The God Market In India: It Is Not Always A Love Story

Assorted Hindu holy men have never stopped charming Western documentary makers. Babaji: an Indian love story (Dir Jiska Roberts, the Netherlands, 71 mins), explores the life of Babaji Basant, who says he is more than a 100 years old, as he lies in a homemade grave where is wife is buried waiting to be reunited with her. People flock to him to be healed.

Babaji is an indigent man. But the god market in India is booming. It has 2.5 million places of worship but 1.5 million schools and a mere 75, 000 hospitals for a population of over a billion.

Religious tourism is the single biggest component of packed tour. One temple complex in India alone had 23 million visitors in 2009. That temple has more than $200 million in bank deposits and earns more than half that amount every year, apart from the gold and silver offerings made by the devotees. Devotees tonsure their head there, which again brings in a tidy sum for the temple. In a 2007 survey, 30% of Indians said they had become more religious in the past five years.

Some Indian documentary makers have been taking a more critical look at the effect of organised religion in India. Among them is Rakesh Sharma, who explored how Hindu Right-wing parties organised large-scale killings of Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002 (The Final Solution). More than 100,000 DVDs of the films have been distributed in India and it won several international awards. The Indian government refused to show it at two film festivals.

Anand Patwardhan's documentary In the Name of God explores the rise of Hindu fundamentalism. In another documentary, Father Son and Holy War, Patwardhan explores the relation between religion, violence and male identity. Does the root of India's recent bloodshed - perhaps all bloodshed - lie in male insecurity, itself an inevitable product of the very construction of "manhood?