The Divine Hustle Review | Piety, Performance, and Precarity

In a divinity-driven economy where one needs agents, representatives, and “packages” to reach God, Sonali Rajkumar Devnani’s documentary The Divine Hustle asks a few uneasy questions. Does everyone have equal rights to God—or, more specifically, to embodying God? Who determines the beneficiaries in a spiritual economy, where even embodying the divine has become a hustle? In temple towns, when devotees offer money to God impersonators, are they offering money to receive blessings, or are they paying for the performance?

At the heart of the film are three god personators/enactors dependent on the spiritual economy for sustenance and survival. When a pre-teen girl, Khushi Batham, wakes up on the Benaras ghat where she lives with her mother, traces of blue paint still stain the contours of her face. She walks down the steps and washes her face in the river. Without pause, she applies a fresh coat of face paint as she gets started for the day. Her mother draws the third eye of Lord Shiva along with a few lines on her forehead. She wraps a toy snake around her neck, and thus begins her hustle—moving from person to person, pressing sandalwood paste onto their foreheads and asking for money. Sandalwood paste, often considered sacred and indispensable in worship rituals, becomes her offering. Within the film’s frame, most people on the ghat accept her approach, maybe out of devotion, or perhaps even out of the fear of divine.

Fifteen-year-old Gopal was born with deformed legs, and when he first encounters the documentary’s gaze, he claims to be content with his “hustle”—sitting on a cart, dressed in the yellow clothes of Lord Gopal, with golden sequins glued above his eyebrows. People slip coins and ten rupee notes into a steel plate placed in front of him as he blesses them with a feather. Only in a private moment with the camera does he reveal more, speaking about being coerced into begging for money. Interspersed with visuals of places where religion and commerce converge, the documentary moves back and forth to capture Gopal’s life with his family

The third character the camera follows is Abhishek, who paints his face with black and red paint and golden glitter to perform as Goddess Kali. In his late twenties, with a wife and a son, Abhishek carries responsibilities that have led him to become a hustler.

It is tempting to view Khushi, Gopal, and Abhishek as entrepreneurs navigating the religious economy to make a living. They are not the first to do so, nor will they be the last. For instance, consider the digital “kumbh snan” ventures, in which photographs of people are being dipped into the river to fulfill their Kumbh wishes for a fee, or the boat owner who reportedly earned 30 crores in just 45 days of the Kumbh. Yet, Khushi and Gopal cannot truly be seen as agents of their own small-scale enterprise, because they do not control the money. Khushi hands her earnings to her mother, who is saving for a major surgery. Gopal’s father prevents the money from reaching him. Only Abhishek, the sole adult among the three, gets to use his earnings to raise his son.

Interestingly, Gopal’s father justifies his son’s dressing up and begging by saying, “He is a child, he is God too.” This statement prompts one to ask whether romanticising children as “little gods” helps perpetuate the systemic exploitation of informal labour while obscuring the family’s own culpability. It also raises a harder question: does such rhetoric allow the father to excuse his own refusal to work and his use of Gopal as a means of earning money and alms? In this world of misplaced faith, even relationships become transactional.

Interspersed with scenes of religious sites, the film underscores the gulf between the spiritual lives of the affluent and the marginalised. On one side, it captures upper-middle-class devotees as well as foreigners immersing themselves in the “spiritual contact” they believe they’ve had with the divine. Meanwhile, the poor living in temple towns barely scrape by. Lacking money or a means to earn a living, they paint their faces, don costumes, and become god-impersonators. Yet when they do so, the gatekeepers—often in the form of self-proclaimed Sanatanis berating a man for dressing up as Kali, or the local police—arrive to harass or even arrest them. It does not take long to notice that not everyone has equal rights over God, just as God does not bless all equally. A monopoly exists on making money in God’s name. Some—like the pandits who inherit the temple economy—enjoy exclusive access to God as a birthright, while the rest claw at the threshold, trying to gather scraps.

Here’s the obvious truth about embodying God: transforming oneself into a deity for the marketplace theatre of the religious economy does not strengthen one’s claim to the divine. At best, you are perceived as a performer; at worst, a swindler. The film underscores this with commendable restraint, relying on observational intimacy rather than explanatory voice-overs.

We watch the performers paint themselves, collect alms, argue with family members, and sit in silence after a long day’s work. By focusing so closely on its three subjects, the film hints at the broader structures, like temple hierarchies, caste exclusions, municipal crackdowns, that shape their lives. As a viewer, one longs for a wider lens: to know how many such performers exist, whether what they earn is enough to support their families, and how authorities regulate or ignore them. A few more minutes of context, and perhaps a little less footage of religious rituals could have transformed individual narrative into systemic critique. On second thought, the absence may be deliberate: Devnani resists turning her protagonists into mere data points. She keeps the emphasis on lived experience of informal labour and its economic grind.

In a neoliberal India where even spirituality is monetised, the poor are not just passive consumers of religion but also its suppliers, who have been embodying gods for others’ benefit. Watching Khushi’s face as she removes her mask, or hearing fifteen-year-old Gopal confess that he has been begging since he was three, one witnesses a child’s fatigue at being turned into a worker. Seeing that reality forces us to ask not only what devotion costs the poor, but what it reveals about the economy built on our faith. In that moment, The Divine Hustle reveals its core insight: that belief is not merely a private feeling but a form of public labour, and for the most vulnerable, that labour is as exploitative as it is essential.

Sritama Bhattacharyya has an M.Phil in Women’s Studies from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She is currently an English Teacher based in Washington.