The Time I May Have Witnessed A Minor Miracle, Or My Experience With Religion in India After 3 Weeks

[DISCLAIMER: So I totally wrote this for Argus. But the whole I-didn't-have-internet-excluding-my-program-house-for-a-month thing kind of killed blogging impulse? Updates to follow]

Two weeks ago, I (along with my homestay families) witnessed a minor miracle.

I had gone down from my homestay mother’s apartment to visit at my second homestay family’s (yes, my homestay mother is best friends with another homestay mother) place just as my homestay sister, Chandni ,and another girl from my program were running out the door. Apparently, Chandni had gotten a call from her mother, who was in the neighborhood at a puja, a Hindu religious ritual, a picture had started sweating holy water. Of course, we all had to go check it out.

We enter the house where the ceremony was being held to see a group of people sitting on a rug in a white room filled with chandeliers (there were three) in front of a large picture of a smiling man placed on a wooden swing and dripping with white fabric, pearls and glittering stone. A heavily embellished chair was placed to the right of this picture, and flowers ringed the whole set-up, with candles and flower petals strewn on the floor. We were directed to go to the front of the picture and bow with our foreheads to the floor. After that, a man with near-perfect English lead us into a bedroom off the main room to show us a picture of that same smiling man, only it’s much smaller and there are four rivulets of condensed water apparent beneath the glass.

The smiling man is called Guru-ji, and he was explained to us as a real person, who only died in 2007, with had the ability to link others to God. Because of that, people worshipped him as above God, since it was only through him could they attain a divine connection. What had happened was that Sunday morning, the father of the house woke up saying that Guru-ji had told him in a dream that he was present in the house and to look for pictures of him. The family knew that the way Guru-ji shows his presence is by one of his pictures producing water, so they began to tear apart the house, finally locating the sweating picture in a back room where they store their food.

After examining the picture, we joined the rest of the group in the main room, who were all (apparently, I don’t speak much Hindi—yet!) sharing their stories of being helped or cured by Guru-ji. We all received prasad, sweets that one gets at a temple as a blessing from the gods in exchange for offering yourself to him/her/them. As the discussion progressed, Chandni began to ask questions (mercifully for me, in English). She questioned how they knew it was really Guru-ji who was helping them, and how people who did not even know about Guru-ji could be helped by him.

What I noticed was that the rhetoric for believing in Guru-ji was the much the same as the rhetoric for believing in any Christian religion: you just have to have faith. However, with Guru-ji, the God was expected to provide proof of his powers of because, in the words of a man at the ceremony, “How can we believe in a God that does nothing for us?”

Is that symptomatic of Hinduism’s polytheistic worldview? Does the fact that they have multiple Gods to choose from mean that a God has to prove himself in order to get followers? In all my lapsed Catholic experience (and I assure you, it’s not much), I don’t think I would have ever heard that sentence come out of a Christian’s mouth.

In general though, my experience with religion in India (after these three weeks, and without seriously studying that vast and complicated subject), has been one of glitter and immediacy. I’ve been to a grand total of two temples, and both were dripping with sparkle, crowded with intricate statues of Gods and practically bursting with color (my poor photography above doesn’t do it justice). Even the small neighborhood temples I’ve seen seem magnificent compared to even the catholic churches in my own town. I’ve also been a part of a puja to Sarawsatwi, the goddess of knowledge, organized by the program to give us luck this coming semester. The ceremony was on the roof of the center, only a big picture of Saraswati laden with fruit and flowers was brought along with a fire pit and mounds of spices.

This brings me to my other observation: the lines between public life, private life, and religious life seem so thin here. This elaborate (at least to me) ceremony to Saraswati, where we threw spices into the fire pit, offered up flower petals and received red string around our wrists, all took place the same place we eat lunch, and the entire thing was mobile. When we walked into the ceremony for Guru-ji, we first walked past two kids watching cartoons on a bed before we reached the shrine, and the house doubled as a place of worship and a house (the sweating picture was displayed in a bedroom). Even looking around, you can see small temples everywhere, gods displayed in almost very cars and rickshaws and people throwing flower petals at statues on the side of the road. Not mention Guru-ji’s picture producing water—I feel like if something like that had happened at one of my local churches in New Jersey, it would have at least made The Independent Press, if not national news, but here, people didn’t even seem to be that taken aback.

Compared to my experience with Christianity in America (and granted, I do not live in a particularly religious place, I’m not from the Bible belt), religion here doesn’t seem to have to take place in a Church or a special building away from daily life. It’s in living rooms, next to sidewalks, and above rickshaw drivers’ head.  And (if you're lucky) miracle pictures dripping water are in the pantry.