THE DISNEYFICATION OF RELIGION
Marx missed the full picture when he described religion as an opiate of the masses. so did George Carlin when he claimed that God was a fiction. For today Neo-Capitalism and right-wing fundamentalism have assigned God a new role and turned Him into an FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Good): far from being an opiate He is now a stimulant for consumption on a gigantic scale, the driver for GDP and GST growth. If, along the Laffer curve, a few consumers die in a stampede or fire, that is acceptable collateral damage, a tax write-off where the public picks up the bill while the high priests of Mammon go chuckling to the Bank. The on-going Maha Kumbh, which the U.P. government claims will add Rs. 2 lakh crores to the state's GDP, is the apotheosis of this new divine role.
The Hindu religion being one of the main pillars of the BJP's very existence and power-play, it has to be constantly glorified, burnished and made larger than life. As Yuval Noah Harari asserts, a religion is not just its deities but also the social functions it performs. The BJP's aim is to ensure that one of these "social functions" is the legitimising and consolidation of its power and narrow world-view. Given these high stakes, Hinduism can no longer be left to the tender mercies of the Shankaracharyas, Mahamandeleshwars, priests, purohits or the humble devotee and pilgrim in the villages. It must be ornamentalised, over hyped and aggrandised, made a television spectacle, a platform for projecting the party and the Prime Minister as its prime custodian. This is a continuation of a medieval mindset we thought the modern world had left behind: did not the emperors and kings of that time build cathedrals, pyramids, gigantic statues, temples and monuments to perpetuate their own myths, dogmas and personalities, to remain in the public eye and memory? Were kings and Pharohs not considered embodiments of the divine power? Religion may be a fiction, so it has to be dressed up, for the grander the fiction the easier it is to get the public to swallow it.
It is in this backdrop that we must understand this government's hostile takeover of the religion, and its obsession with the Disneyfication of our religious places and the conversion of all major Hindu festivals into Cecil de Mille type of Hollywood productions. A few recent instances will help to establish this point:
* The inauguration of the new Parliament building on 28th May 2023 was done with all the splendour of a Roman coronation, complete with the sengol substituting for a scepter and procession of high priests. A secular political function was transformed into a religious one.
* The consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, built at a reported cost of Rs. 1800, crore was an even grander event, the tempo having been built up for weeks before, like some gladiatorial show at the Colosseum.
* The Kashi Vishwanath corridor, which will cost Rs. 800 crores when all its phases are complete, was hyped up as the rebirth of Varanasi, another re-affirmation of a resurgent Hinduism; the destruction of hundred of houses and private temples to make way for the corridors was, of course, acceptable collateral damage.
* The Char Dham Highway, ripping through the heart of the Himalayas and built against all environmental considerations, is again an emblem of religious revivalism, even though it is rationalised on strategic defence grounds. It will cost about Rs. 12000 crores and is already causing irreversible damage to the mountains.
* A dedicated and wholly unnecessary highway is being built for the Kanwariyas in U.P. at a cost of Rs. 650 crores and a reported 33000 trees, once again to project the religion in a larger than life format and to milk religious sentiments.
* The exaggerated claims of the Mahakumbh, its deafening publicity and non-stop 24X7 media coverage, the Guinness scale of infrastructure created at a reported cost of Rs. 7000 crore (and Rs. 5000 crore by the Railways) is again meant to amplify the same message.
It's the same with festivals. The Kumbh has been celebrated since time immemorial, every decade or so, but the frenzy created around it this year is unprecedented, with even Blinkit home- delivering sangam water, virtual dips being offered online, and someone else taking a dip on your behalf at the sangam for a nominal charge! I have lived in Delhi for fifty years but have never witnessed things like Ganesh Chaturthi, the Chhat Pooja or the Kanwariya Yatras being magnified to the kind of spectacles we witness nowadays. This resurgence of a placid faith is clearly contrived, funded and Disneyfied with a purpose.
Somewhere along the way, the spiritual and ascetic in Hinduism has been replaced with the commercial and extravagant, to serve the "function" of a political party. Which should not surprise anyone, because religion has always been a business and tool for power. As Prof. Paul Seabright says in his extraordinary book, The Divine Economy, the divine science (religion) has always had a large element of the dismal science (economics) mixed with it. It offers a product (salvation), has a network of providers (priests) and well established distribution channels. There are many "products" in the market (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism etc.) and they all compete with each other for market share.
It should not surprise anyone, therefore, that the corporatisation of Hinduism now has a righteous , if not liturgical, angle to it, to serve a political purpose. It has become a bustling share market where the common investor gets his returns in divine indulgence, and the new corporates get theirs in votes. And those who do not buy into this stock market are the new kafirs. Nietzsche had famously said that God is dead. He was wrong- God has now been repositioned as a marketable product.
[ This blog was published in the TRIBUNE on 2.3.2025 under the title REPOSITIONING GOD AS A MARKETABLE PRODUCT.]
