Even some gods are starved

The incense of piety still burns in the hearts of the devout, but DNA finds spiralling prices have doused their religious fervour

Inflation just hit a 42-month peak of 7.57% last week, but guess who’s taken a hit?  Lesser mortals, reeling under spiralling prices, can find cause for comfort from the fact that the gods themselves are at the receiving end too.

While it is life as usual at the bigger temples like Tirupati, Isckon, Sabarimala and others, inflation has taken its toll on smaller temples. Devotees, their pockets already buckling under the strain of rising prices, are cutting down on offerings to their favourite gods, preferring to say it with simple prayers instead.

When retired civil servant Pradeep Kumar Mehrotra (62) recently bought a new car in Lucknow, he drove it down to the temple to seek divine blessings. Normally, he would buy “laddoos” to propitiate the lord at the famous Hanuman Setu temple in Lucknow. But this time around, he simply offered the box of sweets which came as a gift from the car agency. His wife Shobha says: “On a special occasion like this, I would have bathed the Shivalinga with milk. But I dropped the idea.” With milk prices up from Rs18 to Rs30 a litre, her placing of fiscal prudence over piety is understandable.

The maximum impact has perhaps been felt in the case of flowers. For instance, a small marigold garland in Kolkata, which was just Rs2 a year back, now comes for Rs5. The price of a hibiscus garland is currently Rs35, as against last year’s price of Rs15. A decent tuberose garland now costs Rs100, as against last year’s price of Rs50. Naturally, devotes have been forced to curtail their offerings.

Sixty-four-year-old housewife, Dipika Chakraborty, visits the Nakuleshwar (Lord Shiva) temple every Monday and the Kalighat (Goddess Kali) temple every Saturday. “Previously, every week I would offer a marigold garland of 108 flowers at the Nakuleshwar temple and a hibiscus garland of 108 flowers in Kalighat. However, following the exorbitant rise in prices of flowers, I have restricted my offerings to once every two weeks, although I still visit both these temples every week,” she says.

Similarly, 60-year-old Chitralekha Basu has curtained her weekly offerings to Lord Shiva. “I now buy half the milk, ghee and sweets of what I used to buy before,” she says.

Similar is the fate of the Mariyamma temple on 100 feet Road in Bangalore. “Our devotees are usually from the middle and lower-middle class. What affects them affects the temple too,” says one of the lady priests, Girijamma. “Devotees don’t bring flowers, coconut, sugar cubes and rice together. They get only one item when they come to the temple these days,” she adds.

Though the devotion in their hearts may be intact, enthusiasm about expressing it in cash and kind has taken a beating. “The cost of sweets, fruits, milk and any other offering one makes at temples has doubled over the past two-three years,” says Shivani Tuli (32), who has been visiting the famous Hanuman temple in Hazratganj, Lucknow, every Tuesday since her university days.

But it’s not the gods alone who are feeling the pinch. With devotees curtailing offerings, priests can feel the inflation eating into their dakshina (remuneration). According to the secretary of Bangiya Purohit Parishad (West Bengal Priest’s Association), Pinaki Chakraborty, rising prices have seen a fall in the number of people going in for detailed offerings, which include havan, where the dakshina is higher.

“Very few people break coconuts now to mark auspicious occasions,” says Shanker Dutt, a ‘pujari’ at the prominent Mankameshwar Temple consecrated to Lord Shiva in Lucknow. The reason is understandable. Coconuts, just Rs10 earlier, sell for Rs20 to Rs24 now. At the city’s Kali Bari temple, even the cash flow into temple coffers seems to have dropped drastically. “On Thursdays, our donation boxes used to be full of coins. That’s an old story. Now, it takes several months to collect a respectable amount,” says priest RK Mishra.

Sudhir D, a priest at Ganesh mandir, near Mayo Hall in Bangalore, says that cash contributions have gone down in past five months. “Earlier we used to collect as much as at least Rs1,000 a day. But these days it comes up to only Rs600 in one day. And I attribute it to the price rise. Life has become difficult as people donate less money on the arati plate.”

Not just priests, others are at the receiving end too. “No one feeds bananas to the monkeys anymore,” laments Ram Kumar, a priest at the Hanuman temple. A dozen bananas was Rs12 till a year ago, but is now Rs24. “Most people now bring cheap sweets,” he says.

(With inputs from Bhargavi Kerur, Deepak Gidwani and Sumanta Ray Choudhuri)