*Article* **Shani on the Web: Virality and Vitality in Digital Popular Hinduism**

#### **Varuni Bhatia**

School of Arts and Sciences, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560100, India; varuni.bhatia@apu.edu.in

Received: 10 August 2020; Accepted: 3 September 2020; Published: 6 September 2020

**Abstract:** What do god posters circulating online tell us about the practice of popular Hinduism in the age of digital mediatization? The article seeks to address the question by exploring images and god posters dedicated to the planetary deity Shani on Web 2.0. The article tracks Shani's presence on a range of online platforms—from the religion and culture pages of newspapers to YouTube videos and social media platforms. Using Shani's presence on the Web as a case study, the article argues that content drawn from popular Hinduism, dealing with astrology, ritual, religious vows and observances, form a significant and substantial aspect of online Hinduism. The article draws attention to the specific affordances of Web 2.0 to radically rethink what engaging with the sacred object in a virtual realm may entail. In doing so, it indicates what the future of Hindu religiosity may look like.

**Keywords:** digital Hinduism; god posters; Shani; Hindu images; Hinduism and mediatization

The power of digital media impinges on everyday life in contemporary times with ever-increasing scope and intensity. The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic has brought this fact into sharper relief than, perhaps, ever before. Needless to say, this enhanced digitality has also permeated the sphere of religion and religious rituals. How different religions reformulate ritual practices in the light of the pandemic and the theological and doctrinal implications of such reformulations is a topic for a different discussion. No doubt, such discussions are already happening and will take place increasingly in the days to come. What this extraordinary moment has allowed, however, is to retrain our attention on the mediated nature of religion. This understanding of technology as constitutive of religions and religious practices, what Jeremy Stolow calls "deus in machina"—God in and as the machine (Stolow 2013)—has come to stay with us for the foreseeable future.

Digital religion is a rapidly expanding academic field of enquiry. According to Heidi Campbell, at the most fundamental level, scholars of digital religion consider how "digital media is used by religious groups and users" for the propagation of religious doctrine and the abetment of religious practices. At the same time, scholars of digital religion also pay attention to the "*reimagining of religion* offered by unique affordances within these new media and spaces" (Campbell 2017, p. 16, emphasis added). When compared to Abrahamic religions, such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam, studies on Hinduism and new media technologies have been relatively sparse. Notable exceptions that exist focus on the use of new media by Hindu organizations, the performance of Hindu rituals online, particularly relating to online *puja*, broadcasting festivals, and the online congealment of different faith communities (Karapanagiotis 2010, 2013; Herman 2010; Scheifinger 2010). Within this body of scholarship, there is a broad consensus that online worship does not, and cannot, replace the 'real' thing for a range of reasons—spatial, embodied, as well as ontological. Digital religiosity, this body of scholarship contends, can operate only as a temporary and partial substitute for actual worship. However, as Stewart Hoover alerts us, we ought to remain wary of positions that either 'essentialize' or 'particularize' the relationship between digital technology and religion, where online religion serves either as a "poor substitute of actual and authentic role played by religion" or "stand[s] in for prior means of mediation" (Hoover 2012, p. 266).

Through its attention on Hindu religious imagery circulating online and over social media networks, this essay is a commentary on the operationalization of Web 2.0 in smartphone devices in India and the use of its interactive capacities in religious contexts. Within media and communication studies, Web 2.0 has three distinguishing features: "it is easy to use, it facilitates sociality, and it provides users with free publishing and production platforms that allow them to upload content in any form, be it pictures, videos, or text" (Lovink 2011, p. 5). In the early days of digital religion, scholarship on Hinduism online, for reasons that had to do more with digital infrastructure, was located primarily within diasporic Hindu communities and their use of the internet to access rituals, sacred spaces and specialized Hindu religious materials from their particular sect or region. Only very recently has scholarship on digital Hinduism being conducted from the vantage point of India (Zeiler 2020). Meanwhile, the rapid permeation in India of the cellular phone has massively widened the base of individual participation in processes of mass circulation of user-generated media in the last few years (Jeffrey and Doron 2013). In a scenario where market scale and competition render smartphone prices and data plan costs increasingly cheaper at the bottom end, it becomes imperative to track how digital affordances are transforming everyday religious practices in India, particularly since 2016.

Kathinka Froystad in her study of the rapidly transforming realm of information and communication technologies in the city of Kanpur in north India notes that "smartphones were often [the] very first introduction to the internet" for most young men, and women, from working-class contexts (Froystad 2019, pp. 125–26). Froystad notes that in 2017, India had 432 million internet users of which 300 million were smartphone owners (Froystad 2019, p. 124). This peculiar infrastructural aspect accounts for much of the vast difference between online manifestations of faith in the diasporic Hindu digital arena and the same in India. It indicates why similar concerns regarding purity, authenticity, and community around the use of digital devices for religious purposes that are so consequential within diasporic Hindu contexts are not key concerns with regard to Hindu online practices in India. Instead, cultures of virality, that form a significant component of online activity with respect to a smartphone device, emerges as a key practice. It is this aspect of interactive online religiosity that I explore further in this paper. The social structures and economic arrangements consequent of digitalization of information and communication technologies—what Manuel Castells calls 'network society' (Castells 2004)—make this moment a decidedly new one with regard to religion as well. Media convergence and intermediality, interactivity and hypermedia, virality and amplification of content that is as much curated as it is spontaneous, new cultures of work and leisure enabled by networked devices, etc., have significantly reconfigured the matrices and modalities of religious practice. These new forms of religious participatory and virality cultures are both products of and processes that characterize web interfaces that exploited and realized the full potential of Web 2.0—social media networks, such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, TikTok, or ShareChat, the platform that I focus on in this paper.

In the context of expanding techno-medial frontiers and Hinduism, the bulk of the existing scholarship deals with the vocal and aggressive presence of Hindu right wing content on the web, with the so-called 'internet Hindus', with their hate-speech, misinformation, and the politics of offense (Gittinger 2015; Mohan 2015; Udupa 2018; Banaji 2018). One of the lesser explored aspects in this article is digital publics. A focus on digital publics will allow us to re-interrogate the purported 'split publics' of analog media (Rajagopal 2001) from a digital perspective and invite us to think how devotional content often operates infrastructurally for political content. While it is undoubtedly difficult to cleanly parse out piety from politics, devotion from power relations, and belief from identity at all times, it remains necessary to not reduce the plethora of online Hindu content to its most extreme, i.e., hate-speech of religious right wing groups, organizations, and bots. In other words, while recognizing the importance of this scholarship in mapping and critiquing how Hindu religious content online often dovetails with majoritarian extremism in the Indian context, I suggest that it is as important to look beyond an all-exhaustive hermeneutic of suspicion in interpreting such content.

#### **1. Research Method and Ethics**

This article analyses images of Hindu divinities that circulate over various digital social media networking platforms. It seeks to understand the source of their sensual charge and the formal elements they deploy to excite and affect the sensorium. The primary virtual 'site' of my research is ShareChat—a social media platform that operates in a variety of Indian regional languages. The platform is popular amongst tier 2 and 3 cities in India, and amongst India's vast vernacular language publics. I limit myself to online content that is primarily user-generated and participatory. Content shared on the specific platform that I focus on often 'goes viral,' i.e., it is 'seen,' 'liked,' and 'shared' multiple times by users over more than one platform. The platform itself allows for content to be shared directly over WhatsApp. For the purposes of this article, I focus on god posters dedicated to Shani that circulate on this platform, and on other public online sites, such as YouTube.

Given the subject matter of my study, i.e., digital god posters or Hindu memes on a regional language social media platform, I had to make certain important decisions regarding two key issues related to social media research. One, the question of intellectual rights and two, the question of privacy and anonymity. In its technical aspects, a digital god poster is an image macro, i.e., an image superimposed with some kind of a text. Image macro is a technical term for what we currently in everyday conversation understand to be internet memes, "a piece of culture ... which gains influence through online transmission" (Davison 2012, p. 122). In common-sensical understanding, as well as in scholarship, memes refer primarily to humorous content. However, image macros that seek to involve themselves in other kinds of affect than satire, humor, ridicule or disgust—those that speak of love, piety, or simply good wishes—are also ubiquitous on social media. Hindu god posters online can be understood to circulate as memes of the non-humorous kind. Davison argues that internet memes are defined by their lack of attribution—an aspect quite clearly discernible in the circulation of Shani images online that I have been examining. Authorship and copyright are almost impossible to track down, and the same set of images are often variously montaged together to produce new religious memes. Davison contends that non-attribution is a generative feature of the internet meme and affords it the replicability and virality that is necessary for its continuation. In their non-attribution, god posters online are similar to devotional poetry from the Bhakti period, where the question of authorship remained secondary to the act of transmission.

In late October/early November 2019, my research assistant, Neeta Subbiah, and I archived a total of 53 images of Hanuman and Shani, both individually as well as together, that were being regularly circulated on the Indian social media platform and file sharing app, ShareChat. Our choice of deity and the social media app were both informed by what we had set out to study—i.e., the prevalence of different aspects of popular Hinduism online and what that can tell us about the intersection between religion and new media technologies in contemporary India. Given this interest, we found the peculiar intersection of Shani, the malevolent deity, and ShareChat, a uniquely Indian social media app optimized for use on an android smartphone, to be particularly propitious for our purpose. Our choice to focus on this particular social media platform was informed by its decidedly user-driven content, easy shareability as an affordance built into the app, and its popularity amongst non-English speaking users in India.

Despite the rich archive of digital god posters dedicated to Hanuman and Shani that we produced, we soon realized that in the absence of tracing copyright, it would be impossible to use these images in either an academic or any other forum. These images, however, are stock images that circulate not merely on ShareChat and through it, but on WhatsApp. They also accompany online news reports, blogs, and articles on popular Hinduism, especially on the topic of vows and observances in honor of Shani. Similarly, the same images are often used in multiple YouTube videos on the legend of Shani and instructions on how to worship him. Given this dense intermedial exchange and media convergences of Shani's images online, I decided for the purposes of this article, to use only those images that are available publicly on the internet. Each one of the images I use here, however, has been used to produce a god poster and an image macro and 'shared' on ShareChat.

The main theme of my article revolves around the question: how have various aspects of popular Hinduism adapted to the digital turn in religion? Given their highly localized circulation, the strong presence of priestly intermediaries, the often variegated myths and legends associated with these deities, and the absence of a prominent, representative institution or organization, how have these regional Hindu deities fared online? Even a cursory glance at vernacular Hindu content online, particularly on apps and other file sharing, social media sites, immediately reveals that a vast amount of this comprises locally prominent, secondary, and tertiary deities. That is, those deities which Philip Lutgendorf in his study of Hanuman calls mid-level, mediating divine beings. Deities who are seen to occupy the space between the human world and the world of the Great Gods. In order to exemplify this contention regarding quotidian Hindu religiosity on vernacular social media networks in India, I explore and analyze the online life of such a deity—the powerful but malevolent Shani. However, to properly appreciate the specificity of Shani's digital dwelling, it is necessary to briefly situate him in his pre-digital context.
