“Vernacular Religious Practice and Canonical Tradition”
by Dr. Rufin Jeremy Saul
In multiple settings around the world in recent decades, we see the rise of more emotive, transactional—indeed, vernacular—forms of religious practice. Of course, such vernacular religion has always been part of the continuum of religious expression, but religious studies has long tended to privilege religion based on scripture and philosophical ideals as the canonical norm. Nowadays, however, scholars such as Justin McDaniel have been calling for an expansion of what is recognized as normative religion to give more attention to popular non-scriptural practices.
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I would suggest that the consolidation of global capitalism since the 1990s has contributed to the impetus for people to seek religious experience that more directly addresses their everyday needs for wealth and wellbeing as opposed to philosophical ideals. The rise of prosperity religions, as discussed by Daromir Rudnyckyj and numerous others, demonstrates how religious practice has adopted the values of economic aspiration in line with the new order. The work of Jean and John Comaroff has even likened capitalism as a worldwide system to millenarian faith offering a kind of salvation for the (capitalist) faithful.
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My own research intersects with these impulses, primarily in tracking the rise of “miracle deities” to prominence in India, especially in the region known as Rajasthan. In the 1980s these deities gained the influential patronage of merchants in cities throughout India who traced descent to Rajasthan. Merchants’ acclaim for these deities’ miracles made a broader impact with India’s economic liberalization from 1991 on, which unleashed a public discourse of rapid prosperity. This patronage, and the example of merchants as models of divinely-favored upward mobility, has also attracted a diverse population of non-merchant devotees from throughout northwestern India, thus expanding vernacular devotional culture.
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None of these newly popular deities were known in classical scripture, although some dedicated devotees have recently sought to elaborate stories that explain their origins and miraculous nature, generally by linking these deities to pedigreed pan-Indian scriptural deities such as Hanuman, Krishna, and Devi. Whereas classical Hindu deities tend to remain somewhat aloof in devotees’ daily lives, these new shrine-based deities in Rajasthan, being regarded as avatars of the pan-Indian deities, appeal to devotees’ desire for immediate benefits in response to sincere prayer for divine miracles in education, career, marriage, health, and so forth. In this sense, vernacular practice has demonstrated increased relevance in an age of ambition for attaining the good life.
