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