together a diverse assortment of people, sometimes acting out distinct social
identities, sometimes transcending them. Attempts to homogenize rituals
within both Hinduism and Islam suggest how certain agencies such as the
A ̄rya Sama ̄j want to “purify” practice so that it will conform to perceptions
of a pristine past. Such groups seek to free the rituals of “folk” accretions
and even want to use certain rituals such as processions as forms of
confrontation with “outsiders.” Many of the conflicting dynamics of religion
in contemporary India, in short, are expressed in its ritual life: selective
appropriation from a perceived past, classicalization, and brahmanization;
hybridizations and homogenizations; conciliations and confrontations
between diverse groups. This performative landscape serves as a kaleido-
scope of the nature of religion in the world today.
Religious innovation, hybridization, and reinterpretation
Religion continues to change in the Indian setting even as it reinterprets
past expressions. People who were once disenfranchised have increasingly
become part of the political, cultural, and religious mix and bring their
orientations to the practice of religion. People of differing linguistic and
religious background interact in cities and the result is sometimes an eclectic
form of religion. Temples, for example, and their iconography embody the
reciprocities of changing (and often upwardly mobile) neighborhoods. The
“past” is selectively appropriated, not least of all those forms of brahmanic
religion once inaccessible to the lower echelons of society.
These currents are expressed in a variety of ways. There is the quest
for gurus and swamis who are thought to be worthy of emulation. There is
the resurgence of old deities, the emergence of relatively new ones, even the
hybridization of the attributes of deities and their cultic life. There is the
emergence of “new” religio-intellectual movements forged of syncretisms
and the restatement of neo-Hindu ideas. Disenchantment with the “estab-
lishment” has also led to conversions to new forms of Hinduism or Buddhism
and to various sects of Islam or Christianity. Not least of all, there is the use
of religion for political ends and the concomitant attempt to construct
governmental polities that support one’s religious ideology often at the
expense of others. To some of these developments we now turn.
The changing faces of deities
Hindu deities have always been rich symbolic expressions, reflecting many
aspects of the human condition. As we have noted in earlier chapters, the
210 Religion in Contemporary India