by Priya Malhotra
When I first met Liara (name changed to protect privacy), my fourteen-year-old daughter’s friend, she was snatching her iPhone from her mother’s hands and furiously typing my daughter’s number into it. Her backpack dangled off one shoulder, her wild hair tumbled to her waist, and she spoke so quickly that my middle-aged brain could barely keep up.
As we drove home from school, my daughter told me that Liara had spent the entire camp talking about thermodynamics and her dream of designing better ways to store solar energy for developing countries. I was only half-listening until she asked, almost hesitantly, “Mom, am I still going to be allowed to wash my hair on Thursdays?”
“What?” I said.
“Liara told me Hindus aren’t supposed to wash their hair on Thursdays. It’s some kind of tradition.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. Liara — the aspiring energy engineer, the daughter of a chemistry teacher — believed in such a thing? Didn’t education, or even basic scientific reasoning, nullify such superstitions? Apparently not. And Liara and her family are far from unusual.
There’s the in-house nurse who tends to my ailing mother and forbids her niece from entering the kitchen while menstruating because she is considered “impure.” There’s Asha (name again changed to protect privacy), an entrepreneur I know, who refused to rent a perfectly located office because its bathroom was near the entrance as she’s a devout follower of Vaastu Shastra, the ancient Indian architectural system that warns such placement can “flush away prosperity.” And there’s that business executive who delayed his relocation to Europe for three months because astrologers advised that the stars were unfavorable. The risk of displeasing the planets, it seemed, outweighed the risk of losing his job.
Across India, such stories are not rare; they are routine. A 2021 survey on religious beliefs in India by the Pew Research Center found that 42 percent of college graduates in India believe in astrology, a practice long debunked by science. Seventy-three percent of college-educated Hindus said they believed the Ganges River had the power to purify. Among college-educated Indians, 43 percent said they believe in angels, 30 percent in demons, and 35 percent in miracles. These are not rural mystics or the unlettered poor — they are the educated, urban citizens of a nation that builds satellites and launches spacecraft.
Superstition is not just restricted to Hindus. Amongst Muslims, a taʿwiz — a small amulet inscribed with Quranic verses — may be tied around a child’s neck to ward off the evil eye. Indian Christians sometimes slip a Bible beneath a pillow to drive away nightmares.
The question that haunts me is this: How do people reconcile their educated, reasoning selves with their superstitious ones? Doesn’t such contradiction create cognitive dissonance?
Over time, I’ve come to think that the answer lies not in hypocrisy but in a kind of mental bilingualism that exists in India, an ability to inhabit two distinct worlds without friction.
In the first universe, the rational one, gravity anchors us, engines move according to Newton’s laws, lightbulbs glow through resistance, airplanes stay aloft by Bernoulli’s principle, and phones unlock through biometric algorithms. This is the world of cause and effect, where everything must add up, where knowledge is pursued and sliced and spliced until it makes sense.
But the second universe — the shadow world that lives alongside — is porous and emotional. It is where irrational fears, ancestral memories, and unspoken longings reside. It’s cluttered and visceral, more heart than mind. It smells faintly of incense and rain-soaked mud. This is where people keep the invisible: the spirits their grandmothers feared, the rituals their mothers performed, the half-remembered prayers they recite when reason fails.
In India, these two worlds rarely clash. They coexist, parallel yet peaceful. You can be a cardiologist and still consult an astrologer before performing heart surgery. You can be a software engineer who writes flawless code and still hang a lemon-and-green-chili charm on your bumper before a long drive. Indians, I suspect, have perfected the art of compartmentalization — of being fluent in both languages at once, without ever translating one into the other.
It’s important to note that India is not just a religious country; it is a religiously saturated one. Belief runs through the bloodstream of ordinary life. Faith doesn’t begin and end in temples or mosques — it infuses kitchens, festivals, marriages, and even real-estate choices.
Then there is something deeper still: a profound conditioned fatalism. Generations have been raised to believe that one’s destiny is preordained, that fate is to be accepted, not challenged. This habit of mind — of surrendering to what is rather than questioning why — trains people to accept not just their circumstances but the ideas and customs handed down to them. In India, children are taught to accept far more than they are taught to question. When one’s grandmother insists you must marry a tree to neutralize a bad horoscope, the instinct is not rebellion but compliance. To question it would feel like a betrayal — of family, of faith, of one’s culture itself.
Superstitions, meanwhile, act as social glue. Women fasting on Karva Chauth for their husbands’ long lives may appear irrational, but the ritual also forges communal bonds; a circle of women united in fasting, prayer, and shared endurance. Families matching horoscopes before arranged marriages are not merely indulging in astrology; they are performing a collective act of validation that unites two clans. To refuse participation is to risk more than skepticism; it is to risk exclusion. If Liara decided to wash her hair on a Thursday, her family would likely see it as defiance. If our nurse’s niece entered the kitchen during her period, she might be forbidden from staying in her aunt’s house.
Yet to dismiss all superstition as ignorance is to overlook its emotional logic. Superstition thrives because it answers needs that science leaves untouched — the yearning for comfort, meaning, and control in an unpredictable world. Rationality can tell us how the heart beats, but it cannot explain why it breaks. Science can reveal how the sun burns, but it cannot explain why its light feels holy.
Perhaps this is why, despite my skepticism, I found myself faltering at a temple one afternoon. The guide told us that if we had a wish, we could whisper it into the ear of Nandi — the great bull who serves as Lord Shiva’s mount — and it might come true. I laughed, of course. Yet moments later I felt an inexplicable pull. I stood before the stone bull, leaned in, and whispered a wish I had told no one.
What was I thinking? My rational mind dismissed it as foolish, but something deeper — more instinctive, more human — wanted to believe that the universe could listen. Maybe it wasn’t faith. Maybe it was simply hope.
I remain a skeptic. I believe that menstrual and caste-based taboos are not quaint customs but mechanisms of exclusion and control; harmful superstitions that must be challenged and rooted out. They must be eradicated, yes, but their enduring hold on human imagination must also be understood.
Perhaps superstition’s persistence is not merely a failure of reason but a reflection of our human architecture — the need to find meaning when reason runs out. Even the most rational among us, I suspect, are not immune to the quiet temptation of the unseen. Maybe the goal is not to erase that impulse entirely but to recognize it, to separate what heals from what harms, what connects from what confines. Between the electron and the amulet lies the narrow but enduring space where most of us live, reasoning and doubting and still, against all logic, whispering our wishes into stone ears.
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