When WhatsApp Groups Became Temples - Groups Became

My mother-in-law hasn't missed morning puja in forty-seven years. Not through pregnancies, not through my father-in-law's bypass, not during lockdown when Hanuman Mandir stayed shut for months.

During lockdown I noticed her phone — the Redmi her grandson forced on her — sitting on the wooden stool where the bell goes. Varanasi livestream. Her neighbour was texting her when to ring the bell so they could do it together.

I thought it was ridiculous, honestly. The whole point is the camphor and the crowd and that particular echo. What comes through a phone? But I watched her face during those sessions and she looked exactly the same as she always had. Eyes closed. Somewhere else.

I still don't know what to make of it.

Modernity as solvent

There's a certain type of dinner party in South Delhi where people assume all this is on its way out. The temples, the rituals, the good-morning-Ganesh forwards. Technology will dissolve it eventually. 

People are video-calling jyotishis and pandits at 2 AM, texting about job interviews, discussing games and chances in the odds96 app and getting their kundalis analyzed by what I can only assume is some combination of algorithm and actual human.

But… what's actually happened is the opposite. In my family — we're spread across six cities now — religious practice has gotten more intense, not less. More daily. My son Arjun knows slokas I never learned. There's an app. My wife put it on his phone two years ago. Every morning a verse comes through with the Sanskrit, the transliteration, the meaning. He doesn't think about it. It just arrives.

My cousin Vikram in Bangalore calls himself basically atheist. He has the same app. "For the poetry," he told me. I didn't push.

Something to live for

My father's brother is seventy-three. His knees went years ago. The steps to Govind Dev Ji might as well be Everest.

His son Rohit — obviously he works in tech — mounted a tablet in the puja room last year. Connected to the temple livestream, which runs twenty-four hours. Chacha does darshan every morning now. He watches the aarti. He's in Facebook groups dedicated to the deity. He gets into arguments with strangers about the correct pronunciation of specific bhajans. It's given him something, my aunt says. She means something to live for.

The priests noticed. They started turning the camera to show the deity's face more directly at certain moments. They acknowledge the online viewers now. Nobody planned this. There was no strategy document. It just happened.

You didn't need a building

There's a priest at a temple near CP. My family has gone there for three generations. I had chai with him last month. He was on his phone the whole time. Forty-seven thousand Instagram followers.

"The young ones don't come," he said. "But they watch my reels. I explain why we break coconuts. Why we go clockwise. Things their grandparents knew."

This surprises the foreign journalists who show up to write about ancient-tradition-meets-modern-India. They expect the pandits to be resisting technology. Instead the pandits colonized it. My kids' Quran teacher — we live in that kind of Delhi neighbourhood, the kind where this coexistence still feels normal — does classes on Zoom now. Students in three countries.

People assume Indian religion happens in temples. But so much of it was always portable. The teaching, the stories, the daily remembrance. You didn't need a building for most of it. Technology just made that obvious.

I should say what bothers me

The family WhatsApp has become a river of garbage. Good-morning images at 5 AM. Videos claiming ancient Indians invented airplanes. Sometimes things about other communities that make me close the app and not open it for the rest of the day.

And Arjun. He can recite the Hanuman Chalisa perfectly. I tested him last week — what does it mean? What does Hanuman represent? Why did Tulsidas write it? He shrugged. The app taught him words. It didn't teach him anything else.

We're building something that's deeper and shallower at the same time. More people knowing more texts. Fewer people understanding them. I don't know what this means. I'm suspicious of anyone who claims to.

Last Diwali. Seven households on one video call during Lakshmi puja. My parents in Rohini. My brother in Pune. My sister in Dubai, where it was still afternoon. Meera's parents in Lucknow. Us near Saket.

My father held his phone up to show the murti while reciting the aarti. Everyone had diyas lit. My niece in Dubai was still in her school uniform because of the time difference. My nephew in Pune kept unmuting himself by accident. We lost my sister's connection entirely for two minutes.

It was a mess. Nothing like the Diwalis I remember, when the whole joint family was in one room and you could smell the sweets from the kitchen and nobody had to think about whether anyone was present because of course everyone was present.

But everyone was there. That was the thing. My mother cried afterward. She said it was the first time in fifteen years she'd done Lakshmi puja with all her children. I keep thinking about her face in that moment.

The form keeps changing

My father would have found the whole arrangement absurd. His father found printed puja guides improper — the prayers were supposed to be memorized and passed down, not read from a booklet. Each generation apparently accommodates what the last one couldn't imagine.

Now it's QR codes for donations. YouTube tutorials for last rites. Priests with Instagram followings. I don't think there was ever a time when practice was pure and unmediated. The printed book was a disruption once. So was the railway that let pilgrims travel to temples they'd only heard about.

Something else continues. I'm not wise enough to say what that something is, exactly. I just watch my mother-in-law with her phone on the wooden stool, eyes closed, and I notice that her face looks the same as it always has.

Maybe that's the only observation I'm qualified to make.