Some years ago, in the city of Bombay, a young Muslim playwright wrote and staged a play that had gods - Hindu gods and goddesses - as major characters. Such plays are not uncommon in India; some would say that they are all too common. This one also included gods and goddesses who were heroic, grand, scheming and comical.

This provoked not the audience but Hindu nationalists, particularly the Hindu Mahasabha, for a long time, a spent political force in Bombay. This city is now being dominated by a more powerful Hindu nationalist formation, the Shiv Sena. It is doubtful if those who claimed they had been provoked were really provoked. It is more likely that they pretended to be offended and precipitated an incident to make their political presence felt. After all, such plays have been written in India since time immemorial. Vikram Savarkar of Hindu Mahasabha - a grandson of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966), the non-believing father of Hindu nationalism who thoughtfully gifted South Asia the concept of Hindutva - organised a demonstration in front of the theatre where the play was being staged, caught hold of the playwright, and threatened to lynch him. Ultimately Savarkar's gang forced the writer to bow down and touch Savarkar's feet, to apologise for writing the play. The humiliation of the young playwright was complete; it was duly photographed and published in newspapers and news magazines.

Though Savarkar later claimed that Hinduism had won, for he had not allowed a Muslim to do what Muslims had not allowed Hindus to do with Islam's symbols of the sacred, at least some Hindus felt that on that day Hindutva might have won, but Hinduism had certainly lost. It had lost because a tradition at least fifteen hundred years old (things might have been different in the pre-epic days) was sought to be dismantled. During these fifteen hundred years, a crucial identifier of Hinduism - as a religion, a culture and a way of life - has been the particular style of interaction humans have with gods and goddesses. Deities in everyday Hinduism, from the heavily Brahminic to the aggressively non-Brahminic, are not entities outside everyday life, nor do they preside over life from outside, but are a constituent of life. Their presence is telescoped not only into one's transcendental self but, to use Alan Roland's tripartite division, also into one's familial and individualised selves and even into one's most light-hearted, comical, naughty moments.2 Gods are above and beyond humans but are, paradoxically, not outside the human fraternity.3 You can adore or love them, you can disown or attack them, you can make them butts of your wit and sarcasm. Savarkar, not being literate in matters of faith and pitiably picking up ideas from the culture of Anglo-India to turn Hinduism into a 'proper' religion from an inchoate pagan faith, was only ensuring the humiliating defeat of Hinduism as it is known to most Hindus.

Since about the middle of the last century, perhaps beginning from the 1820s, there has been a deep embarrassment and discontent with the lived experience of Hinduism, the experience which paradoxically the young Muslim playwright, Savarkar's victim, represented. Vikram Savarkar is only the last in a galaxy of people - Hindus, non-Hindus, Indians, non-Indians - who have felt uncomfortable with the over-populated Indian pantheon, its richly textured, pagan personalities, their unpredictability, variety and all too human foibles. For nearly 150 years, we have been seeing a concerted, systematic effort to either eliminate these gods and goddesses from Indian life or to tame them and make them behave. I am saying 'Indian' and not 'Hindu' life self-consciously, for these gods and goddesses not only populate the Hindu world but regularly visit and occasionally poach on territories outside it. They are not strangers outside India, either.4 By indirectly participating in the effort to retool or gentrify them that has been going on for over one hundred years, Savarkar was only following the tradition of Baptist evangelists like William Carey and Joshua Marshman and the rationalist religious and social reformers such as Rammohun Roy and Dayanand Saraswati in nineteenth-century India, who felt that the country's main problem was its idolatry and the rather poor personal quality of its gods and goddesses. These reformers wanted Indians to get rid of their superfluous deities and either live in a fully secularised, sanitised world in which rationality and scientific truth would prevail or, alternatively, set up a proper monotheistic God like the 'proper' Christians and Muslims had. Vikram Savarkar was attacking in the playwright a part of his self no longer acceptable, but not easy to disown either.

The early attacks on the gods and goddesses by the various Hindu reform movements, from Brahmo Samaj to Arya Samaj, have been dutifully picked up by formations till recently at the periphery of politics in India, such as the ones centring around Hindutva. Today, overwhelmed by the experience of the Ramjanmabhumi movement and the destruction of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya, we no longer care to read the entire Hindutva literature produced over the last seventy-five years. We think we know what they have to say. If all nationalist thought is the same, as Ernest Gellner believes, Hindu nationalist thought cannot be any different, we are sure.5 If you, however, read the Hindutva literature, you will find in it a systematic, consistent, often direct attack on Hindu gods and goddesses. Most stalwarts of Hindutva have not been interested in Hindu religion and have said so openly. Their tolerance for the rituals and myths of their faith has been even less. Many of them have come to Hindutva as a reaction to everyday, vernacular Hinduism.

This rejection is a direct product of nineteenth-century Indian modernity and its models of the ideal Hindu as a Vedantic European or, for that matter, Vedantic Muslim. That is why until recently in no shakha of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh or RSS, the voluntary force that constitutes the steel frame of Hindu nationalism, there could be, by the conventions of the RSS, any icon of any deity except Bharatmata, Mother India. The Ramjanmabhumi temple is the first temple for which the RSS has shed any tear or shown any concern and that concern, to judge by their participation in worship or rituals at the temple, seems skin-deep.

In 1990-91 I had interviewed at great length the chief priest of the Ramjanmabhumi temple itself, Baba Lal Das, a remarkably courageous, ecumenical man of religion who was murdered soon after the mosque was demolished. He told me that during the previous seven years of the movement in support of the temple, no major political leader of the movement had cared to worship at the temple, except one who had got a puja done through a third party without herself visiting the temple. I may tell at this point my favourite story about the devotion to Ram of the Hindu nationalists. Once, in the course of his only visit to a RSS shakha, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi looked around and found on the walls of the shakha portraits of some of the famous martial heroes of Hindutva such as Shivaji and Rana Pratap. Being a devotee of Ram, Gandhi naturally asked, 'Why have you not put up a portrait of Ram also?' Those were not the days of the Ramjanmabhumi movement and the RSS leader showing him around said 'No, that we cannot do. Ram is too effeminate to serve our purpose.'

I am not going to speak about such tense styles of relating to gods and goddesses, which invites one to fight their causes without caring for them. I am going to speak about gods and goddesses who inhabit the world that we live in, sometimes as house guests, sometimes as our neighbour's headache, sometimes even as private ghosts without whom we think we can live in greater peace. Nagaraj accuses me of writing on these things as an outsider. 'You come to the gods and goddesses as an intellectual, academically,' he says. I have often felt like telling him that I do not want to come to them, but they force me to do so. There is an inevitable logic through which these obstreperous deities infect our life, pervade it, even invade and take it over, independently of our likes and dislikes. Like most other South Asians belonging to a whole range of faiths, I have no choice in the matter.

For even among people, communities, cults, sects and religions who deny gods and goddesses, persist relationships typical of religions with a surfeit of gods and goddesses. Gods and goddesses may survive as potentialities even in the most austerely monotheistic, anti-idolatrous faiths. They are not permitted into the main hall, but they are there, just outside the door, constantly threatening to enter the main hall uninvited, as in some of the best known Indonesian mosques where the entrance doors and boundary walls are guarded or manned by Hindu or Buddhist gods and goddesses. (The reverse also holds true. Some gods and goddesses do have a special symbolic place for anti-polytheism. Lord Thirupathi, the presiding deity nowadays of India's high politics, has a Muslim son-in-law whose temple is right within the Lord's campus. And Sabarimala, one of the more potent deities in South India, is also known for his Muslim friend.)

Gods and goddesses are not unknown even in starkly monotheistic religions. They may not be there centre stage, but are waiting just outside the doors of consciousness. Most of the anger against Satanic Verses was inspired by the gratuitous insults Rushdie heaped on some of Islam's revered figures, but a part of it might also have been a response to the latent fear that the banished might return. In particular, the non-Islamic or pre-Islamic forms of consciousness which the book unwittingly invokes may or may not threaten 'mainstream' Islam, but continue to haunt many Islamic communities in those parts of the world where such forms are no longer one's distant, integrated past. Thanks to colonial constructions of 'true' Islam in the nineteenth century, they often seem an immediate, destabilising temptation in the neighbourhood. It is probably no accident that the countries where the main agitation against The Satanic Verses took place were Iran, Pakistan, India and among expatriate Indians and Pakistanis in Britain.

Shamoon Lokhandwala mentions medieval religious compositions of western Indian Muslims that depicted Prophet Muhammad as the last of the ten avataras and served as sacred texts of the Muslims.6 But even in the more austerely monotheistic versions of Islam, gods and goddesses may survive as aspects or qualities of God, as in the ninety-nine names of Allah. Even in Judaism, despite the faith's hard monotheistic core, the dialogical relationship between God and humans in everyday life has many of the features of pantheistic faiths. In this relationship, much sarcasm, wit, accusations of partiality and injustice, light-hearted banter andsharp criticisms of the divine dispensation - of the kind that Vikram Savarkar did not relish - is usual. It is neither seen as blasphemy nor as detracting from the majesty of the divine. Such dialogues can be found in old Judaic folk tales, contemporary Jewish writers, and even in extreme conditions like recorded reactions of Jewish victims in the Nazi concentration camps. Theological monotheism is not a foolproof protection against theophily or attempts to fraternise with the sacred.

In South Asia, such dialogical relationships with divinity sometimes acquire oracular grandeur. Many know the story that philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi has made famous.7 As he tells it, while on a visit to Kashmir, the famous religious leader and social reformer Vivekananda (1800-1902) went to a temple of goddess Kali and asked her what many self-conscious, westernised Hindus must have begun asking in the nineteenth century - why had she tolerated so much vandalism and destruction of temples? As Vivekananda puts it, he heard in his heart the reply of the great mother goddess, 'Do you protect me or do I protect you?' Even the most fearsome deities in South Asia have, I like to believe, a double responsibility that they have to balance - they have to protect both their devotees and the humanity of their devotees. The human responses gods and goddesses give to human predicaments may also be responses to the limited human ability to give or accept human answers grounded in secular reasons or secular morality. These responses may be another kind of self-excavation represented by visions of the devotee where the questions and answers are both latent in the visionaries. In a cosmology dependent on gods and goddesses, it is a moral self-affirmation that can be simultaneously a rational argument.

A this-worldly articulation of the same process can be found in the Indian politician's perpetual fascination with astrology, palmistry, yajnas or sacrificial rituals, and Tantra. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, for instance, undertook a series of pilgrimages during her last years (she overdid it, some spitefully say, because she lost count). I have never heard of a politician, either in her party or in the opposition, who underestimated her rational, cost-calculating, political self. Nobody believed that she would passively manage fate by depending on the good consequences of making the pilgrimages. She went to the pilgrimages, but retained her sharp, wily, ruthless political self. The issue of 'agency' in such matters is important but not simple. The heavens, though continuouswith everyday life on the earth, expect nobody to be passively dependent on it. It refuses to deliver results or answers in the belief that 'agency' has been transferred to the right quarters. This compact is fully understood by all the parties involved.8

Nothing shows this better than the art and the science of astrology. Astrology is most popular in four sectors in South Asia: business (especially if it involves speculative ventures), spectator sports, the film world, and politics. However, I have never heard anyone claiming that the successful businesspersons of the region depend on astrology to solve their problems in the stock market. They do business to the best of their knowledge and understanding, and then take the help of astrologers, tantriks and temple priests to negotiate terms with the gods and goddesses. As if astrology was merely another way of asking questions, equipped with a vague awareness that the answers might be known to one, but needed to be endorsed by suprahuman specialists.9 Thus, when after elaborate rituals and consultations with astrologers, on an average 80 per cent of the nearly 500 commercial films produced in India in a year routinely bomb at the box office, film producers or directors do not give up their belief in astrology. They blame it on their own imperfect reading of the future and flawed ritual performances (which is another way of acknowledging one's faulty reasoning). Presumably, modernity will now make sure that psychotherapists occupy the space astrologers and priests, backed by gods and goddesses, now do. It will be in many ways a less colourful cultural life, but that is a different story.

When gods and goddesses enter human life in South Asia, they contaminate it not in the way the modern, sophisticated, urbane believer fears they would do. Nor do they do so the way the rationalist thinks the idea of God dominates the lives of devotees. They enter human life to provide a quasi-human, sacral presence, to balance the powerful forces of desacralisation in human relationships, vocations and nature. This familiarity has bred not contempt, as the Vikram Savarkars of the world suspect, but a certain self-confidence vis-à-vis the other deities. Gods and humans are not distant from each other; human beings can, if they try hard enough, approximate gods. They can even aspire to be more powerful and venerable than gods. Tapas, penance of various kinds, and sometimes even the benediction of one god, wisely or foolishly given, can give one superhuman, godly powers.

First, spirituality is partly a gift of mortality; it is associated more with the mortals than with the gods, who are usually seen to have a streak of hedonism. The persistent asceticism of Shiva is an exception rather than the rule. Second, gods can also be vulnerable and require the help of humans for fighting demons or other gods.

That is, human inferiority to gods is not absolute; no wide chasm separates the goals and motivations of the gods from those of humans. Indeed, on some planes, the differences between immortal humans and gods become notional. For the classicists, this proposition is difficult to swallow because, of the seven immortals mentioned in the puranas (Ashvathama, Bali, Vyasa, Hanumana, Kripa, Vibhishana and Parashurama), none can, except perhaps Hanumana, claim divine status.10 Perhaps it will be safer to say that there is a continuity between the divine and the earthly, that the chasm between gods and humans in South Asia is narrow or shifting. At times, some gods might even be less effective, potent, or pious than humans.

Maybe that is the reason why allegiance to a deity is often personalised, why sometimes it looks like a bilateral contract or a secret intimacy between two unequal but sovereign individuals. This allegiance, a rather typical feature in this part of the globe, may manifestly have little to do with one's faith.

Anybody who knows something about the great sarod players, Alauddin Khan and Ali Akbar Khan, will also know that both have been great devotees of the goddess Saraswati. Yet, they have also been simultaneously devout Muslims, and proudly so. That devotion to Islam and Islamic piety does not require them to reject their personal goddess or isthadevi who presides over the most important area of their life, musical creativity. Alauddin Khan once composed a new raga called Madanmanjari. As its name indicates, the raga invokes Krishna and the Vaishnava culture.

When someone took courage to ask the Ustad why he had used such a Hindu name, the Ustad, I am told, was surprised. 'Is it Hindu? I composed it in honour of my wife Madina Begum,' he is supposed to have said. What looked blatantly Hindu to some can look to others a marker of Islamic devotion. The piety of neither is disturbed. While studying the Ramjanmabhumi movement, I found a hillock at Ayodhya, venerated both by the local Hindus and Muslims. The Hindus considered it to be the discarded part of the sacred Gandhamadan of Ramayana, which Hanumana had foolishly carried, unable to locate the magical drug Vishalyakarani that he was told to find on the hill, for the treatment of Lakshmana's fatal war wounds. The Muslims associated the same hillock with Hazrat Shish, and considered it a remnant of Noah's ark, discarded of all places at Ayodhya, after the great deluge was over.

When gods and goddesses invade our personal lives or enter our lives as our guests, when we give them our personal allegiance, they may or may not apparently have much to do with the generic faiths we profess. Theologian and painter Jyoti Shahi once reported a survey carried out in Madras where, according to the official census, one per cent of the people are Christian. The survey found that about 10 per cent of the population identified Jesus Christ as their personal god or isthadevata. Such data warn us not to be taken in by what some politicians acting as vendors of piety and some experts on ethnic violence tell us about the geography of faiths. The Indic civilisation has been around slightly longer than the Hindutva-wallahs and the Indologists have been and it may well survive its well-wishers. The more continuous traditions of this civilisation may reassert themselves in our public life. A majority of people in South Asia know how to handle the gods and goddesses, their own and those of others. The gods and goddesses, on the other hand, not only live with each other, they also invite us to live with their plural world.

Years ago, while studying the psychological landscape of western colonialism in South Asia, I checked some nineteenth century documents on Calcutta, because Calcutta is where it all began. Not being a historian, many of the documents surprised me. For instance, the scrappy details of British households showed that they had a large retinue of servants, including often a Brahmin priest who did puja in the house. Many of the British houses also had small temples which the Brahmin retainers took care of.

Apparently, these householders went to Church on Sundays, but found nothing inconsistent in the puja at home.11 The standard reading, I guess, would be that the Indian wives or concubines of the British in India - the Suez Canal was not yet dug and most British in India had Indian spouses - required this facility. However, something else also might have been involved. For the East India Company itself owned 'shares' in at least two temples.

During important religious festivals, the army band went and played at these temples and the musketeers of the Company fired volleys in the air to celebrate the occasion. In return, the Company was given a share of the donations made to the temple. It also seems that many individual British residents in India, while they proclaimed their disbelief in the special spiritual skills of the Brahmins and attacked them as charlatans, were at the same time scared stiff by their possible magical abilities. At least some British householders maintained temples in their homes not because they were lapsed Christians or crypto-Hindus, but because they were afraid of the local gods and the Brahmins and did not want to antagonise them. It was their idea of buying an insurance policy in matters of the sacred. The apparently sharp theological distinctions between some religions may, in specific cultural contexts, observe the logic of complementary self-organisation.

I have come to suspect that the theistic worlds in South Asia observe a series of principles of mediation in their relationships with each other. These mediations endorse continuity and compatibility, but also a degree of anxiety, hostility and violence, though not perhaps distance or inexplicability. Whether the protagonists are Bosnian Muslims and Serbs in East Europe, Hutus and Tutsis in Africa, or Hindus and Muslims in South Asia, familiarity can breed contempt and venomous, genocidal passions, especially in a situation of imminent massification, threatening to negate one's cultural selfhood.

A respected Pakistani political analyst and journalist once claimed in a conversation that 'the ultimate fear in many Pakistanis is that, if they come too close to India, they would be fitted in the Hindu social order, mostly in the lower orders of the caste hierarchy'. India and Pakistan separated fifty years ago; there is hardly any Hindu left in Pakistan. Why then this anxiety? My Pakistani friend himself seemed perplexed, but insisted that there was this lurking fear in Pakistan that Hinduism was not something outside, but also a vector within.

Living in two complementary worlds of legends, folk tales, rituals, marriage rites, music, crafts traditions and, even, some of the same superstitious fears, gods and demons probably has its costs. Perhaps many of the anti-idolatrous faiths in South Asia - they include many Hindu sects, too - are not merely external counterpoints to the sphere of gods and goddesses, but also constitute, within that sphere, a system of internal checks and balances. Perhaps our gods and goddesses also need such checks.

When another faith provides an internal counterpoint, balancing principle, or in-house criticism, it establishes alliances within the world inhabited by deities of other faiths; it no longer remains an alien faith or someone else's faith with whom, to conform to contemporary sensitivities, you have to open an inter-faith or inter-cultural dialogue. The dialogue already exists, waiting to be recognised or joined. Islam, for instance, by the very fact that it denies gods and goddesses, provides in South Asia a different kind of meaning-system that becomes accessible to a person who wants to defy the world of gods and goddesses while living within it. So even the threat of becoming a part of the Islamic order and disowning the Hindu pantheon, by say a low-caste, oppressed Hindu, becomes a particular way of interacting with the pantheon. Islam in South Asia may mean going outside the sphere of gods and goddesses, but it may also mean renegotiating terms and conditions with one's traditional gods and goddesses. It can even mean renegotiating terms with the social status of communities deriving from a shared structure of sacredness.

Many of the most famous temples of Ayodhya, the pilgrimage centre that has become a symbol of religious intolerance in South Asia today, were built with the help of land grants and tax exemptions given by the Shia Nawabs of Avadh in the pre-colonial days. By being patrons of temples, they were making a statement both on their position vis-à-vis the Ramanandis who dominated the sacred city and the Sunnis, constituting an important component of the Muslim community there. Likewise, B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit leader and writer of India's Constitution, when he decided to convert to Buddhism along with a sizeable section of his followers, did so after much deliberation. It was not the standard Therawada Buddhism, with its closetful of deities that he chose, but a more austere Buddhism that, by being close to Islam and Christianity would represent a sharper disjunction with Hinduism. By his conversion, he was making a statement to the Hindu world.

A more intense form of such inter-relationship is the South Asian version of multiculturalism which does not remain a cultural artefact, but gets telescoped into the self of the individual. Kumar Suresh Singh's new survey of Indian communities show that about 600 communities in India can be classified as having more than one 'religion'. (It is doubtful if these believers see themselves as having multiple religious identities; they define their Hinduism or Islam or Christianity in such a way that the symbols of sacredness of another faith acquire specific theological, cultural and familial status.) Thus, there are more than 100 communities that are both Hindu and Christian; at least 70 communities that are both Hindu and Sikh, or Sikh and Muslim.

Sant Fateh Singh, who died for the cause of Khalistan, was a convert from Islam and a part of his family, I am told, remain Muslim, exactly as a part of the family of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, remains Hindu. L. K. Advani, a leader of what is reputed to be one of the world's largest fundamentalist formations, is probably the only one of his ilk to have publicly proclaimed that, in his personal religious sensitivities, he is closer to Sikhism than to his own faith, Hinduism. M. A. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, which separated from India on grounds of religion, belonged to a Muslim community that to many 'thorough-bred' Muslims still looks more Hindu than many Hindu communities. In all these instances, I am not talking of recent converts retaining traces of their older faiths; I am speaking of identities that appear to be simultaneously Hindu and Muslim, culturally and theologically.

Shail Mayaram has worked on the Meos, one of the largest Muslim communities living near the city of Delhi in eastern Rajasthan, though many residents of Delhi may not have even heard of them.12 The Meos trace their ancestry from the Mahabharatic clans and also often have Mahabharatic names. But they are also Muslims, devout Muslims. It is only now, after being victims of a series of communal riots since the days of Partition, that they have begun to feel that they can no longer live in two houses, that they will have to now choose, and some of them have chosen to be Muslim in the sense in which the Tabligh and the Jamaat-e-Islami define Islam. Apart from their own tradition of Islam, that is the only other Islam available to them in contemporary India.

Similarly, in the re-conversion programmes being run by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad clandestinely, the aim is to introduce the non-Hindus into the Hindu fold as so many low-status, mimics of a shallow, neo-Brahminic Hinduism, because that is the only Hinduism the evangelists themselves know. This is a modern tragedy which we have not yet sensed and it effects hundreds of communities all over the region today: Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists. I think India will be poorer if this rich, intricate tapestry of faiths gets destroyed through neglect or shrinks into six or seven standard, mutually exclusive faiths because, in the contemporary world, only such standard faiths enjoy respectability and political clout. It will simultaneously impoverish Hinduism, Islam, and the other South Asian faiths.

I have said at the beginning that South Asian gods and goddesses, like their Hellenic counterparts, can sometimes be found on the wrong side of morality or law. The puranas and the upakathas are full of instances of how loyalty to and instrumental use of certain gods and goddesses can destroy a person or a community.

The vamachari tradition is old in South Asia, and there are deities who have a special relationship with deviant social groups. Years ago, while studying the nineteenth-century epidemic of sati in Bengal, I found out that the popular public worship of Kali (sarvajanin puja) became an important socio-religious festival in Eastern India only towards the end of the eighteenth century. Previously Kali - the fierce, violent, dark goddess of popular imagination - had been primarily the goddess of marginal groups such as robbers and thieves and some incarnations of her were associated with certain dangerous diseases.13 These gave her an ambivalent status. Now, along with Durga, she precipitated out as one of Bengal's two presiding deities, benevolent even if treacherously or violently so, from the great traditional mother goddess of the region, Chandi.

After the great famine of 1772 killed off one-third of the population of Bengal and the colonial political economy produced large-scale cultural dislocations, Kali continued to be the chosen goddess of marginal groups (becoming, for instance, the personal goddess of the newly emerging sect of thugs ravaging the countryside and pilgrimage routes), but also acquired a modern connection as the chosen deity of the anomic, culturally uprooted, urban, upwardly mobile upper castes in greater Calcutta and areas heavily influenced by the British presence, where a new political economy and urban culture were ensuring the collapse of traditional social norms. Durga became a more benevolent incarnation of Chandi and gradually emerged as the most important deity in Bengal. This changing cartography of gods and goddesses, who can be benevolent but are also associated with the extra-social, the amoral and the criminal, gives an altogether different set of insights into cultural changes by profiling the anxieties, fears and hopes of a society that neither a desiccated, formal study of theology and structures of high culture yield nor can any focus on the more formal, better known deities bare. The trivial can often be a surer pathway to cultural insights.

To give another example, in 1994, during the last episode of plague in India, I discovered that, while there were goddesses for cholera and smallpox in large parts of India, there was no goddess for plague except in Karnataka. I wondered why this goddess, pilague-amma, found a congenial abode only in that state and why she had that Anglicised name, as if she was a newcomer to the Indian scene. Could it be that plague was a pestilence that did not arouse crippling anxieties in most parts of India? Could it be a pestilence with which most Indians did not have to psychologically struggle, except perhaps in the Western coastal towns in contact with merchant ships coming from West Asia and Europe - Mangalore, Cochin, Calicut, Goa, Bombay and Surat? I do not know. Perhaps there are goddesses corresponding to Pilague-amma in southern Gujarat and in Konkan; only I have not had the privilege of their darshan yet. Once again, the geography of popular religion gives one a clue as to why plague in India has not triggered the imageries and passions it has invoked in Europe since medieval times and why Indians have never fathomed the anxieties that the incidences of plague in their country have aroused in some other parts of the world.

This brings us to a central feature of South Asian concepts of divinity: the intimate relationship between the gods and the goddesses, on the one hand, and the demons, rakshasas and ogres, on the other. The suras and the asuras, the adityas and the daityas, the devas and the danavas, are all dialectically interrelated; the gods and goddesses cannot survive or be imagined - they are not even complete - without their counterpoints among the demonic.

The divine pantheon - populated by the good and the bad, the targets of right-handed worship and those associated with left-handedness, vamacaar - is part of a larger cosmic order. The gods and goddesses are integrally related to the anti-gods or demons. No theory of violence, no metaphysics of evil in this part of the world is complete unless it takes into account this dialectic. The fuzzy boundaries of South Asian concepts of evil, the temporal and spatial limitations of the concept of papa (which distinguish it from the more 'intense' Judaeo-Christian concept of sin, which is more sharply defined but, paradoxically, transcends space and time more easily) and the tolerance of diverse moral universes can be read as reflecting the inextricability of the ideas of the good, the divine and the godly from that of the evil, the desacralised and the ungodly. Appropriately, the mother of the gods and goddesses in mythic India, Aditi, is a sister of the mother of the demons, Diti, and in story after story there is an intricate, personalised, and ambivalent relationship between gods and demons. Even Ravana, the fearsome Brahmarakshasa, the worst kind of rakshasa, is intertwined with Rama in the cosmic order as two approaches to the same divinity. The two approaches are separated by circumstances and accidents, and in death this contradiction is resolved. By dying in the hands of Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu, Ravana reaches his personal god, Vishnu.14

The capacity of the great Indian thinkers, writers, and painters to sometimes turn gods into villains and demons into heroes, and even the capacity of the less Sanskritised sectors to erect temples to those as ungodly as Duryodhana or as demonic as Hidimba carry a message. Those who worship at such temples do not worship at temples of evil. They are not part of a cabal or a secret society, nurturing secret ambitions that they feel can be fulfilled through some ritualised version of satanism, though that too is not unknown in India. Rather, the worshippers seem to have an alternative concept of divinity where Duryodhana also partakes of the divinity which, in the more gentrified, respectable versions of the Mahabharata, his more popular cousins seem to monopolise.

Such permeable borders between gods and demons, between the definitions of what is sacred in everyday life and what is not, are one of the major sources of social tolerance and of the tacit awareness that the evil you exclude from yourself cannot be entirely projected outwards. For such an outwardly projectable sense of the evil remains only apparently outside at a safe distance from the self. Indeed, the godliness you define and the ungodliness you do not want to define but are still forced to acknowledge, are ordered hierarchically within, as two sets of potentialities. They equip one with culturally distinctive theories of violence and oppression. Last year, a political activist, a committed and successful activist, was telling me how he had started life as a Leftist. There was a touch of both pain and wisdom in his voice when he said to me, 'Now, I have been in this game for twenty years. I am convinced that confrontations do not go very far in India. We wish it went further, but the people are like that!' But people are not like that accidentally. There is a cosmology to back them up. In that cosmology, the good and the evil are differently textured and interrelated. These interrelations - particularly the moral ambiguity that can go with them, deeply offended even a compassionate observer like Albert Schweitzer, who came to believe that Hindu cosmology was inferior to its western counterparts because it did not clearly separate the good and the evil. Schweitzer felt that certain forms of social intervention and altruism were just not possible from within such pagan morality.15 Maybe he was right. But that limitation also ensures that some other forms of violence, certain borderlines that are easy to draw in other civilisations - between the 'monstrous', the 'naturally perverted' or 'genetically flawed' aliens and 'us' -are not easy to draw in South Asia. In the long run, all attempts to draw such conclusive, non-equivocal lines between the insiders and the outsiders, between the godly and the ungodly, between the suras and the asuras, the adityas and the daityas, the devas and the danavas, are doomed in the region. That may not be something to be ashamed of just because Schweitzer felt otherwise.

Can this interpretation be read as only an instance of cultural nationalism or camouflaged ethnocentrism? 'Why have all the avataras been born in India, no where else?,' A sceptic once asked me aggressively. Answers to such questions can only be as clear - or vague - as a culture insists on giving. In Hinduism, there are roughly 330 million gods and some of their avataras might have been born elsewhere in the world. At least one important one, I know, was born in Nepal. A proper census of these 330 million gods and goddesses and their countless incarnations is still waiting to be done.

Less crudely, such questions are partly answered every day by things like the city of Ayodhya in Thailand. Thai Ayodhya is not only sacred, it is unlikely that the Thais will concede it to be a copy. Once however you historicise Rama, once you locate his birthplace at a particular Ayodhya at a particular point of time, either to territorialise his claim to a temple or to oppose it, you automatically deny the sacredness of the other Ayodhya and, while you may serve the purposes of those who view Rama as a national leader, a historical figure and a cultural hero, you cannot sustain his status as a god who, as a god, has to exist today. If Rama is, only then is he Rama. If Rama was, he is no Rama. That is the paradox in which one gets caught when one accepts the language of either the Hindutva-hawkers or the secular fundamentalists.

There is a question that Nagaraj raises, that of Brahminic versus non-Brahminic deities and their status relations. As Nirmal Kumar Bose pointed out years ago, South Asia has a stratarchy of gods, based on the caste system. This allows a different kind of politics of cultures, perhaps even some play in matters of spirituality. For the stratarchy seems to have a few identifiable features. First, the higher the status of a deity, the less directly helpful and relevant in everyday life he or she usually is.16 Thus, Indra, the King of gods, has a high status in the pantheon, but his potency as a god relevant to our day-to-day existence or survival is not particularly high, not at least in our times. Likewise with Brahma, the creator of the universe and the senior-most in the pantheon. The Hindu temples within the precincts of most Buddhist temples in Sri Lanka are a corollary to the same principle. The devotees see the Buddhist divinity as too austere and other-worldly; for everyday purposes, they prefer to dealwith the more amenable, lower-ranked Hindu deities. At one plane the stratarchy distantiates between the Brahminic and the non-Brahminic, between the greater Sanskritic and the vernacular or local; at another, it brings together and balances the Buddhist and the Hindu.17

On the other hand, one's manifest loyalty to a deity, by itself, does not tell much about the powers one imputes to the deity. Thirty-five years ago, when I went to Ahmedabad to join a psychoanalytic research centre and clinic, I found most of the patients who came to the clinic to be upper-caste Gujarati Vaishnavas. Ahmedabad itself was then an identifiably Vaishnava city, a sharp contrast to my native Calcutta. My teacher, psychoanalyst Shiv Kumar Mitra, soon pointed out to me, however, that the Vaishnava style overlay a clear Shakto substratum, with its usual bevy of powerful mother goddesses. When confronted with serious illness or financial crisis in the family, most residents of Ahmedabad rushed to these goddesses. Popular temples in normal times were not necessarily the same as popular temples during times of crisis. As if the Ahmedabadis were discriminating enough to recognise that the goddesses could be not only more powerful than the gods but also be a corrective to the discrepancy between the secular and sacred status of women.

Similar corrections are represented by gods who are more powerful as children than as adults. Krishna the king in Mahabharata is a god all right, but not a god of the same stature as he is as the child-god Balakrishna of the Bhagavata. Exactly as the status of the temple of Bhadrakali at Ahmedabad tells us something about the status of women in Gujarati society, the status of Balakrishna is a statement on the status of childhood in India.18 Likewise, Rama as a raja has one set of devotees; Rama as an avatara of Vishnu has others. When doing field work at Ayodhya in 1991-92, I was surprised to find a section of the priests there convinced that the Ramjanmabhumi movement was a Shaivite plot to take over the pilgrimage centre. With the whole of India on fire on the Ramjanmabhumi issue, some priests insisted that we were witnessing was a political ploy not to defeat the Muslims, but the Vaishnavas. A few of them openly expressed their displeasure that the leaders of the movement, especially the firebrand Shaivite sannyasins like Uma Bharati and Ritambhara, talked of Ram primarily as a king, not as a devotee of Vishnu.

If there are checks and balances within the pantheon in terms of power, interpersonal relations, status, and morality, then it follows, that there are human checks against gods and goddesses, too. Not only in the form of pious men, women and children with unblemished records of penance whose spiritual powers make gods tremble, but also in the form of heroic and epic, even if flawed figures and ordinary, humble folk who take positions against mighty gods on moral grounds. Karna's defiance of fate and his disarming by Indra, Chand Saudagar's defiance of goddess Chandi and her jealous revenge against him and his family, are instances.

Even today, parents in Mithila reportedly refuse to allow their daughters to marry someone from Ayodhya, however eligible the prospective bridegroom (because of the ill-treatment to which Sita was subjected by Rama and the residents of Ayodhya). The practice has lasted for centuries and may outlast the Hindu nationalist politicians shouting themselves hoarse about Ram being a national hero or affirming the unity and homogeneity of the Hindu nation. I am sure there are a few devotees of Rama who support the Ramjanmabhumi movement and vote for the Hindu nationalists in elections, yet would not like their daughters to marry someone from Ayodhya. Is this refusal only comic folk superstition, or is there in this obstinacy an embedded comment on the limits of the spiritual and moral status of Rama or, for that matter, gods and goddesses in general? Do we have access to the complexity of such discriminations and loyalties?

Finally, the matter of birth and death of gods and goddesses. New gods and goddesses are regularly born in South Asia.19 But they also die frequently, despite their theoretical immortality. They die not of illness or accidents, but of forgetfulness or deliberate erasure. These are not diseases that are uniquely South Asian; they are becoming epidemic the world over.

Iconoclasm has killed fewer gods than erasure or reconfiguration of memory. Certainly evangelical Christianity, despite its best efforts, between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century could not manage to finish off the gods and goddesses - coming from a Christian family, I know how much my family lived with them, while aggressively denying that they lived with them. And mine is not an atypical Christian family. 20 My father's Christ, in retrospect, was remarkably Vaishnava.

U. R. Ananthamurthy may be right when he talks of the European Christian onslaught on Hinduism in colonial times, an onslaught that prompted Gandhi to make his notorious remark that Christianity was a good religion before it went to Europe. However, official Christianity need not be the last word on Christianity. There are Christian sects and denominations that have made systematic theological deals with vernacular concepts of divinity. At a pinch, most religions probably know how to live with each other; probably it is the turn of some of the religious to re-learn how to live with each other.

While gods and goddesses are mainly responsible to their devotees, not to outsiders scrutinising them 'scientifically,' even for such outsiders they often faithfully hold in trust, on behalf of the future generations, parts of the selves the devotees disown and would like to jettison. Gods and goddesses do get born, they live and die, but that birth, life and death record not only what they are, but also what we are. Historian of religion, Michio Araki, once said in a conversation that the premodern Japan we now know, is not the Japan that encountered the West for the first time. Araki's argument seemed to be that Japan only theoretically escaped colonisation, for it has always lived with fears of being colonised and that fear has forced it to redefine even its traditions. Today, when we speak of original Japanese culture or state as entities bearing a particular relationship with modern technology and the urban-industrial vision, we miss crucial aspects of Japan as it was, before it saw, in its neighbourhood, two great civilisations, India and China, getting colonised. Araki adds that clues to what Japan was before the western encounter and before it retooled its self-definition cannot be found in Japanese history because, over the last two hundred years, Japan's history too has been reconceptualised. Such clues can be found only in Japanese popular religion; for it has preserved another Japan.

It is a pity that I am not a believer and that I have come to gods and goddesses through politics, mainly politics of knowledge. But for that same reason, I am all too aware that the world of gods and goddesses of people like you and I will not die soon. For our gods and goddesses, like Vivekananda's Kali, can take care of themselves. On the other hand, I cannot but be aware that there are other worlds of gods and goddesses which were being systematically wiped out. These gods and goddesses are exiting the world stage silently, without any fanfare, lament or scholarly obituary.

Some years ago, I studied the first environmental activist of India, Kapil Bhattacharjea (1904-1989), who opposed the Damodar Valley Corporation, the multi-purpose project of dams, hydel plants and irrigation systems modelled on the TVA. I arrived at the usual story - that when the DVC was built in the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted, a majority of them tribals. They were given paltry compensations and told to go and settle elsewhere. And as usually happened during those tumultuous times in a newly born nation-state pathetically trying to catch up with the West, these displaced people went and quietly settled down elsewhere, lost touch with their own culture, inherited skills, and environmental sensitivities (the ecology of resettlement areas usually being different). Mostly belonging to the non-monetised section of the Indian economy, they also quickly spent the money they received as compensation on alcohol and fictitious land deals. Soon they became like any other uprooted community, migrant labourers working in small industrial units or landless agricultural labourers.21 They were some of the earliest members of a growing community-an estimated 50 million Indians uprooted by various megaprojects of development over the last fifty years. This is five times the number of people displaced during the Partition riots. People have not forgotten the ten million displaced by Partition but they have forgotten these 50 million. A large proportion of those displaced are tribals and dalits; one-third of our entire tribal population has been uprooted in the last fifty years and 15 per cent of our tribes have been fully uprooted.22 The gods and goddesses of these vanishing communities, silently and invisibly facing threats of extinction, are the ones who have made me aware of a divine species who, unlike Vivekananda's Kali, require something in addition to devotion. There are also the gods and goddesses of communities that, after centuries of oppression, the communities themselves have begun to undervalue or forget (so hat they can redefine themselves as only a culture-less group of oppressed poor operating a a clean cultural slate).23 I believe that these gods and goddesses - as biographies of threatened cultures, as symbols of their resilience and resistance against the juggernaut of mega-development - deserve something more than standard, rationalist, dismissive ethnographies or archeologies.

We owe something not only to them and their humble devotees, but also to our own moral selves. For no intervention in society, politics and culture becomes moral by virtue of the fact that we cannot, at the moment, think of any alternative to it.

References:

1. Keynote address at the American Academy of Religion, New Orleans, 27-28 November 1996. This was originally an informal extempore presentation and answers to some questions raised by participants at a samskriti shivira (workshop on cultural studies) on gods and goddesses, organised by Ninasam, Heggodu, Karnataka, 8-15 October 1995. Subsequently, K. V. Akshara and his associates painstakingly transcribed the lecture and my exchanges with the participants for the Kannada readers. It is D. R. Nagaraj's persistent interest in the lecture that has prompted me to turn it into something resembling a proper essay. I am grateful to him, U. R. Anantha Murthy and Ganesh Devi, and the intellectually extremely alert, mostly non-academic participants in the shivira who have, through their comments and criticisms, shaped this essay.
2. Alan Roland, In Search of Self in India and Japan: Toward a Cross-Cultural Psychology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
3. Surabhi Sheth, 'Self and Reality', in D. L. Sheth and Ashis Nandy (Eds.), The Future of Hinduism, forthcoming.
4. In Malaysia and Indonesia, for instance, they critically influence the mythic life of a majority of the people. Under the influence of Islamic revivalism, in Malaysia, there are now stray attempts to purify Malaysian Islam and demands that the Malaysian sultans, who constitute a ruling council, drop parts of their titles that are 'Hindu' and obvious remnants of pre-Islamic traditions. However, the sultans seem reluctant to do so, for a part of their legitimacy in a predominantly Muslim community is linked to their ritual status. Gods and goddesses can be in odd places.
5. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 124.
6. Shamoon T. Lokhandwala, 'Indian Islam: Composite Culture and Integration', New Quest, March-April 1985, (50), pp. 87-101.
7. Ramchandra Gandhi, Sita's Kitchen: A Testimony of Faith and Enquiry (New Delhi: Eastern Wiley, 1994).
8. Ashis Nandy, The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games (New Delhi: Penguin, 1989), Ch 1.
9. This part of the story is entirely missed by those who read all recourse to astrology as the denial of free will. For a recent example, see Peter R. deSouza, 'Astrology and the Indian State', The Times of India, 19 July 1996.
10. Though I have recently found out that, in Sri Lanka, there is at least one temple where Vibhishana is worshipped. Of the seven immortals (Ashvathama BalirVyaso Hanumanscha Vibhishanah kripah Parashuramascha saptaite chiranjivinah), Ashvathama is the best known, and, until some decades ago, one could hear claims once in a while that he had been seen still moving around with a wound on his forehead, usually at the foothills of the Himalayas. I have never been able to decipher this fondness for the hills in this tragic puranic character. Despite the unenviable state of the puranic immortals, immortality has been a major fantasy in Indian cultural life. Indian alchemy has been more concerned with the search for an elixir of life, less with the transmutation of base metals into gold.
11. What arouses anxiety in modern Indians does not apparently do so in societies where the elite has not lost its cultural self confidence. I am told that it has become fashionable in recent years for young Japanese couples to get married in picturesque European churches. They get married there according to Christian rites and the marriages are perfectly acceptable in Japan, legally and socially.
12. Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
13. Some folk tales presume Olaichandi, for instance, to be a thinly disguised incarnation of Kali, who presided over cholera. Her Islamic edition was Olaibibi. Often, in a village or town, if Olaibibi was seen as more potent, the Hindus also went to her and vice versa. Exactly as many Muslims in Dhaka go to the Dhakeshwari temple for specific forms of protection or blessings. Dhakeshwari, some believe, still protects one from serious accidents and few among them want to take the risk of testing out the truth of that, not even in an Islamic society.
14. So Michael Madhusudan Dutt's (1824-1873) great act of rebellion, his epic Megnadbadh Kavya which makes a hero out of Ravana and a villain out of Rama, as in some of the earlier dissenting premodern Ramayanas, was after all not that disjunctive with the original as Dutt might have thought. I think I now know why, despite being taught, like all Bengalis, to hero worship Dutt, I could still enjoy my grandmother's conventional version of Ramayana.
15. Albert Schweitzer, Indian Thought and its Development (New York: Beacon, 1959).
16. This also seems to indirectly emerge from Veena Das, 'The Mythological Film and its Framework of Meaning: An Analysis of Jai Santoshi Ma', India International Centre Quarterly, 1981, 9(1), pp. 43-56.
17. Appropriately enough, Sinhala chauvinists have begun to interpret this expression of mutuality as an instance of contamination of Buddhism by Hinduism.
18. Interested readers may look up Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); 'Politics of Childhood', in Traditions, Tyranny and Utopia: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987).
19. Veena Das gives a fascinating account of the birth of a god sired by commercial cinema. See Das, Jai Santoshi Ma. Such entry into the pantheon can even be quite enduring. Only a few weeks ago, writing this paper, I chanced upon a temple at Madangir, New Delhi, which claimed to be an ancient Santoshi Ma temple, Prachin Santoshi Mata Mandir.
20. Probably gods have another kind of incarnation, not captured in any avatara theory. As we well know, many of the European Christian saints, in their Latin American incarnations, bear today clear imprints of pre-Christian Aztec deities. Even the figure of Christ has been transformed into a Meso-American one, far removed from the standardised figure of Christ in the European Christendom.
21. Ashis Nandy, 'The Range and Limits of Dissent: Kapil Bhattacharjea's Critique of the DVC', Presented at the Conference on the Greening of Economics, Bellagio, 2-6 August 1993. To be published in Frédérique Apffel Marglin (Ed.), People Count, forthcoming.
22. Smitu Kothari estimates that of the 60 million aboriginal tribals in India belonging to some 212 tribes, 15 per cent have been displaced by development projects. Smitu Kothari, 'Theorising Culture,Nature and Democracy in India' (Delhi: Lokayan, 1993), ms.
23. Many Dalit communities in contemporary India are good examples of such deculturation. In response, some sensititve Dalit writers have made a conscious effort to rediscover and defend Dalit cultural traditions. See for instance, D. R. Nagaraj, 'From Political Rage to Cultural Affirmation: Notes on the Kannada Dalit Poet-Activist Siddalingaiah', India International Centre Quarterly, Winter 1994, 21(4), pp. 15-26.

    Ashis Nandy
    Manushi, Issue 99

    Dr Ashis Nandy is the Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
    Manushi content is reproduced on India Together with permission. Click here to visit the Manushi home page

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