Jehan Numa Palace Hotel in India

The key to personal wealth lies in India’s ancient texts. That is the message in bestselling author Devdutt Pattanaik’s latest book How to Become Rich: 12 Lessons I Learnt from Vedic and Puranic Stories. Amidst advice about sound accounting practices and saving for retirement, the author, a self-styled mythologist, outlines how Hindu concepts can help people accumulate tremendous riches.

Many Hindu gurus have framed financial success as a spiritual endeavor – take Swami Parthasarathy, Dayananda Saraswati, and Dandapani for example. They are part of a growing trend of religious leaders assuring their adherents – many of whom are among India’s high-powered executives and entrepreneurs – that their pursuit of material wealth does not diminish their piety. Instead, these leaders argue that pursuit for wealth is Hindu at its core. Pattanaik is a slightly different kind of guru. He is no saffron-robed ascetic initiated into a Hindu order, but a former healthcare professional who now makes a living as a self-help author. He does not live in an ashram but in a high-rise Mumbai apartment surrounded by books and art. And unlike these other gurus, Pattanaik eschews words like “spirituality” and even “Hinduism.” As a result, his popularity extends far beyond religious circles. Yet it is Hindu texts to which he turns for financial wisdom.

Pattanaik has written dozens of books, hundreds of newspaper columns, given countless interviews, and delivered multiple TED Talks. His work is particularly popular among Indian business professionals, both in India and abroad. From 2008-2013 he was the “Chief Belief Officer” of the Future Group, one of India’s largest retailers. While there, he infused management practices with an Indian ethos drawn from Hindu texts and practices. In 2013, he authored Business Sutra: A Very Indian Approach to Management. In these works, he presents the constitutive components of late capitalism – the free market, reliance on debt, the financialization of the economy, and an ethos of individual responsibility – as timeless, natural, and yes, even sacred.

Pattanaik’s starting point is that Hindu gods and goddesses are wealthy and they want believers to be wealthy too. The goddess Lakshmi is wealth personified. According to Pattanaik, “to become rich is to seek Lakshmi in our lives.” It is therefore good to have material wealth and to seek more of it. The god Vishnu shows us how. Unlike the god Indra who thought he had a monopoly on human devotion and took it for granted, Vishnu bestows lavish blessings upon his devotees who come back again and again, returning far more wealth to him than they had been given. Like Vishnu, Pattanaik writes, we ought to be generous with our wealth and talents, investing each in the economic marketplace by becoming entrepreneurs, knowledge workers, and stockholders. If we do, returns are inevitable.

For Pattanaik, the core of Hinduism is the act of investment in the hope of a return. In the yagna – one of the earliest rituals found in the Vedas – a devotee places an object into a ritual fire that transforms and carries the object to one or more divine beings who provide something in return. In today’s business parlance, Pattanaik says the ritual fire is the marketplace; the object placed into the fire is the investment; and the object received in return is the ROI (return on investment). This is “the basic principle of economics, or artha-shastra,” he writes. If you think you can be free of yagna, think again because all are born into debt – debt to ancestors, the divine, and nature, each of which gives us life and nurtures us. Our need for Lakshmi – money – begins with our first breath. Pattanaik believes the ultimate goal is to re-invest our money in the marketplace in equity or debt funds so that our money makes money with little effort on our part. In that way, we become like Shakambari, goddess of fruits, seeds, and trees who “feeds herself by feeding others.”

While others have quibbled with Pattanaik’s interpretation of Hindu texts, that is not my aim. Instead, I want to understand why this message is so appealing to people in today’s economic climate. Despite appearances, there is more to this than money. Pattanaik’s message promises Hindus that they can achieve success in a neoliberal capitalist system. But perhaps even more importantly, he promises that they need not become Western to do so. In order to make this claim, Pattanaik pushes back against longstanding stereotypes of Hinduism. His is a message of hope wrapped in cultural pride.

Paths to Prosperity in Uncertain Times
Pattanaik is hardly the first person to suggest that the pursuit of wealth is compatible with religion. For the past several decades, prominent Christian leaders have promoted the “prosperity gospel.” As Joel Osteen once put it in an interview with Oprah: God doesn’t want you to be poor. Instead, “Jesus died that we might live an abundant life.” Prosperity gospel pastors preach that God provides the faithful with abundance—homes, cars, health, and luxury goods. Ministers encourage congregants to demonstrate their faith through giving to God (that is, to the church and its leaders). In return, God will reward them. Want proof? Look at the wealthy pastor, his beautiful home, and pictures from his recent vacation on a private island. The minister knows the prosperity gospel is the truth because it’s in the scriptures and it has happened to him (or her). Sowing and reaping – investing and receiving a return – are sacralized.

There are clear parallels between the prosperity gospel and Pattanaik’s message. Both uphold personal wealth as a sacred aim and promise a path to it via scripture. They sanctify conceptions of debt, profit, and investment. They repudiate accusations from within their respective religious folds that what they are doing is plain materialism. Yet beyond that, there are different assumptions underlying the Hindu texts to which Pattanaik refers than those of biblical texts. In the Puranas, there is not one God who wills you to have certain things. Instead, there are many deities whose engagement in the world is characterized by lila – play. There is no devil or evil. There are simply opposing forces – neither of which is wholly good or wholly bad. Actions have consequences and you can learn about those consequences by consuming the gods’ stories. The tone is practical rather than preachy.

Pattanik’s work, then, outlines a more straightforward approach to wealth than the prosperity gospel’s moralizing admonishment to have greater faith. The means to achieving wealth lies not in having faith in a God who wants you to be wealthy. It lies in seeking God herself. There is no devil to stop you from finding her. You stop yourself from finding her by either not asking for her, or by trying to grab and hoard her rather than helping her to circulate in the cycle of free exchange between investor and investee, company and consumer for which she was intended.

The prosperity gospel, according to Duke Divinity School professor Kate Bowler, gives people hope in uncertain times by providing overwhelming optimism that they can overcome every obstacle that comes their way. Pattanaik’s work does this too. The answer to the question “How do I become rich?” is clear. It is all there waiting for you. You just need to see the truth in the Vedas and Puranas and wealth will be accessible. As economic inequality continues to rise in India as it does the world over, this is a powerful promise indeed.

Hindu Capitalism
Pattanaik’s message addresses another profound need that Christian versions of the prosperity gospel do not. He overturns Western stereotypes of Hinduism with roots both deep and wide: that Hinduism is inimical to capitalism and therefore primitive. In the early twentieth century, Max Weber famously blamed Hinduism for capitalism’s late arrival in India, steeped as he saw it in fatalism and other-worldly asceticism. His sentiment echoed British colonialist policies that sought to reform Indian merchants so they might break free from caste and kinship ties and pursue profit for profit’s sake. Even two decades after India’s independence in 1947, Indian economists disparagingly described the nation’s slow economic growth as a “Hindu rate of growth.”

Devdutt Pattanaik

Against such naïve views, Pattanaik provides a model of Hindu scriptures that encourages the acquisition of wealth and a system of capitalist exchange, lauding the accumulation of profit for the purpose of reinvestment. When challenged by Hindus who argue that one ought not be so “money-minded,” he asks: “Why are we driving Lakshmi out of India instead of inviting her lovingly into our lives?” To not seek wealth, he argues, is to ignore what Hindu scriptures actually say. It is in fact to drive the goddess away – a most inauspicious act.

Many others share this sentiment. India’s upper-middle-class Hindus pushed for the government to open India’s economic borders in the 1980s, making trade and travel with the rest of the world more possible and attractive. Upon India’s wholesale adoption of neoliberal economic policies in 1991, India was touted as the next economic superpower. Its citizens are major players in, and benefactors of, this new form of global capitalism. They relish the opportunity to buy iPhones and Gap jeans, and to do their grocery shopping at international supermarket chains. They make up the workforce of IT employees, managers, and CEOs of multinational corporations all over the world. Hindus seem to be very good capitalists indeed.

Neoliberalism and Neocolonialism
The push for greater capitalist wealth has changed Indian society, and not always in positive ways. My friends in the IT industry in Bangalore, Kolkata, and Mumbai speak of the harsh culture of multinational corporations for which they work. Those corporations have a reputation for being rigid, cutthroat, encouraging bragging about one’s achievements (“selling oneself” as it is typically put), not giving any leeway for family situations, and mandating the use of English in all business interactions. They report that a Western set of cultural values is replacing an Indian set, even while many find it difficult to pinpoint what constitutes that set of Indian values. By their account, they live and work in a world that is not their own. And it is a world that threatens to erase their culture and crush their souls.

Yet this is the kind of work that is most lauded among young professionals in India. The top recruiters for Indian MBA students are multinational investment banks and management consultants who offer jobs abroad and in U.S. dollar salaries that can be up to ten times more than other salaries offered to students at the same institutions. Business schools purposefully train incoming students to acquire these jobs, even as some academics within them fully acknowledge and critique the neocolonialism of this situation. Most business schools do not offer instruction in a language other than English, and they promote the notion that working for first-world employers is more prestigious than third-world employers, including Indian ones.

It is this combination of the pressures and constrictions of the neoliberal economy and the postcolonial context that produces the desire to create (or, as it is often framed, “recover”) a Hindu ethos that can inform the way Indians engage in corporate life. Pattanaik’s work does just that. He assures readers that they can be successful not by becoming Western, but by becoming more like themselves – by embracing their Hindu culture.

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 A few years ago, I asked Pattanaik to meet with me so that I could learn more about his Business Sutra, and specifically the yagna model he proposed in it. How to Become Rich had not yet been published, but he was already promoting similar ideas that would appear in that book. He graciously accepted my request and conveyed to me that everything was really quite simple. “Hinduism is based on return on investment. Karma. Every action has a reaction. So all your actions – you are trying to do actions which will give you a good return on investment.” He demurred: Why couldn’t people just see that?

“The problem is that Hindus are embarrassed by Hinduism,” he explained. He spoke of the damaging legacy of India’s colonial history. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the European colonizers who ruled India saw their own religion – Christianity – as the highest form of religion and equated it with rationality. In so far as other religions differed, they were deemed “irrational.” They deemed Hindu practices superstitious, idolatrous, sexist, and hierarchical. Some Hindus imbibed these critiques, reforming Hinduism so that it took on remarkably Christian features, from embracing monotheism to establishing weekly worship services. As a result, Pattanaik says, Hindus have only been exposed to two forms of Hinduism. One is “mysoginist” and “caste-ist” that “nobody wants to be associated with,” and one is a form of spiritual universalism that Westerners love but that does not reflect what Hinduism really is, in its particularities. The latter, he says, does not connect people to the stories their mothers told them when they were children. There is this disconnect, then, between what is absorbed in culture and what is respected in high society.

Pattanaik resolves this tension by mining these stories for wisdom applicable to peoples’ daily lives. He helps fellow Hindus rejoice in these stories and learn from them rather than being embarrassed by them. The sentiment of our conversation was simple: ‘This is what our scriptures say – invest and expect a return. That’s economy, that’s the natural state of things. Embrace it because it will make you successful in life. Stop being embarrassed because you think religion shouldn’t talk about such things.’

Resistance Repackaged
In an attempt to push back against the neocolonialism that undergirds Indian economics, one might imagine a simultaneous attempt to resist the neoliberal project itself – a project that makes the generation of wealth the highest human aim, and an individual’s ability to contribute to that wealth the source of their value. That is not what we find in How to Become Rich. Instead, Pattanaik writes that there is nothing novel about the kind of uncertainties we face in our work lives today. Risk is eternal. The solution is to engage fully in the marketplace as entrepreneurs, laborers, and consumers, and to employ the tools the marketplace offers to mitigate risk by having home insurance, savings accounts, and wills.

Yet in our conversation, Pattanaik expressed a great deal of concern about the kinds of risks involved in business life today. He said he wants businesspeople to ask themselves: “What does the business do to you as a person? Because the business doesn’t need you. And one day the business will kick you out because it will survive and you will be out of the market. What does it do to you as a person? You spend your entire life 9-5 working weird hours, youth gone, working in these offices with laptops. What does it do to you?” He said he has seen a number of giant business moguls up close and they are “hungry animals.” “They are just hungry, hungry because they’ve been told ‘be hungry, be foolish.’ We have valorized stupidity. Its like you keep running, running in a marathon and like ‘wow’ everybody is cheering you, but… which direction are you going?”

Pattanaik’s warning about the toll late capitalism takes on individual workers did not make it into his book. In How to Become Rich, he doesn’t ask what your work does to you. He doesn’t ask what your wealth does to you. He doesn’t remind you of your insignificance in a system that ultimately does not care about the people that make it work. Why not? Probably because those sentiments don’t sell nearly as well as the promise that anyone with a proper understanding of ancient Hindu texts can be rich. Pattanaik knows his message must be packaged and commoditized if it is to find wide circulation in our neoliberal world. So in this version of the message, Pattanaik uses the Vedas and the Puranas to support this particularly unforgiving form of capitalism, much like the Bible was once used to justify the capitalism that subjugated India and her peoples to the exploitations of European imperialism. This ironic state of affairs reflects the double-bind of the economic power structures we inhabit. The necessity of having to live within those structures incentivizes individuals to try to find success within them rather than thinking beyond them. And whatever ideas one has about them must be made legible within those structures. India’s new business gurus provide paths to success in neoliberal India on its terms.

Deonnie Moodie is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma and a Sacred Writes/Revealer Writing Fellow. She is the author of The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kālīghāṭ and Kolkata (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is currently writing a book about the recent emergence of Hindu ideologies in Indian business schools and corporations.

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This article was made possible in part with support from Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion.