Digital devotion aids Hindu belief
A PUBLIC lecture hosted by the University of Kwazulu-natal this week delved into how devotional networks provided the infrastructure for ethnonationalist politics in the Hindu digital sphere.
The College of Humanities and the School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics hosted the public lecture on “The Rashtra is Online: How Digital Devotional Networks Aid the Global Reach of Hindu Nationalism”.
The lecture was delivered by visiting scholar Professor Dheepa Sundaram, whose research focuses on the formation of Hindu virtual religious public audiences through online platforms, social media, apps and emerging technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
Sundaram is an assistant professor of Hindu Studies at the University of Denver, in the US.
Her research work includes hate politics, ritual, nationalism and digital culture in South Asian contexts.
“Digital platforms ensure a dynamic, ‘living’ canon of work that can be altered to suit the needs of the collective body of users within the network.
“Rather than making digital canons less rigid, such flexibility enables an authenticity politics to which the ‘canon’ can now be moulded to support,” said Sundaram.
Focusing on two seemingly disparate case studies, the virtual spiritual corpus of global guru Mata Amritanandamayi (Amma, the Hugging Guru) and the militant Hindu priest Yati Narasinghanand’s violent, anti-muslim messaging, Sundaram argued that both figures converted orthopraxic canons into accessible, saleable formats which relied on Hindu digital devotional networks or “publics” invested in Hindu majoritarianism.
As such, these devotional networks provide the ground for Hindu nationalist ideology and beliefs to become normalised as part of the Hindu praxis.
Sundaram said Hindu majoritarian values traversed digital networks in a variety of ways.
“Even spiritual networks like that of Amma, for whom the rhetoric of inclusivity is a vital aspect of her movement, can still be instrumentalised as part of a majoritarian politics – it can still contribute to the Hindutva ethos by continuing to promote the hallmarks of a caste privileged, often sanitised, digitally portable Hinduism.
“Turning Hindu values and culture into a commodity that can in effect be marketed and sold through spiritual networks invariably fosters market dynamics rather than representational inclusion,” she said.
She said within the globalised space, economies not only traffic in physical items but also in metaphysical trends like cultural values and religious doctrines.
“Basically we don't just sell things, we sell ideas all the way through networks.
“We first begin by thinking about the deep penetration into India of not only mobile phones but also internet and then consequently social media.
“Regarding social media, they are not all the same. They are individualised, they are customised, they are seeking out different demographics.
In India, Facebook is the second most used social media – closely behind Instagram.
“The mobile phone usage in India has grown exponentially since 2010 and smart phone usage alone is projected to reach 931 billion users by 2022 in India alone.
“India has surpassed the US, as of 2017, to become second only to China in mobile phone penetration in the market,” she said.
Sundaram questioned why this was important.
“It’s not just all about mobile phones, it’s about smartphones.
“It’s projected that by 2040 we’re going to see 1.5 billion smartphones in India.
“This matters because by becoming an indispensable part of life of so many Indians, smartphone usage is a useful metric in understanding how we think about social media platforms and being inserted in our daily lives.
“This shows how tech companies are hopefully being forced to consider the impact their devices have on of very ways of being human,” said Sundaram.