Guest is God: Pilgrimage, Tourism, and

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Guest Is God
 Guest Is God
Pilgrimage, Tourism, and Making
Paradise in India

D R EW T HOM A SE S

1
 3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
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© Oxford University Press 2019

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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Thomases, Drew, author.
Title: Guest is God : pilgrimage, tourism, and making paradise in India /
Drew Thomases.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2019. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019015420| ISBN 9780190883553 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780190883560 (updf) | ISBN 9780190883577 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190883584 (online)
Subjects: LCSH: Hindu pilgrims and pilgrimages—India—Pushkar. | Pushkar
(India)—Religious life and customs.
Classification: LCC BL1239.36.P88 T46 2019 | DDC 294.5/3509544—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019015420

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed by Integrated Books International, Inc., United States of America

 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Note on Transliteration xi

Introduction: Mapping Out Paradise 1

1. Others and Brothers 27
2. Making Pushkar Paradise 52
3. Savitri’s Curse 78
4. Camel Fair Kaleidoscopic 108
5. Peace But No Quiet 130

Epilogue 159
Notes 163
Glossary 193
Works Cited 195
Index 209
 Acknowledgments

Any piece of writing is necessarily the product of many minds. Every book
is made from an assemblage of voices, of hints and gentle nudges, pieces of
advice and long-​held concerns, heads both shaken and nodded. Of this vast
assemblage, I am most grateful for the nods and shakes of two people in par-
ticular: Jack Hawley and Rachel McDermott. Individually and collectively,
they exhibit an enviable balance of brilliance and compassion. Not only has
their work provided a model for academic excellence, but their capacity for
warmth and support has been an enduring source of inspiration for living
life—​both inside and outside of the academy. It is hard to put into words what
I owe them.
This project began as a series of conversations with friends and mentors at
Columbia University. For those conversations and more, I want to thank Joel
Bordeaux, Patton Burchett, Allison Busch, Divya Cherian, Elizabeth Castelli,
Dan del Nido, Ryan Hagen, Udi Halperin, James Hare, Jon Keune, Abby
Kluchin, Joel Lee, Ben Fong, Dalpat Rajpurohit, Jay Ramesh, Rakesh Ranjan,
Simran Jeet Singh, Hamsa Stainton, Michael Taussig, Somadeva Vasudeva,
Anand Venkatkrishnan, and Tyler Williams. Todd Berzon and Sajida Jalalzai
read chapters at an early juncture in the writing, and helped me to clarify and
contextualize many of the ideas that form the basis of this book. I am partic-
ularly indebted to Liane Carlson, who read a number of my chapters at a very
shabby stage and who allowed me to ramble about my work over probably too
many Happy Hours. Thanks also to my dissertation committee—​Courtney
Bender, Katherine Ewing, and Ann Gold—​for helping me to translate those
more difficult ideas locked in my mind into compelling words on a page.
I have presented parts of this book, in various stages and instantiations,
at a number of venues: the American Academy of Religion, the American
Anthropological Association, Columbia University, the International
Conference on the Forum of Contemporary Theory (in Mysore), Syracuse
University, and the University of Wisconsin-​Madison. In those locales, I was
fortunate to speak in front of audiences that were both receptive and generous;
in particular, I appreciate the critiques, encouragements, and well-​wishes of
Carla Bellamy, Koya Edoho-​Eket, Afsar Mohammad, Pritika Nehra, Corrie
viii Acknowledgments

Norman, Christian Novetzke, Andrea Pinkney, Sheipra Rajanikanth, and Sue

Wadley. This book would not have been possible without the institutional
and financial support of the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), the
Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, the Fulbright IIE, the Charlotte W. Newcombe
Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, and Columbia University’s Institute for
Religion, Culture, and Public Life. The AIIS program in Jaipur was so impor-
tant to me—​a year in which I solidified my grasp of Hindi, found a fieldsite in
Pushkar and, most importantly, met my wife. For their support throughout
that year, I want to offer special thanks to Vidhu Chaturvedi, Neelam Bohra
Singh, and Anita Tripathi.
In Pushkar, there are so many people to thank. First, I extend my grati-
tude to all the fine folks by Brahm Ghat, who welcomed me and my prying
eyes. I want to thank the Pandey family, and Hemant Pandey in partic-
ular, for making me feel as if their home was mine, too. Dharma and Ravi
Parashar were especially supportive, providing love and laughs and chai on
a daily basis. As a research assistant, Ravi helped me access ideas and people
who would have otherwise remained inaccessible. I am also deeply grateful
to Ashok and Madhu Parashar—​and their sons Kuldeep and Pradeep—​my
family in India. Their support I will never be able to pay back.
There are several friends and colleagues who have read chapters, offered
insight, or shared their thoughts on some facet of my work. I am grateful to
Carol Babiracki, Adam Becker, Sravani Biswas, Arun Brahmbhatt, Stephen
Christopher, Greg Clines, Ruthie Dibble, Elaine Fisher, Anya Foxen, Dan
Heifetz, Carter Higgins, Amy Hirschtick, Yoshina Hurgobin, Borayin Larios,
Andrew Nicholson, Elayne Oliphant, Jenn Ortegren, Jef Pierce, Geoff Pollick,
James Reich, Nidhi Vij, Emera Bridger Wilson, Ian Wilson, and Angela Zito.
I have to single out Kali Handelman, my dear friend and editor, who read the
manuscript multiple times and who was able to airlift me out of the forest
of this book when my nose was rubbing against the bark of a tree. Kali’s pa-
tience and incisiveness made this book many times better than it would have
been. Thank you, Kali.
San Diego State University has been my institutional home since 2016,
and there I have found friends and colleagues who—​whether through
books, lunches, or soccer—​have made my life richer. I thank Rebecca Bartel,
Raechel Dumas, Stephen Goggin, Risa Levitt Kohn, John McDonald, Khaleel
Mohammed, Javier Núñez, Casey Roulette, Kate Rubin, Sthaneshwar
Timalsina, Kim Twist, Isaac Ullah, and Roy Whitaker. At Oxford University
Press, Cynthia Read and Drew Anderla have been encouraging from the
 Acknowledgments ix

start. My thanks to them for their guidance and positivity, and for doing all
of the nitty-​gritty stuff that went into making this book. The reviewers for the
book were also extremely helpful. The feedback of Jim Lochtefeld, in partic-
ular, was thorough yet sympathetic, pushing me to make substantive changes
while still keeping faith in the overall project.
Parts of this book have been published elsewhere. An earlier version of
­chapter 1 was published as “In Defense of Brothering: the ‘Eternal Religion’
and Tourism in North India,” in the Journal of the American Academy of
Religion 84.4 (2016): 973–​1005. An earlier version of c­ hapter 2 was published
as “Making Pushkar Paradise: Hindu Ritualization and the Environment,” in
the International Journal of Hindu Studies 21.2 (2017): 187–​210. And small
sections of c­ hapter 5 were initially part of “Spreading Peace in Pushkar: Shanti,
Tourism, and Hindu Hybridity,” in the Journal of Contemporary Thought 38
(2013): 65–​71. I am grateful to Oxford University Press, Springer Nature,
and the Forum on Contemporary Theory for permission to reprint materials
from these articles.
I thank my father and mother, Mark and Doreen Thomases, for not being
too horrified when I decided to study religion and for encouraging me—​
despite their worries—​to live far away, in India. My daughter Zinnia was
born when I was in the middle of writing this book. Her spontaneity and
charm have been such striking reminders of what matters in life. She has
helped me so much, all the while not knowing or caring for a single second
about this book. Finally, to Jocelyn Killmer I owe too much. She has read
nearly every page that I have written over the past many years, and it is only
because of her love that I have managed to keep writing. This book, and eve-
rything else, is dedicated to her.
 Note on Transliteration

In an effort to make this book more accessible to a wider audience, I have de-
cided to go without diacritical marks. This necessarily elides certain sounds
common to Hindi and Sanskrit and entails a whole host of compromises. For
example, ṣ and ś both appear as sh. Similarly, nasalized vowels (ṇ, ṅ, ñ, etc.)
are rendered as n. Without macrons, long and short vowels are indistinguish-
able (ā and a both appear as a). Without dots, that’s true too of dental and ret-
roflex consonants (t and ṭ both appear as t). And while the ch sound in “chai”
is usually marked as a c in popular systems of transliteration, I have chosen to
use the more immediately obvious ch. For the sake of consistency, I have also
eliminated the diacritical marks from quotations written by other authors.
This is largely without consequence, except in a few places where a quoted
author, using both diacritics and Sanskrit-​based transliteration conventions,
refers to the town of Pushkar as “Puṣkara.” I have omitted the diacritical mark
while keeping the original spelling, leaving “Puskara.” For the most part, my
transliteration reflects local pronunciation. This means that I have dropped
the medial and final vowel a, which Hindi speakers in Pushkar tend not to
pronounce (e.g., Ramcharitmanas instead of Ramacharitamanasa). However,
for words that are either increasingly familiar to an English-​reading audi-
ence (e.g., karma, yoga, Shiva), or whose Sanskrit-​based spelling is especially
common (e.g., Ramayana, Mahabharata, sanatana dharma), I retain the final
vowel. There is a glossary of frequently used terms at the end of the book.
 Introduction
Mapping Out Paradise

October 2

I descended the broad marble stairs (ghats) toward the lake. It was a
bright and cool morning, the sky an unbroken blue. A teenager named
Vishnu sat on a huge metal trunk selling birdseed by the bowlful.1 Close
to the water’s edge, a few pilgrims removed their sandals and tossed
seed to a flock of pigeons. There were nearly a hundred of the birds, all
flapping and strutting around the morning’s meal. Trying to strike up a
conversation, I told Vishnu that where I was from, in the United States,
pigeons are usually considered a nuisance. He countered, saying, “Well,
in a future life, I would like to be a pigeon in Pushkar.” “But why?” His
answer: “Because Pushkar is heaven” (pushkar svarg to hai).

November 16

Sitting on my favorite stone bench, I looked out over the water. Faraway
loudspeakers crackled and hummed as they discharged distorted
sounds of a Hindu recitation on the other side of the lake, utterances
I’d been told transmit positive vibrations out into the ether. I scribbled
some thoughts in my notebook, its pages stained with chai and oil, tur-
meric and spaghetti sauce. A brahman priest by the name of Mukesh
came to look over my shoulder and see what I was writing. He feigned
interest for a minute, and then asked for the notebook and my pen. He
wanted to share with me a Hindi couplet he had thought up years before,
something that brought a wide smile to his dimpled cheeks:

nim ka per chandan se kam nahin

pushkar shahar london se kam nahin.

Guest Is God: Pilgrimage, Tourism, and Making Paradise in India. Drew Thomases, Oxford University Press
(2019). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190883553.001.0001
2 Guest Is God

The neem tree is no worse than the sandalwood

Nor is the town of Pushkar worse than London.

February 10

After a long day of wandering around the lake and its surrounding
temples, I returned to my room and opened my computer. Before
committing myself to writing the day’s fieldnotes, I went straight to
Facebook. Even there, my research followed me like a hungry street dog;
someone from Pushkar, a brahman and restaurant owner, shared a pic-
ture of the town. Taken at sunset, the picture showed the waterfront,
ghats, and nearby buildings all blanketed in a warm and orangey glow.
Temple to the left. Mosque in the back. Arched windows and doorways
on all sides. In addition to the thousand words told by the picture, my
friend captioned two more: “our heaven.”

November 20

Nick and I sat at the hotel’s rooftop restaurant as the day’s dust became
visible in the refracted light of the setting sun. He was eating chana ma-
sala while I polished off my pizza. Hemant, the hotel’s owner, joined
us too. We chatted about the fast-​approaching camel fair, which had
brought Nick to Pushkar for the first time, and which inevitably filled
every bed in every hotel. Hemant was visibly excited, not just because of
the business but because of the opportunity to make new friends from
all over: “I really love that I live here, and that so many people from all
over the world come to this one place.” He sighed and said, “For me,
Pushkar is paradise.”

~
Pushkar is a Hindu pilgrimage town in the northwestern state of Rajasthan,
India, whose population of roughly 20,000 sees an influx of two million
visitors each year. The town’s fame comes from Brahma, the creator god, who
eons ago established Pushkar as his home by making a lake in the desert and
 Introduction 3

performing a sacrifice there. So, while pilgrims visit for a host of reasons—​
seeking the favor of the gods for things like a successful marriage, good grades
on an exam, the birth of a son, etc.—​most make sure to bathe in the holy lake
and visit the Brahma temple, the latter regarded as the only temple dedicated
to the creator god in the known universe.2 Since the 1970s, Pushkar has also
received considerable attention from the international tourist community, a
group that, early on, was composed largely of hippies and backpackers, but
now includes visitors from a wide spectrum of social positions and religious
affiliations. Tourists, too, come with different goals in mind, from seeing the
lake and experiencing the annual camel fair to doing drugs and taking in the
peace of a small-​town setting.
Thus, it is perhaps a platitude—​if a true one—​to say that Pushkar is many
things to many people. But the most pervasive discourse surrounding the
town claims Pushkar to be one thing in particular: paradise. Call it what you
will—​heaven, paradise, or “no worse than London”—​in the eyes of many
people who call it home, Pushkar is a remarkable place. And yet, even heaven
needs some upkeep. That is, paradise cannot exist without a concerted ef-
fort to make it so, and thus on a daily basis the town’s locals, and especially
those engaged in pilgrimage and tourism, work to make Pushkar paradise.
This book explores the massive enterprise of building heaven on earth, and
how the articulation of sacred space necessarily works alongside economic
changes brought on by tourism and globalization. As such, I not only attend
to how tourism affects everyday life in Pushkar but also to how Hindu ideas
determine the nature of tourism there; the goal, then, is to show how religion
and tourism can be mutually constitutive.
It is precisely within this mutually constitutive realm of religion and travel
that the process of “sacred making” happens, where developments in (and
agents of) tourism draw and redraw, over and over again, the perimeters
of paradise. Said differently, the criteria for what counts as “paradise” have
shifted together with the changing economy. And as this takes place—​as par-
adise is made and remade in a globalized world—​Pushkar’s type of Hinduism
is affected, too. Hinduism here possesses a kind of fluctuating scope, at times
focused on Pushkar and the uniqueness of its sacred space, at other times
expanding to a more panoramic perspective. This book examines the ways
in which Pushkar locals work to incorporate both of these perspectives,
claiming allegiances to their home and community while making inroads to
a vision of human belonging that attempts to embrace all.
4 Guest Is God

The Lay of the Land

It is important to remember, as Clifford Geertz has famously stated, that “the

locus of study is not the object of study. Anthropologists don’t study villages
(tribes, towns, neighborhoods . . . ); they study in villages.”3 Working from
that premise, this book does not examine a town called Pushkar but rather a
discourse about Pushkar, by which I mean a constellation of “ideas, attitudes,
courses of actions, beliefs and practices” that constructs both “subjects and
the worlds of which they speak.”4 The discourse in question is that of making
Pushkar paradise, the constitutive parts of which include but are not lim-
ited to beliefs about Hindu universalism and how its principles incorporate
people from outside of the Hindu fold, ritual repertoires that brahmans per-
form on behalf of their clients in order to propitiate the gods, mythic tales
that boast of Pushkar’s greatness printed in five-​rupee pamphlets or narrated
by priests at the lake, environmental action taken up by locals worried about
lake pollution, and guided tours designed to promote the kind of atmosphere
where people from around the world can feel as if they belong. As such, this
is less a study about the place in which these ideas and activities are situated
and more about the people who think and do them.
At the same time, the people whose lives and words feature in the following
pages do not represent all of Pushkar’s population. The project of making
Pushkar paradise is pursued especially within the axis of tourism and pil-
grimage, and so I tend to engage with the people who labor in those realms.5
These are shopkeepers, hotel owners and staff, restaurant owners, waiters,
cooks, camel safari personnel, taxi drivers, priests, and tour guides. With the
exception of the latter two categories, which are dominated by brahmans,
these other groups are made up of people from a fairly large range of castes. In
terms of gender, however, the ratio is decidedly unbalanced. Women do have
a presence in the public sphere, as store clerks and pilgrims most commonly,
but men conduct the vast majority of business related to tourism. This is not
to say that I did not speak to women. Over the years, I have been welcomed
into a number of homes, and in those instances when I was folded into the
family6 I was able to speak with women quite freely and on a vast range of
topics related to my research. In other, less familial settings, conversations
were often circumscribed or cut short by Rajasthan’s conservative gender re-
lations and expectations.
Overall, I found that the people who invested their time and effort most
explicitly in the idea of Pushkar being a heavenly place were priests and
 Introduction 5

tour guides. It’s worth noting that locals often use the English word priest,
a capacious term which includes both people whose primary job involves
providing ritual services (pujas) for pilgrims or tourists at the banks of
Pushkar lake (called pandas), as well as those who manage and oversee
temples (called pujaris). Throughout the book, I use priest both because it
is commonly used and in order to encompass the variety that Hindi offers.
Moreover, whether pilgrimage priest or temple priest, they all come from
the brahman caste—​for many of them, the only designation of real impor-
tance. Within the category of brahman, most of my collaborators were from
the Parashar subcaste; they constitute Pushkar’s most influential brahman
group, both as leaders of the town’s most prominent Hindu organization—​
the Pushkar Priest Association Trust7—​and as those who work on some
of the lake’s very best real estate.8 Parashars also make up the majority of
the town’s tour guides. And as with priests, brahman guides identify more
with their caste status than their occupation. The Parashars whom I called
“guides” would consistently remind me that they were not, in fact, guides,
but “brahmans who do guiding work.” Throughout the book, I continue
to use the term guide, knowing well that some would refuse—​or at least
contextualize—​such a designation, but also recognizing the need to differ-
entiate clearly between various occupations.9
Brahmans, needless to say, occupy a privileged position within India’s
caste hierarchy, a convention whose effects not only determine Hindu
conceptions of ritual purity but also lead to uneven access to education,
employment, and power. In an article published in 1990, Khushwant Singh
discusses the changing and increasingly disproportionate employment
of brahmans: “Under the British, they had 3%—​fractionally less than the
proportion of their 3.5% of the population. Today . . . the Brahmin com-
munity of India holds between 36% to 63% of all the plum jobs available in
the country.”10 This kind of incongruity has lessened alongside the relative
successes of India’s reservation policy over the past 25 years, but Singh’s state-
ment still largely holds true. Brahmans very much remain part of an elite
class across the subcontinent.
Interestingly, brahmans’ disproportional representation in positions of
government seems—​at least in part—​to echo a similar situation in Hindu
studies, a field where brahmans receive a great deal of attention despite being
such a small minority.11 There are, no doubt, specific and non-​nefarious
reasons for this scholarly orientation: textually, brahmans have long exerted
enormous authority over the Sanskrit literary canon; anthropologically,
6 Guest Is God

much of modern Hindu practice—​in which temple-​going and the worship

of images are so central—​remains inextricably tied to the priesthood. In this
sense, my work in Pushkar follows suit. But what makes Pushkar a particu-
larly interesting case study with regard to caste is that its brahman population
is not such a small minority. Throughout my fieldwork, I consistently found
the town’s priestly presence, with so many brahmans in such a tiny place,
to be at odds with India’s caste demography. Government censuses have not
tallied the number of brahmans, or any other specific caste community, since
1931. Local reports nevertheless estimate the town to be around 30%–​50%
brahman—​and to me, at least, this seems possible.12 Again, these numbers
may not represent the absolute, unequivocal, Brahma-​given truth, but they
do make a case for Pushkar being a pilgrimage town where brahmans domi-
nate not only in power and authority but in numbers as well.

Pilgrimage, Tourism, and Religion

The field of pilgrimage studies has become somewhat of a minor industry

for those interested in the religions of South Asia.13 This is particularly true
of ethnographic literature, where pilgrimage offers a wide range of analyt-
ical possibilities: it demonstrates how religion and ritual are tied inextri-
cably to techniques of the body14; it amplifies and transforms everyday social
formation, in which journeyers’ identities—​like those of gender, religion,
and caste—​can slide in and out of place15; it provides a venue for devotees
to express their religious hopes and expectations, whether they be mun-
dane or otherworldly16; and finally, it helps to establish and reinforce sacred
geographies.17
But despite these plural interpretive angles, only recently have studies
emerged that offer a sustained analysis of how pilgrimage, pilgrimage places,
and the people who live in those places have been shaped by the tourism
industry.18 This is partly a matter of chronology; it has only been in the
last twenty or so years that tourism in India has proven to be an indelible
and enduring feature of pilgrimage. The other reason, I suspect, is equally
simple though in a different way: people generally do not like tourists. In
places across the world, tourists are often perceived as an anonymous group
of people passing through, mindlessly consuming, disturbing the peace,
and then moving on. It is easy to dislike such faceless travelers. But when
in the position of a tourist, it can be hard to convince yourself, never mind
 Introduction 7

others, that you aren’t one; all the more so if you are an anthropologist. One
can easily imagine how, for anthropologists of religion in India, people
who have spent years learning a language and studying and who want to be
recognized for their efforts, doing fieldwork in a tourist town (and therefore
being “misrepresented” as a tourist) can be extremely ungratifying. In a sim-
ilar vein, tourist towns get in the way of some of the more old-​timey and
masochistic impulses of fieldwork. I didn’t jot down my daily thoughts by
oil lamp as sweat dripped from my nose onto the pages of a decomposing
field journal; I had electricity, air conditioning, and Internet. I also had
warm showers, and sometimes-​fabulous falafel. Anyway, there remain cer-
tain tendencies in South Asian studies (and in graduate school, especially) to
think of ethnographic pain as pleasure, and creature comforts as somehow
not right. As long as these tendencies hold, tourism in India will continue to
be understudied.
Outside of South Asia, there is a more substantial body of scholarship
on pilgrimage and tourism. The literature can be roughly divided into two
groups. Inaugurated by Victor and Edith Turner’s Image and Pilgrimage in
Christian Culture, the first group focuses on the structural similarities be-
tween pilgrimage and tourism.19 The debate tends to gravitate toward a ty-
pology of these two central identities—​pilgrims and tourists—​and sets out to
determine whether the two exist on a continuum, are starkly different, or are
one and the same.20 The second group, however, downplays the search for a
perfect typology of agents and seeks instead to explore the broad interface of
pilgrimage and tourism “on the ground.” It is to this group and its attendant
issues that we turn.
When scholars approach the interaction of pilgrimage and tourism, it is
often in the language of negative “impact.”21 This perspective is not inher-
ently problematic but, in the case of religion, tends to imply the profaning
of a once sacred site.22 Take, for example, the work of Erik Cohen, a major
figure in tourism studies and one who sees tourism and pilgrimage as “both
closely related and diametrically opposed modalities of conduct.”23 Their op-
position, Cohen claims, is based on the idea that whereas pilgrimage entails
a sacred search toward the center of one’s religious life, tourism is a sec-
ular quest in search of the other.24 Given this distinction, tourism’s impact
on a religious site or pilgrimage center is “generally a secularizing one—​a
weakening of the local adherence to religion and of the belief in the sacred-
ness and efficacy of holy places, rituals, and customs.”25 So, according to
Cohen, religion is somehow compromised by the emergence of tourism.
8 Guest Is God

Pushkar, with its incredibly palpable atmosphere of religiosity as well as its

ever-​increasing popularity as a Hindu pilgrimage site, serves as an obvious
counterexample to this supposed secularization. More importantly, Cohen’s
argument implies a layering of dichotomies that is equally common and mis-
leading: religion becomes purity, and tourism becomes danger.26 In such a
formulation, tourism assumes the role of corrupting force; religion remains
something pure, and yet always subject to outside defilement. It is this sup-
posedly diametrical opposition that (as we will see in future chapters) makes
tourists and outsiders so wary of priests who make money while simultane-
ously promoting ideals of religious harmony.
But as Russell McCutcheon reminds us, religion cannot be, and has never
been, some “private affair” held entirely apart from the effects of histor-
ical, social, or economic change.27 And indeed, metaphors number aplenty
on how we might think about the relationship between religion and these
other spheres of influence. Are they like a rope, woven of many threads?
Tiles, imbricated? Bricks, bound with mortar? For my part, I prefer a bo-
tanical metaphor. Picture this: a thicket of trees with branches intertwined.
In places, the trees are separate and distinct—​call them “religion,” “politics,”
“economics,” etc.—​but in other places the branches grow completely to-
gether, the space between them erased. Botanists have a complicated word
for this growing together, “inosculation,” but the image is clear: trees can si-
multaneously have their own identities and become indistinguishable from
others.28 In this model, religion is neither fully reduced to something like
an economic scheme or a political tool, nor is it some pristine experience
untouched by the outside world. Thus, the interface of religion and tourism
cannot find honest representation in a model of opposition, but in one of in-
osculation and co-​production. And we must redouble our efforts in rejecting
the idea that such a growing together is a bad thing.

Sacred Making

Given the inosculation of religion and tourism, the devotional and the ec-
onomical, how does this relationship effect Pushkar’s status as a “sacred”
place? Scholars in the discipline of religious studies have long grappled
with the idea of “the sacred”—​its substance, its salience—​but no consensus
is waiting in the wings.29 Among those involved in the study of India, one
of the most vocal opponents of “the sacred” is William Sax: “People still
 Introduction 9

write about Hinduism in terms of the hackneyed dualities of sacred and

profane, mind and body, matter and spirit, and so forth, hardly stopping
to consider that these Cartesianisms are historically determined and cul-
turally specific.”30 Following the “ethnosociological” method of McKim
Marriott, Sax prefers to think about Hindu pilgrimage through Indian
categories. For my work too, Indian vocabulary and categories serve an
undeniably important purpose: they help to reflect with greatest accu-
racy and greatest adherence to local values the context in which particular
topics are discussed.
At the same time, I also see in Sax’s approach a possible amputation of
Indian studies from the broader field of religion. We prevent ourselves from
having meaningful conversations with scholars of different traditions or re-
gions if we see the cultural worlds in which we work as totally alien to one
another. And in more ways than one, Pushkar is itself testament to the fact
that “Indian categories” are increasingly shaped by the people, languages,
and discourses that bounce across the globalized world. For example, locals
themselves call Pushkar a “holy place,” sometimes using the Hindi transla-
tion pavitra sthan, but more often than not relying on the English.31 So does
this make the English phrase “holy place” an “Indian category”? Maybe. Or
maybe it is harder and harder—​and in some cases, less useful—​to confine
certain ideas to a bounded geography or tradition.
Sax is right, though: we should be wary of the “hackneyed dualities” that
structure Western thinking. “Sacred” and “profane” represent one such du-
ality, and it can be used to essentialize the relationship between pilgrimage
and tourism. But, to me at least, the primary problem here is not the du-
ality itself but the fact that “sacred” and “profane” are sometimes taken to be
inherent qualities, existing outside of history or politics and not subject to
change. This is where Jonathan Z. Smith comes to the rescue, explaining that
“the sacred” does not simply exist in a vacuum, but is made:

We do well to remember that long before “the Sacred” appeared in dis-

course as a substantive (a usage that does not antedate Durkheim), it was
primarily employed in verbal forms, most especially with the sense of
making an individual a king or bishop (as in the obsolete English verbs to
sacrate or to sacre), or in the adjectival forms denoting the result of the pro-
cess of sacration. Ritual is not an expression of or a response to “the Sacred”;
rather, someone or something is made sacred by ritual (the primary sense
of sacrificium).32
10 Guest Is God

For Smith, ritual is not simply a series of repetitious actions but is “first and
foremost, a mode of paying attention.”33 As such, something like a temple or
a ritual object or a pilgrimage place only becomes sacred when it has “atten-
tion focused on it in a highly marked way.”34 This means, then, that instead of
trying to identify “sacred spaces” as if they simply are, we should look to the
actions and affective orientations that can make the sacred. The ritual com-
ponent behind the making of sacred space echoes my own observations from
fieldwork, and especially so when it comes to the topic of locals cleaning up
Pushkar lake, which I will explore in the second chapter.
But beyond ritual, we must also see in the creation of sacred space factors
related to power. David Chidester and Edward Linenthal are particularly in-
sightful on the issue:

Sacred space is inevitably contested space, a site of negotiated contests

over the legitimate ownership of sacred symbols . . . Power is asserted and
resisted in any production of space, and especially in the production of sa-
cred space. Since no sacred space is merely “given” in the world, its own-
ership will always be at stake. In this respect, a sacred space is not merely
discovered, or founded, or constructed; it is claimed, owned, and operated
by people advancing specific interests.35

Here, Chidester and Linenthal help to support and give texture to one of this
book’s most basic premises, namely, that Pushkar becomes paradise not be-
cause of some timeless truth, but through the actions of historically situated
people who negotiate its terms, articulate its borders, and claim ownership
over it.36 Thus if we were to attribute Pushkar’s popularity as a pilgrimage
place to what James Preston calls a “spiritual magnetism,” we would need to
understand that magnetic or attractive quality in terms of particular powers
and interests.37 So while locals may consider their town a “holy place”—​
and may pin that holiness on Brahma and his sacrifice, or the lake’s magical
powers—​I want to emphasize the extent to which the idea of a holy or sacred
Pushkar is also shaped and produced through the tourism industry, its eco-
nomic incentives, and the people whose lives depend on such an economy.
Most of this book is about those people: the priests and guides and hotel
owners and shopkeepers who together participate in the project of sacred
making. They do it with rituals, stories, sayings, recitations, and vibrations,
among many other things. We will discuss these issues later, both in the in-
troduction and throughout the coming chapters. For now, however, we will
 Introduction 11

briefly explore the broader interests behind Pushkar’s still-​growing popu-

larity, some of which are not local at all but are controlled by much larger
institutional bodies responsible for India’s economy and infrastructure.
As Ian Reader explains, the creation of pilgrimage places is often
“facilitated by powerful commercial interests instrumental in providing the
publicity” that garners attention from a wide audience.38 Said differently, be-
fore a pilgrimage place can be a pilgrimage place, people need to actually go
there. And before going there, people need to know about it and have the in-
frastructure to get there. Pushkar has attracted Rajasthani pilgrims for hun-
dreds of years, but its popularity on the national and international stage is
more recent, with a particularly substantial jump in tourism over the past
thirty years. Much of this jump is due to the effects of India’s liberalization,
which entailed a series of reform policies that the federal government put
forward in order to open their economy to the global market. These policies,
which were initiated in the mid-​1980s and further advanced in 1991, led
to reduced tariffs on foreign goods, the growth of the private sector, and
increased wealth within the Indian middle class.39
Domestically, increased GDP and spending capacity on the part of the
middle class meant Indians were now increasingly able and inclined to travel.
Internationally, foreign interest and investment spurred the Indian govern-
ment to recognize tourism as one of the major paths toward the country’s
economic development. As part of this recognition, the state government
of Rajasthan initiated a number of infrastructural road, rail, electric, and
water projects throughout the 1990s which, among other things, helped to
make the state more manageable for visitors.40 In 2002, the Indian Ministry
of Tourism launched an international branding campaign called “Incredible
!ndia,” which has tirelessly promoted the romantic appeal of Rajasthan as a
land of mustaches, turbans, camels, white dunes, and brown bodies. As for
Pushkar, geographic logistics make it a convenient destination. Because the
town is only a short bus trip from Jaipur, which along with Agra and Delhi
forms the “Golden Triangle of Tourism,” Pushkar offers an easy experience of
small-​town India for middle-​to-​upper-​class tourists on packaged tours who
don’t want to stray too far off the beaten path. Backpackers come too, and al-
though they tend to have less money than their package-​tour counterparts,
they also stay for much longer. These are travelers who tend to determine
their itineraries by the seat of their pants, relying on travel advice from books
like Lonely Planet or from word-​of-​mouth recommendations. But regardless
of tourists’ differing dispositions, we can see from the significant increase in
12 Guest Is God

the number of internationals coming to Pushkar over the years—​with 8,820

in 1985 compared to 63,312 in 2005—​that the triumph of Pushkar’s “spir-
itual magnetism” seems to emerge alongside, and entangled with, broader
economic gains brought on by liberalization.41 These are things that grew to-
gether. And recognizing that such “spiritual magnetism” is subject to change,
we can now look to Pushkar in the beginning of its experiments with tourism,
when things were quite different than they are today.

The Growing Pains of Tourism

A small international presence in Pushkar preceded India’s liberalization

by some decades, beginning in the early 1970s with an influx of young,
backpacking, and hippie types. Staying in Pushkar would have been a very
different beast back then, because the town had only caste-​based rest houses
meant for pilgrims (dharamshalas), and possessed none of the conveniences
now associated with tourism, such as banana pancakes, bottled water, and
toilet paper. But changes came quickly. As witnesses to the new and pecu-
liar trend of wandering hippies in the main bazaar, a few of the more en-
trepreneurial locals opened their homes to outsiders. These homes became
the town’s first “guesthouses,” which now, decades later, unendingly line
Pushkar’s streets and alleys.42 With ever more foreigners, their pockets
bulging from favorable exchange rates, cash flowed into the town. This
led to further investment as locals set up more hotels and restaurants and
juice stands and clothing stores and shops selling trinkets, tchotchkes, and
knickknacks.
As might be expected, problems between locals and tourists began to
surface from almost the very beginning of their relationship. In 1979,
local scholar Janardan Sharma penned an article in the Hindi magazine
Dharmyug, titled “Devanagari Pushkar men Hippie” (“Hippies in Pushkar,
a Town of the Gods”). In it, he bitterly critiques the town’s hippie pres-
ence: “You can see these whimsical tourists everywhere, in Pushkar’s alleys,
bazaars, houses, ghats, hotels, fields, and cremation grounds; they relax and
sing, swim in the lake, smoke marijuana and hash, make noises, laugh, and
are a nuisance—​all of this they do naked or half-​naked.”43 Sharma then
laments the proliferation of hotels and drug use, both of which stand to
threaten the “mental peace” that the town holds so dear. And he ends on a
particularly sour note, wondering “how much more will the change brought
 Introduction 13

on by Western culture damage the town’s spiritual nature.”44 In some ways,

Sharma’s elegy really does ring true; Pushkar has undoubtedly changed. The
town’s tourism economy is omnipresent, and joining the small contingent of
half-​naked hippies are now thousands of other visitors from a hugely diverse
background. Of course, whether such changes damage the town’s “spiritual
nature” is a matter of opinion. But I hope to show throughout the book that
the very content of Pushkar’s “spiritual nature” has itself changed along with
the town. That is, Pushkar’s being paradise is increasingly contingent upon,
rather than in spite of, tourism. Nevertheless, by bringing up drugs and
hotels in particular, Sharma highlights the two topics that can, even today,
still elicit animosity.
Drugs came to pose a material threat to Pushkar in the early 1980s.
Beyond marijuana, which was in all likelihood only culpable for inspiring
hippies to frolic in the nude, heroin was a much more serious problem. For
reasons related largely to geography and agriculture, India was brought into
the network of international drug trafficking at that time.45 The subcontinent
was never meant to be the final destination for these drugs—​just a stop on
the way to other locales—​but some never left. And heroin was one in par-
ticular that stayed beyond its welcome, making some rich and many more
addicted across the country. Pushkar was not unique in this sense, though
tourism provided an especially robust and constantly-​refreshing market for
the drug trade. Rick, a grey-​haired hippie from Canada, referred to Pushkar
in the 1980s as a place famous “for the wrong reasons.” Local police got more
serious about cracking down on dealers and putting addicts in hospitals
after 1985, though even in 1988 a report from The Times of India referred to
Pushkar as a “center for drug traffic.”46 According to the article,

Transactions worth lakhs of rupees take place at the time of fairs and
festivals. Even the “pandas” are engaged in the trade. If a senior police of-
ficer is to be believed, the number of those involved in deals, directly or
indirectly, is around 500 . . . Smack has been the most sought after, followed
by charas [hash] and ganja which are in demand by foreigners . . . The flour-
ishing trade has led many youths to drug addiction, and drugs have claimed
the lives of four youths during the past two years.47

By all recent reports, and in my own observation, heroin use and abuse has
steadily decreased since the 1980s, and is no longer a problem in Pushkar.
Nevertheless, these memories are sufficiently fresh that many of the older
14 Guest Is God

locals continue to voice concerns about how tourists’ use of drugs might un-
duly influence the town’s youth.
Now to hotels. In 1982, Pushkar found itself in the crosshairs of two
volunteers affiliated with the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), a Hindu na-
tionalist organization with the stated goal of “protecting” Hindu religion.
This husband and wife team—​who were not themselves locals—​founded the
Pushkar Bachao Samiti (Save Pushkar Committee) and gathered the support
of the community against foreigners and tourism.48 One of their most pop-
ular slogans, painted on white-​washed walls throughout the town, was “hotel
hatao, pushkar bachao” (“remove hotels, save Pushkar”).49 Conducting her
fieldwork in Pushkar during the late 1980s, Christina Joseph offers this syn-
opsis of the Pushkar Bachao Samiti:

Their main agenda is to remove hotels on the ghats as they infringe upon the
lake and deprive pilgrims of a place to bathe. They have staged rallies and
processions, held town meetings in the middle of the main street and or-
ganized protests on a regular basis to build up grass roots support . . . They
also demanded the rigorous enforcement of the ban on liquor, meat and
drugs and called upon the pandas [priests] to be ready to sacrifice them-
selves for Pushkar’s sanctity if necessary.50

It seems clear, from the final statement especially, that the Pushkar Bachao
Samiti worked upon an explicit appeal to self-​sacrifice, a call to arms for
staunching the tide of tourism and change. The committee articulated an ex-
plicit dichotomy between various agents of profanation on the one side—​
whether hotel owners or tourists, meat eaters or drug users—​and Pushkar’s
priests on the other. Brahmans were the defenders of sanctity, and the Samiti
needed their support in order to effect any change. At first, locals supported
the Samiti in substantial numbers, participating in rallies and giving atten-
tion to various causes. But years passed and little was accomplished. Many
became skeptical of the Samiti’s professed goals of restoring Pushkar’s sanc-
tity, seeing instead a group trying to garner support “for political organ-
izations that were themselves ‘foreign’ to Pushkar.”51 Popularity declined
steadily from the early 1990s, and by 1999 the Pushkar Bachao Samiti was no
longer active.52
Aside from the specific issues surrounding hotels and heroin, there has
long been a general concern that tourism and its attendant actors run the
risk of giving Pushkar a “bad reputation” (badnami). Drugs and alcohol are
 Introduction 15

certainly included, though a range of other issues exist as well: many are par-
ticularly irked when tourists touch or kiss in public, an act that can still raise
eyebrows even in some of India’s larger cities; in addition, locals deem the
clothing of foreign women (often revealing legs and shoulders) to be inappro-
priate by conservative Rajasthani norms. And it is because of this whole host
of concerns that in the 1980s, the District Magistrate and the local commu-
nity together established a code of conduct. Posted in hotels and on the major
ghats, it notified foreigners that “in Pushkar, holding of hands or kissing in
public is not permitted,” and that “ladies are kindly requested to wear proper
clothes which cover themselves sufficiently, so as not to offend.” Here was
the final statement, in all caps: “THESE RULES REFLECT ASPECTS OF
THE HINDU RELIGION AND TOURISTS MUST UNDERSTAND THAT
BREACHES OF THESE RULES CAUSE OFFENSE AND ARE AGAINST
THE LAW.”53 A somewhat less aggressive code still stands today, painted on
bright yellow signs all around the lake (Figure I.1).
And yet, more than half of the time that I asked my collaborators about
their opinion of tourists, I received a single response. They would raise one
hand with their palm out, fingers extended, and say in English: “five fingers,
not the same.” The maxim can be traced back at least as far as 1886, with

Figure I.1. A notice board for foreigners.

16 Guest Is God

the publication of S.W. Fallon’s A Dictionary of Hindustani Proverbs. Fallon

lists a proverb that goes like this: panchon ungliyan barabar nahin hoti hain,
which he then translates as “The five fingers are not all of the same length.”
According to Fallon, the proverb means that “all men are not alike.”54 In
Pushkar today, that is exactly what “five fingers, not the same” is intended
to convey. It means that while some tourists do misbehave, we cannot judge
them all as one. Overall, I find it an enchanting formulation—​part mudra,
part mantra—​repeated over and over, and transmitting a message of non-​
essentialism across the town. Nor should it be lost on us that this Hindi
proverb from over a hundred years ago is now presented more often than
not in English. The popularity of this proverb-​in-​translation reveals the ex-
tent to which its message is now entangled with tourism, and perhaps even
suggests that it can be used to assure the “good tourists” that they are not
being grouped with other, less desirable ones.
I don’t want to paper over an important history. Pushkar’s experience of
tourism has not been without serious issues, and a certain number of these
issues remain. At the same time, the era of heroin and hotel protests is over.
The priests who were practicing what Christina Joseph called a “politics of
exclusion” back when she was doing her fieldwork, in the late 1980s, have
changed with Pushkar. Decades later, these same critics now have friends
working in hotels or running restaurants. They have sons and daughters who
have grown up knowing nothing other than a post-​hippie Pushkar, and who
chat on Facebook or WhatsApp with tourists across the world. Whereas the
past was characterized by a fairly pervasive animosity toward the tourism
industry in toto, the situation today is different; now, if there are problems, it
is because of a few bad mangoes. In other words, five fingers, not the same.55

The Phrase Factory: “Guest Is God” and Other Sayings

“Treat your mother like a god. Treat your father like a god. Treat your
teacher like a god. Treat yours guests like gods.”
—​Taittiriya Upanishad56

“So, we say ‘atithi devo bhava’ (guest is god). This is Rajasthan’s tra-
dition, from the time of kings. Atithi (guest) could be anyone—​either
Indian or foreign—​and they are our guests. From this tradition, we
welcome them, help them with darshan or puja, tell them about this
 Introduction 17

place. We want to make it so that they hear these things and become
happy, knowing that they’ve come to a place of peace, and that they feel
peaceful inside.”
—​Kamal Parashar, of Pushkar

This book’s title, Guest Is God, derives from a commonly known and
oft-​repeated Sanskrit adage, “atithi devo bhava.” This South Asian in-
stantiation of something akin to “the customer is always right” is age-​old,
tracing back more than two thousand years and appearing throughout the
Sanskrit literary canon.57 In general, modern-​day Hindus continue to hold
to this ideal, seeing hospitality as an integral part of being a dutiful, right-
eous person. In Pushkar especially, people will remind you time and again
that “guest is God.” And yet, the phrase’s prevalence today is due not solely
to authoritative texts or high ideals, but to the tourism industry. In 2005, the
Indian Ministry of Tourism launched their “Atithi Devo Bhava” campaign,
designed to bring about “an attitudinal shift among the masses towards
tourists.”58 Indeed, whereas the government’s “Incredible !ndia” campaign
had set out to promote India and its supposedly exotic wonders to the outside
world, “Atithi Devo Bhava” looked inward.
The Ministry committed itself to the training of taxi and rickshaw drivers,
guides, immigration officers, and others within the industry, all toward
creating an awareness about international tourists’ needs and expectations.
During his time as brand ambassador, Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan
was featured in a number of commercials for “Atithi Devo Bhava.” Broadcast
across the subcontinent, these commercials showed foreigners besieged by
all types of unsavory characters: rapacious hawkers, persistent guides, people
promising “very cheap hotels,” thieves, gropers, etc. And right on time, a
hero—​sometimes Aamir Khan himself—​would save the day. In a particu-
larly poignant commercial, Aamir Khan not only confronts the villainous
guides, but then shames the onlookers: he accuses them of standing idly
while bad men give India a bad name; he explains that such behavior empties
the country of honor and the people’s pockets of money; if tourists don’t
come to India, then livelihoods are lost. In a different commercial, Khan
looks into the camera and implores the viewers back home to “take pride in
being an Indian.” Indians, the argument goes, are people who treat guests like
gods—​and this is something to fight for, something to be proud of.
“Guest is God” evokes a number of themes relevant to this book. The phrase
is deployed by the tourism industry and establishes an obvious economic
18 Guest Is God

incentive: treat guests well, and make more money. And yet, it was not created
from nothing. It calls upon ancient religious ideas, and is made meaningful
to individuals because it relies on a cultural logic familiar to Indian or Hindu
ways of being. Thus, the heroes of “Atithi Devo Bhava” commercials argue
that treating guests like gods is both about earning a living and taking pride
in one’s culture. Throughout this book I want to emphasize how the reality
of moneyed interest does not discount the genuine care and feelings of hos-
pitality with which Pushkar locals approach their relationships with people
from the outside. Yes, money indelibly impresses upon the town’s cultural
landscape, but the rhetoric behind Pushkar being paradise—​attendant with
its appeal to universalism, to diversity and sharing—​is far too pervasive to
contradict what people actually think. Guest Is God entails all of these ideas
and more.
“Guest is God” also happens to be one of an entire constellation of words,
sayings, and phrases that saturate the discourse of making Pushkar paradise.
Throughout the book I refer to this collection of sayings as “the phrase fac-
tory.” Of course, there is not an assembly line where phrases are made, or a
single location from which they are shipped. Rather, the phrase factory is
almost an urge, a disposition to deploy idiomatic or stock phrases. And in
Pushkar, there are so many of them. We have already seen two in the past few
pages: “five fingers, not the same” and “guest is God.” As we will see in the first
chapter, there is also “same same, but different” and “hindu, muslim, sikh,
isai: ham sab hain bhai bhai” (Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Christian: we’re all
brothers!). There are at least three languages in play in the phrase factory,
with Sanskrit rhymes, Hindi couplets, and English formulas. The producers
of such phrases differ quite significantly too: on one end of the spectrum,
there is the Indian Ministry of Tourism and their team of folks who cooked up
“Incredible !ndia”—​and for whom the oddly placed exclamation point likely
took months of deliberation. On the other end, there is my friend Sandeep,
who runs a chai shop in Pushkar and keeps a notebook nearby in case a good
rhyming phrase comes to mind. Sometimes a saying can fall flat, as when an
informant told me that two things were “same same, but different,” but in
truth they were just really, truly different; he knew it too, but pushed through
nonetheless. Other times a phrase might be used quite cleverly, as when one
friend accidentally spit on my shoes and declared aloud, “Incredible !ndia”
(exclamation point most certainly included).
For ethnographers, stock answers or phrases can be quite unsatisfying.
Too often they replace active thought with pre-​formulated words in a row,
 Introduction 19

so our initial impulse is to discount such statements as somehow insincere

or, at least, not reflective of an individual’s ideas about the world. That was
certainly my first impulse. But after hearing so many phrases so many times
from so many different people, I began to take them seriously. In partic-
ular, I came to see that repetition makes reality. That is, when phrases are
repeated over and over, people not only believe in what they hear, but also
what they themselves say. So when a local guide tells tourists again and again
that people from different countries are “same same, but different,” he is con-
vincing not only them but also himself. He is expressing and reproducing
his own conviction. I especially felt this to be true with many of my younger
informants, people who largely grew up in a Pushkar already changed by
liberalization. Many of them had been hearing such sayings from birth,
and had likely internalized key components of the phrase factory long ago.
This means, then, that the phrase factory has an effect on both hosts and
guests, each deployment of a saying, idiom, or keyword working to con-
struct and maintain a particular image of Pushkar. Collectively, the images
created from individual sayings tend to cohere around certain ideals—​
ones related to similarity and tolerance—​though, as we will see in future
chapters, images of a “colorful Pushkar” or a “peaceful Pushkar” can mean
very different things depending on who you are and where you come from.
In the book that follows, I will not only introduce many sayings, idioms, and
keywords, but more importantly I will address both the images that they
construct and the discursive work that they do. No chapter deals exclusively
with the phrase factory, but it inextricably shapes the ethnographic context
in which my work is situated.
The phrase factory also highlights the extent to which many ideas in
Pushkar are not necessarily unique to Pushkar. Of course, in later chapters
we will see several instances to the contrary, situations or stories related to
Brahma or the lake or the camel fair that together lend a certain uniqueness
to Pushkar’s religious landscape. But regardless of this fact, and regardless too
of locals’ constant assertion of their town’s absolute singularity, Pushkar actu-
ally presents a pretty compelling case study of globalization. “Globalization”
has in some ways become a term too capacious to mean anything. As a fa-
vorite buzzword of contemporary scholarship, it encompasses so many inter-
pretative and analytical possibilities that one stumbles to find solid ground.
But this is likely due to its huge successes, both in the sense that its effects are
felt in basically every nook and cranny of the contemporary world and be-
cause of its theoretical ramifications throughout the academy, where scholars
20 Guest Is God

have employed the vocabulary of globalization to show how cultures are far
more fluid and far less bounded than they once were, or were once assumed
to be.59 But what does it mean? Ted Lewellen offers a helpful, albeit expan-
sive, definition of the term (emphasis in original): “Contemporary globaliza-
tion is the increasing flow of trade, finance, culture, ideas, and people brought
about by the sophisticated technology of communications and travel and by the
spread of neoliberal capitalism, and it is the local and regional adaptations to
and resistances against these flows.”60
Within the context of India, globalization is most explicitly linked to lib-
eralization, as mentioned earlier.61 The repercussions of India opening its
economy to the global market were powerfully felt. One of the most obvious,
surface-​level consequences has been the increased visibility and availability
of foreign goods: Nike shoes and Arnold Schwarzenegger films and Levi’s
jeans and Spiderman and Diet Coke. Individually, the fact that such things
can now be eaten and worn and seen in India seems not so significant. But
alongside these surface-​level consequences, consumers within a “new middle
class” have become increasingly aware of the plural ways of experiencing
a wider and wilder world.62 In Pushkar, such an awareness of plurality
generates a heightened sense of “global thinking,” by which I mean an ap-
preciation of the fact that different people exist across the world, and that a
certain degree of interconnectedness binds them all. This new appreciation
and awareness also creates fertile ground for cross-​cultural comparisons.
Locals provide an interesting alternative to the scholarly discipline of “com-
parative religion”; here it is not an academic pursuit but an integral aspect of
the formation of religious identities. In Pushkar, comparative religion serves
the goal of establishing a particular type of Hindu universalism. The extent to
which locals use “global thinking” and comparativism to nurture this univer-
salism will become especially clear in c­ hapters 1 and 3.
Moreover, in Pushkar and elsewhere, the results of globalization have
had the most impact on youth culture. Ritty Lukose refers to these young
consumerists as “liberalization’s children.” In her fascinating ethnography
based in Kerala, Lukose explores “the workings of globalization among
young people who are on the margins of its dominant articulations yet fully
formed by its structures of aspiration and opportunity.”63 In Pushkar, where
tourism functions as a manifestation of globalization—​but without the af-
fluent subculture of India’s major cities—​young priests and guides in their
late teens and twenties similarly experience the globalized world from the
periphery. My work does not focus exclusively on youth, but a majority of
 Introduction 21

my informants were, in fact, between eighteen and thirty years old. And as
people who have never known their town without tourism, they see Pushkar,
and their life within it, as inextricably shaped by global presences.

Walking Around and (Deep) Hanging Out

Research for this book spanned from 2008 to 2017, a period over which
I lived in India for some 30 months, with most of that time spent in Pushkar.
I have seen the town in every season, made and renewed contacts with people
throughout the years, and celebrated holidays often twice, sometimes three
times, with those who have steadily become friends and family. As an an-
thropologist of religion, my methods are ethnographic. But like the number
of Hindu gods, which are sometimes purported to be neither more nor less
than the total number of Hindus on the planet, field methods are manifold.
In other words, they are unique to each ethnographer and each ethnographic
context. For me, fieldwork in Pushkar involved two fairly straightforward ac-
tivities: walking around and hanging out.
In thinking about walking—​its significance and pleasures—​I am inter-
ested in the concept of the flâneur. French for “stroller” or “saunterer,” the
flâneur and its attendant gerund, flânerie, have received considerable atten-
tion from those both within and outside of the academy.64 The concept has
managed to evade any agreed-​upon definition,65 though perhaps the most
popular summary of the flâneur was offered in 1863 by Charles Baudelaire:

The crowd is his element as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His
passion and profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the per-
fect flâneur, for the passionate spectator it is an immense joy to set up house
in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the
midst of the fugitive and infinite. To be away from home and yet feel oneself
everywhere at home; to see the world, to be the centre of the world and yet
remain hidden from the world—​such are a few of the slightest pleasures of
those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but
clumsily define. The spectator is a prince and everywhere rejoices his in-
cognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family.66

I harbor no illusions about being the “perfect flâneur,” and there are no
doubt discrepancies between ethnographic fieldwork and flânerie,67 but the
22 Guest Is God

idea remains a compelling one. In particular, my experience of fieldwork

resonates well with the goal of being a “passionate spectator” who, although
away from home, tries to feel “everywhere at home”—​to be, in the words of
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “the man of the crowd.”68
Moreover, it is the strolling that really matters. “In 1839,” Walter Benjamin
writes, “it was considered elegant to take a tortoise out walking” in the
arcades of Paris.69 Such an image “gives us an idea of the tempo of flânerie.”70
An extreme response to the bustle of modernity, the flâneur literally slows
down to a turtle’s pace. In Pushkar, I would sometimes envision myself with
a turtle leading the way, a self-​imposed regime of engaged sauntering.71 In
the beginning of my fieldwork especially, I walked slowly and without a des-
tination. Walking without a destination does not, of course, imply that my
wandering was aimless. The flâneur, as Benjamin states, is one who “goes
botanizing on the asphalt.”72 This fascinating image suggests the exploratory
and investigative aspects of flânerie. As such, a flâneur pounds the pavement
with an eye for discovery.
But the ethnographer must be more than a flâneur. To ride the wave of a
crowd is not in itself sufficient for the purposes of fieldwork; we must also
stop and talk and listen. In the case of Pushkar, this was fairly simple. First
of all, as a white man, I had unmitigated access to the public sphere. And
because Pushkar is a tourist town, my foreignness was not particularly
marked. All I had to do in order to garner attention, then, was walk at a
turtle’s pace, sport a mustache, and reply to every random namaste with an-
other in kind. Locals would call from their shops and offices, inviting me
over for chai. Initially, I was perceived as a tourist, something I now see as
only a mild annoyance when compared to ethnographers who need to per-
suade their informants that they are neither government officials nor intel-
ligence agency spies. But the fact that I spoke Hindi and was researching
religion in Pushkar was usually sufficient to be invited a second time. Some
relationships would fizzle out or never really take off, but several expanded
into massive networks, as friends and co-​workers and family members
volunteered to help me in my work. Amazingly, this simple act of sitting
and chatting with chai—​repeated over and over again until I shook from
the caffeine—​served as my initiation into the field. Renato Rosaldo, and
then later, Clifford Geertz, referred to this whole process as “deep hanging
out.”73 For Geertz especially, “deep hanging out” provides the methodolog-
ical backbone to anthropology; as he explains, “if fieldwork goes . . . the dis-
cipline goes with it.”74
 Introduction 23

There is an interesting corollary to “deep hanging out” in India, not applied

to the ivory tower but to everyday living, called “timepass.” The Hinglish verb
is timepass karna, or “to pass the time,” a term used with incredible regularity
throughout North India and which carries a number of connotations. In
his book Timepass, Craig Jeffrey explores educated and unemployed young
men in Uttar Pradesh, and what he calls the “politics of waiting.”75 In these
instances, timepass constitutes an act accompanied by a certain desperation
about job opportunities, about being good enough in a competitive market,
and about reaching the goals one once thought to be realistic but which now
seem fleeting. This is waiting as the world passes you by. In Pushkar I was
sometimes privy to this version of timepass, too, but far more often timepass
was simply the term people used to describe hanging out while having little
to do. Timepass was having chai with friends while waiting for pilgrims to
arrive on the ghats; timepass was reading the newspaper while waiting for a
phone call from a taxi driver; timepass was watching YouTube videos of Yo-​
Yo Honey Singh while waiting for a tour group; in all, timepass was not an
indication of hopelessness but a simple recognition of the fact that in a place
where boredom always threatens to creep in, waiting itself demands atten-
tion. What you do with waiting is the art of timepass.76
The structural similarities of timepass and deep hanging out generated
many an ethnographic opportunity. While people passed the time, often
waiting for the next pilgrim or tourist to turn around the corner, I would
hang out with them. We would talk about anything at all, from Justin Bieber
to gun violence, though I would often try at some point to circle back to life in
Pushkar. For the first few months of research, conversations were entirely in-
formal. I would jot down choice phrases and sentences after speaking with a
person, but the subject matter was never predetermined. After realizing what
my research was actually about—​a realization that was itself months in the
making—​I started showing up with a recorder in hand. Not a single person
objected to my using the recorder, though I found recorded interviews to
be decidedly more formal, and more stilted, than the type of free-​flowing
conversations that preceded them. I came to understand that recorded
interviews were not necessarily the ideal, but rather a particular method with
a particular strength: good for precision in long interviews, bad for capturing
spontaneity or emotional resonance. In total, I conducted interviews with
just over seventy people, and sometimes on multiple occasions.77
Due to the fact that so many of these conversations involved a certain
degree of give and take, structured in much the same way as any “normal,”
24 Guest Is God

non-​ academic discussion, I refer to these conversation partners with

three different but often overlapping terms: “friends,” “collaborators,” and
“informants.” I do occasionally use the term informant, but overall consider
it a poor representation of fieldwork relationships, as if my task were simply
to suck information, vacuum-​like, out of the minds of those around me.
Indeed, several people in Pushkar became good friends of mine, in which
case “informant” seems cold, and “friend” is more obviously applicable. I use
“collaborator” the most in order to underline the idea that these were people
with whom I shared not only tea and time, but also quite personal thoughts
and feelings about the world around us. Their contributions make this book
what it is.

The Topography of the Text

In c­ hapter 1, I explore local language and rhetoric surrounding the idea of

sanatana dharma, which roughly translates as “the eternal religion.” Despite
the term’s complex pedigree, it more often than not conveys an appeal to-
ward universalism. I consider it a technique of “brothering,” a concept which
indicates that through seeing similarity and downplaying difference, an
“other” can become a brother. Tourism serves as a major catalyst in the cre-
ation of this discourse, a dynamic epitomized by the repertoire of sayings
and phrases promoting Hindu universalism. At the same time, given its
place in Pushkar’s tourism economy and its nationalist history, the promise
of brotherly love can seem at times tenuous. Here, I discuss how issues of
moneyed interest and virulent nationalism shape, and are negotiated within,
discourses of the “eternal religion,” while simultaneously giving serious con-
sideration to the prospect of brothering.
Chapter 2 leaves the world of universalism and addresses the most ex-
plicitly material aspect of making Pushkar paradise. That is, I explore the
environmental degradation that has befallen the town’s holy lake (due, in
large part, to development and tourism), and then I focus on efforts by local
Hindus to clean it. In the chapter, I contend that the broad goal of making
Pushkar paradise, and more specifically the task of cleaning the lake, in-
volve a robust process of ritualization. Here, cleaning becomes not only
cast within the vocabulary of karma and Hindu duty (dharma) but is in fact
yoked to other religious activities, too, like circumambulation and feeding
animals. Thinking alongside the work of Catherine Bell, I aim to show how
 Introduction 25

environmentalism becomes ritualized, and in turn renders a place sacred.

I conclude with the idea that cleaning the lake is both an activity born out of
the understanding that Pushkar is paradise, and also one which simultane-
ously sets paradise in the making.
In the third chapter I focus on Pushkar’s new generation of tour guides.
Departing from the caste-​based and hereditary position of brahman priest,
these young men see in guiding a “new form of the priesthood” (pujari ka
naya rup) in which the great karma exchange that makes up the “traditional”
Hindu service becomes supplemented with the exchange and flow of infor-
mation. They are the mediators of knowledge about Brahma and Pushkar,
and, when guiding foreigners, about Hinduism. In this capacity, they are cul-
tural translators and comparative religionists of the highest order. But their
jobs are not perfect. Limited opportunities and fierce competition for clients
have created friction with foreign tourists, people who rebuke priests and
guides as “selling salvation” on the banks of Pushkar lake. Part of this friction
derives from a fundamental disagreement about the price of “spirituality”
and what, ultimately, paradise is supposed to look like. At the same time,
those who do not want to do this work find it hard to get a steady job outside
of Pushkar’s industries of tourism and pilgrimage. Bounded to both Brahma
and Pushkar, brahmans believe themselves cursed, sometimes metaphori-
cally and literally, to a life on the lake.
Chapter 4 explores the annual camel fair, and especially its discourse on
color. From both the written and ethnographic record, the camel fair emerges
as an event where color, more than anything else, permeates the town. This
is the color of Rajasthani dress, the color of a crowd, the colors of cele-
brated diversity. But what is the value of color? In answering this question,
I focus on two entangled discourses of color, one from tourist pamphlets
and English-​language newspapers emphasizing the exotic, the other from
local perspectives on international diversity and religious sharing. These
two sources invite an exploration of what an economy of color might look
like. Finally, alongside the language of color we encounter the centrality of
photography. As a type of spectacle, the fair provides a unique opportunity
for photography, in which tourists photograph locals, and locals photograph
tourists. This mutual objectification helps to underline how inhabitants of a
tourist town can make sense of, and reshape, the tourist experience.
The fifth and final chapter begins with an observation: Pushkar, people say,
is a place of peace, of “shanti.” But those who have been to Pushkar know that
it is not a quiet place. There are motorcycles and honking horns, humming
26 Guest Is God

loudspeakers and lots of electronic dance music. Peace, but no quiet. Here,
I address this ostensible paradox by exploring the creation and maintenance
of “peace” in Pushkar. Far from attempting to silence Pushkar’s rich sound-
scape, locals instead find peace by adding yet more sound to the atmosphere.
They do this with songs and sacred words set on speakers and intended to
spread shanti throughout the town. The chapter begins, then, with an explo-
ration of shanti, and how the sacred landscape of Pushkar is mapped onto
the sonic terrain of religious recitation. Importantly, the power of religious
recitation derives not principally from the spiritual messages therein, or even
from devotion to the divine, but rather from the “good vibrations” created
by sound itself. The chapter proceeds with this issue of vibrations: What
are they? How are they used? And why do so many locals refer to them as
“vibrations” or “vibes” when Hindi and Sanskrit equivalents abound? In
the end, I will argue that Pushkar’s “vibrations” come as much from ancient
Sanskrit material as they do from 19th-​century American and European
metaphysics. Like vibrations themselves, such a discourse seems to travel
through the atmosphere, wheeling back and forth across the world.
So this book is about vibrations, color, curses, the environment, univer-
salism, and interesting phrases (among many other things). These are un-
doubtedly disparate topics, but together they animate a story that I think
needs telling. That story is about Hinduism today, or really about Hindus
today, and the ways in which a particular group of Hindus in a small-​town set-
ting make sense of the idea that their home is at the center of an increasingly-​
globalized world. As one local told me, Pushkar has become “the true center
of Greenwich Mean Time.” And along with the acceptance of this metaphor-
ical relocation of longitude—​this re-​centering of the world axis—​comes the
recognition that Pushkar will continue to see more and more visitors from
the outside. This fact prompts broad and enduring questions—​about how to
make money, about how to flourish as a Hindu and as a human, and maybe
even about how to treat guests like gods.
 1
Others and Brothers

Of the fifty-​two stone staircases that descend into the holy lake in Pushkar,
Brahm Ghat1 enjoys an economic vibrancy without equal.2 Right there, in a
tiny concrete room labeled “Donation Office” in stenciled letters above the
window (Figure 1.1), a brahman man sorts through coconuts, money, and
receipts, all evidence of the religious ceremony that so many pilgrims and
tourists choose to undertake. The receipts are particularly interesting: on the
front, each one is a record of the donation offered for the ceremony, money
collected by—​and then divided among—​members of the Pushkar Priest
Association Trust; on the back, the Trust’s primary objectives are laid out.
Among the mundane goals of cleaning the lake and caring for cows, each
receipt also mentions the propagation of “sanatana dharma.” This term,
frequently translated into English as the “eternal religion,” has remarkable
traction throughout South Asia, but its contours are far from agreed upon.3
What is this “eternal religion” that the priests of Pushkar hope to spread?
Whom does such propagation benefit? And how should we make sense of
this image, coupling proof of purchase with religious ambition?
Since Brahma’s creation of the universe began there—​so the town’s narra-
tive goes—​Pushkar has been a tirth, that is, a “crossing” or “ford” signifying
a pilgrimage place of religious power and efficacy.4 Locals are particularly
proud of Pushkar’s status as the world’s only tirth for the entirety of the
“golden age” (satyug), which lasted some 1,728,000 years. But it was only
with tourism, in the past handful of decades, that the tirth has also become
what one informant called a mahasagar, a “great ocean” where metaphor-
ical rivers meet. Despite foreseeable growing pains associated with the
tourism industry, the town has flourished thanks to its new identity as a
place where the world’s people see each other in full color. And instead of
the more common exoticism that accompanies the production of a tourist
space—​what Keith Hollinshead calls “difference projection”5—​the predom-
inant discourse surrounding Pushkar as a gathering place is anchored in
an assertion of similarity and universal expression.6 Those in the public
sphere, and especially brahman priests who control the axis of tourism and

Guest Is God: Pilgrimage, Tourism, and Making Paradise in India. Drew Thomases, Oxford University Press
(2019). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190883553.001.0001
28 Guest Is God

Figure 1.1. The donation office on Brahm Ghat.

pilgrimage, populate this discourse with an impressive collection of sayings

and phrases. One of the sayings most explicitly linked to sanatana dharma
is this: “hindu, muslim, sikh, isai: ham sab hain bhai bhai” (Hindu, Muslim,
Sikh, and Christian: we’re all brothers!). Although the translation does
little to convey either the rhyme of the Hindi original or the very palpable
pleasure that is apt to be exuded by its speaker, it does communicate the
basic point: regardless of religious identity, and in spite of our coming from
different places, we are all kin.
In this chapter, I will argue that although sanatana dharma has never had
a single, stable meaning, in Pushkar it is most frequently deployed as a code
word for universal belonging and religious brotherhood. It is what I consider
a technique of brothering,7 a process which, unlike the more common dialec-
tical relationship of “inscribing the other” and “inscribing the self,” suggests
that through blurring distinctions and drawing large enough boundaries, the
other can become the self.8 In terms of social formation, this suggests that
while people are predisposed to defining themselves in terms of othering,
they may be equally predisposed to seeing themselves as resembling those
 Others and Brothers 29

they once thought different. As one might expect, many of the diverse
elements that constitute this broad discourse of universalism in Pushkar
have complex genealogies that extend well beyond the town. Some find
echoes throughout the subcontinent, and others in communities outside the
Hindu fold. What makes Pushkar noteworthy is not the fact that such ideas
exist, but that they have been so successfully tethered to the town’s landscape,
are so effectively curated, and so widely pervade everyday life.
A brief note on methods: as with most of this book, my collaborators in
this chapter are primarily men. This has particularly important repercussions
when it comes to the idea of brothering. Patriarchy is very much the status
quo in Pushkar—​as it is in countless other places of religious conservatism—​
so, even though collaborators affirmed the inclusion of women in their image
of universalism, such ideas are nevertheless cast in the language of brother-
hood. “Brothering” is thus undoubtedly gendered. If we in the academy were
to consider the term as having some explanatory power beyond the confines
of Pushkar or India, we would have to be just as open to ideas of “sistering,”
“all-​ing,” or somewhat more clumsily, “sibling-​ing.”

Same Same, but Different

Ten years ago, Sandeep worked as a priest and tour guide in Pushkar. Like
many Parashar guides in their twenties, he would try to offer his services to
travelers and pilgrims at the nearby Brahma temple, Pushkar’s best known
tourist attraction. That the Brahma temple garners so much attention is a fre-
quent point of contention for many locals; they claim it is the lake that reigns
supreme. So, after some cajoling and a quick visit to the temple, Sandeep
would shepherd his flock through a twisty lane to Brahm Ghat. Right off the
street, an archway opens to wide descending stairs of checkerboard marble,
black and white, all the edges rounded and soft with wear. Tourists in tow,
Sandeep would reach the broad landing—​about forty feet clear until another
set of stairs to the water—​and talk about Brahma’s creation of the lake. This
led inevitably to an invitation for puja (ritual prayer) at the shore, performed
by either Sandeep or another Parashar brahman. The content of a puja is not
ironclad, ranging from about two to ten minutes and usually involving a ben-
ediction to the gods—​especially to Brahma and the lake9—​as well as a request
for good health and well-​being.10 The ceremony is conducted in a combina-
tion of either Sanskrit and English, or Sanskrit and Hindi (depending on the
30 Guest Is God

patron). Toward the end, the tourist-​turned-​patron promises to give a cer-

tain amount of money in the form of a “donation” to the priest and is offered a
red thread bracelet now imbued with the power of protection.
With solid English, Sandeep made more money than most but eventually
grew unsatisfied with what he called the “donation life.”11 Selling karma, as
he put it, was not for him. After a few years, he opened up a chai stand on
the outskirts of town, where he could timepass with the newspaper and his
thoughts. That is where I first met him, and where I would often go for hot
chai and good company. Many years after his stint as a tour guide, Sandeep
continued to maintain that Pushkar was a unique place made even more
unique by the fact that people of different religions and cultures were all
respected as equals. And it was on this topic that he brought up sanatana
dharma:

Sandeep: Here everyone is equal (saman). Sanatana dharma. All religions

are protected. It doesn’t mean you have to accept my culture; you just
need to be respectful. We don’t say you have to accept our culture, and it’s
not possible for you to accept it. But only respect. Because we can give you
respect, and get respect back.
Drew: So tell me a little more about sanatana dharma.
Sandeep: Sanatana dharma is the oneness of it all (sab ka ek)—​Hindu,
Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Catholic, Parsi. In it, there is neither caste, color,
culture, nor religion. We are all humans—​one. Caste, color, culture: we
make them. Why do we make them? Because we have different climates
and lifestyles, different ways. That’s why we make difference. Otherwise
we are all humans, all the same.

Although Sandeep’s gloss is unique in terms of poetic flair, it echoes a re-

markably pervasive sentiment that the Parashar brahman community evokes
when speaking on the topic. The “eternal religion” is that which brings people
together, erases difference, and ultimately allows us to see ourselves for what
we really are: the same. Integral to this rhetoric, as Sandeep implied, is the
notion that God (bhagvan) created humans, and all distinctions thereafter
are due to human perception. Any tear in the fabric of human society—​any
discrimination or subsequent act of violence—​cannot be blamed on the di-
vine. Importantly, this includes the very existence of different religions. God
would not lay claim to such a divisive concept as the possibility of plural
religions and is dumbfounded by the fact that we humans would forge these
 Others and Brothers 31

often antagonistic communities. As one friend exclaimed, “even God doesn’t

know what’s going on!”
According to many in Pushkar, the clearest evidence for the oneness of hu-
manity is the fact that our blood is red. It is an idea—​and biological reality—​
so frequently pointed out that its usage extends far beyond conversations
related to religion.12 I talked with a tour guide named Pankaj, both of us
nursing our bottles of Thums Up soda and debating issues like marriage and
politics and money, and how cultural differences shaped the way we saw the
world. He dramatically shook his head, and said with care: “You’re white
(angrez13) and we’re Indian. No! God made one caste: the human caste. There
are different castes and cultures, but this is wrong. Take you, or me, or him.
Look at your blood, or mine, or his; the blood is the same.”14 So the redness
of blood trumps the whiteness or brownness of what we see on the outside;
humanity—​the human caste—​is not drawn on racial lines.
Joyce Flueckiger encounters a similar assertion in her treatment of ver-
nacular Islam in South India, namely, that humanity is divided by only two
castes: men and women.15 For Flueckiger, this demonstrates the importance
of gender as a local organizing category in comparison to that of religion.
For our purposes, it is an example of how the language of a common hu-
manity is neither uniquely Hindu nor Muslim, practicing what it preaches
by making the border between the two religions increasingly porous in its
very usage.
Implicit in the redness of blood and unity of humanity is the fact that God,
too, is one. The idea that “God is one” is far from novel, though Rajesh, a
particularly energetic brahman who works on the ghats, made some inter-
esting connections. Rajesh is one of the more senior priests on Brahm Ghat,
performing pujas and directing the traffic of pilgrims and tourists as they
approach. He is seen more often than not blowing on a neon green whistle,
the color screaming out from the rest of his outfit, a white polo shirt tucked
into white slacks. Sitting on a broad marble bench by the ghat, Rajesh relaxed
his grip on the whistle and offered his thoughts on across-​the-​board oneness.
“God is one” (ishvar ek hain), he said with a warm smile. “We’ve given him dif-
ferent names. Our blood is red, your blood isn’t black. If you’re Muslim, your
blood is not black. It’s also red. Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Christian: we’re all
brothers! (hindu, muslim, sikh, isai, ham sab hain bhai bhai).”16 Moreover,
Rajesh was quite explicit in making a connection between God’s oneness and
the notion of brothering: if God is one, and all blood is red, then we are all
part of the same human family. “We’re all brothers.”
32 Guest Is God

But the “eternal religion” did not always look like this. When it first started
to carry momentum in the latter half of the 19th century, sanatana dharma
was far from standing for, in Sandeep’s phrase, the “oneness of it all.” Instead,
it took the role of “old-​time religion,” at least insofar as it was “a self-​conscious
affirmation of religious conservatism in a perceivedly pluralistic context.”17
At the time, there was ever-​increasing pressure on the old ways—​in partic-
ular, critiques of “idol worship” and caste—​put forward not only by Christian
missionaries but from the Arya Samaj and other Hindu reformist groups
as well.18 In their effort to defend the “timeless” and “eternal,” these earliest
proponents of sanatana dharma came to represent an amorphous Hindu or-
thodoxy, lacking any agreed-​upon set of beliefs or rituals but focusing on is-
sues like the preservation of brahmanical authority within the caste system,
the centrality of image worship, adherence to the Veda, and care for cows.19
Thus, this particular version of the “eternal religion” was conservative, ex-
clusive, and largely unconcerned with a more expansive vision of belonging.
Around the turn of the century, though, the idea of sanatana dharma as
orthodoxy “began to be superseded by a more potent symbol of organized
Hinduism: the Hindu nation.”20 We can mark the expansion of the term’s
reach with, among other things, the publication of Annie Besant’s Sanatana
Dharma: An Elementary Textbook of Hindu Religion and Ethics in 1903.21
Indeed, Besant’s advanced version of the textbook, published just a few
months after the elementary one, presents a case for sanatana dharma being
India’s great nonsectarian religious tradition22:

The name to be given to these books was carefully discussed, and that of
“Sanatana Dharma” was finally chosen, as connoting the ancient teachings
free from modern accretions. It should cover all sects, as it did in the an-
cient days. May this book also aid in the great work of building up the na-
tional Religion, and so pave the way to national happiness and prosperity.23

Aside from the call to move beyond sectarian distinction, what seems most
striking about Besant’s statement is how these dual objectives—​the shedding
of “modern accretions” and then the building up of “the national Religion”—​
can exist alongside each other without friction. This shows the extent to
which eternality and timelessness so suffused the discourse of sanatana
dharma that even for those trying explicitly to effect change in the modern
world (and while employing modern concepts, like “the nation”), an earnest
claim to “ancient days” remained.24
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