Faith Accompli

IN July 2021, as India was emerging from the deadly second wave of the Covid pandemic, Hormazd Khambata’s mother was rushed to the hospital. Doctors suspected she had contracted Covid, leading to an abnormal buildup of fluid in or around the lungs (a condition known as pulmonary oedema), and her condition was deteriorating rapidly. Khambata, a resident of Mumbai’s Gamdevi area who had recently graduat­ed from college, did what he often does in moments of crisis. He turned to god. He vowed to give up all non-vegetarian food and alcohol if his mother’s life was spared. In about two hours, Khambata says, he got a call from the hospital. Her Covid test reports had come back negative. “The doctor said she had caught pneumonia, and her condition was now improving,” Khambata says. Two days later, she was back home.

Khambata, a Zoroas­trian by birth who also observes Hindu festivals and prays to Hindu deities, had always been reli­gious by nature. Now, his faith became even more resolute.

“God had intervened and saved her life,” he says.

Khambata’s deep faith is representative of a feature visible among the young in India today. They aren’t just religious, but proudly so. Their bhakti fills up our social media, has led to the rise of ‘faith influencers’ who condense ancient religious wisdom into pithy homilies for Instagram reels, and is leading to a boom in religious travel and the business of faith-based apps. One only needed to travel to Prayagraj during the Mahakumbh earlier this year or watch the social media posts Gen Zs uploaded of their holy snans to gauge the scope of their religiosity. According to some estimates, around half of all the 66 crore individuals that the UP government claimed took the holy dip comprised individuals below 30 years of age. There are not that many studies about the religiosity of Indian Gen Zs, but one can infer at it by looking at papers that examine the faith of the larger Indian population. A 2021 Pew Research Center study, for instance, noted that as many as 97 per cent of Indians said they believed in god, with roughly 80 per cent being “absolutely certain” that god exists. Even our most popular songs online tend to be devotional ones. The nearly 10-minute long vid­eo of Hanuman Chalisa, featuring Gulshan Kumar and sung by Hariharan, which was uploaded on YouTube back in 2011, be­came the first Indian video on YouTube to cross three billion views back in 2023. Today, it has more than 4.5 billion views and 18 million likes.

India has always been religious, but the young were not religious enough was also a complaint forever on the lips of the elderly. Even in movies, the young tended to be a bit shy about their en­gagement with religion. In Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), for instance, the character played by Shah Rukh Khan who represented a type of Gen X and millennial cool—he even wore a chain with the word cool would visit temples but secretly. When he is caught by another char­acter on one such visit, a mortified Khan explains he does so because boys don’t visit temples. With millennials, you could be a temple-going individual, but it wasn’t cool to be seen doing so. This is different with Gen Zs, and you only have to follow the Instagram accounts of the current Bollywood stars, as they make their way from one temple to another, to know that being faithful isn’t seen as uncool anymore.

Khambata is repre­sentative of the religiosity sweeping through the young today. Since he follows the Zoroastrian faith, he observes its festivals and prays at Parsi fire temples. But a large part of his devotion is directed towards the Hin­du faith. He prays to the images of Hindu deities at the altar in his house, vis­its Hindu temples all the time, reads religious texts and watches religious shows on TV, and some­times even uses online services to order prasads from temples. Back in 2021, he criss-crossed through the length and breadth of the country, as he went on pilgrimage to some of Hinduism’s most sacred sites, including the 12 revered jyotirlingas, or shrines dedicated to Shiva. He travelled alone and made these journeys across 11 months. The pandemic was very much around then, and booking darshans at these sites was always a challenge. Last year, he took leave from work and spent a small fortune to visit the Ram temple in Ayodhya. And this year, although he couldn’t visit the Maha­kumbh, he had a friend bring back a bottle of the sacred water, with which he bathed immediately. Since he took the oath, he’s also continued to abstain from alcohol and non-vegetarian food.

“It [being religious] has changed me a lot,” Khambata says. “So many of my bad habits have gone away. I used to have anger issues, anxiety, and I used to drink too. All that has gone. I have also become more humble, more at peace now.”

This rise in Gen Z spirit­uality comes at a time—or rather is a manifestation of—of a larger assertion of the Hindu identity on the public square. Some of this interest among the young could be triggered, as sociologists tend to believe, by a need to seek solace and meaning in a turbulent world, one which is modernising at a rapid pace and where there are anxieties over jobs and careers and the place of the young in the world.

Giresh Vasudev Kulkarni, the founder of Temple Connect, a firm that provides information on Hindu temples to global pilgrims and which works in the temple management space, points also to the role played by social media. “In earlier generations, when you look at the devotional space, there wasn’t this much awareness… In present times, in this time of Gen Zs, everybody is connected and aware,” he says. He talks about how this increased awareness of sacred spaces, coupled with improvements in infrastructure to access these sites, is leading to huge footfalls, especially of the young, at pilgrimage spots. “In earlier times, people after they had crossed their 40s and 50s, once their responsibilities were over, that is when they began to visit these places. Today, it is the era of doing it just now. Everyone wants everything now. So with greater information and awareness [about sa­cred places], and improved connectivity… [it’s all changing],” he says.

Khushi Soni, a 24-year-old travel con­tent creator from Delhi, posts a lot of content on spiritual destinations on social media. As someone who liked to travel, she began posting content around her trips around two years ago, but it was her posts on spiritual destinations that began to generate a lot of traction. “Whenever I travel to these places and post about them, I get a lot of views and interaction. There is a lot of curiosity, people want to know more about these places, and how to get there,” Soni says. “One of my videos on Kedarnath got over a million views in a very short period of time.” Soni now travels widely across holy sites in India, looking for new details and aspects to cover, and has even begun to use her online popularity to organise and lead trips for others to spiritual destinations.

Although she never identified herself as particularly religious, she has become quite so in re­cent years, she says. “Since I have begun travelling, and seeing how religious others are, I think it has rubbed off on me too. There is a kind of peace you find in sacred places that you can’t get any­where else,” she says.

WHILE Gen Zs have embraced spirituality, they do so on their own terms. Travel firms now have to combine faith with fun, coupling temple darshan with paraglid­ing or bungee jumps to attract the young. “We are witnessing a marked shift—today’s new-age travellers, particularly young millennials and Gen Zs, are coupling spiritual journeys with immersive cultural and adventure experiences,” says Rajeev Kale, president and country head of Holi­days, MICE and Visa at the travel services firm Thom­as Cook (India). “To cater to this growing demand, we have strategically designed… a combination of spiritual breaks with unique local experiences and outdoor adventure like white-water rafting and night trekking in Vaishno Devi,… bungee jumping in Rishikesh, magnificent views of sunsets from the ghats, boating on the Ganges or exploring the weavers’ vil­lage in Varanasi, as well as guided cuisine or cultural trails by local experts.”

As the young embrace spirituality, one result has been the boom in faith-based apps through which you can get darshans in distant holy temples, offer pujas or light lamps remotely, or even consult astrologers. Punit Pandey, the cofounder of a popular astrology-based app As­troSage, admits that much of the recent growth in the user base of such apps is in the Gen Z and millennial cohort. Pandey always knew, he says, that there would be a lot of demand for services connected to astrology and spirituality. Back in the late 1990s, during visits to shops that sold assembled personal computers, he would notice, that the two softwares most buyers wanted installed were pirated copies of Microsoft Office and the kundali (horoscope).

“In the past, accessi­bility was the problem. I would say, in general, tech­nology has democratised it,” he says. Given the wide scale adoption of services such as his by youths, and the growth of AI in online astrolo­gy, where AI chatbots can accurately calcu­late horoscopes and give instant answers to the most pressing or puzzling queries, he believes there will be even wider adoption in the future. “Generally, in India, astrologers are consulted for only a handful of occasions, say marriage. But as access grows and people become more comfortable with it, they start using astrology for day-to-day things. For instance, before buying some property, or even before buying a mobile phone,” he says. He’s already beginning to see some of this. His AI chatbots get questions that are much more daily events based (like questions related to the stock market) and also of a much more intimate nature (such as queries about their health or sex lives), than those posed to the human astrologers on his platform. “They can ask these questions because they know there is nobody on the other side. So as more youths come to platforms such as ours and interact with AI, they are also transforming the way astrology is used,” he says.

Ravindra Yadav, a 26-year-old from Delhi, doesn’t use online astrol­ogy. But he is someone who puts a lot of stock in religion and spirituality. Originally from a town close to Ayodhya in UP, he had a religious upbringing but says he lost his way when he moved to Delhi for a college education. “I began eating non-vegetar­ian food for the first time. There was the nightlife. It was all about being cool,” he says.

In the last couple of years, Yadav has begun adopting a more religious life again. He’s returned to being a vegetarian, goes on pilgrimages quite often, volunteers at the local gurdwara during his free time, and counsels his old friends to quit smoking and assume a more spiritual life. “When I be­gan going on pilgrimage, I discovered that religion is the great bind that ties us all. When I tell people I’m visiting such and such temple, complete strangers just open their homes to me,” he says.

Back in Mumbai, when asked about how becom­ing more spiritual has changed him, Khambata talks about the time when he went on a boat ride on the Ganga in Varanasi. “It was around 5PM and fairly quiet. We had come close to the Manikarnika Ghat, where I could see a body being burnt. The boatman suddenly said, ‘Look, that is where life ends. Everything we do through our lives—our fears, anxieties, or the things we do to keep appearances— everything is pointless.’ And that really struck a deep chord,” Khambata says. “Because really, that is the truth.”

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