Neoliberal Temple, Sacred Pleasure: Reconsidering the Akshardham Temple Complex in Delhi

Shreetoma Biswas [Email]

In anthropological thinking, theme parks – along with fairgrounds and carnivals – are regarded as performing the function of subverting social order by turning the world upside-down. However, the Akshardham Temple complex in Delhi, a recently-built Hindu religious theme park, challenges this formulation. Instead of inverting them, Akshardham reinstates the forces that structure the world outside, particularly those of globalisation, urban development, liberalisation, and class formation. Further, despite being a ‘temple’, Akshardham eschews ideas of religious austerity and embraces consumption, producing a novel kind of religious space that is compatible with neoliberal values. This sets Akshardham apart from other theme parks and prompts a re-evaluation of the political role of theme parks in the study of spatial forms.

Theme parks are one of the many pleasure places of the modern (mostly urban) world, along with shopping malls, arcades, and promenades. Academic writing often frames theme parks as the most recent descendants in a lineage that boasts of spaces such as fairgrounds and carnivals, arguing that they all perform the similar function of turning the world upside-down (Cross and Walton 2005, 62). However, the Akshardham Temple complex in Delhi, a recentlybuilt Hindu religious theme park, challenges this formulation. Instead of inverting them, Akshardham communicates with and reinstates the forces that structure the world outside, particularly those of globalization, urban development, liberalization, and class formation. Further, despite being a ‘temple’, Akshardham eschews ideas of religious austerity and embraces consumption, producing a novel kind of religious space.

This essay examines the ways in which Akshardham echoes but also diverts from existing understandings of theme parks, as well as the processes through which it reconciles traditional Hindu ideas of austerity with consumptive practices. It begins with a brief history of theme parks in England and the USA, by which Akshardham has been inspired. It then discusses the economic and religious context in which Akshardham is situated, and to which it responds. This is followed by an overview of the Swaminarayan sub-sect that built Akshardham, as well as a description of the architectural features and attractions within the temple complex. Finally, it moves onto an analysis of the kinds of consumer-friendly religiosity, liberal citizenship, middle-classness and spatial politics it produces. The essay concludes by considering the manner in which Akshardham produces a new urban topography, and why that sets it apart from other theme parks.

From pleasure places to edutainment: A brief history of theme parks

The theme park had its predecessors in medieval English and Welsh trade fairs, rural hiring fairs, and urban pleasure gardens going back to the 12th century, complete with acrobats, freak shows, and fireworks displays (Cross and Walton 2005, 39). But the format of the modern theme park understood as “a large, enclosed area controlled by a single company regulating or directly owning various entertainments within” (Cross and Walton 2005, 39) is directly traceable to 18th- and 19th-century urban and provincial seaside resorts such as Coney Island located east of New York City, and Blackpool close to the English county of Lancashire. Both were located close to rapidly expanding commercial and urban industrial activity from which they drew their crowds. While Coney Island, comprising a “smattering of cheap wooden bathhouses, eateries, saloons, gypsy fortune-tellers, and ballad singers” was popular among New York’s diverse crowds, with advances in transportation opening access to the poorest of classes, Blackpool built up a reputation among the provincial gentry as a polite destination for sea-bathing cures and annual visiting seasons (Cross and Walton 2005, 11-12, 15-16).

What also distinguished the two was their temporality: the proximity of Coney Island to New York and the short summer season meant that both the crowds and the attractions were transient (Cross and Walton 2005, 15, 49-50). On the other hand, the visitors at Blackpool came from closely-knit communities, with whole towns going on holiday together and often staying on for as long as a week. As a result, anonymity was harder to maintain and infrastructures such as rooming houses were permanent (Cross and Walton 2005, 16-17). With a combination of attractions such as dime museums, sideshows and mechanical thrill rides, and an architectural fantasyland comprising, for instance, an “electric Baghdad” complete with spires and colonnades, and a 375-foot tall and fully illuminated Beacon Tower (Cross and Walton 2005, 40-45), Coney Island and Blackpool both provided an escape from the drudgery of industrial life. Comparing it to the ancient Roman mid-December saturnalia which allowed “unrestrained indulgence in food, drink, sex and aggression,” Cross and Walton argue that Coney Island and Blackpool served as a sort of industrial saturnalia, offering a “world upside down” that enabled a “psychological release for people who daily endured the rigours of scarcity and the humiliation of authority” (2005, 61-62).

Removed from the “dirt and danger of the carnival world of freaks, barkers and thrills rides” (Cross and Walton 2005, 167) that Coney Island and Blackpool represented, Disneyland, opening in Southern California in 1955, offered a new kind of theme park. While carrying forward the “hyperreality” characteristic of the former, Disneyland sought to “control and tidy nature and history…not to mock, bend, or parody them as did Coney” (Cross and Walton 2005, 168). What Walt Disney pioneered was a “culture of the cute” that rendered the dangerous, mysterious and unpredictable world of animals, freaks and physical thrills innocent, controllable, and less sexual. This was not only in response to the middle American family’s need for a lowest common denominator of culture, set at the level of the child, but also out of an imperative to “replace the magical charm of belief in the supernatural and fascination with disaster with the child’s belief that ‘dreams can actually come true’” (Cross and Walton 2005, 178).  Its attempt to substitute religious or supernatural beliefs indicates Disneyland’s ability to offer a new kind of religious pilgrimage “where a three-dimensional site (a ride instead of a church or a holy city) gave physical depth and reality to a set of stories and symbols (based on movies instead of scripture) and allowed the faithful to walk in the steps of the divine (or in this case to ride through a fantasy space of Snow White or Tom Sawyer)” (Cross and Walton 2005, 176). Further it was able to communicate the timelessness of these fantasies over and above the ever-changing present (Cross and Walton 2005, 184).

This ability of theme parks to foster a quasi-religious imagination is what makes the entertainment and pleasure they provide useful as tools for spirituality, despite religious calls for asceticism. Take for instance, the case of the Florida-based Holy Land Experience (HLE), which describes itself as a “living, Biblical history museum” and is testimony to the ways in which Christianity today “can be reinterpreted to fit a commercial, entertainment-focused enterprise”, or ‘edutainment’ (Chmielewska-Szlajfer 2017, 545). Chmielewska-Szlajfer uses Boorstin’s concept of “pseudo-event” and Baudrillard’s “hyperreality” to argue that through its exaggerated reproduction of Biblical episodes, the HLE produces an ‘authentic’ religious experience, not by reproducing the original event, but by eliminating the very need for the original altogether and substituting it with a provincial version that is far more accessible due to its familiar aesthetic (Chmielewska-Szlajfer 2017, 548). Further, by relating Protestant Christianity to individual accumulation and national development, the HLE successfully links religion with capital and the nation. Both these themes are echoed in the case of Akshardham.

A final theme that cuts across the above-mentioned theme parks is their appeal to middle-class respectability and morality. Most of them introduced an admission charge at their gates that effectively “excluded undesirables who threatened the social tone of the park” (Cross and Walton 2005, 39). In Coney Island and Blackpool, the aristocrats and bureaucrats who owned resort property excluded “gypsy fortune-tellers, pushcart merchants, target game stalls and prostitutes” who sought clients among the crowd (Cross and Walton 2005, 19). Disneyland appealed to middle-class sensibilities through various visual clues such as licensed merchandise shops, cleanliness, staff decorum and manicured sceneries that replaced the ‘huckstering of food-sellers’ and ‘trinkets of dubious cleanliness’ (Cross and Walton 2005, 171). What is interesting is the role that architecture played in producing controlled pleasure. Commenting on the thrill rides at Coney Island, Cross and Walton observe that the “diffusion of desire across a wide array of simulations at the amusement park in effect made crowds playful but peaceful and self-constrained…childlike appeals, a large visual sensuality, and boisterousness were brakes on promiscuity and mob behaviour” (2005, 77). This preoccupation with middle-class respectability is strongly echoed in the case of Akshardham as well.

Situating Akshardham: Economic Liberalisation and Hindu Nationalism

Before launching into the temple itself, it is important to briefly review the political and religious context in which Akshardham is situated, and to which it responds. In 1991, the Indian economy was liberalised by the P. V. Narasimha Rao government, which loosened governmental controls and interventions in the functioning of private economy (Saxena and Sharma 1998, 247). Thus, liberalisation signalled a transformation in national political culture, in which Nehruvian state socialism and the Gandhian ideal of austerity was replaced by an impetus to consume newly available commodities as a sign of India’s integration in the global economy (Fernandes 2006, 29-30, 59). Consumers, then, were consuming not just commodities, but a new, globalising national image that these commodities collectively symbolised.

The principal actor in the new economy was a rapidly growing urban middle class. Middle class families would often overextend themselves financially to obtain the commodities that were symbolic of the new globalising culture. Further, they engaged in deliberate practices such as exhibition-visiting to acquire the aesthetic and cultural knowledge required to partake in new consumption practices. In attempting to acquire new aesthetic-based distinctions, the new middle class was effectively reworking old colonial class-based ideas of distinction such as ‘bhadralok (gentlemanly) respectability’ into new consumption-based categories that were appropriate to a liberalising culture (Fernandes 2006, 67-72).

The dialogue between the liberalising state and its ‘respectable’ middle-class subjects produced new socio-spatial transformations, chiefly the proliferation of several civic organisations aimed at making visible the interests of the new middle class. Civic organisations such as the Mumbai-based Citizens Forum for Protection of Public Space (CFPPS) and the Bhagidari (people partnership) scheme initiated by the Delhi government produced a politics of spatial cleansing, focussing on “middle class claims over public spaces and a corresponding movement to cleanse such spaces of the poor and working classes” (Fernandes 2006, 139). Akshardham is, as will later be discussed, part of this “spatialized production of middle-class identity,” which is linked to the changing relationship between state and capital in the context of a liberalising economy (Fernandes 2006, 138-139).

A final point of interest is that the global move towards capitalism, of which post-1990s India is a part, has been found to be closely correspondent with growing religious fundamentalism (Saxena and Sharma 1998, 239-240). In India, religious fundamentalism since the 1980s has taken the form of Hindu fundamentalism, or Hindutva. The origins of Hindu nationalism can be traced to V. D. Savarkar’s ‘Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?’, where the pitribhumi (fatherland) and punyabhumi (holy land) are identified as the cradle of Hindu religion – in other words, only Hindus can be Indian patriots, not Indian Muslims or Christians (Saxena and Sharma 1998, 245-246). These ideas were carried forward by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Jan Sangh etc., all of which are now encompassed ideologically by India’s current ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).  

Scholars on Hindu religion have variously observed the incompatibility of Hinduism’s asceticism with the accumulative impetus of capitalism. Studying the different social orders produced by religion, Weber noted that Hinduism and India, by extension, was “intrinsically incapable of generating a capitalist system” and, consequently, modern democratic or liberal systems (Saxena and Sharma 1998, 242).  An exhaustive analysis of the unique features of Indian capitalism that make it compatible with Hindu nationalism is beyond the scope of this paper. What’s important to bear in mind is that the consumptive tendencies of the new Indian middle-class is represented in dominant public discourses as embodying the “liberalising nation-state” rather than a “Westernised global aristocracy” (Fernandes 2006, 32), which makes it amenable to radical nationalistic ideals. In Akshardham, Hindu nationalism and modern consumerism are brought together in a similar move.

Swaminarayan Hinduism, BAPS and the Akshardham Temple complex

The Delhi Akshardham Temple complex has been built by the Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), one of the main sects within the Swaminarayan movement, which is itself one of the fastest growing sub-sects of the Hindu religion. The movement is located within the larger Bhakti strand of Hinduism and is based on the teachings of the Hindu ascetic Bhagwan Swaminarayan. Swaminarayan Hinduism has a global following, the largest group being Gujaratis, which makes it the dominant form of transnational Gujarati Hinduism. There are Swaminarayan temples all over the world, with the Delhi complex being modelled after the smaller one in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, which is the native state of the current Prime Minister (Srivastava 2015, 192-193).

BAPS, like other Swaminarayan sects, has a long history of temple-building, with its temples being inspired by 10th-12th century western India Maru-Gurjara temples (Singh 2010, 49). Completed in 2005, the Akshardham Temple in Delhi is spread across 100 acres and cost $45,000,000 to build (Singh 2010, 47; Srivastava 2015, 195). There has been a fair bit of controversy surrounding the allocation of the temple’s present site to BAPS, with allegations that the then-ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), of which the BJP was the dominant partner, “smoothed the way for the Society to take over the land” due to the former’s “Hindutva leanings” (Srivastava 2015, 194). This allegation is particularly telling because the land in question was in an environmentally fragile zone near the Yamuna river, and the fact that around the same time, Nangla Machi, a slum colony in the same area was demolished and its residents resettled to pave way for a “beautification” drive involving the construction of “shopping plazas and arcades, promenades, and various leisure facilities (Srivastava 2009, 339).

The corporate quality of the complex becomes apparent as soon as one enters the complex: visitors arrive at the temple via chartered buses and cars that are “directed to a massive parking area, not unlike those that surround large shopping malls in the United States”, and the underneath of which are checked by volunteers with security devices. Visitors enter the complex through the Mayur (peacock) Gate, decorated with 869 peacocks, before moving into “a large covered hall with marble flooring, dim lighting, potted plants, and information counters”, behind which sit young women in “corporate saris” (Srivastava 2015, 195-196).

Once inside, a combined ticket gives one access to the complex’s key attractions which include the ‘Hall of Values’ or ‘Sahajanand Darshan’ comprising an audio-animatrix show that depicts scenes from Swaminarayan’s life; an IMAX theatre called Neelkanth Darshan; Sanskruti Vihar, which is a “boat ride through 10,000 years of Indian history”; a musical fountain called Yagnupurush Kund; a ‘Garden of Values; and finally, the temple itself surrounded by a moat (Srivastava 2015, 197). There are also multicuisine food courts and souvenir shops (Singh 2010, 50).

The show begins in the Hall of Values where the audience is first made to face a “large back-lit mock-granite rock that turns 180 degrees to reveal a figure chiselling away at the rock,” as the narration says, “Your life is in your hands,” before enumerating the principal teachings of Swaminarayan’s life. The audience is then ushered into a cinema theatre to watch a film about Swaminarayan, followed by a tour through four exhibition halls that contain dioramic scenes from Swaminarayan’s life. These dioramas comprise life-sized mannequins animated through a “combination of robotics, fibre optics, and light and sound”. This is followed by Neelkanth Darshan, an “IMAX show on an 85’ x 65’ screen” that depicts the key events in the life of Bhagwan Swaminarayan from childhood to adulthood. The IMAX show is followed by the boat-ride, described in advertisements as a “journey into 10,000 years of Indian civilisation in ten minutes”, and comprising mechanized boats that move on underwater tracks alongside life-sized tableaus that depict ancient Hindu rishis’ (ascetics) achievements in the fields of astronomy, medicine, armaments manufacture and warfare, mathematics, and democratic governance. Other important figures from Indian history are also depicted. What is striking is the lack of any representation of Mughal India or Islamic personalities. Next is the Garden of Values, also called the Garden of India, featuring manicured lawns and important figures from Indian history who are, once again, exclusively Hindu. Finally, the temple itself comprises “234 ornately carved pillars, nine ornate domes, twenty quadrangle shikhars, a spectacular Gajendra Pith (plinth of stone elephants), and 20,000 murtis and statues of India’s great sadhus, devotees, acharyas, and divine personalities.” It is surrounded by a moat called the Narayan Sarovar which “contains water from 151 rivers and lake” in keeping with “Vedic traditions of water pilgrimage.” Running around the moat is a colonnaded pink walkway allowing circumambulation (Srivastava 2015, 198-202).

With its animated shows, water displays and central shrine, the Delhi Akshardham successfully combines the temple with the museum and the theme park (Singh 2010, 50). In fact, Ramesh Swami, one of the swamis (ascetics) in charge, proudly admits that “a group of Swamis visited Disneyland Park and Universal Studios during the planning of the temple complex, and that several of the exhibitions were inspired by modern American equivalents (Srivastava 2015, 198). At the same time, the architectural features of the temple, both in appearance and structural properties are modelled on ancient and medieval temples at Mahabalipuram, Modhera and Dilwara. There is no use of steel or cement in the temple itself, which is made entirely of pink sandstone and white marble, with an infrastructure of “stone, sand and bricks, as was done at Mahabalipuram or Konarak” (Singh 2010, 56).

Moral middle-classness, Hindu nationality and respectable public space

At Akshardham, one observes the playing out of the notion of modern middle-classness, and the realignment of consumer practices, religiosity and urban development to this middle-class identity (Srivastava 2015, 191-192, 197). Srivastava describes the processes of consumption within Akshardham as “surplus consumption” and “moral consumption.” He defines surplus consumption as “consumption behaviour that unfolds through recourse to cultural symbols, meanings, and strategies generated across a number of time spans. The goods and experiences that are the objects of consumption are, as if, wrenched from a number of different contexts which are then effaced – or collapsed into indistinction – through the acts of consuming them.” This form of consumption provides consumers with a “strategy of engaging with the intensity of social and cultural changes introduced by (a number) of global forces.”

At Akshardham, surplus consumption unfolds through recourse to commodities and visual symbols that are connotative of global, corporate systems: the entrance lobby reminiscent of five-star hotels, the swamis walking around with Motorola walkie-talkies, and the brightly lit neon boards, t-shirts, keychains and baseball hats that are all indicative of a McDonald-like experience. Most importantly, these practices of consumption are not antithetical to that of religious frugality. Srivastava explains that at Akshardham, a very particular kind of middle-class identity is being forged, that of the ‘moral’ middle-class, “one that has control over the processes of consumption” because “it is only through consumption that one can demonstrate mastery over it.” Therefore, from the religious-nationalistic point of view, there is no apprehension about consumption itself, only a preoccupation with the “best way of consuming.” Such patriotic consumptive practices are part of a complex of other schemes such as the consumer awareness programme called Jago Grahak Jago! (Wake up, Consumer!) and the Hindu-oriented company Patanjali Ayurved which collectively advocate responsible and patriotic consumptive practices. Thus, tradition and consumerism are seamlessly brought together (2015, 202-211).

Akshardham’s use of exhibitions, tableaus and educational films for religious-nationalistic purposes in a manner similar to the HLE is indicative of “broader trends in the changing role of museums and the museal mode across the globe”, where there is a recourse to the didactic rhetoric of the museum to lay claim to “pan-Indian significance” and to “primordial roots” (Mathur and Singh 2015, 203, 213). Throughout the various exhibition halls and gardens, Hinduism in general, and Swaminarayan Hinduism in particular, is framed not in terms of ‘religion’, but in terms of the ‘nation’ (Singh 2015, 53). For instance, Neelkanth Darshan follows the travels of a young Swaminarayan all over India, representing a journey through space, while Sanskruti Vihar, the boat ride “through 10,000 years of Indian history” takes visitors on a journey across time. The Garden of Values implicitly identifies Hindu icons as being the only ones that matter, while the Narayan Sarovar symbolically encompasses India through its waters.

Together, these spatial, temporal and sensorial clues collapse Hindu-ness and Indian-ness, excluding all non-Hindu (especially Muslim) elements from its attractions (Singh 2010, 52-55, 60, 69-72). Singh observes that Akshardham, along with the rebuilt Somnath and Ram temples, is an “imaginative reinstatement” of old/destroyed Hindu temples to show what India could have been had Islam not ‘conquered’ India. As one of the many Gujarati-looking temples now being built all over the country, it also represents a gradual ‘Gujaratification’ of India over the past decade or so (Singh 2010, 74-76). Further, built from various historic/mythical references and assembled using ancient techniques and materials, Akshardham appears as a “brand-new relic from an earlier age” (Singh 2010, 57), thus dissociating religious ‘authenticity’ from ‘originality’, in a similar vein to the HLE. In the fantasyland of Akshardham, a sort of religious globalization takes form. A hybrid, multicultural-yet-standardized “McReligion” is created, where a metaphorical Mickey Mouse “hands out McSacred on a plate as devotees become consumers in the drive-through alleys of the McTemple” (Chatterjee 206, 133).

Akshardham’s spotless, marble-floored, colonnaded appearance is also part of a new spatial politics of middle-class assertion. The spaces and relationships created by the Bhagidari scheme, the CFPPS and Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) make possible and legal the building of ‘clean’ spaces such as Akshardham, and the simultaneous demolition of ‘unclean’ spaces such as Nangla Machi which “did not fit the look of a world-class city” and was a “nuisance to middle-class aspirations for a clean, green, safe city” (Da Costa 2016, 138). (Srivastava 2009, 345; 2015, 204-205). Akshardham, then, is illustrative of the ways in which the forces of creative economy, capital-rich diasporas, slum clearance, and ecological disregard co-constitute middle-class identity and public space in India (Da Costa 2016, 138-139).

Conclusion

Delhi is currently witnessing the unfolding of an “urban topography of moral middle-classness” (Srivastava 2009, 345) which is produced through a variety of forces, viz. housing strategies, consumptive practices, religiosity, exclusion, illegality, rightful citizenship and corporate-civic-state partnerships. These processes connect the state, global market forces, urban life and family (Srivastava 2009, 345) in a nexus whose implicit function is to communicate – nay, dictate – the criteria of ‘legitimate’ citizenship, and symbolically (or, in the case of Nangla Machi, literally) erase those who do not fit these definitions: principally, non-Hindus (particularly Muslims) and the poor. Akshardham is but one of the spaces within which this nexus is acted out and, so, reinforced.

However, it would be inappropriate to place Akshardham within the same category as other theme parks such as Coney Island, Blackpool or Disneyland. What makes Akshardham separate from the academic understandings of theme parks described previously is the fact that rather than demarcating itself as separate from the world outside, or turning it ‘upside-down’, Akshardham is “understood by its visitors and represented by its promoters as contiguous with the world outside.” The ideas of cleanliness, infrastructural development, efficiency, consumption, and technological ingenuity link it with “the world of toll-ways, highways, shopping malls, city ‘beautification’ and slum-clearance drives.” This makes Akshardham a “threshold space” rather than a world-turned-upside-down (Srivastava 2015, 206). This problematizes the very understandings of the theme park and its functions in scholarly writing. Akshardham, then, provides a lens into re-evaluating the political role of theme parks in the study of spatial forms.

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