Temples of 21st Century India

The Ramjanmabhoomi temple in Ayodhya is all set to be dedicated on the 22nd of January. The religious and cultural significance of this event is enough to mark it out as a major event in the long history of Indian civilization. However, it also reflects a new approach to thinking of our cultural legacy as an economic asset rather than as a burdensome liability that we need to drag around merely because of sentimental attachment.

In the first decade after independence, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru diverted much of the country’s scarce resources to build capital intensive projects such as mega-dams and public sector behemoths. These were dubbed as the “temples of modern India”. The messaging was deliberately designed to suggest that modern India was leaving behind wasteful spending on Hindu temples and shifting to more productive investments. Over time, some of these proved to be fruitful but most failed to deliver.

The same disdain for India’s cultural legacy was reflected in many other spheres. When it was decided to build a new city in Chandigarh, the architect Le Corbusier was specifically told to design it without any reference to India’s past. Even the British colonial government had taken the trouble to incorporate indigenous architectural features in their buildings, but not newly independent India. Indeed, so-called “modernist” building codes would enforce the drab concrete-box architecture that came to dominate our cities.

It was quite clear by the seventies that the experiment in Nehruvian socialism was a failure. The failure was recast by establishment economist Raj Krishna as the “Hindu rate of growth”. The message again was clear: India, with its Hindu roots, had failed Nehru and not the other way around.

The attitude towards cultural assets began to change in the nineties, coinciding with economic liberalization. Changes in hotel classification regulations meant that old palaces and forts, left to crumble over the previous half a century, began to be converted into heritage hotels. However, it was still about revival and preservation of pre-exiting cultural assets.

The Kashi Vishwanath corridor in Varanasi was an experiment in shifting the game from preservation to enhancement. Thus, a pre-existing temple complex was enhanced by re-visioning its environs in a completely different way and complementing it with modern amenities such as a new airport terminal, a connecting highway and so on . The results have been an unambiguous success with the number of visitors to the site jumping ten times between 2019 and 2023. In turn, this has generated jobs and incomes in sectors such as hotels, restaurants, travel, religious services, boating, construction and so on.

The construction of a grand temple in Ayodhya marks yet another shift as it goes beyond enhancement to effectively creating a new cultural asset. Till recently, even practicing Hindus who may have visited Vaishno Devi and Tirupathi, would rarely express a desire to visit Ayodhya. It was almost as if people did not want the actual place to disappoint the grand imagery from the epic that they carried in their head. That has clearly changed now – and it is not the old but the young who seem most enthusiastic (just wander along the ghats of Varanasi these days to understand what I mean).

A brand new airport, an upgraded railway station, hotels of every grade, heritage restoration, and a ring road are among the large number of investments being completed or in the pipeline. Along with new attention being given to places like Gorakhpur, Varanasi and Prayagraj, the spurt in investment in Ayodhya has brought economic buzz to eastern and central Uttar Pradesh. This is the first time in centuries that this region has received so much investment – and it is all due to temples!

Interestingly, the idea of Hindu temples as economic hubs is a return to ancient roots. The temples of ancient India were more than just religious centres but clustered a wide range of activities ranging from dance, theatre and music to medicine and martial arts. Importantly, major temples acted as banks that financed infrastructure, commerce and industry. By the medieval period, India’s outsized clout in global supply-chains was driven by corporatized guilds and large merchant fleets that, in turn, were financed by a network of temple-banks. This is the reason that Hindu temples held so much gold. The systematic plundering and destruction of these temples, therefore, was as much an economic catastrophe as a religio-cultural one.

In recent years, many state governments across India have woken up to the potential of their cultural assets. Assam is investing in a Kamakhya temple corridor, Madhya Pradesh in the Mahakaleshwar temple in Ujjain, Odisha in the Jagannath temple in puri and so on. The cleaned-up corridor leading to the Golden Temple in Amritsar has changed the whole experience.

Pilgrimage tourism in not a new concept. Cities like Rome, Jerusalem and Mecca have long leveraged their religious importance to generate economic activity. What has changed is India’s unapologetic embracing of these assets. Thus, it turned out that the temples of twenty-first century India are actual temples!

(Sanjeev Sanyal is Member, Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council. All opinions are personal).