LAST YEAR, on a trip in southern India, I met a man who makes gods.
Srikanda Stpathy was both a Brahman priest and an idol maker: the twenty-third of a long hereditary line going back to the Chola bronze casters who had created some of the greatest masterpieces of Indian art at the beginning of the Middle Ages. His workshop was in Swamimalai, near Tanjore, from where the Chola dynasty once ruled the southern half of the subcontinent. There he and his two elder brothers plied their trade, making gods and goddesses in exactly the same manner as their ancestors: "The gods created man," he explained, "but here we are so blessed that we-simple men as we are-help create the gods."
His forefathers, explained Srikanda, had settled in Swamimalai in the thirteenth century after one of them accidentally discovered that clay made from the especially fine silt at the bend in the Cauvery River on the edge of the town was uniquely well suited to making the molds in which the bronze idols were cast. This business has now kept the family employed for nearly seven hundred years. "It is with the blessings of the Almighty," he said proudly, "that we have taken this birth, and are able to make our living in this way, creating gods in the form of man."
In fact, added Srikanda, business was actually very good at the moment, and the workshop had a backlog of orders that would take at least a year to clear. There was a growing market for what he called "show pieces" for tourists and collectors; but the family's main work was idols created in exactly the manner laid down by the ancient Hindu religious texts, the Shilpa Shastras, and specifically designed for temple worship. These days most of the orders were no longer from southern India, their traditional market, so much as from the new temples springing up wherever the Indian-and especially Tamil-diaspora had settled around the world, from Neasden to New Jersey. Their largest order ever had been from ISKCON, the Hare Krishna headquarters in California.
You could feel the surge of prosperity in Srikanda's workshop. It buzzed with energy and industry. Eight cross-legged workers, all stripped to the waist, were chipping, filing, finishing and decorating the cast bronzes, ready for shipping to temples around the world. One boy was busy polishing the idols with a bottle of Brasso; another rested the head of a nearly completed goddess on a wooden chock while he worked on her bangles and armlets.
Surveying this scene with obvious pride, Srikanda said he had only one worry: "Who knows what will happen here after my generation has passed away?"
My son is saying that he wants to become a computer engineer in Bangalore, and that he will give up the family business, so breaking our lineage. He is obsessed with computers-always in front of the screen, always playing computer games. Certainly I will make sure that he acquires these skills of ours-and already he can make good wax models. But if he gets good grades, and has the opportunity to study computer engineering at college, it would be unfair for me to deny him the opportunity he wants. We are inheritors of an unbroken tradition, generation after generation, father to son, father to son, for over seven hundred years. But my son says, this is the age of computers. And as much as I would want it otherwise, I can hardly tell him this is the age of the bronze caster.
The sort of changes threatening Srikanda's workshop in Swamimalai are being reproduced in different ways all over South Asia as India transforms itself at breakneck speed. The country is already on the verge of overtaking Japan to become the third-largest economy in the world, and, according to CIA estimates, the Indian economy is expected to overtake that of the United States by roughly 2050. Much has now been written about the way that India is moving forward to return the subcontinent to its traditional place at the heart of global trade, but so far little has been said about the way these huge earthquakes have affected the diverse religious traditions of South Asia. For they, much like India, are rapidly changing as the region reinvents itself.
While the West often likes to imagine the religions of the East as deep wells of ancient, unchanging wisdom, in reality, much of India's religious identity is closely tied to specific social groups, caste practices and father-to-son lineages, all of which are coming under threat as Indian society transforms beyond recognition. Certainly, as I have traveled around South Asia over the last two years, I have found many worlds strangely at odds. In many cases they have yet to find a peaceful reconciliation. This is how stories of mystics and miracles come to live side by side tales of the growing religious turbulence in both India and Pakistan.
