The latest issue of India Today, a special issue on youth “Looking Ahead in Anger,” carries my article “Forfeiting a Religion.” (To get a subscription to India Today, go here.) The article follows:

Lord Hanuman is the biggest land-grabber in Bihar. I had heard this often when I was growing up in Patna. If you wanted to make an illegal encroachment on any piece of public land, all you needed to do was erect a small brick temple with a statue in it, in robust red of course, of the monkey-god regarding with an even eye all acts of greedy humankind.

I later learned that avarice is universal. And the instrumental use of religion has a rich and varied history. Nevertheless, whenever I witness the use of faith and religiosity for narrow ends, I find there the echo of the small-town mentality that surrounded my childhood. This is true particularly of events in big cities. In the papers, I come across news of communal riots in the slums surrounding a metropolis and think to myself that the small town has won over the city.

This is only my bias. Sociological research suggests that religion is used as an instigator of violence much more commonly and effectively in cities. Instances of religious violence are comparatively rare in the hinterland. My prejudice if not my ignorance can be explained only by going back to what I had seen on display in the Patna of my youth. The Chief Minister of Bihar at that time, Jagannath Mishra, publicly offered prayers whenever a new political struggle loomed. He sat bare-backed at yajnas and poured ghee into the sacred fires. Mishra’s fingers were heavy with rings prescribed by different spiritual advisers; amulets and necklaces were draped around his neck. Sacrifices were consecrated to the gods outside his official residence, and, at least during one difficult crisis, also on the lawns of the Bihar Bhawan in New Delhi.

Lalu Yadav followed suit with even greater candour and aplomb. His appeals to the gods have been more regular and lavish than his appeals for bail in the course of the fodder trial. But the Lalu raj has also given birth to a new form of religiosity in the minds of the masses. Widespread corruption as well as nearly total decline of public institutions in Bihar led to such despair among the people that, during visits to Patna or Deoghar, I have been able to explain the ever-lengthening lines of the devout outside the temples to the hard reality of poverty and unemployment.

But religion in small towns isn’t only the cynical creation of the Jagannath Mishras and Lalu Yadavs of this world. In his exuberant debut novel Patna Roughcut, the writer Siddhartha Chowdhury gives a glimpse of the happy, innocent pleasures that have always been a part of religious festivals. Here is Chowdhury’s description of Durga Puja in Patna’s Kadam Kuan:

“Harryda used to play the dhaak in the mornings during aarti and in the evenings he would dance the dhunoochi. It used to be the highlight of the evenings and people, especially girls, from all over Patna would come over and the pandal would be filled to capacity. And Harry before the idol would dance like a man possessed. Long clotted hair flying all over the place, the torso bare gleaming with sweat, eyes teary and red with smoke, and each time some of the burning embers singed his body, the Bengali girls would go, ‘aah ma go’. Each year many girls would come and watch him dance and play the dhaak and invariably lose their hearts to him.”

Nostalgia, a quality that I share with Chowdhury, has given the past a sweetness it didn’t always have. Maybe because I’m older, and more cynical, I remember the frenzy with which, as kids, we collected chanda for the festivals from the local traders and our neighbours. I recall also the competition between the mohallas and the inevitable fights in which knives were used. And yet, even as I recount these details, the past appears sacred to me—because what has almost completely vanished from the contemporary cultural landscape in Bihar is that quality of humaneness that gives religion or any other social practice its essential value.

Here’s a scene from the present.

I’m sitting at dhaba an hour away from Patna during the election season when a jeep festooned with flags stops by. The campaigners are all young men barely out of their teens, some of them wearing cheap sunglasses and handkerchiefs covering their collars to soak the sweat. The order chilli-chicken and roti. They drink the bottled beer even though because of electricity failure the beer is warm. The youth are discussing election strategy.

One of them says, “Eh Ranjan, ask your uncle to capture the voting booth.” The Ranjan in question, bearded and shallow-chested, says, “He does not do this kind of work.”

But the first guy is not to be put off. He asks, “Why? He gets girls kidnapped all through the year? What is wrong with votes?”

The landscape occupied by these youth isn’t one from which Hanuman or any other deity has been entirely banished. Rather, gods exist as middlemen to prosperity. They are treated as superior because of their power, but devotion is more in the form of a bribe. “Dear God, I will offer you laddus worth 500 rupees if you help me steal the Tata Qualis that Inspector Choubey next door has bought.”

Is this bad? No doubt. But it can also get worse. Imagine a place where the gods are no longer seen as having any power. They can neither help the hoodlum—nor can they save you from him. In that nihilist wasteland, you won’t even need the excuse of a Hanuman mandir to occupy public land. I can understand why many people would prefer the better compromise, and agree to share space with Lord Hanuman instead of his outlaw creatures.