Why does the harmless act of a group of people walking around a faraway temple agitate so many and so vehemently? Are the temple-goers crushing an endangered species under their feet? Are they hurling harmful epithets at an oppressed group? Are they bio-hazardous?
No. Yet, what was once a small temple in a village on the way to Hyderabad’s Golconda Fort seems to have rattled commentators in distant America as much as the “Reds” did in the 1950s or some other kind of bogeymen or “witchy” women did in centuries before.
Senator Eric Schmitt has joined an illustrious list of temple-fearers. In a post on X about H-1B visas, he accuses the Chilkur Balaji temple of being the hub of a “visa cartel” that cons hard-working American citizens out of jobs through a weird ritual of circumambulation. Naturally, this latest salvo in the growing anti-Indian rhetoric in American politics has been met with not only warnings but also some laughs at the agitation of a powerful country’s politician over a distant deity.
It is not just demagogues or trolls who have been losing their hair over Chilkur. The Wall Street Journal called it a “failing temple” which just got big thanks to America. The lack of cultural understanding is worse than the condescension. There are no “failing” temples. A temple is not a congregational space. A temple exists for its deity. A modern mind might say devotees come first. But a devotee is, by definition, one who says the deity comes first.
Demonisation, destruction, de-ritualisation: Hindu temples have survived the combination of ignorance and fear that hit them before modernity, and will doubtless triumph against the same combination coming at them now. But there is one difference between the past and the present.
In the past, temple-haters were explicit about their fears. As Catherine Nixey shows us in The Darkening Age, her famous study of early Christian attacks on Greek and Roman temples, temple-razers went after their targets with total conviction that they were seeing scary demons there. “Modern historians,” she writes, “tend to pass over demonologies with a silence that speaks eloquently of embarrassment, but such fiends obsessed… some of the greatest minds of early Christianity.” The obsession with demons was precisely how thousands of people got “brainwashed” into great violence against ancestral temples, libraries, and indeed, any trace of their community’s past. It began in West Asia and swept across Europe and, eventually, through them, the whole world.
Today’s global temple-fearers work in a slightly different idiom, and with a different set of linguistic, quasi-legal, and psycho-political tools. They don’t admit to seeing demons anymore, but their zealous interest in destroying the freedom of distant devotees to go on with their private matters of devotion in their own privately owned spaces for rituals is playing out equally zealously.
If one set of racists in America can’t help smearing a temple in Telangana in what ought to have been a secular debate on visa policies, another set of racists in America has been pining away publicly for authorities to shut down a popular Hindu temple there. The New Jersey Swaminarayan temple was accused of being built by the blood and sweat of caste-slaves. If there really was such a crime, then indeed, it would be horrifying. But there wasn’t. No blood was spilt. No “thuggee” cult was found.
One wonders what goes on in their minds. Childhood comic book pictures of cruel Pharaoh and thousands of slaves building the pyramids? Trouble distinguishing space and time, or one Brown person and another? Like their traumatised ancestors who saw demons, do they see whips in the Brahmins’ hands, forcing compliance to false gods? Too much Apocalypto and the Temple of Doom? Coincidentally, or ironically, actor Harrison Ford recently called for protecting indigenous cultures in a college graduation ceremony. Students were amused.
The core issue in the cacophony over temples is reality. And at the heart of reality is memory.
Nothing embodies and expresses the survival of memory in the face of propaganda as vividly as the Hindu temple. Unlike history textbooks and political monuments which can be rewritten or demolished, the temple, and its heart, the deity, exists as the one thing we know for sure meant the same to us as it did for our ancestors. As digital platforms and networks spread and replace lived experiences in the minds of our descendants, will they have memories of reality or just incepted propaganda? Will people read one day about the “Visa Temple” and think it was a cult, a hoax, a scam run by greedy priests and human smugglers — even though the temple has existed far longer than even the country whose visas some devotees might pray for?
For every assault on reality, there is still one story, one memory of a moment in time felt deeply at a place. For me and my friends from Hyderabad, the Balaji of Chilkur is indeed such a place. How do we remember? The first thing my friend said about Chilkur is that Pandit Ravi Shankar got married in that temple, and that his father was there. For me, the memory that matters most is that my father took me there as a child, long before any “visa miracles” were spoken of. But the power of memory is not to hold us only in the past. It is also about the future. My father used to speak fondly of the temple’s traditional guardian, his colleague and friend, Prof Soundararajan. My father passed away 12 years ago. Dr Soundararajan passed away this year. His son, Chilkur Rangarajan, now serves the deity, as his father did. Time moves on, times change. Lives begin, lives end. But life remains. Our gods stand watch.
The writer is professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco
