is that some people experience what might be called a global consciousness.
But globalization can be measured in different ways: it is accessible to differ-
ent degrees – more accessible in urban areas and to elites – that is, to the
educationally and economically privileged and less accessible in rural areas
and to the half billion persons who remain poor in India. Further, a “global
consciousness” is appropriated selectively. Some pick and choose those
parts of the “global culture” of which they will take advantage. These appro-
priations may be more external than internal. That suggests, further, that
a global mind-set may be internalized by relatively few: just because one
uses Colombian coffee, for example, doesn’t mean one thinks Colombian.
Not only that, one may be “global” and Indian, global and ethnic at the
same time, or “global” in one context and “ethnic” in another. Furthermore,
“globalization” has spawned resistance and renewed interest in local and
national values. We noted in the last chapter how patterns that might be
called “global,” or at least originating outside India, nonetheless, led to a
rebirth of Indian self-consciousness, including a resurgence of religion.
Similarly, “modernization” is not the opposite of “tradition” as if “tradition”
stood for some monolithic past that was unchanging in contrast to some
dynamic “modern era.” In fact, we have noticed how India’s past has been
constantly changing. Each new moment obviously reflects its own time
and place; yet the “past” is perceived and celebrated selectively. People tend
to reclaim a past, reinterpret it, perceiving it in terms that suit their own
moment. This is the nature of “tradition”: people constantly reconstruct
it based on their perceptions of what must have been. Hence, in India today,
new religious movements are said to be consistent with the Vedic past or
with a ̄gamic practice. Such claims have the character of myth: the present
is read into the past. Such perceptions of the past, often glorified, provide
a sense of rootedness and identity. Over a century ago, Nietzsche noted
that “modern man” was given to groping in his past for a sense of lineage
and roots – that is, for “myth”;^4 in a similar way, over a quarter of a century
ago, sociologist Robert Bellah commented that modernization was marked
by rapid social change, but also by a kind of romanticism that found in
language, ethnicity, and religion a sense of continuity and identity.^5
True, many families have discontinued the details of rites of passage so
elaborately described in classical texts. Of course, Vedic fire rituals are done
much less commonly than might have been the case in ancient India (but,
in fact, there have been attempts to recover and re-enact some of these in
recent years). Hence, while religion may have changed, it is by no means
dead in India. In fact, religion may be as visible in India today as it ever has
been – in pilgrimages and festivals, in renovated temples, in the private pu ̄ja ̄
rooms of affluent families. It is worth attempting to capture something of
the flavor of this dynamic religious landscape.
196 Religion in Contemporary India