How to Prove Divinities? Experiencing and Defending Divine Agency in a Modern Indian Space
✍ Scribed by Ursula Rao
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2002
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 87 KB
- Volume
- 32
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0048-721X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Exploring material collected in the Hindu Temples of the Indian state capital Bhopal, this article deals with the problem of how to accommodate the divine in the modern world. It explores how the presence of the divine-in the form of revelations, miracles, mediums and prophets-is accommodated in the contemporary discourse of urban India. I show that the communication with deities is understood in terms of 'sensory experience' and 'physical experimentation' and is thus constructed in a way parallel to arguments in a 'scientific' discourse. As point of entry I have chosen the life history of Mr Bagware, a bank employee and a temple president in Bhopal, in order to show how he allowed the goddess to take over his life. This example is followed by a more general discussion of the ways the divine is experienced and the reasoning that allows for the integration of revelations, miracles, possession and predictions into the discourse of modernity. There follows a discussion of the different formulations of modernity and tradition and of the conflicting ways in which religion is accommodated within this framework.
2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
'The wisdom of truth: ''That which is susceptible of introducing a significant difference in the field of knowledge, at the cost of a certain difficulty for the author and the reader, with, however, the eventual recompense of a certain pleasure, that is to say of access to another figure of truth'' '. (Michel Foucault, Times of India 18.3