This week, I performed my mother’s first annual ceremony by the river Tungabhadra near Hampi. I was profoundly moved by the invocation to the punya kshetra uttered by the priest. He reminded us we were near the holy river island of Navabrindavana, the seat of nine Dvaita sages, and then he uttered one of the oldest names by which the region has been known— Kishkindha — invoking the presence of the mighty Hanuman himself.
My mother, the actor and former Member of Parliament Jamuna, was born on the other side of that river. One year after her passing, her ceremonies were done on this side, surrounded by boulders and mountains and temples and shrines, some destroyed and empty, but some still alive.
It felt like she came home, in a way. But along the way, of course, was an incredible journey, not only of her own life and career, but also for what temples have come to mean for the people of Bharat (and the diaspora) in these changing, confusing, modern times.
It was in the midst of this mood of filial gratitude and surrender to the natural beauty of this kshetra that I got the news about another temple that had just been inaugurated. This time, it was not in the historical Hindu lands of South Asia, but quite far away, in Abu Dhabi. Naturally, the only thing that visitors and elders seemed to be talking about after our ceremonies was the new BAPS Swaminarayan temple — and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Somehow, perhaps by virtue of being in Hampi and hearing lectures about Krishna Deva Raya these past few days at the Vijayanagara Utsava, I was reminded of a comment made by a friend around 2014 that Narendra Modi was nothing short of an avatar of Sri Krishna Deva Raya!
Back then, that comment seemed like a fan’s hyperbole. Today, it does seem to warrant some attention, if only to help us understand where our current euphoria about temples may end up going.
It is indeed possible now that like Krishna Deva Raya, Prime Minister Modi’s legacy will be of someone who revived something very dear to us; the ritualistic celebration of our ancestral gods in their traditional (and new) homes which today we call temples.
Just as how one might visit almost any sacred temple in southern India and find a record of Krishna Deva Raya’s support for it, be it the magnificent Tirumala or the peaceful and sleepy Srikurmam, perhaps one day people will think of Kashi, Ayodhya, and even the Abu Dhabi temples as things that happened because of Prime Minister Modi’s leadership.
The building of temples seems to be something that we expect of our leaders, whether they happen to be monarchs, or modern, democratically elected Prime Ministers. Historians might, of course, debate the nuances of what Jawaharlal Nehru or P V Narasimha Rao did or did not do in this regard, and experts will argue about whether Modi’s unabashed love for big temple developments is a blow to secularism or merely a reasonable counterforce to “pseudo-secularism.”
But in any case, it is clear that the people, the leader, and the times, all have converged on Hindu temples today as something very important and instrumental in forging a new Bharat.
This force is indeed a ground reality today, but there is also a sobering analysis that is needed. Will temples merely become tools for things other than what they are traditionally meant to be? Is a temple merely a place where lots of people come to spend money and grab souvenirs?
Is a temple even a place where people are meant to gather in large numbers, as is the case with congregational faiths?
Is the modern social or cultural function of a temple bigger than the ecology of the natural surroundings which house it?
Will the gods still be there if their trees and sacred springs are disturbed?
The strain is showing on this count in many places. In the small Yantrodharaka Hanuman temple which sits snugly among boulders by the Chakratirtha in Hampi, the presence of growing crowds demanded a new structure. The trouble is, this garish new stone face looks like an eyesore in the undisturbed valley.
Even worse has been done, locals say, to the Pampa kshetra. And things have not stopped with temples. Despite the entire landscape being protected as a world heritage site, acres of once pristine boulders right by the Hampi-Anegundi bridge are being pulverised and carted away as we saw every day this week.
If the transformation of temples into mass tourism sites poses one challenge, the other one comes from the growing generational loss in cultural, intellectual, and ritual competence. Certain temples, especially ancient ones, are so closely tied to their deities and customs of worship, whether it is Sabarimala or Kamakhya, that the “stakeholders,” some of whom can claim that label over hundreds of generations, need to be privileged over mass tourism (and armchair activism).
One way forward in order to solve the challenges of nature and culture might be to encourage a conceptual distinction in the minds of devotees as well as government officials between traditional kshetra-centric temples and modern, or eclectic temples.
Already, many temples once known only in their own regions have become hubs for mass pilgrimages, leading to ecological destruction, as well as a ravaging of the cultural harmony of the structures. At least two ancient temples we visited in Andhra Pradesh, for example, no longer looked like temples because of all the modern trappings, railings, police presence and so on. In Hampi, by contrast, one feels the deity long before entering the shrine because of the undisturbed nature of the entire landscape.
In the future it would therefore be vital to preserve the natural surroundings and traditions of the traditional punya kshetras, while also celebrating the building of large and joyous new temples by modern sampradayas such as the BAPS Swaminarayan community.
The genius of polytheism has been to understand deeply that “all religions are not the same”. The imperative of polytheisms that have survived monotheistic expansion for centuries and still wish to remain plural and free is to recognise that “all temples are not the same” either.
Krishna Deva Raya honoured not only the different gods of his people, but also their unique cultural styles of worship, too. We can hope that our democracy too will express the idiom of that diversity, that beauty, that refusal to be just one that is sanatan dharma.
The writer is professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco
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