The Goa Taxi Jesus

I’m in a taxi in the western Indian state of Goa, a sun-drenched surfer’s paradise known for good seafood, wild parties and easy access to illicit drugs. Like most of India, to my western eyes it’s a hard-to-grasp mishmash of poverty and prosperity, of vitality and dreariness, of incredible beauty and unbelievable filth. It’s also the only place I’ve ever visited where all of the world’s major religions seem to coexist in at least some level of harmony. There are lots of huge Christian churches (courtesy of the Portuguese colonial rulers), but there are also impressive collections of Islamic mosques, Hindu temples, and other religious structures I can’t even identify. Given this obvious attitude of religious tolerance, I guess the shrine on my taxi driver’s dashboard shouldn’t surprise me.

It consists of three figurines glued to the dashboard and sprinkled by a handful of fresh flower petals. It’s common to see these little shrines in Indian taxis—if you’ve ever experienced Mumbai traffic then you understand the need for divine intervention. It’s not the fact that the shrine exists that gives me pause, it’s the figurines themselves. Two of them are typical Indian god figures, brightly colored and festooned with jewels. I recognize the one with the elephant head as Ganesh (he’s easy for a westerner to spot), but the other one is a mystery. It’s generally humanoid but with too many arms, but like Ganesh, it is full of cartoonish color and energy.

The third figurine confuses me: a sad-looking bust of a young man with a bloody face and a crown of thorns, with the word JESUS printed in large brown letters on the square base. In stark contrast to the joyous riot of color of the two Hindu gods, Jesus is incredibly depressing. His figurine is painted in bloody shades of brown, and his expression of morose suffering is the exact opposite of the sly grin of Ganesh.

The shrine raises so many questions that I don’t even know where to start.  In a majority Hindu country, how does Jesus rate a spot next to the two Hindu gods? Does the taxi driver worship them each in turn? At first I suspect this is his way of covering his bases with his passengers, who could be from any of Goa’s religions. On closer inspection, though, it’s obvious that the shrine is personal and important to him. The figurines are clean and polished and the sprinkling of real flowers is probably refreshed every morning.

To me, the mixture is incomprehensible. I grew up a Christian in the American South, and I learned all about the Christian God in weekly Sunday School, endless sermons, Wednesday Bible Study, Vacation Bible School, church camp, and all the other ways kids in the South are indoctrinated into the faith. As far as I could tell, the main lesson of Christianity was this: there is but one God, and thou shalt worship Him and no others. This is pretty much the Number One Rule (yeah, I know, it gets a little confusing when you throw in the Holy Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but let’s put that aside for the moment). I’m not kidding about this being the Number One Rule; if you don’t believe me check the Ten Commandments. It’s also pretty clear from the Bible stories I read as a kid that He is incredibly jealous and spiteful: if you break the Number One Rule He will seriously mess you up. He once even went so far as to wipe out all human civilization and horribly drown every man, woman and child (except the hand-picked family of Noah, who apparently was the only guy who rated saving, even though he had a tendency to get drunk and run around naked in front of his kids).

Given the fact that the Christian god doesn’t play well with others, how is it that my taxi driver can worship Jesus right along with the elephant-headed Ganesh? Taken in context it makes sense, I suppose. Hindus are accustomed to a massive pantheon of gods (at last count there were something like 300 million deities), so really, what’s wrong with adding one more to the mix? The problem is that Jesus just looks completely out of place up on the dashboard. The Hindu god figurines are full of color and vitality. The depressingly monochromatic image of Jesus, on the other hand, looks injured, sorrowful and half-dead. A religious scholar could probably write an entire comparative religion thesis based solely on the dashboard shrine of my Indian taxi driver. I’m not naive, I know there are many flavors and nuances to both Hinduism and Christianity, but based on the taxi-shrine, you could come to only one conclusion: the Hindu gods celebrate life, and the Christian god celebrates suffering.

I’m not trying to be snarky or insulting; I’m of the firm belief that if religion helps you makes sense of the world and gets you through the day, then you have every right to believe whatever you want, as long as you don’t hurt others. As for myself, though, I gave up my religion a long time ago when I realized that it was impossible to reconcile what I was being taught in Sunday School with what I saw in the wider world around me. As I grew older and began to travel and experience other cultures, I learned that the idea of God is pretty universal, but the various incarnations, rituals and practices of the idea can be incredibly diverse. Most religions use their God to squeeze you into a little box from which there is no escape, a few use their version of God to broaden your horizons to a universal perspective. To some degree, every organized religion has been twisted into a tool for the power-hungry to impose control over society, almost as if they were created specifically for that purpose. I’m not saying that religion is bad or even unnecessary, but it is quite clear that it is often perverted by politicians to convince people to act against their own best interests.

Which brings me back to the taxi driver. His name is Ravi and he is a thin man with darker-than-usual skin. He’s wearing all white: white trousers, a white dress shirt, even white shoes. Every article of clothing is spotlessly-clean, pressed and polished. He doesn’t say much, but his eyes are kind and he responds with a friendly smile every time we speak to him. His English isn’t very good, so I can’t ask him about his dashboard shrine even though my curiosity is killing me. In the end I decide it really doesn’t matter. After all, it’s what a person does that’s important, not what he believes. Ravi, with his kind soul and quick smile seems a genuinely good man, and to me that’s the only criteria that matters.

To see all the posts in this series (Seven Weeks in India), click here and scroll through the post listings.