The Kalki Craze

A teenaged girl from Rajupetta (Andhra Pradesh), ill-prepared for her exams, scores a first class. A commuter, grappling with Mumbai's chaotic transport, finds a speeding bus halt just for him. A Russian epileptic in Novocherkask discovers a surprise gift of Vodka to spiritaway his seizures. Lost toys surface to cheer a child in Leningrad.

The list of such "miracles" attributed to Kalki, the latest bhagwan to hit an already crowded human pantheon, is extensive. Equally lengthy is the queue of doubting Thomases scoffing at the claims of the bhagwan who, according to his venerating devotees, is the tenth reincarnation of Vishnu in his Kalki avatar, born to extricate mankind from kaliyug's clutches. "Purify and cleanse yourselves of your sinful nature that you could be saved by Me from the natural calamities and the varied sufferings that would issue forth from March 1998." Such dire foreboding coupled with an inherent promise let loose in 1989 on a disillusioned humanity seem to have earned Kalki not only a fanatic fan following, but also oodles of opprobrium.

Rumours of hypnosis-induced devotion and forced donations, charges by distraught parents of impressionable youth being brainwashed into monkhood, reports of police raids and press censure have dogged the cult, particularly in south India. As the charges start flying thick and fast, the bhagwan himself has conveniently gone into Anantarmukha at his ancestral Nemam village—i.e. he has receded into the self: no darshans and no sermons. Till March next year, when he will "appear" to straighten out the world.

Elsewhere, including in Mumbai, his disciples defend the guru. "This (the accusations) also is the bhagwan's maya. Has not every prophet in every religion experienced this? The suspicious will resist it only to later join the flow. This is just a temporary phase and it will strengthen the dharma," predicts the 20-something Acharya Akshayamati who has been "chosen by the Lord" to spearhead the movement in northern India. She looks to the sanyasins for help: they pipe up that they voluntarily stepped into Kalkidharma. Anjana says she walked into the cult from Ernakulam after the "Lord helped me with my ninth standard studies". 

Anita "Kalkidasa" left her executive father in Bangalore and dropped out of school. Delhi's Arthi also left school to become a monk. Scotching rumours of coercion, Akshayamati maintains: "If the family comes for them, we send them back. Where is the question of holding them back by hypnosis? Though these children have renounced the world, they interact with their families. A few children want to return, and they are sent back." Like a typical southerner who views everything above the Vindhyas as the North, Akshayamati (originally from Telugu land) clubs Maharashtra as part of her turf. Her headquarters in Mumbai, which appears tohave escaped disconcerting media scrutiny, is the three-storeyed Survesh Sadan tucked away in suburban Bandra's crowded Linking Road. Its delicate concrete grills and fluted window-sills are the only faint symbols of the temple within.

As the traffic snarls below, Akshayamati-led devotees, mostly teenagers and some middle-aged monks with completely shorn heads draped in yards of yellow or white robes, sing Kabir bhajans and spout Sanskrit shlokas, which have been tinkered with for the contemporary Kalki flavour. Office-goers often join in, clashing cymbals, while kanjeevaram-clad housewives from Mumbai's Tamil quarters, dripping with diamonds, sway with the drumbeat. Incense hangs heavy in the air, while the large portrait of the 48-year-old Kalki presides over the hall. The luxuriantly-bearded godman is swaddled, like his monks, in flowing yellow robes. His palms, outstretched in benediction, is marked with spots of red that strangely duplicate the Christ-on-cross effect. Strands of sweet-smelling flowers garland his portrait which the Kalkidasas revere as the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Srimuti.

Everyday dyed-in-the-wool believers pour into the 'mandir' for a 'darshan' of the portrait and "sessions to continue cleansing their soul of impure thoughts" at the feet of Akshayamati. Akshayamati and the seven acharyas are the "chosen" ones to propagate the Kalki myth. While Sammadarshini herds the gullible in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, Vimalkirti focuses on steeling the cult's stranglehold in its birthplace, Tamil Nadu. Maitreyi initiates the female hordes thronging the bhagwan's feetand transforms some of them into monks, while Koushika replicates this effort among the self-abdicating sanyasis. Anandagiri has been elevated to blazoning in the US the prophesies of the "new light breaking upon the earth". Shankara Bhagawat, a nuclear physicist who stopped chasing the mysteries of the atom to plumb the depths of this new-found religiosity, is the Paramacharya who actually "divined" the presence of the Kalki. "Kalki was born in 1949 in Natam (TN). His four childhood friends realised that he was Kalki when he revealed himself to them. But the message was not reached to the world at this point. Paramacharya continued with his studies to research nuclear physics and become a physicist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He left for Germany to further his studies. But he gave it up after the calling and went to a village in Andhra Pradesh and started a school called Jivashram in 1984. The phenomenon started here," Akshayamati narrates solemnly.

She was just a child then, she recalls, more amused than moved by the "mystical experience" of the other children. "It was my brother who saw the Lord. He saw his entire past life go before him, just like the other children. I was curious and went along. I saw the Truth. Miracles began to happen in my life. I was suffering from asthma and it disappeared. I felt unimaginable bliss. My entire family felt it, they became a better family," she says, parroting the lines that have been repeated zillion times in sessions. And then came the personal anointment. "The Lord chose me. My family was very happy. I joined the dharma in 1990." Since 1989, the juggernaut of the Kalki cult had begun to roll through the rest of the country. It had also long begun to cross the shores, traversing into the Americas, with centres in Florida, New Yorkand Argentina. In Russia, followers have been baptised by its trailblazer, Freddy Nielsen. The cult's monthly newsletter, The Golden Age of Kalki, has numerous letters purportedly written by Russian devotees. If Akshayamati is to be believed, the cult has 20 lakh devotees in India and 30 lakh in the rest of the world.

With a drop-out researcher steering the movement, the cult has progressed with precision. Questionnaires probing the psyche of the person attending the "vara yagnas" or training sessions are sedulously collected. Questions range from whether the participant "felt the Personal God, divined past life experiences or physical experiences or health read-justments like de-addictions. " Pamphlets capitalise on the "prophesies" of earlier dharmas. So, there is a saying by the Mother of Aurobindo Ashram that the "manifestation of the Supra-mental upon the earth is no more a promise, but a living fact, a reality." Then, there is Swami Viveka-nanda's prediction that "it is from Madras that the new light must spread all over India. With this end, you must work. I had always great hopes for Madras and I have the firm belief that from Madras will come the spiritual wave that shall deluge India." These are rounded off with Ramakrishna Para-mahansa's belief that "the greatest manifestation of His power is through an incarnation." The pamphlet also makes this eclectic offer: "Kalki and Bhagawat (the Paramacharya), living amid us today, are granting experiences to people either in their own forms or in a form (including the formless) suitable to their personal dispositions of faith. Kalki is no new god, he is the Ishwara of Hindus, the father-in-heaven of Christians and the niraakar of other religious communities." A newsletter profile of its American devotees is yet another eye-opener: "Here the dharma of Kalki is taking on a new Christian form in recognition of the power of the local religious traditions."

Devotees, of course, see in it another sign of the Divine Truth. "Though I am a Brahmin, I feel like embracing a non-Brahmin, all of humanity without the barriers of caste and creed. That itself is a miracle," says Anandi-lakshmi Balasubramaniam who, along with her husband, shifted to Mumbai "to feel closer to the Lord". She joined the cult after an aloof husband sought her forgiveness, an instance of Kalki's 'miracle'. As devotees urge you to "open up" to the dharma, Akshayamati throws a line: "You, too, should take Kalki as your personal god. There is still time." Possibly, but only till March next year.