Superstitions and India
The Power of Superstition in Public Life in India
Why are superstitions a part of public life in India? The modern mechanisms for risk-management or “disciplines” ranging from statistics to modern medicine exist side-by-side with superstitions in the country. The answer to why these disciplines have not penetrated into the pores of Indian society lies in the history of political power in India.
It is difficult to use the word “superstition” without imagining quotation marks around it. For, one person’s “superstition” is another person’s “religion”. But broadly speaking, we can use the word “superstition” to refer to practices marked by two features: (a) they entail human beings appealing to supernatural, extra-human forces for positive or negative interventions in their lives, and (b) these forces cannot be systematised into a set of religious doctrines. The second feature is the one that I find most interesting about superstitions.
You can believe in the death of god, the coming of a secular age, the Age of Reason, but you find superstitions in all societies. The little gods or goddesses or demons and devils – or whoever or whatever they are – that we hope will intercede on our behalf when we are in trouble, are so many in number and so indeterminate in nature that you cannot extinguish them all. They are by nature inconsistent and profoundly heterogeneous. That is why they cannot be refuted all at once. You may be superstitious in one context – in a completely secular context like a baseball game, an examination or a job interview – but not in another. Superstitions speak of some perennial and primitive condition of the human being, our deep sense of vulnerability in this world and our hope that miracles can happen at any time that we might in small ways even help in bringing them about. Superstition seems to be a human universal.
The moral-political question is: should superstition be a part of public life? Our private superstitions cause no
Why are superstitions a part of public life in India? The modern mechanisms for risk-management or “disciplines” ranging from statistics to modern medicine exist side-by-side with superstitions in the country. The answer to why these disciplines have not penetrated into the pores of Indian society lies in the history of political power in India.
It is difficult to use the word “superstition” without imagining quotation marks around it. For, one person’s “superstition” is another person’s “religion”. But broadly speaking, we can use the word “superstition” to refer to practices marked by two features: (a) they entail human beings appealing to supernatural, extra-human forces for positive or negative interventions in their lives, and (b) these forces cannot be systematised into a set of religious doctrines. The second feature is the one that I find most interesting about superstitions.
You can believe in the death of god, the coming of a secular age, the Age of Reason, but you find superstitions in all societies. The little gods or goddesses or demons and devils – or whoever or whatever they are – that we hope will intercede on our behalf when we are in trouble, are so many in number and so indeterminate in nature that you cannot extinguish them all. They are by nature inconsistent and profoundly heterogeneous. That is why they cannot be refuted all at once. You may be superstitious in one context – in a completely secular context like a baseball game, an examination or a job interview – but not in another. Superstitions speak of some perennial and primitive condition of the human being, our deep sense of vulnerability in this world and our hope that miracles can happen at any time that we might in small ways even help in bringing them about. Superstition seems to be a human universal.
The moral-political question is: should superstition be a part of public life? Our private superstitions cause no