Leap Of Faith: Gurus, Godmen, And Post-Secular India

In the climax scene of the blockbuster film PK, the godman, Tapasvi, challenges the vaunted atheism of the alien protagonist in a media trial aired on a national TV channel: “People who have nothing to live for, but if they find purpose in their lives by placing faith in God, who are you to take that away from them?”. Our despondent alien agrees with the godman, that the idea of God can give one hope and strength in the face of suffering, but “in whose God should I believe?” he retorts. “The one who made us, or the one who is made up by you (humans)?” Since we know nothing about the God who made us, and since the God made by us is just like us, “petty, corrupt, and deceitful”, our atheist hero’s panacea is to “believe in the God who made us, and abolish the God you [humans] made up”. This is an instructive scene to any understanding of public religiosity in India, not least because it captures the dialectical effacement of reason and faith, and their contradictory manifestations in the everyday lives of Indian publics.

There are strong rationalist sentiments in India against the role of gurus and the “God Market” in Indian society, often advocating a wholesale rejection of the cultures of devotion and public religiosity under the guise of secularist reason. While there is no harm in envisioning a society where science and reason triumph, for a country with over 4,000 years of multi-faith communities, the many rationalist solutions―most of which boil down to a single institutionalist solution, namely to educate the illiterate and innocent devotees―proposed to the “God Market” in India are all but myopic. An antidote to these secularist remedies, I would contend, must lie with a healthy practice of religious faiths in a secular society, and not with arrogating and appropriating the former into the discourses of educational therapy, where the individual―the devotee―becomes the object of reform, rather than, say, the structures that forge complicity between the state institutions and godmen.

This approach, namely to create conditions for a healthy co-existence of multi-faith communalities that are not necessarily antithetical to the world of science and reason, is aptly post-secular. It is post-secular because it responds to the fallacies of secularism, and the “deep moral state” privy to all secular societies, including the Western ones, which are built on the ethos of a dominant host religion. In many European countries today, there is the usual “church tax”, and a good deal of what we consider today secular-legal doctrines of justice are derived from the Christian ethos or the Protestant ethic―with significant contributions and implications to the debates of euthanasia and abortion―just as the Indian state’s secularism is spearheaded by the ethos of its own dominant religion: Hinduism. A post-secular approach, one that exposes the “deep moral state” of secularism anchored in a dominant religion, bears the potential to issue a course correction by accommodating a secular distribution of matters of faith and beliefs that crosscut organised religion.

Consider, for instance, the inauguration of the two significant events in recent years. The opening ceremony of the new Indian Parliament in 2023 was a textbook case of pseudo-performative secularism of the state: there is a representative of each major Indian religion, Jain, Sikh, Jew, Hindu, and Muslim, presiding over the stage in their respective vestments―cassocks, robes, muhapatti, kasaya, headgear―reminiscent of the “fashion show” scene in the film PK which debunks the myth that a person’s religious identity is tied to dress code and appearance: “Beard, moustache, and turban, you have a Sikh. Remove the turban, you have a Hindu. Remove the moustache, there’s the Muslim. Such a difference is made by a false God. If a real God wanted us to divide into so many religions, he would have put a label on us.”

The false Gods we have created, PK goes on to assure us, are connected to the “fashion parading” of religions: the performance of religious difference in public spaces through which politicians and gurus mobilise socio-economic discontent for political support. Consider, then, the other major event: the inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya in 2024, where a similar fashion show was staged, but only for the Hindu Indian audience: the Prime Minister was seen along the chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Mohan Bhagwat, with the blessings of other prominent Hindus who were on the official invitee’s list for the event: Bageshwar Dham’s Dhirendra Shastri, Baba Ramdev, Jagadguru Rambhadracharya, and Sadhguru, among others.

This Janus-faced secularism of the Indian state―where religious difference is invoked in one event, and completely erased in another―is of a piece with what I call here the rise of entrepreneurial gurus. Historically, India has witnessed four types of gurus: ashram-based gurus such as Bala Sai Baba or Puttaparthi Sai Baba who offered both spiritual and philanthropic services; global celebrity gurus such as Osho and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who became the emissaries of Indian spirituality in the West; political gurus such as Chandraswami who advised politicians; and, the most influential of them all, Bhagwan-style gurus who claim to be the agents of God possessing magical powers, such as Mata Amritanandamayi, Asaram Bapu, Sant Rampal, and Swami Nithyananda, among others.

Entrepreneurial gurus are the latest incarnation among these; a fatal combination of all the guru typologies listed above, with the only exception that the former receive the blessings of the Indian state, often in the form of overt devotional patronage of the Prime Ministers and Chief Ministers, or as tax benefits, subsidies, exceptions from environmental clearances to build ashrams heavily subsidised by the taxpayer’s money. Ramdev Baba’s co-owned Pathanjali and Jaggi Vasudev are the biggest beneficiaries of such perks, besides the photo-ops with the Prime Minister on national events of significance that help legitimise their place in national life. The notoriety of these entrepreneurial gurus stems from mobilising Indian tradition and spirituality against the perceived “ills” of scientific reason, and weaponising anti-western sentiments to pitch their respective products of spirituality: “inner engineering”, yoga, Ayurveda, spiritual counselling, ashram services. In its implied collusion and complicity with such gurus, the pseudo-secular Indian state detaches its moorings and deposits in the individual.

A post-secular antidote to this toxic spirituality, and the individual “self-reengineering” promulgated by the complex interplay of capitalism, communalism, and vote banks may not necessarily lie with the empowerment or agency of the devotee, but with the untangling of the toxic agents that turn matters of faith into unhealthy instruments of conflict, dissent, and stampedes. And when advocating this position, I could not help asking myself: what might a healthy practice of matters of faith look like? The answer, as it turned out, wasn’t too far from my own life.

When I was about nine years old, I was bitten by a reptile. My panicked grandmother somehow concluded that it was a cobra, a family curse from Nagadevatha. My confused father rushed me to a doctor, some 20 km away; much to my grandmother’s protest that English medicine―practiced then by a Christian doctor who went by the name Sunder Paul―is no cure for a Hindu snake. And to my grandmother’s delight, the doctor refused to give an antidote because we couldn’t identify the make and type of the snake. So, without much ado, my grandmother brought me back to the village and requested an audience with the local mantric, a Hindu snake healer, with a specialisation in cobras. After checking the bite marks, the Hindu healer conceded that his mantras would be of no help if the snake wasn’t a Cobra. So, to play safe, the healer referred us to another Mantric in the village: a Muslim fakir, also known as ‘spitting doctor’, whose vigorous spitting on the bite marks is believed to have the power of an antidote. Apparently, it worked, as I lived to tell the tale, but my grandmother would never acknowledge the fact that a Muslim fakir would have the cure for the venom of a Hindu snake, let alone the English medicine from a Christian doctor. When I began to write about this piece for the current issue on gurus, this peculiar childhood episode of mine revealed to me as much about the indispensability of faith as the dispensability of religion, one that gestures towards its inherent post-secular character: it no longer matters what religion the snake or the Mantric belonged to, but it matters immensely that it was faith as such that vindicated my survival of the snake bite.

(Views expressed are personal)

(This appeared in the print as 'Leap Of Faith')

Pavan Malreddy is a specialist in comparative anglophone literatures at Goethe University, Frankfurt