Culture and Symbolic Transformations II: Religious Organizations and Piety, Commodification of Rituals, Communalism and Secularism, Pilgrimage, Religion and Economy, New Religious Movements
2. Commodification of rituals; pilgrimage and religious tourism
Rituals and religious goods increasingly circulate as commodities — online pujas and e-darshan, prasad delivered by courier, packaged pilgrimage tours, televised and streamed worship, a wedding industry that sells ritual as spectacle, and marketed gurus and yoga. Scholars describe a 'spiritual marketplace' (Wade Clark Roof) and a religious economy: rational-choice theorists such as Rodney Stark, Roger Finke and Laurence Iannaccone argue that religious vitality rises where competition among religious 'firms' is high. Critics of commodification argue that it hollows out meaning; others show that believers reinterpret commodified rituals in devout terms. Indian examples include the spread of festivals through film and television (Karva Chauth), and the public Ganesh festival, which Tilak turned into a mass civic-religious event in the 1890s and which is now also a large commercial economy.
Pilgrimage (tirtha-yatra, ziyarat, hajj) has been read through Victor and Edith Turner's Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978) as a liminoid journey that suspends everyday hierarchy and generates communitas among pilgrims. John Eade and Michael Sallnow (Contesting the Sacred, 1991) countered that shrines are arenas of competing discourses — pilgrims, priests, traders and the state bring different meanings, and hierarchies of caste, gender and wealth often persist. India offers rich cases: the Kumbh Mela rotating among Prayagraj, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nashik; the Pandharpur wari to Vithoba, described by Irawati Karve in her essay 'On the Road'; the Sabarimala pilgrimage with its vows of equality and its dispute over women's entry; and the Char Dham circuit. Religious tourism is now promoted by the state (the PRASHAD scheme for pilgrimage infrastructure), raising questions about the commercialisation, crowding and ecological strain of sacred sites.
3. Communalism and secularism
In the Indian usage, communalism is an ideology that treats a religious community as a political unit with common secular interests opposed to those of other communities. Bipan Chandra (Communalism in Modern India, 1984) traced three stages: first, the belief that followers of one religion share common secular interests; second, 'liberal communalism', holding that these interests differ from those of other religious communities; third, 'extreme communalism', holding them to be mutually antagonistic and hostile. Gyanendra Pandey (The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, 1990) argued that 'communalism' was itself shaped by colonial knowledge that read Indian history as a history of religious conflict. Paul Brass's institutionalised riot systems and Ashutosh Varshney's civic networks (Unit 4) explain when communal tension turns violent.
| Position on Indian secularism | Argument |
|---|---|
| T.N. Madan ('Secularism in Its Place', 1987) | Secularism is a gift of Western, Protestant Christianity; in South Asia, where religion is a totalising way of life, it is 'impossible as a credo' and 'impracticable as a basis for state action' |
| Ashis Nandy ('An Anti-Secularist Manifesto') | Distinguishes religion as faith (tolerant, plural, lived) from religion as ideology (a political identity); state secularism and modern ideology, not traditional faith, feed communal violence — tolerance should be drawn from traditions |
| Rajeev Bhargava | Indian secularism is not a wall of separation but 'principled distance': the state may engage with or keep away from religions, in order to promote equality and freedom — defensible and distinctively Indian |
| Constitutional position | The 42nd Amendment (1976) added 'secular' to the Preamble; in S.R. Bommai (1994) the Supreme Court held secularism part of the basic structure; the ideal is often expressed as equal respect for all religions (sarva dharma samabhava) |
4. Religion and economy; new religious movements
Weber's Protestant Ethic and his comparative studies argued that religious ethics shape economic conduct, and that Hindu doctrines of karma and caste obstructed rational capitalism. Later research qualified this: Milton Singer found Madras industrialists combining ritual observance with entrepreneurship, and India's historic trading communities — Jain and Vaishnava Banias, Parsis, Chettiars, Bohras — developed religious ethics of thrift, trust and charity that supported commerce. Religion also forms economies of its own: temple economies (the Tirumala Tirupati shrine is among the richest religious institutions in the world), waqf endowments, zakat and other charity, interest-free Islamic finance, and the ritual-goods markets described above.
| Wallis's type (The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life, 1984) | Orientation to the world | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| World-rejecting | Critical of the wider society; demands commitment, often communal living | ISKCON (founded in New York in 1966 by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada); the Unification Church |
| World-affirming | Accept the world's goals and offer techniques to achieve success, health or self-realisation | Transcendental Meditation (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi); human-potential movements |
| World-accommodating | Distinguish spiritual from worldly life and seek to revitalise inner religious experience without rejecting society | Charismatic renewal movements within established churches |
Eileen Barker's The Making of a Moonie (1984) tested the popular claim that new movements 'brainwash' recruits and found that most who attended workshops did not join, and most who joined later left — undermining the brainwashing thesis. Indian and India-origin movements — the Radha Soami tradition, the Brahma Kumaris, the Osho (Rajneesh) movement, the Sathya Sai Baba movement studied by Lawrence Babb (Redemptive Encounters, 1986), the Art of Living, and large deras in Punjab and Haryana — combine guru devotion, meditation techniques, social service and, often, transnational middle-class followings, and several have drawn followers from lower castes seeking dignity outside caste hierarchy.
Key takeaways
- Troeltsch's church and sect, Niebuhr's denomination and the cult typology describe religious organisation, but Indian sampradayas, mathas, panths, silsilas and deras fit them imperfectly.
- Secularisation theory has been challenged by desecularisation (Berger), deprivatisation (Casanova), believing without belonging (Davie) and piety as ethical self-cultivation (Mahmood).
- Rituals are commodified in a spiritual marketplace; pilgrimage is read as communitas (the Turners) or as contested space (Eade and Sallnow).
- Bipan Chandra's three stages of communalism and the Madan-Nandy-Bhargava debate on secularism — Western import, faith versus ideology, principled distance — define the Indian discussion; Bommai made secularism part of the basic structure.
- Weber linked religion to economic ethics; Wallis classified new religious movements as world-rejecting, world-affirming and world-accommodating; Barker's study undermined the brainwashing thesis.
Practice questions (10)
Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.
According to Bipan Chandra, the stage of communalism in which the interests of different religious communities are seen as mutually antagonistic is:
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Answer: B — Extreme communalism
Bipan Chandra's third stage, extreme communalism, holds that the interests of different communities are hostile; liberal communalism (the second stage) holds only that they differ. Principled distance is Bhargava's account of Indian secularism.The description of Indian secularism as 'principled distance' is associated with:
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Answer: D — Rajeev Bhargava
Bhargava argued that the Indian state neither walls itself off from religion nor favours one, but engages or keeps its distance on principles of equality and freedom. Madan and Nandy are critics of secularism in South Asia.Which of the following are types of new religious movements in Roy Wallis's classification? Select all that apply.
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Answer: B — World-rejecting; C — World-affirming; D — World-accommodating
Wallis (1984) distinguished world-rejecting, world-affirming and world-accommodating movements by their orientation to the wider society. 'World-encompassing' is not one of his types.Assertion (A): Ashis Nandy is critical of state secularism in India. Reason (R): Nandy distinguishes religion as faith, which is tolerant and plural, from religion as ideology, and holds that the modern state and ideology, not traditional faith, feed communal violence. Choose the correct option.
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Answer: A — Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
Nandy's anti-secularist position follows from his faith-ideology distinction: if tolerance lives in traditions of faith, a secularism that sidelines faith weakens the very resources that restrain communalism.H. Richard Niebuhr argued that sects tend, over time, to become:
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Answer: C — Denominations
In The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929) Niebuhr held that the fervour of a sect cools in its second generation, as members' children are born into it and it accommodates the world, becoming a denomination.Eade and Sallnow's Contesting the Sacred criticised the Turners' view of pilgrimage by arguing that:
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Answer: B — Shrines are arenas of competing discourses where hierarchies often persist
Eade and Sallnow (1991) held that different groups bring different meanings to a shrine, so pilgrimage is a realm of contest rather than a uniform experience of communitas.Eileen Barker's The Making of a Moonie is best known for:
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Answer: C — Showing that most people exposed to the Unification Church did not join or later left, undermining the brainwashing thesis
Barker (1984) followed people who attended Unification Church workshops and found low conversion and high defection rates, which is hard to square with irresistible brainwashing.In which year did the 42nd Amendment add the word 'secular' to the Preamble of the Indian Constitution? (Enter the year)
Numerical answer — type the value.
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Answer: 1976
The 42nd Amendment (1976) added 'socialist' and 'secular' to the Preamble, although secular principles were present in the Constitution's rights from the start; S.R. Bommai (1994) later held secularism part of the basic structure.Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety challenged which common assumption in social theory?
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Answer: D — That agency must take the form of resistance to norms
Studying the women's mosque movement in Cairo, Mahmood argued that women cultivating piety through disciplined practice exercise agency in inhabiting norms, not only in subverting them — a challenge to liberal-feminist equations of agency with resistance.Which pairing is NOT correct?
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Answer: D — Gyanendra Pandey — Communalism in Modern India
Communalism in Modern India (1984) is Bipan Chandra's; Pandey wrote The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990).