I snapped this billboard on MG Road in Bangalore last month. The celebrity televangelist is so quintessentially capitalist cheese, so ’80s camp, so late-night TV that the ad seemed utterly incongruous. ‘This town has gone completely Amrika-crazy,’ I mused.

Since the guy has brown skin, it never even occurred to me that he might not be desi. Turns out it’s the American evangelist Benny Hinn (no relation to Benny Hill), he of whom bloggeth Abhi yesterday. Hinn is a Christian Arab Israeli from Florida. There will be a pop quiz on that in 30 minutes.

Hinn kicked off his prayer meeting at an airfield outside Bangalore today. The airfield resounded with the usual miracle healings, but violent protests against the convention flooded central Bangalore with torched buses and tear gas.

I’ve seen it all before, this bubble. It’s a land grab for souls and page views, folks, and India’s perceived as a wide-open market. It’s one of the largest and most passionate markets for religion in the world, so Hinn’s hungama is nothing but a trade visit, really. American churches already outsource prayers to Kerala. And for false miracles, every American charlatan put together couldn’t hold a candle to Indian holy men. Check out Gita Mehta’s brilliant Karma Cola:

Gita Mehta details the extent of the hippie infatuation with South Asia in her classic book… Westerners seek instant salvation; Easterners the quick rupee. Gurus could pack entire astrodomes in the ’60s, levitation was believed to signal salvation, and Western disciples believed above all else in moksha through easy sex and hard drugs. At one point there were over 100,000 hippies trekking all over South Asia searching for enlightenment in woolly-minded religious platitudes and a variety of uppers and downers.

Continue reading →

As long as we are talking about biscuits and conversion, I thought I’d point out this story by the BBC on what happens when non-biscuit based conversion is proposed:

Hardline Hindu activists in southern India have protested against the visit of American TV evangelist Benny Hinn. Some businesses in Bangalore were also shut in response to a strike call by the activists against Mr Hinn’s three-day visit to the city.

Mr Hinn is one of America’s most famous evangelists and has his own daily television show, This Is Your Day.

He is expected to hold well-attended prayer meetings on the outskirts of Bangalore on Friday.

The BBC’s Sunil Raman says there have been a few incidents of stone throwing, damage to public property and attempts to stop traffic by protestors.

Banners and posters saying “Benny Hinn Go Back” have also been put up in Bangalore, hub of India’s software industry in Karnataka state.

The BJP apparently doesn’t approve of Hinn. Who would have guessed?

Bangalore-based Hindu organisations, including a main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, say that Mr Hinn would use these meetings to convert Hindus to Christianity.

Organisers deny such allegations.

Dr Sajan George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians, said this was not the first time Mr Hinn was in India.

If biscuits are passed out, all hell is going to break loose. Continue reading →

Boston University professor Stephen Prothero writes a pretty acerbic commentary today in the Los Angeles Times:

The sociologist Peter Berger once remarked that if India is the most religious country in the world and Sweden the least, then the United States is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. Not anymore. With a Jesus lover in the Oval Office and a faith-based party in control of both houses of Congress, the United States is undeniably a nation of believers ruled by the same.

Things are different in Europe, and not just in Sweden. The Dutch are four times less likely than Americans to believe in miracles, hell and biblical inerrancy. The euro does not trust in God. But here is the paradox: Although Americans are far more religious than Europeans, they know far less about religion.

In Europe, religious education is the rule from the elementary grades on. So Austrians, Norwegians and the Irish can tell you about the Seven Deadly Sins or the Five Pillars of Islam. But, according to a 1997 poll, only one out of three U.S. citizens is able to name the most basic of Christian texts, the four Gospels, and 12% think Noah’s wife was Joan of Arc. That paints a picture of a nation that believes God speaks in Scripture but that can’t be bothered to read what he has to say.

I can’t argue with any of the main points in his commentary. I’m not sure what his agenda is though. Is he being critical of religious ignorance because of its deleterious effects on society, or because he wants people to become more religious?

A few days after 9/11, a turbaned Indian American man was shot and killed in Arizona by a bigot who believed the man’s dress marked him as a Muslim. But what killed Balbir Singh Sodhi (who was not a Muslim but a Sikh) was not so much bigotry as ignorance. The moral of his story is not just that we need more tolerance. It is that Americans — of both the religious and the secular variety — need to understand religion. Resolving in 2005 to read for yourself either the Bible or the Koran (or both) might not be a bad place to start.

I’ll take that advice.

Commentator Shahnaz Chinoy Taplin writes in India Currents magazine, about her experiences with hybridized Christmas celebrations after coming to America. As reported by New California Media:

At a conference, “Clash or Consensus,” held in Washington D.C. in 2003 and sponsored by the Global Fund for Women and the Women’s Learning Partnership, I met Zainab Bangura, chair and co-founder of the Movement for Progress, a political party in Sierra Leone. When asked how it was to be a Muslim in her country, she replied: “Muslims and Christians are so integrated through marriage and in other ways that in Sierra Leone we call Christmas Christmus.”

Her comment transported me back to my youth in Bombay where we celebrated “Christmus” in a predominantly Hindu India. My Muslim mother attended a convent school and loved going to mass on Christmas Eve. Our ugly green plastic tree was strung with multicolored, electric fruit bulbs until one year when I conspired with my young and foolish maternal uncle to persuade my young, but slightly wiser, mother to let me light the tree with birthday candles—the “real thing.” Against her protestations, we lit the candles, and in a flash the tree burst into a burning inferno! Doused with buckets of water, the fire was extinguished, and passed lightly into memory.

But could the “Christmus” of her youth survive, after being trasported to America?

But Christmus didn’t always translate well for American-born children. My best-planned but worst-received Christmas was celebrated with our 4-year-old son on a December visit to the Bharatpur bird sanctuary. I was excited about doing an “Indian” Christmas for my bicultural child. From the bazaars of Jaisalmer and Jaipur, 11th-century desert towns in Rajasthan, my husband and I picked up miniature silver figurines for Riaz—a camel, an elephant, a lion, a precious Nandi (Lord Shiva’s bull), and horses in different sizes. I thought these little personable creatures would be perfect gifts on the heels of seeing live tigers and elephants in the wild at the Ranthambore Wildlife Sanctuary. Merrily decorating freshly cut branches and simulating snow with toilet paper after I put Riaz to bed, I had high aspirations for an unforgettable Christmas. Wrong!

For our son, who was used to freshly cut Christmas trees in San Francisco and had grown up with images of Santa coming down the chimney to munch on cookies and milk, this improvised Christmas in Bharatpur paled in comparison. Dissolving into tears, Riaz wailed, “Santa forgot about me, his reindeers couldn’t find Bharatpur …” I tried to reassure him. “How could Santa not find Bharatpur? It is next to the Taj, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.”

I guess nothing is perfect. As for me, I cried whenever I didn’t get Space Legos. At least we should be thankful that we can celebrate however we want. In some places (like at the college across the street from our family home in India), people are looking to ban (often through physical violence) days like Christmas and instead to promote days like “Traditional Day: A day to see how a girl looks in traditional dress.”

I wanted to point out that we here at Sepia Mutiny, have a long and rich tradition of not simply bringing to you daily gossip and rumors, and of stirring up trouble, but of also bringing you a little South Asian history from time to time. We’d secretly like to stay respectable so that you aren’t ashamed to talk about us around the water cooler, and can use us to impress that cute girl or guy you are into, with your newfound knowledge. Thus I point you to an enlightening story about St. Francis Xavier in Time Magazine’s Asia edition. This month an estimated 2 million people will shuffle past Xavier’s tomb in the state of Goa to pay their respects. That is a pilgrimage that is second only to the Haj in numbers. These bunch of pious peripatetics may cramp the style of those, who like many of our friends, are going to Goa this New Year’s Eve to party.
So what did Xavier first think of the Goan’s?

A great number of them were adventurers of all sorts who left behind them in Europe even the semblance of outward morality [and] who had become utterly corrupted by temptations [and] vices. [They] made no pretense of desisting from their most abominable practices [and] led the most licentious lives.
—Henry James Coleridge,
The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier

Wow. Almost 500 years later that still seems to be an accurate description of some of our friends that are going to Goa. Xavier it seems, was loved by many yet his behavior might definitely be called abhorrent in many ways today. Such is usually the case with religious figures. Continue reading →