helping to elect twenty-seven women to the national lower house (Lak
Sabha) and 105 women to state assemblies.^2
Similarly, the third five-year plan targeted the need for enhancing
educational possibilities by increasing the number of schools and teachers
available for youngsters. By 1960, as a result, some 50 million Indian students
were attending almost half a million schools and the literacy rate had risen
to 23.7 percent, though only 12.8 percent of India’s women were literate by
that time.^3
For the rest of the century, India continued its development on many
fronts. The literacy rate has grown with the creation of more schools.
Virtually every village has been electrified and provided with modern com-
munication facilities; the founding of highly competitive national Institutes
of Technology has helped create a community of scientists, now among the
three largest in the world. The economy, once based on a socialist pattern
with many nationalized industries, was opened to foreign investment in 1991,
thereby stimulating more competition amongst its business elites.
Of course, problems have persisted: a large portion of the population –
perhaps more than half a billion – continues to live in relative poverty. Cities
cannot keep up with the flow of immigrants, who now live on the sidewalks
and in slum pockets. The population explosion, especially among the poor,
continues almost unabated. There is jostling for space in crowded cities;
a quest for power amongst those once disenfranchised; frustration that
prosperity and literacy have not reached many at the lower echelons of
society; and corruption and cynical exploitation on the part of some poli-
ticians, national and local. India, in short, is a microcosm of the modern
world, lunging forward toward still unattained possibilities while selectively
trying to retain elements of its storied past.
As for religion, it is alive and very visible in India today. Despite predictions
by social scientists that forces of modernization, globalization, secularization,
and economic development would consign religion to India’s trash bin, in
fact the reverse has been true: not only is religion alive, it has been resurgent
in many corners of the subcontinent. In fact, it may be not so much despite
these kinds of currents, but because of them that religion is resurgent.
To be sure, many Indians have become “secularized” and are interested in
attaining “material” prosperity even while the number of technologically
and scientifically trained people on the subcontinent has mushroomed. Yet
scholars and even casual observers have noted that prosperous people are
not necessarily irreligious and that scientists are often engaged in the building
of temples and the rethinking of religion, especially in the Indian diaspora.
Of course, globalization has come to India’s cities bringing satellite tele-
vision, e-mail, cyber cafes, Internet, and most of the wizardry of global
communication. The outcome of this process, on the one hand, obviously,
Religion in Contemporary India 195