Opinion The Ram temple is here. But the Ravan of elitism continues to haunt India

Ram has won, they say. But.

My impertinence is bound to provoke my devout elders and passionate youthful readers. But, I will say, despite the impatience, there is a problem. Ravan has not been slain at all. He is stronger, wilder, and more belligerent than ever.

One night, I witnessed one of the most astounding displays of petty Ravan-like behaviour in the pious space of a once serene and sacred ashram where, naturally, the name “Ram” occurs in even the greeting uttered by members of this community to each other. After the Sunday evening bhajan and aarti ended, I saw a staff member order hundreds of poor devotees to get out from the premises with a level of rudeness I simply have not seen in real life in many years. The rudeness of “volunteers” in ashrams whose motto is “Love All, Serve All, Help Ever, Hurt Never” is unfortunately not a new thing.

For decades, and over generations, devotees have told themselves that their guru is only testing their faith, and somehow learned to endure it, compensated somehow with the thought of a kind gesture, word, or miracle from their living deity. But even with this knowledge, I had an epiphany of sorts at what I witnessed, perhaps because I saw what it did not only as a devotee but also as a social observer; it was about the petty, nasty, reality of social and economic class.

In an ashram, where once upon a time, there were devotees ranging from world leaders and celebrities to poor slum dwellers, on this Sunday evening it seemed that the gathering was almost entirely of simple, pious, working-class devotees. Even the usually present middle-class staff members were not there, presumably away at the main ashram in Andhra Pradesh for Sankranthi. It was an extremely raw, rude situation, of a man with power over a space unleashing it over a visibly powerless, docile, devout mass of human beings. A man could even mouth the name of “Ram,” and enjoy being Ravan.

This is, of course, not a story unique to this place or occasion. For years, Hindu devotees have put up with all sorts of ill behaviour around sacred places. In Telugu, we even have a saying, “Devudu varam ichchinaa, Pujari ivvadu,” (“Even if God grants you a boon, the priest won’t let you get it”). The figure of the Brahmin priest as a greedy interloper is even more well-established in social and political thought and policy. Scholars tell us that from German Indology to modern South Asia studies, that figure is a colonial projection of European-Protestant attitudes to Jews and Catholics. The issue may be “Brahmanism” and “casteism” to some, or classism or elitism (the latter is the more precise explanation, in my view). But whatever it is, in my love for Ram, and my guru, I have to understand the nature of this social phenomenon.

To do so, I must share another story, this time from a secular context. I found myself in a peculiar situation with the hotel I am staying in during my visit to Bengaluru. I asked the hotel staff midway through our stay if our room could be available for longer and to extend my stay accordingly as we still had more family to meet here. Two people at the desk said yes, and stated that my check-out had been changed. That afternoon, I got a call from the duty manager who dropped a bombshell saying the hotel was full — and they just couldn’t help it because the cricket team was coming. For two days, I witnessed the strangest behaviour from management. They assumed a certain attitude and role which was polite, sure, but also condescending, opaque, and what they used to call “sarkari”. The interactions inevitably became one in which one party assumed that it was the benefactor and the other a supplicant, and the stock answer would be to deny a request because of the latter’s lack of social status. The funny thing, of course, was that I found rooms were easily available online.

Social interactions in Indian modernity need to be studied more carefully and with our own lenses. As S N Balagangadhara says in the book As Others See Us, Indian traditions pass on largely through practice and imitation rather than theory and application. Unfortunately, with colonialism and the rise of mass society, new forms of elitism, arrogance and exclusionary behaviour have also become normalised through institutional reproduction. Human beings who “volunteer” to regulate a peaceful spiritual gathering imitate those before them and those above them to turn into Ravan giddy with the power to make hundreds of poor, hungry bodies tremble at the gates. Human beings who “train” to work in the “hospitality” industry imitate those above them and before them to turn into corporate bots performing social superiority with no understanding of human dynamics, humanity, or reality around them. The humble applicant today turns into the arrogant arbiter of favours to supplicants tomorrow.

Elitism is the Ravan that pervades India, and of course, its prosperous diaspora too. Socialised into it from birth or through peers, so many grow up indifferent to the reality or consequences of their behaviour.

Millions of indignities, insults and injuries are happening in this Ram Rajya we yearn for every day. Most simply, put up and live with it.

I pray to Ram, and even more urgently, to Hanuman, our greatest example of humility and service, that we follow them and slay the Ravan in our midst. May the mandirs within us and without us ring loud and pure.

The writer is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco