In the name of hope and holy men

Whenever she goes back home, Umabai says, her body starts hurting and her head starts spinning. “I feel better the moment I am back here,” she says. “Baba is not letting me go.” Sailani Baba had the reputation of freeing people ‘possessed by evil’. And the dargah built here in his memory came up in 1908 – the year he passed away. While the trust that governs the shrine runs only on the donations it receives, the place is rife with small-time independent godmen in the vicinity, who take advantage of the circumstances and extract money from poor people.
In Buldhana: faith in magic, fear in the mind

Bhausaheb has promised Rs. 1.25 lakh for the construction of the temple. He doesn’t have his own farmland, and lives in a rented one-room house, paying Rs. 1,500 per month. “Contributing to the temple is an honour we won’t get for the next three generations,” Bhausaheb says. “When the time comes in a year and half, we will keep the cash at Baba’s feet.”
Drowning in devotion, donations and debt

Despite struggling to make ends meet, Dahifale never had second thoughts about hosting that feast. “Otherwise, the goddess wouldn’t bless me and grant my wishes,” he says.
Superstition reaps a harvest of gold in Mohate

(all the quotes are from an ongoing series on superstition by Parth M. N)

For the Making of God-Men

A gullible people is the first need.
Stunned
we adore the static and its empty spiel,
and trace—muscle-memorized—
wrathful lords in stones silent otherwise.
On bloodied knees we kneel to alarm steadily strummed,
prone to easy frenzies, crescendoing on terror surely to come.
For us to live,
others—mirrored farther than they are—surely must die,
God-Men we say will save us in god’s eye.

Nestling enough sins to merit hectic purgation,
find us fishing piety in plays with hacks.
While in the trenches, tear us a piece of paradise promised
and find stacked
the honeyed crucible tipping in tributes—
all judge all jury spared.
God-men—still men—will see our reason we say.

Then ripping and slipping into the plastic skins of god,
God-men dictate divine desires to a gaping mass
hungry for succour and still with our pockets picked.
Leaving even rivers and forests with their holiness nicked.
Unlinking the hands—those lapsed from the regimented swoop—
meeting in the name of a prayer to rely,
God-men then claim whole a quilted sky.

Heaven and hell are conquered and stamped literal
God-Men rise untethered and free.
They efface the humane to make space for godliness—
perverted, twice-removed, distanced from soil and its sea.

God-Men command and god fights proxy fights,
God-Men scheme and god muffles the writhing of hunger—or tries.
God-Men point and god exacts his pound of flesh,
God-Men require and god irons the beating red afresh.

For the keeping of such God-Men,
people are to die after killing
with all the living dodged.
Every glance at the sky is sieved for strays,
while god—look around—has been looking away.
Until the headiness of this unholy ritual sends you reeling and still—
a life is to be lived.
Time is made to tick in rounds of grain, sweat, and seed,
and borrows only from those it can stretch out a calloused hand to—
and reach.
Muttering thanks to goodness for hands
patchworking, soldering and inked,
smeared in budding earth;
no longer foddering themselves
for glitzy panacea in prescribed mirth.
Slowly then, as quiet as now moving ripple,
deliverance takes the name of other ordinary people.