In the age of self-declared godmen and swamis, Somak Biswas offers a refreshing account of the spiritual world in which the Indian gurus and their western disciples experimented in colonial India. It explores the tangled tales of cultural de-Anglicization of the disciples reposing their faith in non-white bodies through the mystiques of Hinduism. Nandy (1983) hinted at this phenomenon. The Whites, who had unsettled childhoods, deduced the prodigy of Indian cultures and took refuge in Eastern religions to gratify their anxious selves. Thus, the impact of religion in global history is multifaceted and remains a contested historiographic site for scholars.
Biswas critically scrutinizes the platonic relationships between Indian gurus and disciples. CF Andrews and William Pearson were the close aides of Tagore and Gandhi. The female christened disciples—Margaret Noble (Nivedita), Josephine MacLeod (Jaya), and Sarah Bull (Dhira Mata)—shared a lifelong companionship with Vivekananda, and Madeleine Slade (Mira) was Gandhi’s most treasured follower. The gurus with differing orientations shared a common ambition: promulgating Hindu spirituality as an alternative to non-Indic religions, engaging in politics of respectability and challenging modernity.
Indophilia is the ‘romanticised engagements around Hindu ideas of India in late colonial British India’ (p. 4). The gurus, as self-makers, imbued their disciples with an Indianized self—drawn from Hindu cultures—serving as a pathway to practise Indophile politics. It was strengthened through the exchange of letters and life at ashrams and ashram-like spaces in the mammoth yet mystical world of spiritual domesticity and territoriality.
The ashram was used to forge a utopian community to regain the lost (Hindu) world by transcending the bounds of gender, class, and national hierarchies. The author contends with the postcolonial frameworks and offers diffused premises of the politics of deep guru-discipleship. He argues that the colonial pathologies gave birth to individuals who did not fit in the colonial (Müllerian) or anticolonial (Saidian) binaries; they rather participated differently in the public spheres of colonial India.
There are five chapters in the book. How to make sense of the world of gurus and disciples? The chapters, ‘Languages of Longing’, ‘Home in the World’ and ‘Practices of Discipleship’, probe the guru-disciple world exhaustively after a classy Introduction. Indophilia was sprawled from a tiny private affair to the giant anticolonial project through letters and ‘place-making’ in ashrams. Letter-writing between a guru and their disciples was central to forming an epistolary community in acquiring a language of longing and the process of embodiment. For the disciples, ‘anxious for physical and emotional proximity to their mentors’ (p. 28), these letters carried emotive descriptions of the everydayness of ashramic life and spiritual curricula grappled in anti-coloniality.
The gurus demanded their disciples be transmogrified into desexualized bodies to build impersonal relations while living in overly informal spaces. Biswas discusses two major ashrams—Shantiniketan and Sabarmati—founded by Tagore and Gandhi, respectively. The disciples and gurus had to undergo a range of tests where ‘each small training was part of a larger self-making’ (p. 157). These modern ashrams codified a strict Hindu lifestyle in the making and remaking of selves to counter the modern notion of space, time and being, which could appropriate Christianity into Hindu spirituality.
The appeal to the personhood of gurus was altered to immerse the disciples in a larger spiritual-cultural-political project. Through mantradeeksha, a female disciple would come to a new ‘birth’ (Brahmacharini) by denouncing the previously ascribed affiliations. Being a proud English woman, Noble was insulted by Vivekananda; Gandhi imposed rulings on Mira, from lifting human excreta to wearing a Khadi saree; and Tagore was equally worried by the ‘love adoration’ of Andrews and Pearson. Such austerities helped them to become White Hindus.
A group of ‘holy’ disciples scaffolded Vivekananda in culminating a global figure. Biswas reckons that he took the self-making of the disciples to another level: loving India meant loving his sort of Vedanta religion. ‘The chanting of strange Sanskrit hymns in a near mystifying atmosphere, clad in a Hindu monk’s habit, slipping in and out of meditation, produced a great theatrical effect’ (p. 161) that appealed to the West. Such performances brought to him some of the most affluent American and European figures. His theatrical effect traversed from West Bengal to Tamil Nadu and from the USA to the UK.
The chapter, ‘India, Indophiles and Indenture’, analyses the roles played by western exponents as interlocutors between the British officials and the Indian labour classes. Andrews and Pearson proved successful in calling attention to the plight of labourers in Mauritius, Fiji, and South and East Africa. They typecast the nationalist discourse filled with the anxieties of representation.
The global advocacy for Indian respectability, the greatness of Hinduism and abolishing indenture was part of the Indian middle-class aspirations suited to the ‘nationalist rhetoric for equal rights and representation within a multi-ethnic British Empire’ (p. 129). It reproduced the hegemonies of race and caste hierarchies. On the other hand, this ‘respectability’ had never been friendly to the oppressed communities. They do not fall in the worldview of Andrews or Nivedita; rather, there are moments when they infused anti-Muslim pronouncements (pp. 101-102).
The last chapter, ‘Vedanta and Its Variables’, pivots on the vehement efforts of Vivekananda and his brother monks in projecting Hinduism. His disciples Nivedita, Bull and Macleod wilfully entered the cultural world of Hinduism ‘to make India great’ and global. Amidst the world religions, they alluded to ‘its grand inclusive schema, its ability to reconcile modern science with religion, and the universality of its tenets’ (p. 241). There were others who drew on Vivekananda indifferently. Ashton Johnson and Henrietta Muller ‘exposed’ his deceptive world. The Epilogue of the book details such frictions.
Contradictorily, a disciple’s loyalties had been wavering, even if they became the ‘object of memorial politics’. Andrews, who was thrashed by the colonial administration, was suspected as a British spy; the roads for Mira and Pearson to the custodianship of ashramic life were hardened, and Noble’s Hinduness was always on the testing cradle. Hence, the Indophile characters could neither achieve the ‘utopian Indianised self’ nor be accepted by the masses beyond the ashramic and nationalist political realm.
The major segment of the book engages with Vivekananda, who intervened as a liminal protagonist between the glorious past and a promising modern future through Vedantic spirituality. The book sheds light on how gurus and disciples forged a global network of ideas and played the politics of respectability. They propagated the Great Aryan thesis ad romanticized an imagination: the Hindu spiritual embodiment could defeat the ‘falsehood’ of colonial modernity and the British Raj in India. However, the book leaves no clues as to whether the ‘Indian Self’ integrates the non-Indic religions! This nuanced piece of archival work carries burgeoning political implications of such a conceptual territory in a world marked by both ‘communal future’ and ‘spiritual turn’.
Reference
Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Abu Osama teaches Social Work at Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad.