Delhi (23 page)

‘Look!' Uncle pointed with a blunt clean nail at the very bottom. ‘Here you are. And here are your brothers, David and Boris.'

‘Uncle, please let me update that. My brothers are called David and Thomas.'

‘Are you sure?'

The computer froze, again. We settled back to wait, my back slurping sweatily against the rubberized chair back. The fan thwacked through the hot juicy air.

I glanced around. Prominently displayed in one corner was a calendar. The page said DECEMBER 2008, with a gaudy border of clipart images: the iconic sacred syllable
om
, flowers, planets, Ganesh's elephant face, Krishna wielding a flute—wait a minute, was that bearded figure Jesus? Dominating the page was a man with thunderous eyebrows and enormous staticky hair which trebled the size of his head. His palm was raised in a gesture of benevolence, and he seemed to be wearing an orange prison jumpsuit.

It was Sathya Sai Baba, the late, great symbol of middle-class Hinduism in the global age. India's ‘teeming urban spiritual supermarket', as one scholar has called it, is a highly competitive place—and nobody was more successful than Sai Baba. The Jimi Hendrix hair was no accident. He was a spiritual rockstar with followers all over the world, and controlled a fortune calculated in the billions of dollars. Half a million people attended his burial, including the prime minister. His photo had smirked at me from many a taxi dashboard.

While some modern gurus' reputation rests on their business philosophies and some on their yoga skills, Sai Baba's appeal was perhaps more old-fashioned: it rested on claims of divine reincarnation and the performance of miracles. In many pictures he is shown brandishing a statuette or a golden trinket that he had materialized from the ether. He combined this with a far more modern style of influence, carrying out good works on a spectacular scale—schools, charities, canals, drinking water provision, flood relief. His message was carried through digital radio and the internet as well as more traditional posters and cassettes.

‘But why is Jesus on the calendar too?'

All religions are one,' Uncle said. Sai Baba had a nice line in contemporary aphorisms—‘follow the innernet, not the internet'—not least of which was a very modern-sounding cosmopolitanism. He began with the claim that he was the reincarnation of a yogi who had died in 1918, and whose Sufitinged claim
Sab ka Malik Ek
(‘One God governs all') can still be found painted on autorickshaws.

The second Sai Baba's claim expanded. By his death Sathya Sai Baba was variously an avatar of Krishna and Ram (Vishnu's most famous incarnations), Shiva and his female consort Shakti, and even (he implied rather controversially) Jesus—although he had dropped his predecessor's Islamic hue like a hot
aloo tikki
. Pursued by financial, religious and sexual controversy, at Christmas 2000 he noted that Jesus Christ, too, ‘underwent many hardships and was put to the cross because of jealousy. In those days there was only one Judas, but today there are thousands'. The money continued to flow.

‘Enough,' said Uncle. It was time for another Bengali tradition. ‘Now you must take a nap.'

Sloping back from an interview a week or two later, I ran into a tourist. He was instantly recognizable: a crust of beads and henna and dreadlocks atop a pair of violently coloured dropped-crotch pants, looking lost in the middle of the anti-pedestrian embassy quarter. Guards eyed him from a white turret.

We were walking in the same direction, but at first ignored each other as tourists are wont to do. Of course, after nightfall we huddle together in backpacker cafes and Irish pubs, eating hummus and bitching about mosquito bites and Machiavellian locals. But out on the streets and around the monuments, at least when we first arrive, we pretend the other tourists don't exist, ignoring the fact there are several tens of thousands of us wandering about at any one point, all following the same guidebooks.

Eventually the silence became awkward. I introduced myself with some weather-based small talk. He told me his name but I didn't catch it—something like ‘Jerd'. The moment passed and I couldn't ask again.

‘I
love
India. Really,' Jerd said. ‘Apart from all the tourists, of course. Everywhere is so crowded.' And apart from the pesky Indians.

‘And why,' I asked in what I hope was a level and neutral tone, ‘do you love India so?'

In the thicket of his brand-new beard, his face creased with an expression that I mistook for gastrointestinal trouble. It was in fact spiritual profundity. ‘Because it is a land of ancient timeless wisdom.'

Oh no. He was an
Eat, Pray, Love
type.

It was inevitable that I would pick up
EPL
at some point. I too like eating and loving, and have nothing against praying. I too was
One Woman Searching for Everything
, or at least
Something
. I too had slept on a bathroom floor, though inadvertently while in the throes of sickness. I even shared the author's name, Elizabeth.

But on India we must disagree. For Elizabeth Gilbert, India is
the
place you go for a dollop of divine transcendence and spiritual awakening. To me that's a three-hundred-year-old stereotype, and not much more sensible than travelling to Ireland and expecting to become funny. I don't deny that India has a proud religious heritage, the cradle of four world religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism). Nor do I deny that religion and the sacred permeate Indian public life in a fashion utterly alien to the West. I do protest the idea that this is an unadulterated blessing. In India, as elsewhere, spirituality suffers as money and politics and prejudice creep in.

(It probably didn't help that I already had my own guru: the Supervisor, a capricious half-god(dess) with a sceptreful of red ink. As with any other guru, we were instructed on the first day of the PhD that ‘this should be the most important relationship in your life'. Sometimes when I work I open her webpage so that her face stares down on me, her eyes kind but always faintly disappointed. I imagine she can see me across the leagues of Eurasia, and shoots off cryptic missives—‘Eh?'—at the moments of my greatest weakness. My university provides ‘How to Manage Your Supervisor' courses, as though supervisors are household accounts, or grief.)

‘Of course Delhi isn't really India anymore, it's just too Westernized,' Jerd continued sorrowfully. ‘And expensive. In
real
India, people are poor but they're so happy. It really makes you think. Do we really need so much
stuff?
Such
crude materialism?'

He paused to haggle over two rupees with an auto driver, and drove off towards nirvana. Or, more probably, some shady new avatar of Sai Baba.

It's not only bead-encrusted New Agers who believe that India is a land of spirituality. Indian nationalists have long made the same argument: the West might lead on material comfort, but India is the conscience and soul of the world. Three hundred million gods—the commonly quoted figure, plucked from the sky by some long-dead sage—permeate the very air. The Harvard scholar Diana Eck argues that the whole of India constitutes a ‘sacred geography', a network of pilgrimage places.

In such a geography Delhi is something of a backwater. With a few notable exceptions—the murky Yamuna river, the shrine of the Sufi mystic Nizamuddin Auliya—it is not an especially holy city. Its historical fortunes were revived more by Islam than Hinduism. Until now.

One sultry September afternoon, I travelled east over the oily-roily holy river to Akshardham. This isn't just any Hindu temple: it's the world's largest. The Guinness certificate is proudly on display, though its South Indian rivals argue that IMAX theatres and food courts shouldn't count towards the world record.

I nearly gave up. Security is draconian, forcing customers—sorry, devotees—to leave bags, phones and cameras outside; only wallets are exempted. I'd thought this was a transparent excuse to extract Rs 200 from us for official photos, but the ban even extended to my notebook. The security guards carefully examined each page (shopping lists, book titles, other such subversion):

‘This diary is not allowed.'

What are you afraid of, Swamishri? Your ever-plucky author persevered, though, with merely a few muttered curses (also banned). It was worth it.

You couldn't invent Akshardham. The place makes Muhammad Ali look self-effacing. A representative line from my glossy brochure: ‘The sheer magnitude, beauty, and experience of Akshardham simply puzzles and amazes all as to how it was accomplished in record time.' It hums with ambition, dwarfing the small crowds that afternoon. It would remain ‘for millennia', the same brochure announced breathlessly—no, not mere millennia: it will ‘
forever
remain etched in the annals of history'. There is an eerie internet consensus that it is ‘the eighth wonder of the world'.

Planned and executed by an organization that rejoices in the acronym ‘BAPS', the complex is a strange hotchpotch of architectural styles, all adorned with a frenetic crust of sculptured stone. The sculptures look almost too crisp and numerous, giving the whole a faintly plastic air; much was carved in Rajasthan and later assembled, which might explain this. The construction was amazingly ambitious: it took 32 years for BAPS to acquire the land, in typical Delhi bureaucracy style, but only five years to build the complex: 7,000 artisans worked on 300,000 stones for 300 million man-hours. As this suggests, Akshardham is obsessed with numbers: 100 acres, 1,070 feet of elephant carvings, 300 x 300-foot step-well-cummusical fountain, 45,000 extras in the child-yogi film (shown on an 85 x 65-foot IMAX screen), and so on, until you are numbed into a sort of Stalinist awe.

At the heart of the complex, surrounded by hypercoloured paintings and donation boxes, sits a giant gold-plated statue in an eye-watering cavern of green, shell-pink, gems and gold. This is Swaminarayan, former child-yogi and founder of a reform sect that has been carried all over the world by successful Gujarati migrants. Whilst retaining a strong Gujarati emphasis, the sect—or rather the BAPS splinter—has proved an adaptable and aspirational brand of Hinduism, taking to the internet far more adeptly than almost all its rivals.

As I walked around the little ‘holy water body' surrounding the main temple (water from 151 sacred rivers and lakes, flowing from 108 spouts), the inspiration became clear. A white-clad man with blue age-rings in his eyes greeted me. ‘When we were planning, we visited great monuments around the world to study the secrets of their success. See those elephants? Angkor Wat. The boat ride? Disney World.' We might add: the illuminated musical fountain? A Vegas casino.

The Disney analogy feels right on the money. The anthropologist Christiane Brosius, perhaps Akshardham's closest student, can only bring herself to call it a ‘temple' in eye-rolling inverted commas. As the
New York Times
said shortly after the complex opened in 2005, ‘The crowds here aren't pilgrims; they're day trippers.' The whole place is a grand theme park.

The temple is supplemented with fee-paying exhibitions. First up was a 50-minute series of animatronic extravaganzas inside something called ‘the Hall of Values'. The guru-child robot—an eleven-year-old with a rolling bass voice—creepily looked me right in the eye every time. (Akshardham, if you're reading this, that little guy is firmly in the Uncanny Valley: a little
too
human-and-yet-not and therefore utterly chilling.)

Then there was the aforementioned indoor boat ride, unashamedly modelled on Disney's ‘It's a Small World'. In 14 minutes the boat swept us through 10,000 years of Indian history, during which Hindu mannequins invent everything: gravity, astronomy, Pythagorean geometry, aeroplanes, plastic surgery, embryology…

For Akshardham isn't just about Hinduism. It's a nationalist pageant too. Witness the garden filled with statues of ‘patriots', in which, incidentally, Gandhi is dwarfed by the more authoritarian ‘Sardar' (‘Chief') Patel, ‘the Iron Man of India'. (In the Swaminarayan movement's home state of Gujarat the state government is planning to build a far larger monument to Patel, a ‘Statue of Unity' double the height of New York's Statue of Liberty.) Akshardham presents a compelling vision of India: a spectacular, clean and emphatically Hindu India, unified by its glorious past and all set to conquer the future—because, well, it invented all of modernity ten millennia ago anyway.

This is a decidedly middle-class vision, erasing dirt and diversity. Instead it offers a strong nation, family values, schoolwork, vegetarianism and scripture. The other visitors were notable for being almost exclusively Indian—for domestic tourists it's one of the capital's most popular sights—and all sleekly dressed, dispensing money with aplomb.

This vision is not only for domestic consumption, though, for all the funny looks the Indian tourists gave me. Akshardham aims at the world stage. I was chatted up, formally surveyed (‘Which country, madam?') and repeatedly reminded that BAPS is transnational. With, of course, more statistics: 700 temples and 3,300 centres worldwide, attracting 45,000 youth volunteers and 34.5 million visitors; London's Swaminarayan temple was, at least until recently, the largest Hindu temple outside India. More than us irreligious
goras
, Akshardham eyes the huge Indian diaspora, offering deep-pocketed international migrants a pristine and proud version of India.