TIRUCHIRAPALLI, INDIA, March 14, 2007: (HPI note: This article appeared in the Washington Post, one of America’s leading newspapers.) Balaji, a Hindu priest, stood before the reclining god and offered a plate of coconut and bananas. His chest bare and his face adorned with red and yellow sacred paste, he set the food at the foot of a statue that Hindus regard as an embodiment of Lord Vishnu. Following ancient tradition deep inside one of India’s oldest and holiest temples, he chanted Vishnu’s names 108 times to beseech health, wealth and good fortune – not for himself, but for an Indian emigrant living in London who had purchased the prayer with her credit card on a Hindu Web site. “If you wish to make an offering, God will accept it – even if it’s on the Internet,” said Balaji. The Internet has become a hub of religious worship for millions of people around the world.
Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs and people of other faiths turn regularly to Web sites to pray, meditate and gather in “virtual” houses of worship graphically designed to look like the real thing. Some sites offer rites from baptism to confession to conversion to Judaism. “The first wave of religion online, in the 1990s, was mainly for nerds and young people and techies,” said Morten Hojsgaard, a Danish author who has written extensively about online religion. “But now it really is a mirror of society at large. This is providing a new forum for religious seekers.” Hojsgaard said the number of Web pages dealing with God, religion and churches increased from 14 million in 1999 to 200 million in 2004. Religion now nearly rivals sex as a topic on the Internet: A search for “sex” on Google returns about 408 million hits, while a search for “God” yields 396 million.
India, with more than 1.1 billion people and a passion for technology, has become a leader in the practice of religion online, through a very large number of often very small Web sites, a pattern that reflects the decentralization of much of religious life here. Hindus sitting in the United States or Europe watch streaming live video of morning prayers from temples in their home towns. Members of India’s fast-growing middle class have embraced the Internet in ways that startle their parents, many of whom were raised in villages that still barely have telephone service. At many Hindu temples, a priest’s typical day includes time set aside to read e-mails asking for blessings.
Saranam.com was founded by Mahesh Mohanan and Mervyn Jose, a pair of young computer software engineers in Chennai, the steamy port city formerly known as Madras. It is home both to some of India’s most magnificent old temples and to some of its most cutting-edge technology firms. Mohanan said he hit on the idea shortly after his marriage in 1999, when his new mother-in-law insisted that he and his new bride visit 15 Hindu temples over three days to seek blessings. “It was exhausting,” Mohanan said. “I thought it would be so much easier if I could just do it on the Internet.” With financial backing from a local businessman, Saranam.com was up and running within weeks as a for-profit company. The site now gets about 100,000 visits a year and about 200 orders each month, the company says. Most customers buy pujas to pray for sick relatives, to ease marital or financial problems — or even, in the case of some Indians living in the United States, to help get a green card. According to Mohanan and Jose, Saranam limits its advertising and marketing to avoid offending users who visit the site for serious religious purposes. “We can’t say ‘Winter Sale!’ or things like that, because it would damage our credibility,” Jose said. But it does use a time-honored promotional technique of posting articles written about it, including a news service account that appeared in The Washington Post. At first, most of the customers came from the 20 million or so Indians who live overseas. But now most are Americans, Europeans and people from the Middle East who have become interested in Hinduism, at least in part because of information available on the Internet.