This BBC article postulates the interesting possibility that high-tech proliferation extends into religious practices in India .
"A growing trend is for people to go online to get their daily dose of religion.
Religion is very important to most Indians, and the country is dotted with temples and religious shrines.
But increasingly, many young Indians are expressing their discontent with organised religion and are seeking alternatives. "
Where there’s a will, there’s a way to make money out of anything, such as this web entrepreneur who has set up an online portal to allow people all over the world to offer pujas( ritual prayers and offerings) to a number of temples.
More from the BBC article:
"In an India at the forefront of an IT revolution, it is not surprising that an online portal decided to cash in on this need for immediate salvation.
Mahesh Mohanan set up saranam.com, a website which sells religious services, in 1999.
For a fee ranging from $4 to $300, Indians can perform virtual complex religious ceremonies in any temple in the country.
"People just log in, go through our services and place an order," says Mohanan.
"We have a network of priests, we call them franchisees. They go out and perform the ceremony."
Such websites have definitely grown at an explosive rate over the last couple of years – Consider that a google search on "online pujas temples" pulled up in the excess of 250,000 pages, of which easily 5-10% could be good hits.
It points to the fact that organized religion in India has not gone away, just morphed in form to adjust to the demands of a new generation by taking advantage of the latest technology to make money. It certainly has roots in the widespread belief in rituals mitigating the sins perpetrated in this life.
Buddhist sites, as do the Jains, permit similar online sponsorship (for a price, of course) of readings of their sacred texts.
Curiously, similar offerings for Christian churches are not much in evidence on the web, perhaps because they hog the airwaves as televangelists who rely on frequent fervent exhortations and a more direct verbal plea for financial support from the faithful. Salvation by TV is more in vogue here.
A search for similar offerings by mosques turned up even less hits than for Christian websites, underscoring the fact that for Muslims, the physical act of praying in groups trumps any distant online piety and rituals.
In my opinion, this begs the question: Does all this online devotion translate to anything other than relief at having easily discharged what may otherwise have been an onerous chore? There’s definitely something lost in the process of distancing oneself from the actual practice of the ritual. What might be gained would be the mental satisfaction of having discharged one’s ‘duty to the gods’. Again, there is a wide range of variability in the acceptance of such e-worship, as is shown in the rush to adopt internet prayers in some religions while others are more lukewarm to using the power of the world-wide web.
In the end, everyone derives whatever benefit suits them from their preferred mode of worship, so this just serves as a peek into the way religion in India has adapted to the current state of technology to help sustain itself.
Note: Thanks to Dean C. Rowan for the pointer.
Update: While discussing this post, Dean again mentioned a term ‘e-communion’, which led me to an interesting article about how Christianity is adapting to the internet (with many specific references to the rituals of Roman Catholics as examples).
Accidental Blogger 
7 responses to “Virtual Devotion (Sujatha)”
Let us hope that God subscribes to sufficient bandwidth on the prayer line.
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To extend the analogy further, religions are like the cable and phone companies, trying to control the channels and your access to them. Antennas should be the norm, not these intermediaries.
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[R]eligions are like the cable and phone companies…
And AT&T knew well to exploit the figurative value of the verbs in their famous ad campaign, “Reach out and touch someone.” Some religions seem to be following suit. But we’ll know the revolution was televised when we see our first e-Communion.
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Thanks Dean for the pointer and also your comment on e-communion ( I couldn’t come up with the correct googleable term). I hit gold in the first link for ‘e-communion’- a fascinating look at how Christianity is adapting the internet to its needs and a discussion of research methods to track these developments.
A relevant quote from the article
“As ritual studies recognize, it is not merely the action that makes an activity religious, rather it is the intent behind the action that gives it its religious significance. For example, lighting a candle may or may not be considered a religious event; it is dependant upon the situation and also the interpretation of the participants. The same holds true for clicking hyperlinks on websites. People may or may not be undertaking the activity to obtain a true religious experience. In many ways, evaluating the activity focuses upon the authenticity of the event and this is something that is extremely problematic to determine.”
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I had no idea “e-communion” had been coined by any church, as it had according to the article you identified! I was simply complying with the convention that affixes “e-” to any newfangled online version of a traditional practice. In a message offline to Ruchira, I remarked along lines related to the quote you include in your comment:
Sujatha picks up on interesting themes regarding ritual, which so often entails a fetish component, i.e., a material object on which the devotees focus (or obsess, what have you). Hence my remark about Communion. How to maintain proximity to a concrete object over the network is the problem. Of course, one can simply substitute one object (the monitor’s glow, the bits coursing across the circuit board) for another (the relic), but it’ll take time for everybody to get on board. Really interesting question.
In the quote you provide, clicking on hyperlinks becomes a physical action that affords a degree of proximity to the fetishized object. Once upon a time, folks went on pilgrimages to stand next to the sacred lock of hair or bones. Now, Second Life might do the trick.
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How comfortable we are with substituting “real” objects/ acts with their e-versions is really a matter of our mind set. I remember that people had similar complaints about online shopping when it first began. And for e-mail as opposed to personal letters. Who writes letters anymore, I ask. (I still send out Christmas / New Year / Birthday cards. E-Greetings just don’t do it for me.) So many other acts that we performed in person before started getting done over the telephone first and now on the internet.
I am actually quite okay with this innovation. If you are remotely located, strapped for time but still “believe” in a ritual, I see nothing wrong in forking over the money to do it over the web. The middle man cannot be avoided in any case whether on the web or in flesh and blood. Look up the etymology of the word “vicar.”
I myself have become much more comfortable now with e-commerce, e-gift giving and other e-human transactions than I was before. I think the value of a sentiment or an experience is not necessarily enhanced or diminished by calculating how “hard” or “easy” it was to do.
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In all these transactions, it’s definitely the ‘thought’ that counts. As technology evolves, it no longer seems to be heresy to use e-greetings and e-vites instead of wishing/inviting on the phone (which supplanted the practice of door-to-door visits to invite people to parties and the like). The next logical step would be to dispense with the parties and just have e-gatherings (just as they do in e-workplaces now).
As far as religious ritual, one of my friends today remarked on a new aspect of e-devotion. He mentioned that one of the puja websites actually walks the user through performing the actual puja ceremony with interactive prompts for the various steps. So the next level has already started there for those inclined to DIY their rituals.
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