Magic as Religion: The Case of Indian Fantasy

In my article for the last issue of The Diplomat Magazine, I had a look at one common aspect of two subgenres I am exploring: Indian fantasy and Indian science fiction. Previously, I focused on how the “Ramayana,” a Sanskrit epic, functions in fiction (beyond its core role as a sacred text). This month, I would like to focus on another interconnection: in what ways Indian history may inspire the authors from that country to write their fantasy novels and stories somewhat differently from American or British authors.. 

Across fantasy, magic is often a partial reflection of religion, and therefore an experience of a different history of faiths may translate into a somewhat different way of writing magical systems in fantasy.

One aspect I found common in my readings of fantasy, however limited these have been, is that magic systems in fantasy are partially an echo of historical religious beliefs. This may sound like a terrible generalization, but bear with me. Throughout history, before the era of universal education, priests of all religions had an edge over common believers. They often knew the sacred language; they could read it while most could not, and they understood it more deeply than the uneducated believers, who would often recite prayers by heart. Thus, religion appeared as a mysterious domain, a power few mastered. 

This is exactly how magic is depicted in a great many fantasy novels. 

Sometimes mages appear as alchemists, who need to learn certain techniques and gather certain ingredients; sometimes as individuals simply born with powers. But the wizards also often appear as priests: They have mastered a certain complex language of power (the Latin or Sanskrit equivalents of fantasy lore); they are organized into orders similar to monastic institutions or churches and are very secretive about their ways. 

Moreover, just as studying a religion and its sacred language removes certain curtains and shows it is a work of humans, rather than being otherworldly powerful, in many fantasy novels a magic system, at first opaque, dark, and scary, gradually reveals its mechanic to the protagonist, becoming more predictable, like laws of physics. It even sometimes turns out to be at least partially based on simple tricks and suggestions. In the end, a magic system just functions as a natural part of that fantasy world, but the task of understanding and mastering this force is left to the priest-like elites.

There is little doubt that the experience of history – the history of one’s civilization, country, region, or people – often greatly inspires an author’s fictional world. Western fantasy authors, from J.R.R. Tolkien to George R.R. Martin, from Brandon Sanderson to Joe Abercrombie, often take the medieval landscape of monarchical Europe and paint fantastic lore over it. What might be different in case of Indian fantasy authors, who are drawing from a different historical tradition? 

An Indian colleague shared his manuscript of a fantasy novel with me not long ago. First, from the very beginning I could feel that I was being immersed in a very ethnically diverse society (especially when compared to the cozy, provincially British landscape of the Shire the reader is eased into at the beginning of both “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy). The story takes place in a Himalayan-like region, and its political and geographical circumstances probably should best be compared to an Indian hill kingdom under the rule of imperial China. Thus, we see at least three cultures merging in the novel; with references to the real-world we could call them Indian Hindu, Tibetan Buddhist, and Chinese (whether Confucian or Taoist, I cannot say). The organized form of religion in the novel appeared more as monastic orders than a hierarchical church. Magic powers were the same for different communities, but these groups referred to them using words and concepts from their respective cultures, so at the beginning it seemed there existed different magical systems. 

This is one aspect that may appear in non-Western fantasy more often: The experience of history with less centralized culture and language may translate into a less “centralized” fantasy lore. My comparison between magic in fantasy and religion in history is a case in point here. Arguably, in the history of religion there is no other institution that was, and is, both as powerful and as hierarchical and centralized as the Roman Catholic Church, and this may often be reflected in Western fantasy. 

Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is the most outspoken – and a vehemently critical – instance of picturing this historical role of this Church, but there are other, subtler ways this manifests itself. The learned people of medieval Europe had to universally know Latin. In many Western fantasy novels – for example, in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet – all magic is invoked by the uttering of exactly the same words, which means that all wizards, like all medieval monks and priests, had to master the same language. In some novels, such as the Harry Potter series, this language of magic even sounds Latin-like. 

This may be a stretch, but by comparison the way of understanding magic in the particular novel of my Indian colleague seemed closer to the mystical understanding of religion. There are various languages of power, which means God is one but He appears different when viewed through colored pieces of glass of various faiths.

An aspect that is connected to this, and which I think may appear more common in Indian, or maybe even generally non-Western, fantasy are the ways that pre-colonial beliefs and customs are represented as magic systems. This is true for “Empire of Sand” by the British Indian author Tasha Suri. In this novel, the rulers of a fictional India, clearly modeled on Muslim Mughal emperors, persecute the subjugated population and their local beliefs, treating them as pagan rites. But it turns out that these beliefs are actually a working magic system, the effectiveness of which depends on a perfect execution of certain gestures. For the author, the inspiration was classical Indian dance, but it can be argued that these gestures, and the lore around them, are actually like a religious ritual that invests a believer with magical powers when enacted the right way. 

Another clear case of pre-colonial beliefs operating as magic in Indian fantasy is a beautifully written story by Shiv Ramdas, “And Now His Lordship Is Laughing” (you can can find it in Strange Horizons, an online literary magazine). In this story, a Bengali woman living under cruel British rule possesses magic powers that the European overlords do not have. In another story, “Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island” by Nibedita Sen, magic may not be religion, but in a way a cultural custom works like a magic power. Using a magical power arguably serves a metaphor of transplanting one’s culture to a Western society after migration.You can judge for yourself; the story can be found on the website of Nightmare Magazine.

To sum up my magic-religion comparison, I believe that the above instances see Indian authors declaring that India’s traditional beliefs have value too – a statement that runs contrary to the historical, colonial narrative that there was only one true religion. In other words, by turning historical religion into magic, certain fantasy authors contradict the historical view that one religion is true and others are not. If in a novel or a story religion is magic, then each faith may simply be a way of acquiring specific power, rather than the only true way of living.