dance and experience
the physical sensuality of commodities that come to them, transporting the aura
of the showroom to their doorstep and becoming one with their domestic lives.
The preceding text describes the related contexts of postnational modernity
and moral consumption. Gated communities are exemplary sites of the making of suburban religiosities in tandem with the consolidation of the suburban
(middle-class) family as the focus of postnational consumerist modernity. That
is to say, if national spaces, such as the state-run educational system and factory towns (Roy 2007), were once the imagined space of personal and familial
transformations from premodern to modern subjectivity, that role now appears
to have passed to the more intimate localities of domestic residence. The postcolonial era in India witnessed earlier periods when residential spaces were
part of the state’s imagination of social life and change. Today, in contrast, the
state loiters outside the home, and its relationships with domestic space are
of a different nature. This has speciic consequences in terms of new relationships between different kinds of spaces (domestic and public, for example),
religiosity, gender and new notions of the self. Within gated communities,
where the street is not the street, and, for precisely that reason, is the site of
intense middle-class activity, public women both can be the guardians of tradition and take part in sexualized presentations of the self, rather than having to
choose between the two (Phadke 2007). So, on the night of the Hindu festival
of karva-chauth, traditionally attired women of Birmingham Garden pray for
their husbands’ well-being, and, the morning after, they pace the condominium
grounds on their exercise rounds dressed in latex clothing. Consumerism, here,
is the grounds for the making of a moral middle class that is able to combine
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‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ in appropriate measure. Women, in particular,
are able to take part in consumerist modernity and return to tradition when
required. Postnational consumerism provides the grounds for the making of
moral consumption: for one must take vigorous part in consumerism in order
to display one’s ability to withdraw from it. One must display modernity to
remain traditional.
Between the Temple, Reality Television and Time
Management: Young Men in Haridwar
If non-religious spaces such as gated communities act as sites of moral consumption, there are other, more explicitly religious contexts in which religiosity is itself an entry point to the world of material goods. This occurs through
“a continuous balancing act between reaching out and staying apart, between
embracing the world and staying aloof, between addressing and appealing to
the public and imposing some kind of boundary through which believers are
set apart” (Meyer 2009: 21).
Dev Sanskriti Vishwavidyala (DSVV) is a private university located in the
(Hindu) holy city of Haridwar in the state of Uttarakhand in northern India. It
was founded in 2002 and is one of several educational institutions run by the
All World Gayatri Pariwar, a Hindu religious organization founded by Pandit
Ram Sharma Acharya (1911–1990) in 1958. Pandit Acharya was born in the
village of Anwalkheda near Agra in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The headquarters of Gayatri Pariwar is Jyoti Kunj Ashram, also in Haridwar. The Ashram,
like many others in Haridwar, is popular with pilgrims from around the country. Jyoti Kunj is a mini-city and contains temples and other religious spaces,
accommodation for visitors, restaurants and dining halls, kitchens that prepare
foods to be used during religious festivities, printing presses, administrative
units that deal with domestic and international visitors and a variety of other
ofices. According to its website, “Spiritual reinement of the suksma vatavarana (subtle environment) has been the predominant focus of the mission and
it has endeavoured a Yagya -based movement on the lines of the Vedic tradition
to achieve this virtually impossible goal.”6 The current head of mission is the
son-in-law of the founder of Gayatri Pariwar. He is also the chancellor of the
Dev Sanskriti Vishwavidyala, which is located on an eighty-four-acre campus,
approximately three kilometres from Jyoti Kunj Ashram. The university was
established under a special act of the state government of Uttarakhand.
I was irst introduced to DSVV in March 2011 by Ankur Patel, who,
along with his wife Malti, is in charge of distance education for the university. On my initial visit, Ankur arranged for me to stay at the Ashram. When
I arrived at Jyoti Kunj on a cold January morning, the air was thick with smoke
from a number of havans (sacred ires) that form part of rituals of ‘yagya’,
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originally a Vedic sacriice ritual.7 The havans were surrounded by devotees.
Loudspeakers installed upon pillars blared chants that devotees were expected
to repeat. Ankur told me that the yagya ritual at Jyoti Kunj has a very speciic
dress code: men are required to wear dhotis (an unstitched garment, tied at
the waist and covering most of the legs) and the women must be in ‘Indian’
attire. Among the crowd of devotees were a number of European and Japanese
women wearing loose-itting ‘harem’ pants. I was met at the Ashram gates
by Ashish Kumar Singh, who is a volunteer at the Ashram. He is in his midtwenties and comes from the town of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh. He has an
engineering degree. Like many other volunteers at the complex, Ashish was
wearing saffron dhoti–kurta.8 I checked into the Patanjali Bhavan (‘Patanjali
Mansion’) guest house, named after the Sanskrit grammarian of ancient India.
Ashish had become familiar with All World Gayatri Parivar (AWGP) at the age
of thirteen when he became involved in some of their activities as a schoolboy.
He is the only child in his family, so when he decided to join the organization
as a full-time volunteer, his parents were unhappy with his decision. Now, he
told me, they have reconciled with his membership.
Ankur Patel and his wife both have management degrees and earlier worked
in corporate jobs in Bangalore. Malti’s family had long been part of AWGP, but
Ankur knew nothing about it. Before marriage, they visited Jyoti Kunj in 2008.
Shortly thereafter, they decided to get married at the Ashram, but then returned
to their respective jobs in Bangalore. However, Ankur said, he realized that
he was increasingly “missing something” in his middle-class corporate life.
He and his wife decided to meet with the head of AWGP. They told him that
they wanted to “give their time to the mission.” The head told them that, given
their jobs, he thought that they might be able to spend only a short period with
AWGP. Malti responded as follows: “If we decide, it will be forever.” Shortly
thereafter they moved to Haridwar. Their families, they said, “were completely
shocked.” Ankur tried to mollify his parents by telling them that he and Malti
would get a salary of 20,000 rupees per month (approximately $330) each,
whereas they actually received a stipend of 700 rupees per month (approximately $12). The stipend was recently increased to 1000 rupees per month.
When his mother found out, she broke down and accused him of lying to her.
His father supported him, saying, “He is not asking for any money from us and
he is earning whatever he does with izzat [honor].” When Ankur and Ashish
took me to meet the AWGP head, they touched their foreheads to his feet in a
traditional sign of deference, and sat on the loor rather than occupy chairs. The
same ritual is performed at the morning darshan, when the head and his wife
(daughter of the founder of AWGP) ‘bless’ the large crowd of devotees who
queue up to see them.
Ankur was my chief guide to the DSVV campus. The university vicechancellor told me that the institution caters ‘mainly to poor students’,
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including many from rural areas from states such as Bihar, Madhya Pradesh,
Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. The university has nine departments, including Sanskrit, English, Indian History and Culture and Scientiic Spirituality.9
The academic day consists of six hours of classroom teaching. DSVV offers
certiicate, diploma, graduate and post-graduate degrees in courses such as
Holistic Health Management, Journalism and Mass Communication, Human
Consciousness and Yogic Science and Applied Yoga and Human Excellence.
DSVV is located – along with many other such institutions – within a
speciic geography of the underfunding of provincial education. This sense
of backwardness is keenly felt by the inhabitants of these spaces. They are
marked not only by uneven development of educational facilities, but also by
lack of conidence in them and a general sense that there is little of worth in an
upbringing that is conined to the province. The following quote from an article
by anthropologist Chaise LaDousa on schooling and the politics of language in
Banaras (Varanasi) provides a succinct summary of this viewpoint:
Although most people living in Banaras send their children to the city’s schools, a small
number ind it necessary to send their children away for schooling. The case of my
neighbour [during the period of ieldwork] demonstrates that not everyone in Banaras
focuses on medium differences within the city. Indeed, the neighbour believes Banaras
to be unable to offer the kind of English that he sees necessary for success. (LaDousa
2005: 468)
Within this context of social and economic disadvantage, a tertiary institution,
such as DSVV, that provides relatively inexpensive education is likely to be
popular. However, DSVV is, in the irst instance, a religious institution and
its key aim is the propagation of Hindu identity. Irrespective of how this is
imagined, this activity has raised the now relatively familiar concern regarding
the “Hinduization” of education in particular and the public sphere in general (Sundar 2004; Chopra 2008). At irst glance, DSVV’s moral and physical
geography would certainly seem to conirm such concerns.
To begin with, DSVV bases itself on the ‘gurukul’ model of education,
the modern roots of which lie in the establishment of gurukul schools by the
Arya Samaj movement in 1902 (Pandit 1974; Kumar 1993). Organized around
ideas of gender segregation, strict hierarchy between students and teachers
and the ‘timeless’ relevance of ‘ancient Hindu knowledge’, the schools were
intended to return Indian education to its ‘ancient’ past through purging it of
‘foreign’ (i.e., Muslim and Western) inluences. Within the (modern) gurukul
movement, temple and religious life were central to the life of the student. The
centrepiece of the DSVV campus is a temple to the god Shiva. Every evening, students gather at the temple to hear lectures on religion and morality
delivered by teachers. This is followed by recitations by students of writings
of Gurudev (‘the Holy Guru’), as the founder of DSVV’s parent body (the All
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World Gayatri Pariwar) is referred to. Following the recitals, there is discussion between students and teachers, during which the latter seek ‘clariications’ on Gurudev’s writings. As in almost all other contexts, boys and girls
sit separately and at the feet of their teachers. These activities are followed by
ifteen minutes of meditation during which religious music plays over the public announcement system. The meditation period is common to the campuses
of Jyoti Kunj Ashram and DSVV, and gates to both institutions are locked for
ifteen minutes, during which everyone present is expected to mediate. Thus,
the university and the religious Ashram are united as a single space and the
distinction between secular and religious education is dissolved.
Given certain analyses of Indian religious and social spheres (outlined in the
introductory section of this chapter), one interpretation of DSVV’s activities
could be that they manifest the Hindutva project of ‘restoration’ and purity and
a condemnation of the decline of ‘authentic’ Indian social and cultural beliefs.
With respect to the concepts of postnationalism and moral consumption, however, I suggest that the case of DSVV provides another example of a different
tendency in Indian society in which consumerism itself is the condition of
possibility for increased religiosity. Furthermore, this context is not marked
by a search for a pure and singular self. Rather, it signiies the un-remarkable
consolidation of a divided subject that ranges across consumerist and religious
subjectivities, encompassing both positions but determined by neither. It is
also in this way that the Indian example, though apparently similar to the case
described by Stambach (2007), differs from her Tanzanian case.
Stambach points to a tension at the heart of the relationship between consumerism and religiosity in the Tanzanian evangelical context. Discourses of
gender and deference to authority and the strictly enforced austere routine of
daily life at DSVV would also seem to position it in opposition to the pervasive practices of consumption, leisure, and individuation outside its gates.
A student’s day begins at 4 A.M. and ends at 9:30 P.M., which is bedtime. In
between there are multiple periods devoted to prayer, meditation, and activities
such as ‘wandering through the levels of physical body, to sub-conscious and
then super-conscious’, ‘music mantra’ and ‘submission of your whole work to
god’. It is a rigorous daily routine, particularly marked by activities designed
to produce ‘pure’ Hindu subjects, ‘recovered’ and corralled from the tumult of
the outside world. ‘Time for entertainment’ consists of sporting activities and
‘cultural evenings’, which entail student performances based on exclusively
religious themes.
One afternoon, as I wandered around the campus during the time set apart
for ‘entertainment’, I came across a group of young boys huddled around their
music teacher. The boys were all part of the bhajan (prayer) singing group
and performed regularly at various public events at the university. The group
is rigorously trained in bhajan singing, as that is the key form of musical
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performance both at the DSVV campus as well Jyoti Kunj Ashram. This afternoon, however, they were attentively looking at the music teacher’s phone as it
replayed a recording of Bollywood singer Sonu Nigam’s performance on a television musical reality show. Nigam displayed his virtuosity by alternating, in
rapid order, between a 1950s songs, contemporary pop numbers, bhajans and
Urdu ghazals. Santosh Singh, the music teacher, told me that that he wanted all
his students to become as ‘versatile’ as Sonu Nigam.
I asked Santosh about the implicit institutional policy where the only form of
musical training students allowed is in bhajans and other forms of devotional
music. Would aspirations to be Sonu Nigam-like not undermine the “sociomoral discourse” (Stambach 2000: 171) that DSVV sought to propagate? And,
did the students not risk “losing their material-moral-grounding” (Stambach
2000: 173) that lay at the heart of DSVV pedagogy? Santosh Singh appeared
not to address my question at all. Instead, he said:
You know, I have studied music at BHU [Banaras Hindu University] and I can’t even
begin to tell you about the sanskar [ritually correct behaviour or a respectful manner]
I learned there. We always touched the feet of our teachers and as we ascended the stage
for a performance, we also respectfully touched our heads to the steps. . ..
Try as I might, I was unable to draw him out any further, as he appeared to
consider this an adequate response to my inquiry. After this, he and his students
went back to watching the Sonu Nigam video. The reason for his apparent disinterest in engaging with my questions became clearer later on.
Soon after the aforementioned encounter, the registrar of the university sent
word that he wanted to see me. When we met, the registrar asked if I might
be able to do some casual teaching in DSVV’s classes titled Essence of
Lifestyle Management and Time Management. These, he said, were part of
‘PD’ (Personality Development) courses that DSVV had recently initiated.
Some other nearby universities, such as the Garhwal University, he continued, had also expressed an interest in initiating these courses on their campus. Other subjects within PD included Ideal [sic] of a Successful Personality,
Building Conidence through Public Speaking, Ideal Leadership, Developing
Leadership Skills, Preparing Self Evaluation Chart and How to Become a Goal
Achieving Personality. The courses, the registrar went on to say, were based on
“the latest management theories as well global psychology principles.”
There is, of course, a long history to the coupling of Western knowledge with
Hindu-nationalist projects. These include ‘proof’ of the it between ‘ancient’
Hindu principles and modern science (Chatterjee 1993; Prakash 1999), and
speciic demonstrations of the imbrications of “Ancient Precepts and Modern
Teachings” with respect to sexuality (Pillay ca. 1940), and caste as a biological
fact (Srivastava 2007). It is possible to invoke this lineage as an explanation for
the contemporary situation, where an institution such as DSVV (and its parent
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body, the Gayatri Parivar) combine the production of a Hindu subject with
ostensibly global discourses of scientiic management and personality development. I would like to suggest, however, that these identity projects differ
from those characteristic of the era of ‘high’ nationalism that characterized
the decades following independence from colonial rule. The most signiicant
aspect of this is the decline of what might be called the anti-consumerist and
pro-industrialization nationalism of the Five Year Plan state (Chatterjee 1993;
Gupta 1998) and the subsequent incorporation of consumption as a way of life.
Within this context, ‘consumer-citizenship’ forms the cornerstone of quotidian
relationships between the state, citizens and private interests (Fernandes 2006;
Roy 2007). Hence, in the case of agitation by RWAs against the electricity
price hike cited earlier, the issue of how resources should be distributed among
different sections of the population was most frequently articulated in terms
of the difference between ‘good’ consumers (the middle classes) who were
forced to subsidize ‘bad’ consumers (the slum-dwellers) who ‘stole’ electricity
(Srivastava 2014). It is this aspect that plays out with a further twist in the case
of DSVV.
Conclusion
DSVV is, as I have suggested, located within the twin contexts of Hindutva
identity politics and non-middle-class (and economically disadvantaged) education. Practices of moral consumption within the campus are located at the
juncture of these two aspects. The seemingly contradictory positioning of discourses of Hindu identity alongside global ones of ‘personality development’
that draw on management science and psychology and that many teachers and
students saw as linking DSVV to the broader consumer culture was a frequent
topic of discussion among teachers and students. And, just as frequently, it was
the juxtaposition that was itself invoked as providing a coherent rationale, as
well as a reason for why DSVV differed from other arenas of consumption.
The juxtaposition, as the registrar once explained to me, ‘proved’ that DSVV
provided training to its students such that they are able to take part in ‘global
ways’ and yet ‘return to Indian traditions’ when required. This, he suggested,
was what differentiated members of the Gayatri Pariwar from ‘other kinds of
Indians’ who took part in consumerism, but were not in control of this activity.
The latter were, I interpret him as suggesting, determined by their modernity,
unable to withdraw from it at will and, hence, effect the seamless movement
between globally sourced PD courses and locally developed Hindu perspectives. The latter aspect constitutes moral consumption. Further, as a inal rung
to my argument, moral consumption is also the making of a moral middle
class that seeks to differentiate itself from other, historically prior, economically better off and ‘Westernized’ middle classes. Hence, moral consumption,
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in the context of DSVV’s relationship to the world beyond its gates, relates
simultaneously to religious and class identities. It is also the context of the
rise of new class fractions involved in the process of establishing ‘distinction’
(Bourdieu 1984) within contexts of postnational consumer modernity. Further,
postnationalism and the production of consumer citizens is crucial to the process of class differentiation, as it is only through intensive participation in consumption that one proves one’s ability to return to ‘Indian’ culture. This is what
music teacher Santosh Singh meant to suggest, without stating it explicitly,
when he juxtaposed the ‘sanskar’ (training in morally approved behaviour)
gained at Banaras Hindu University with the world of reality television. Unlike
the case of Tanzanian youth, who are warned off consumerism by Christian
evangelists but take part in consumerism despite the proscription, in the Indian
case, consumerism is both a source of anxiety as well as a solution to it. This,
perhaps, is the most signiicant aspect of the postnational era.
While I mean to describe the ways in which consumer culture constitutes
signiicant and indispensable grounds for the making of contemporary religious identities in India, I am not suggesting that religious life is completely
determined by the latter. The key focus of my discussion is the manner in which
the two should be seen as interwoven contexts. The divine life of markets and
consumerist manifestations of religiosity provide us with a way of understanding aspects of social life “as a combination of piety and economic calculation”
(Osella and Osella 2009: S204). This way of thinking about the relationships
between market forms and religious lives is not, of course, unique to India.
Fenggang Yang (2005) provides an account of young Chinese Christians who
favour McDonald’s restaurants as a meeting place for religious gatherings,
interpreting the restaurant space as one of ‘modernity and cosmopolitanism’
(Yang 2005: 425). And, Daromir Rudnyckyj (2010) discusses an Indonesian
context where “The creation of a spiritual economy involved elucidating and
implementing a number of compatibilities in the ethical practice constitutive
of both Islam and neoliberalism” (Rudnyckyj 2010: 23). While building upon
analyses such as these (and others cited throughout the chapter), I have suggested that, for the Indian case, it is crucial to keep in mind an additional context that relates to the interweaving of consumer culture and religious life.
This, I have argued, concerns the making of new class identities, located in the
crucible of consumerist and religious activities.
DSVV and the gated localities of DLF City are, this chapter has suggested,
sites that signify the making of a new relationship between markets and religiosity. In particular, they are contexts of an explicit dialogue that seeks to posit
a contemporary Hindu identity whose religiosity is in tune with the cadence of
neoliberal capitalism and whose neoliberalism is informed by the requirements
of religious belief. This is the context – and the process – I have referred to as
moral consumption. A signiicant background to this is what I have referred
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to as postnationalism, an era that sees the consolidation of new class identities built around consumerism and a relationship with the nation-state that is,
increasingly, mediated through private capital. This is in marked contrast to
the situation that prevailed in the decades immediately following the end of
colonial rule. Postnationalism and moral consumption, are, in turn, the overlapping contexts for the making of divine markets where consumers ind solace
through spiritualizing their relationships with commodities and commoditizing
relationships with spirituality.
Notes
1 For a more benign view of privatization, see Kanbur (2007).
2 The articles in the recently (2013) published volume edited by Nandini Gooptu on
Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India traverse a territory contiguous to that in the
present discussion.
3 The inquiry was constituted under the chairmanship of the leading industrialist G. D.
Birla and the report came to be known as the Birla Report (BR). In blunt terms, it concluded that “the story of the Trust is the story of failure” (Birla Report 1951: 7); that
its record of slum-clearance had been “meagre” (3); the Town Expansion Schemes
had merely resulted in the “freezing” rather than “development” of considerable land
areas (3); it had commissioned neither a “civic survey” nor a “Master Plan”; and
its strategy of selling land to the highest bidder had only exacerbated the housing
problem (4).
4 Interviews with residents of DLF City, November 2011–December 2012.
5 Sanjeev K. Ahuja, “11.53 lakh population: The Numbers Lie, Say Residents”,
Hindustan Times, 10 August, 2010, p. 4. The website of the Municipal Corporation
of Gurgaon pegs this igure at 876,824. Citizens groups complain that the underreporting allows the Corporation to escape its responsibility of proper provisioning
of infrastructure.
6 www.awgp.org/MissionVision/Philosophy (Accessed 1 May 2014).
7 The Vedic period refers to the ancient era during which Hinduism’s oldest scriptures
were composed. At the current time, right wing Hindu movements use terms such as
‘Vedic Hinduism’ to refer to a ‘pure’ form of religious belief and practice.
8 Saffron is the colour identiied with both Hindu religious identity as well as rightwing religious groups that propound ‘Hindutva’ (Hinduness) as a political movement. See, for example, Basu et al. (1993).
9 The Scientiic Spirituality course seeks to demonstrate the rational basis of ancient
Hindu religious thought and its relevance in the current period. This builds upon a
modern Indian preoccupation with establishing parity between western and Indian
knowledge regimes and belief systems (see, e.g., Chatterjee 1993 and Prakash 1999).
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