Surinder S Jodhka, professor of sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, points out that recent decades have seen a marked rise in religiosity among Indians in the wake of liberalisation, the expansion of the middle classes, and hyper-consumption. Places of worship that were least frequented by people in the 1980s or the 1990s now attract large crowds. Which explains why there has been a jump lately in the pursuit of men and women considered holy and godly. Jodhka pauses to speak about the purposes of someone visiting a place of worship, for instance, a dera (a socio-religious centre in some states of northern India attended largely by Dalits among the Sikh community who had in the first place converted to the religion to escape caste discrimination in Hinduism but soon realised their plight was no different in their new religion). Jodhka has written extensively about it, explaining the rationale behind visits to the deras. "Why do people go to the dera? Without undermining the spiritual value that a visit to a dera has for a devotee, some of the more mundane reasons too are by no means insignificant. The most frequently stated reason for going to the dera is the fact that it fulfils one's mannat, meaning a wish or desire. 'If you have pura vishwash (complete faith and trust), your wish will certainly be fulfilled.' An equally important reason is the code of conduct that the gurus at deras insist on for their followers, the most attractive of these being the insistence on giving up consumption of liquor and other drugs. It is invariably the women of the house who insist on visiting the dera and, given the spiritual sanctity of the act, they manage to take their husbands and other male members of the family along," he writes in the paper 'Of Babas and Deras'.

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