Where atheists walk on coals.

"They are firm in their Islam," said the man dressed in white Indian khadi, nodding at the house of his Muslim neighbors and smiling crookedly. "They are firm in their Christianity," he continued, pointing toward the Catholic seminary down the road. "And we, we are firm in our atheism." He opened his arms to the low, thatched roofs of the Atheist Center, in the south Indian city of Vijayawada, of which he--a man known as Lavanam--is director. I had just arrived. It seemed a good moment to tell Lavanam about the results of a recent Gallup survey: Indians grant religion more importance than any other people on earth. "Yes, that is so," he said sadly, bobbing his head side-to-side Stevie Wonder-fashion, as South Indians often do. We were standing outside the center's low-slung huts in the shade of a coconut tree. "You see, philosophically, atheism has been there in India from the beginning. Practically...well, not so much."

Not so much is an understatement. New religions sprout like weeds in India. After the March elections, the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena and BJP are once again poised to take over the government. In the north, terrorist groups trade hostages and gunfire in the name of God. Even ardent "secularists" like Indira Gandhi are transformed, in the popular mind, into Hindu mystics. I had heard tirades, on the train down from Delhi, about my own country's appalling lack of spirituality.

"Come," said Lavanam, "you will be hungry." I was very hungry. I had just spent twenty-four hours on the Grand Trunk Express from Delhi, eating only an orange and a can of almonds: pilgrim fare, in a sense. I had come to find out what third-world atheism was all about. Lavanam led me through bright morning sunlight into a hut where five or six bodies lay wrapped in brown blankets, sleeping. At a wooden table someone was putting idli--rice cakes--onto a plate for me. A television flickered near the window, playing the morning news in Telugu. On the wall was a picture of Gandhi at his spinning-wheel. This was Atheist Center headquarters, Lavanam said, and they ran it Indian-style: lots of labor. very little money.

"We try to arrange intercaste marriages," Lavanam told me. "We provide cosmopolitan dinners, much mixing. Mostly we provide education." We were joined now by an American, a gaunt scholar dressed in white Indian khadi with a ragged white beard and feverish eyes. He was here helping Lavanam to write a book about Gandhi and atheism, he said. Gandhi had wanted to abolish untouchability--the vilest part of the Hindu caste system--but the Atheist Center takes it further: they want to abolish caste and all of its religious underpinning.

At the bottom of the Indian caste ladder are the Harijans, or as they now prefer to be called, Dalits: the poorest, "untouchable" caste. In the villages of rural Nizamabad, not far from Vijayawada, poor Dalit families are often forced by debt to sacrifice a daughter as a jogin, or temple prostitute. She becomes a virtual slave of the village landlord, and she has to beg to feed her children, to whom the landlord owes nothing. There are some 20,000 of these women in Andhra Pradesh alone, despite the Atheist Center's success in forcing the state government to outlaw the practice. Lavanam's wife showed me pictures of the jogins: bright eyes glancing fearfully at the camera, or staring ashamedly at the ground. In one picture a beautiful young former jogin was smiling, her head wrapped in a golden shawl, with a man sitting next to her, and a banner over their heads: LAKSHMI WEDS SHANKAR.

What can atheism mean to the villagers--mostly illiterate--who comprise 80 percent of India's population? I found one answer in the Atheist Center's Science Museum--an effort to compress five hundred years of intellectual history into a few easy lessons. Most of the exhibits were once used by fakirs to demonstrate miracles. Now they are used to demonstrate the laws of physics. There were marbles that run in loops once they have sufficient momentum; grooved and tapered runners that carry balls uphill, temporarily overcoming gravity; wooden puppets with levers; human bones, to dispel the fear of ghostly possession. Sometimes the Atheist Center hosts firewalking events, inviting villagers to walk over the hot coals and to refute the guru Sai Baba, who used to claim it was only possible through a holy miracle. My favorite piece of atheism was a poster, designed to explain a certain natural miracle to credulous villagers. It was a picture of a young man and woman with a baby, and below them the words "Who Is Responsible?" To the right were three blank boxes, each aligned with a word: first GOD, then WOMAN, and finally MAN, With a big red check mark through his box. At the bottom of the poster, in large print, were the words: YES. IT'S A SCIENTIFIC FACT.

The Atheist Center was founded in 1940 by G. Ramachandra Rao, a university professor who adopted the name Gora for himself and tried to win Gandhi over to atheism. His children, who now run the center, all have nonreligious names derived from political events in the year of their birth: Lavanam, for instance, means salt, for Gandhi's 1930 Salt March. You can learn all this from the countless pamphlets the Atheists print on an old-fashioned, movable-type printing press. Lavanam's twenty-two year-old nephew Vikas, who plays in a heavy metal band in Hyderabad, handed me "Positive Atheism," followed by "We Become Atheists," "An Atheist with Gandhi," and "The Atheist Golden Jubilee." Then there was the periodical The Atheist--dozens of issues, with hopeful epigrams on the cover: "Atheism Has Bright Future!" and "Victory to Humans!"

The Atheist literature is a strange blend of Enlightenment rationalism ("I came to the conclusion that it was man that made god out of psychological necessity in primitive times," writes Gora) and Gandhian progressivism. One of Gora's early associates was the Indian economist, J. C. Kumarappa, who pioneered the modern cult of "sustainable development." But the keynote of Gora's prose is a majestic confidence that the death of god leads directly to moral and political solutions: "The problem before atheists is to find out a method by which economic equality is achieved while preserving the freedom of the individual. That is, taking democracy and socialism together." Never mind the cold war, remove god and the flood of loving kindness surrounds us all. The really strange part is that after a few days among the atheists you start to believe it. Without ever articulating it very clearly, the atheists enact a belief that the moral impulse flowers best without ritual or doctrine. And it is contagious.

The next day Lavanam, known in the pamphlets as "the Good-Will Ambassador of Atheism," went to Bangalore to spread the good news. His brother, Vijayam ("Success"--the Congress party succeeded in the 1937 elections), took me to the village of Srikakulum, where his youngest sister, Nao ("Number Nine"--nothing interesting happened that year, they told me, but she was the ninth child), runs a school. We went by Jeep, on narrow roads full of bullock carts stacked high with fresh-cut sugar cane. We passed through tiny villages, and after an hour or so the road dwindled to a deeply rutted mud trail. The Jeep was jumping up and down like a mad water buffalo, and I was about to beg for mercy when Vijayam turned to me, smiling sweetly, and said that Princess Anne had come out to the school on this road, in 1985. I kept quiet. And it was true: I found her signature later that day in the guest book, the one word sweeping across an entire page in florid script. They gave me a tour of the school, and afterwards we sat on the porch sipping tea. The children had gone home. It was a lovely school, I said. And the curriculum here ... was it--well, you know--"--Atheist? Oh yes," said Vijayam, nodding vigorously: "very atheist."

Back at the Atheist Center, I was greeted with warm, unchristian hospitality and plenty of head-bobbing. I began to feel ashamed of myself: these people were all educated, but doing the selfless work of nuns or saintly women like Mother Teresa. They did it all in the name of atheism, and they did it with smiles on their faces. Would I be attending the World Atheist Conference, they asked, to be held in Vijayawada in January 1996? 1 was welcome! Thousands of atheists would be coming, from all over the world! I said I would try.

ROBERT WORTH, a frequent Commonweal contributor, is a graduate student in English at Princeton University.