19 Urban Religions

Surya Prakash Upadhyay

Module Structure

1.       Introduction

2.       Modernization, Secularization and Religion

3.       Religion, City and Commercial Culture

4.       Conclusion: new forms of religious life in cities

I. Introduction

What are the forms in which religion operates in the cities? Anyone interested to explore this simple question has to just walk down on the streets in any city and would observe varieties of ways in which religion exists in the city. You would see that almost every street or corner has some or other religious place (i.e. temples, mosques and so on). Sometimes a religious place may come in the middle of the road and city municipalities struggle to displace it. On select days these religious places are full of people who come to offer prayer. The people form a community of believers and develop social bondings that are tied around these religious places.

Often, religious place may use loudspeakers and bhajans and prayers are played on. Similarly, you switch on your television and browse the channels, you would see several dedicated religious channels such as Aastha, Sanskar, God TV, QTV that telecast spiritual/religious sermons. At times, channels such as Sony TV or Zee TV may also telecast spiritual programs of select spiritual leaders. Many of these leaders may not be affiliated to any established cult, sect or denomination. These spiritual leaders are seen delivering lectures on Bhagwadgita, Ramayana, Quran, Bible or any other everyday life topic such as health and yoga. Incidentally, many of the viewers of these channels are urban residents. One can see pamphlets and billboards placed around the city informing the visit of some or other spiritual leaders. Often, these lectures are organised at public places such as parks or public auditoriums. These spiritual leaders offer dedicated services for people who are often considered as middle class. For example Swami Sukhbodhanand, popularly called “Corporate Guru”, organise LIFE management with Bhagwadgita, sessions for employees of corporate

houses such as Infosys. You may also see several dedicated shops selling products produced by some of these spiritual leaders such as Baba Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravishankar. The prevalence and instrumentality of new media technologies have given a new dimension to religious activities and participation. One can even participate in prayers and perform rituals online without travelling to the temple. For example, Siddhivinayak temple complex in Mumbai streams live aarti.

During festive seasons, be it Eid-ul-Fitar or Holi or Diwali, you may encounter crowded streets and markets. Similarly, during Muharram or some other grand festival, you may encounter large religious processions. One observes a variety of things happenings in these processions. People may be singing and dancing and moving in queues towards the destination. Often, a few groups bring out morning procession chanting bhajan and kirtan. Sometimes it is a joy and people enjoy in religious practices while at other times it may be painful and violent. At times, one may hear of some violence which may have religious overtones as well. People are injured or killed during these violent incidents. Often, religious violence is planned and organised (for detailed discussion see the Module 5.4 titled Urban Violence). Interestingly, all these religious acts take place in the cities. In fact, some cities, for a long time in history, developed and grew due to presence of strong influence of religion for example Ajmer, Madurai, Tirupati, and so on. Some cities emerged and remain important because of religious pilgrimage such as Varanasi, Haridwar. Cities, that grew during colonial times, for example Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, contain strong religious flavour. People visiting Mumbai or Kolkata often visit places such as Haji Ali dargah (shrine), Mahim dargah or Siddhivinayak and Mahalakshmi temple. Similarly, Kolkata has strong presence of devi cult and people travelling Kolkata visit Kalighat to have drashan (visual glance) of Kali temple. During Navratri (a nine days performance around devi cult) is dominated by large processions and programs in different urban localities in Kolkata which has spread to other cities in the recent times. The theatrical perform of Ramlila and various programs around Durga puja marks a different kind of experience for the people in urban areas. These programs not only have a continuance but also have been transformed in the recent times.

A few towns have grown around popular gurus such as Puttaparthi developed around Satya Sai Baba or Shridi has grown around medieval mendicant Sai Baba. In recent times, we can observe the growth of highly organised temple complexes in cities such as Akshardhaam temple complex in New Delhi and Ahmedabad. Similarly, a few religious groups are known to have developed their Headquarters in cities. You may also see several new temples designed in old as well as new styles in the suburbs of the cities. One may encounter several small temples on the roadsides in the new areas in Hyderabad, Chennai and other cities as well. Often, these temples develop due to the presence of specific regional communities. But they are also a part of larger real estate politics that is now dominating the cities in India. These cases are not specific to India only. In fact, cities such as Chicago or New York are dominated by various religious buildings. A few are in dilapidated state while several others have been renewed and renovated which serve specific communities. Religious places have often been attacked and converted to serve religious purposes of other communities. With migration of people to different parts of the globe, their religions also travel and get accommodated in those cities. In Belfast, Northern Ireland, Hindus who migrated from India bought an old Church and built a new Hindu temple which acts as a community centre for immigrant Hindus.

These are a few variegated examples that illustrate how religion exists, operates and dominates in urban life and how people associate and imagine religion in urban areas. One may tend to look at some of the ways in which religion was imagined by social scientists. We may begin to ask: How does secular and religious exist together in the cities? How does religion unfold and fuse with commerce, media and politics? What is the relationship between religion and urbanisation? What happens to religious life of people when they migrate from the villages to towns or cities? Are the city gods different from the ones worshipped in rural areas? Does religion operate differently in cities and the villages? How has religion been imagined and how do we place religion in metropolitan cities and towns? How are new temple complexes incorporated into contemporary urban spaces? What resemblances and discontinuities do we find in architecture of new religious places? How do religious communities develop in urban areas? What is the significance of religious buildings for different religious communities in urban areas? What kinds of contestations do we encounter around religious processions and festivals in the cities? Do religious spatial practices influence urban development, governance and management of the city? How do religious practices influence urban transformations and vice versa? How do we understand intertwining of religion, market, media and politics? Theses are a few questions to begin an exploration of religious life, practices, places and formation of communities in the cities.

This module looks at a few important themes that are necessary to understand relations between cities and religion. In the coming sections, we would discuss how religion was discussed and imagined by the theorists of modernity. In this section, we will look at the idea of secularisation and analyse secularisation thesis in the light of changing dimensions of religion in the cities. Further, we will look at some of the important aspects of religion in contemporary times that make us reconsider the ways social science has imagined religion in the cities. We will take up cases of religious innovations from Europe, America and South Asia to investigate the relationship between religion and urbanisation. Lastly, we will take cases from India and discuss how religion has been a persistent feature of Indian cities and how under global capitalism commercialisation of religion has been made possible. It would also discuss how media, politics and economy have intertwined with religion and given a new lease of life.

II. Modernisation, Secularisation and Religion

Historically, urban centres had been a fertile ground for the emergence and expansion of religions. In India, if you look at the history, you will find several cults, sects and especially Buddhism and Jainism essentially originated in urban centres. Rodney Stark (1996, 2006) interestingly showcases how Christianity in Europe largely remained an urban movement. As we have discussed in the introduction, religion in Indian cities have a profound effect on people and it intertwines well with economy, technology, media and politics. It has to be recognised that religion exists and operates much against the wishes of modern thinkers be it Voltaire, Durkheim or Marx. Modernity is better understood in terms of its products such as scientific advancements, technological development and enhancement in telecommunication medium, cities, and secularization of society and so on. Modern thinkers considered religion an important theme and also predicted the future of religion. It was argued that with the

progression of modernity, religion and its dominance on institutions— political, economic— would be reduced. It was further argued that a secularism will lead to secularisation of society by which the affects and effects of religion will gradually be removed from the society. Sahliyeh (1990) beautifully summarises the vision of modernist thinkers, “Students of social

development hypothesized that exposure to education, urbanization, the presence of opportunities for modern employment, technology, scientific advancement, as well as the formation of new and more complex social organizations, would inevitably lead to the spread of secularization, pluralism and political differentiation throughout the world. These changes were also expected to lead to the adoption of new values and modern life-styles that would sharply clash with religious traditions” (Sahliyeh 1990: 3).

Modern social theorist, guided by their conviction and preoccupation with the idea of evolution and progress, suggested a marginal role for religion in modern society. Though most of the social theorists argued for secularisation of society but we do not find any unified thesis of secularisation in the works of classical theorists. For Marx, religion was the source of many societal ills which would be removed once perfect communist state is established.

Durkheim looked religion very differently. He also proposes that religion as a binding force would decline as society progresses. Weber argued that with the application of scientific andobjective knowledge, rationality and bureaucratic developments, religion’s effect in the society would decline. At the very heart, for almost all the classical thinkers of modernity, as the society modernises, urbanised and progresses, religion’s social effect would decline in the

society. This is what one can call the early phase of secularisation thesis. The modernist argued that new scientific methods, reason and rationality ushered by modernity will push religion out of public sphere, restrict it to the private domain and gradually religion will disappear from the society. This is the basic premise of secularisation thesis.

In a profound and influential explanation, Bryan Wilson and Karel Dobbelaere argue that secularisation is about the decline of social significance of religion. For them, secularisation moves at three levels: secularisation at societal level; secularisation at organisational level; and, secularisation at personal level. Among the most influential defenders of secularisation thesis, Steve Bruce combines Durkheimian idea of individualisation and Weberian thesis of rationalisation and argues that secularisation is still operative in modern society. He supports his secularisation thesis based on decline in Church attendance, significance of religion in Christian weddings and Baptism rituals.

Secularisation thesis remained influential in understanding the place of religion in modern society and in cities in particular till very recently when scholars began looking at empirical facts that goes completely opposite of what had been suggested. Peter Berger who initially

argued for the secularisation thesis changed his theoretical position and suggested, “The world today, with some exceptions, is as furiously religious as ever” (Berger 1999:2). David Martinin his book A General Theory of Secularisation (1978) does not completely denounce secularisation thesis. Much against the proposals of secularisation thesis, there is a continuance as well as resurgence of religion, even in so called “secularised” societies.

We see religion operates in varied forms from religious fundamentalism to new religious movements to New Age Movements with their mix-and-match religiosity something like bricolage, cyber religiosity and spirituality and so. As Robinson (2004) aptly writes, “The theorists of modernity had written off religion in the 1950s and 1960s. It had appeared to them to be, like other so-called ‘primordial’ identities, on the wane. In the modern world, it had been argued, if religion persisted at all, it would confine itself to the realm of the private. The public apparition of religion that rose in many developing and developed countries, long after modernisation’s last whistle, was something later theorists had to contend with. It is now accepted, if a little late in the day, that ethnic and religious identities rarely disappear with modernity. In fact, modern institutions, values, urbanisation, technological development, scientific advancements have renewed the interest in religious life among the people.Modernity refashions religious identities in various ways and, in fact, can lead to a resurgence of faith under particular conditions” (Robinson 2004:17).Robinson (2004) further writes, “The last decade or so of globalisation resurrected all the old

debates of modernisation. In a global economy and culture, would the world be likely to end up looking more and more similar? Will the modernist dream of one world, one market and one culture ever materialise? Or, as seems far more likely, does globalisation promote particularistic identities of various kinds, enabling them to be projected onto a much larger map facilitated by modern communication technologies? (Robinson 2004: 17). Robinson (2005) asserts that the trajectory of development has shifted enormously, and religion is playing a much more important role than has been imagined. The emergence of various sects and new religious movements across the religions emphasize the resurrection of power of religion. The claim of the modernists seems to fail in detaching the religious nature of man.

The secularization thesis of modernity is now being considered to have gone “to the graveyard of failed theories” (Stark 1999: 270). The privatization of religion has remained nothing more than a historical fact. “Secularization was made part of a powerful social and historical narrative of what had once been and now was ceasing to be” (Martin 2005:18).

III. Religion, City and Commercial Culture

If Weber proclaimed secularisation of the world then the recent theorists such as Harvey Cox in his book The Secular City claimed that religion will not exist in the society. “Many also accepted at the face value the testimonies of nineteenth-century urban observers who recorded religion’s demise without questioning the narrative stance of these earlier interlocutors” (Giggie and Winston 2002:3). In the recent times, religion in urban areas has flourished, expanded and imaginatively intertwined with commercial culture, politics, media technology, advertisement and so on. Rather than declining in influence, religion in cities are reinvented and made a part of urban living. Is the public apparition of religion a failure of modernist thinkers and their imaginations of secularisation of society? Aren’t we compelled to explore the re-inventive power of religion which has reconfigured itself that satisfies the needs that might not be fulfilled by secular city? How do secular and religion coexist in the city? Isn’t this something surprising? Well! this appears to surprise us. But this surprise emerges from the way we have been imagining and locating religion in modern society and in cities in particular.

For social scientists, cities are places where modern institutions, values, technology, scientific rationality would flourish and thereby remove intolerance, ignorance and vices of religious traditions. Therefore, modern cities were conceived to promote secular culture. While for the religious groups, cities were the sites that perpetuate immoral and irreligious people. In conceiving so, modernist as well as religious groups negated each other. For Mircea Eliade, urban religion is the remnant of “pure” religiosity. This demise of religion was a kind of celebration for the secularists while the religious groups (read authorities) remorse. It is interesting to note that modern cities definitely promoted secularity but at the same time cities also offered fields, tools and methods that promoted flourishing of religion. In sum, secular and religious do co-exist in cities which Susan Sylomovics (2005) showcases in her research about parades of South Asian Muslims in New York City. She describes how religious and secular motives mix properly in New York. The same mixing of secular and religious can be discerned by looking at religious places, celebrations, processions, festivals that exist amidst the busy urban spaces.

Another important dimension in understanding the relationship between religion and city is that cities provide a great space and tool for the emergence as well as perpetuation of religion in urban spaces. Jose Casanova argues that most of the world religions— Christianity, Islam, Buddhism— originated in cities. In India, as elsewhere, cities often were centres of religious cosmologies, religious learning and religious experimentation. Despite such deep relation between religion and urban, modernist denounced the presence and flourishing of religion in urban centres. This imagination also has its bearing in the Western European conceptions of modernity and religion. As Peter van der Veer (2015) argues “religion” in its modern, universal sense (that all people everywhere have religion) is a 19th Century concept has a deeper genealogy in Western thought. However, religions can also be modern and urban. The Fundamentalism Project conducted by University of Chicago argued that religion can be modern as well as urban without being fundamentalist. We cannot deny that religions do not produce or instigate unrest, riots and violence but it is also needed to recognise that religions in cities also produce spaces and create new communities, friendship, solidarity and conviviality. This is especially demonstrable in the case of migrants where urban spaces are used to recreate religious solidarities and communities.

During the last couple of decades, various dimensions of religion in urban spaces have been explored and our knowledge about relationship between city and religion has deepened extensively. As said earlier, modern academicians announced the passing of religion from the cities. Giggie and Winston (2002) discuss how American cities have often demonstrated strong presence of religion in the urban spaces. Of late, scholars have reported vivid, polychromatic, lively aspects of religion in the modern cities. Robert Orsi in Gods of City and Tony Carnes in New York Glory have focussed on religion in the city. “Both collections reveal what previously had been hidden in plain sight: amid the urban cacophony, believers transform cityscapes into religious vistas” (Giggie and Winston 2002:4). Several movements

in America such as Salvation Army used urban codes for women to break with the conventional roles of domesticity and gained access to spaces and activities that were dominated by male (Winston 2002). While many other religious movements used urban commercial culture and advertisement to make Christianity more masculine. As Turner (2011) argues in modern society religion has been “commodified” as well as “commercialized”

which attracts the attention of an upwardly mobile middle class. In India too, one can see that under the aegis of spiritual gurus Hinduism is developing as a business model (Bayer 2012) suitable for the neoliberal age and economy (Upadhyay 2016). Several studies look at the n intertwining of religion and commerce. Laurence Moore’s Selling God; Leigh Schmidt’s Consumer Rites; Jeremy Carrette’s Selling Spirituality, Mara Einstein’s Brands of Faith, and Daromir Rudnyckyj’s Spiritual Economies are a few important studies that look at

commercial aspects of religion in contemporary times. Smriti Srinivas and Tulasi Srinivas in their distinctive studies on Satya Sai Baba, one of the most studied spiritual leaders in postcolonial Hinduism, show how urban built environment, urban sensorium, architecture and mobilities help establishment of religious life in contemporary society. Smriti Srinivas locates her study in the cities such as Puttaparthi (the home town of Satya Sai) and Bangalore in India, Nairobi in Kenya and Atlanta in the United States. For her, the cultural memory makes an important aspect along with the idea of body and its construction in the guru movement.

Srinivas concludes, “the Sai Baba movement’s experiment in pluralizing modernity is also a project of multiplying and perfecting the meanings of urban modernity, of creating a Eutopia” (2008: 344). She holds that for many individuals, neighbourhoods and communities, urban life includes locating and grounding modernity, the sacred and faith in one single space. Similarly, Maya Warrier studies a recent transnational women guru— Mata Amritanandamayi. Warrier (2005) suggests that the simple views of the Mata attracts her urban middle class followers who seek relief from the stress and strain of their modern life. Warrier asserts, “the most crucial aspect of faith within Mata Amritanandamayi Mission is the individualized, personalized and often highly intimate bond that come to be established between the guru and each individual devotee who enters her fold” (2005:1).

It is interesting to note that religion in city offers experimentation, transformation as well as adaption. The recent emergence of various spiritual leaders who may not belong to established groups create newness in religion that enchants the followers. They offer methods and techniques of prayers that are need based and “potentially solves specific problems”. The involvement of media and entertainment and spiritual creativities enable the spiritual groups to attract more and more people in their groups. These groups have also been seen bringing in transformation in rituals, prayers, architectures and donations that again has potential to attract more and more people in their group. However, it should not be considered that the spiritual groups are crafting such methods. Rather this has been a trajectory of religion across space and time. Historically, one of the reasons why people were attracted towards Jainism or Buddhism that these religions offered something novel which was not existent in Brahminical Hinduism. In the course of such shifts, a lot of practices transform and new methods are adopted. David Lyon in his book Jesus in Disneyland explores how religion in the West is flourishing in multifarious forms. He explores how secular and religion has been mixed in  contemporary religious cultures and illuminates religion’s relation with consumerism,

advertisements, popular culture in Pentacostal groups, New Age Religions and so on. He also examines how religion is related with cyber culture, religious identity and new quest for meaning in religious practices. In India, various studies have focussed on the urban form of religion. Joanne Punzo Waghorne (2004) in her study of Hinduism highlights the importanceof temples and how temples in the city have “mushroomed” in the recent times. She compares

the construction and transportation of Hindu gods by urban middle class and shows similarities with the wave of construction of new churches, new mosques and new synagogues in Washington D.C. and London. She illustrates the links between ritual and worship, religious structures, modern economy, and the influence of the great middle class. Uma Kalpagam also explores the mushrooming of roadside temples in Chennai. However, for her such rampant construction of temples offers insights into secularism of society. The physical movement of gods from one place to another has created interesting avenues through which communities develop and organise at different places. Vineeta Sinha (2005) in her study of Muneeswaran temple in Singapore offers vivid portrayal of Hinduism. The god is a new insertion in Hindu pantheon among Singaporean Hindus. Though the god had localised appeal but remained neglected for a long time (for more than 175 years) which has been reinvented by younger generations of Singaporean Hindus. In an interesting article Shalini Kakar (2012) shows how a fan (Pappu Sardar) of Madhuri Dixit (a Bollywood film actress)

has created a temple, festivals and created community in Tatanagar. “Pappu Sardar conducts puja for Madhuri’s posters…he navigates the streets of Tatanagar in a Madhuri rath, an open- air truck adorned with deified posters of star while thousands participate in the divine festivities by chanting ‘Madhuri Dixit ki Jai’ (Hail to Madhuri Dixit)” (Kakar 2012:113).

IV. Conclusion: new forms of religion in the cities

It is now important to recognise that religion has got a new lease of life by appropriating tools and methods of modern society. At one end, we see emergence of several new religious groups, such as Pentacostals, New Age Movements, Spiritualism, and Yoga developing outside the established religious institutions. On the other we also observer how religious groups are coming up with innovative techniques and methods that makes religion convenient, fun, colourful, sanitised, less demanding and enchanting. There are innovative uses of popular media technologies and popular cultural materials in religious groups. At the same time, we also see how new temple complexes are developing and using popular memories and contemporary architecture that displaces chaotic experiences of the city.

The middle-class has been a good ground for the incursion of new religious cults and spiritual ‘tele-gurus’. The modern guru cults could also be referred to as religio-cultural because they  implicate more than spirituality. The spiritual gurus recommend how to live, what to eat, and what to dress and how to manage the affairs of living and working in contemporary society. The spiritual tele-gurus assert that people have forgotten their ‘real-self’ and engaged in

materialistic life. According to them, this has produced stress and strain in life, reduced interpersonal relations, moral values have diminished from the family and sexual feelings have increased. The spiritual gurus associate it with urban ways of living and assert that improper food habit, improper daily schedule, visiting to clubs, pubs and bars have produced anxiety, fear and health issues such as diabetes, coronary failure, blood pressure, arthritis, asthma, allergies and insomnia. They suggest techniques not only to improve health but also to create positive vibrations for happiness in family. The middle class who encounter a stressful living in contemporary city is also engaged in various such practices and there is a dependence on spiritual to wallow material life as well. This becomes more evident from the images, texts, discourses, advertisements of self-care products. They not only visit spiritual gurus but also purchase, consume and gift items that are considered to bring happiness, health, prosperity and positive vibrations. The increasing presence of contemporary Hindu spiritual gurus in urban India and a huge cultural market that creates hope for ‘happy, healthy and prosperous life’, well-being, and promises to achieve aspirations could also be understood as consumption and lifestyle practice.

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