It’s a time of sandhi in Punjab—a time when things meet and collide gently at the boundaries, intersecting, rupturing, melding and transacting with each other. In the air, the dull heat of late autumn mixes with a premonition of winter. On the flat acres below, green paddy is being cleared to make way for the seasonal carpeting of wheatish-gold. As the plough digs deeper, into the human subsoil, another kind of harvest is being born. Religion runs through India’s consciousness like a gene: it orders reality, it shapes social behaviour, it moves and it anchors, as much as it estranges and cleaves. Here, even when framed within Punjab’s melting-pot history, something novel and mould-breaking is emerging. A wave of Charismatic Christianity—drawing from the worldwide Pentecostal movement—is sweeping through Punjab in tidal volumes and generating all sorts of conflicting emotions. A deep sense of belonging and ecstatic hope for those on the inside, disquiet for those watching from the ringside. It’s a new borderland. One that Punjab, with all its scars from previous border-making, is not used to and does not know how to orient itself to.
Things look normal enough on the surface till you wind past the featureless cityscape of Jalandhar to Khambra village, on its periurban edges. Going to the Ankur Narula Ministry on a Sunday is like visiting Delhi’s Akshardham complex; at 65 acres, it’s even bigger in physical area. Its spiritual catchment area matches that in scale. Just 37, and born to a Hindu Khatri family that traded in marble in Jalandhar, Narula has that clean-cut, cherubic look that could blend into middle management anywhere. But what he runs—the Church of Signs and Wonders—is the largest among Punjab’s new Charismatic orders. A mini-empire, in fact, counting prefectures across nine districts of Punjab, besides Bihar and Bengal and global embassies in the US, Canada, Germany and one in Harrow, Greater London. Once he converted in 2008, he started life as a miracle preacher with just three followers. Now his ministry claims a global flock of 300,000—all of whom adoringly call him ‘Papa’, although he prefers the prefix ‘Apostle’. Square that number against the 2011 census figures, which totalled Christians in Punjab at a mere 348,000, and you bump up against the hard edge of the equation—the reason why the mandarins of other religious establishments are shifting uneasily in their august seats. Fears of a demographic spike are precisely what feed the bogey
