The age-old business of liberation & salvation

Imagine if you could buy moksa, improve your spiritual index, invest your way to paradise? This is not a new thought; it's as old as civilisation

Five centuries ago, you could buy your mother out of purgatory. A fee to the Church shortened her wait. There was theology around it, but the mechanics were simple. The Church needed money for cathedrals and wars. Sin became a commodity. A friar named Johann Tetzel toured Germany selling indulgences with a jingle: drop a coin in the bowl and a soul drops out of purgatory. Martin Luther objected, nailed his complaints to a door, and became the father of the Protestant Reformation.

The idea behind indulgences did not die. It just changed its name.


Islamic finance tells the same story in a different language. The Quran bans riba, interest on loans, to stop the rich from exploiting the desperate. But banks need to lend and borrow, so contracts like murabaha and ijara were invented. The bank buys something and resells it to the customer at a markup, paid over time. No interest, just profit. Sharia boards of scholars certify these contracts, for a fee. The ban on usury did not end usury. It renamed it.

India has its own version, dressed in Sanskrit. Wealth managers now build portfolios around purity, non-violence and conscious living. What counts as purified changes with each fund's brochure, but the pattern holds. Banks, cement, petroleum and plastic are in. Alcohol, meat, tobacco, leather and weapons are out. Violence that happens off-screen is acceptable. A slaughterhouse is impure. A blast furnace is pure. A tannery is impure. A data centre running on minerals mined unjustly is pure, because no goat died where the shareholders could see it.

Every one of these systems strips out the hard part and keeps the label. Indulgences were supposed to come with genuine penitence. Tetzel sold them without it. The ban on riba was meant to protect the poor, not fund banks. Ahimsa was never meant to stand alone either. In monastic practice, it came bundled with not stealing and not hoarding. A monk who practiced ahimsa owned nothing. Purified investing keeps the ahimsa and drops the rest. It affirms old values while pushing the actual violence out to the fields, where it is easy to forget.

The Indian case makes the caste angle obvious. Distance from filth has always been a mark of purity here. Brahmins do not touch corpses, skin, or waste. Someone else does that, and that someone was given a caste and a name for the job. The stock exchange has simply inherited this arrangement. The farmer, the fisherman, the leather worker are absent from the portfolio. The banker, who touches neither soil nor blood, gets roughly a third of it. The fund did not invent this hierarchy. It found it already built, ran it through Bloomberg, and called the result ethics.

What indulgences, Islamic banking and purified investing all show is that markets do not shy away from religious language. They gather around it. A wealthy society will always pay for a story that makes its wealth feel clean. The Church sold that story in Latin, with a receipt. The banks sell it with a Sharia certificate. Bombay sells it with a fund fact sheet.

Underneath, the same activity continues: debt collection, profit margins, industrial extraction. Only the label changes, and the label is where the real money gets made.

Purgatory did not close when guilt became a commodity. It moved. Look at any major temple town in India today. Mecca figured this out long before Ayodhya did. Now there are quotas and licensed operators. Packages come in tiers. The rich get proximity to the deity. The poor get the queue. Tirupati runs on the same logic, with a special entry ticket for those who can pay and hours of standing for those who cannot. Temple trusts operate like corporations, complete with gold reserves and hospitality wings. The pilgrim has become a customer. Queue time is the new yield curve. Nobody sells indulgences anymore. They sell access instead, and the devotee always lines up. The rich believe money can buy salvation. That belief, the wise have always said, is the real illusion.