Bhavdeep Kang [Kang - Gurus: Stories of India’s Leading Babas

westland ltd

Gurus

Bhavdeep Kang is a graduate in History from Lady Shri Ram College, and later did her diploma in Journalism from Delhi. She began her career with the Times of India in 1986 and since then has worked for several newspapers and magazines including The Indian Express, The Telegraph, Outlook and India Today.

Bhavdeep Kang is now a freelance journalist and writes on politics, agriculture and food policy. She lives in New Delhi.

Gurus

Stories of Indias Leading Babas

Bhavdeep Kang

Acknowledgements

For their help in putting the book together: Atul Jain, K G Suresh, Ram Madhav, Harish Thawani, Amod Agarwal, H N Sharma, Parsa Venkateshwarao Jr, Prabhu Chawla and Shravan Garg.

Contents

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Dhirendra Brahmachari

Chandraswami

Mata Amritanandamayi

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Morari Bapu

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

Baba Ramdev

Bhaiyyuji Maharaj

Introduction

In Jamalpur of the late 1960s, the Railway Officers Colony was an oasis of privilege. As the training ground for its elite engineering corps, the little town in Bihar figured prominently on the map of the Indian Railways. Its officers led patrician lives in colonial bungalows ringed by sprawling grounds, manned by an army of attendants. Most evenings and entire weekends often centred around the club, its swimming pool and golf course. My father, an alumnus of the famed Institute for Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, now taught at his alma mater. I, the younger of two daughters, was enrolled in kindergarten. Our afternoons were spent playing noisily on the evergreen front lawns, flourishing kitchen gardens and orchards, seguing into evenings at the club, where our mother decorously tossed shuttlecocks on the badminton court or played an Indianised version of the popular card game Rummy, paplu, while we snuck into the pool room to chalk the cues, or the card room to shuffle the decks dexterously and pore over pictures of cakes and bakes in Good Housekeeping .

The world outside our red-brick enclave rarely intruded; Neil Armstrongs landing on the moon moved us far more than events closer home, like famine or Naxalism. The one exception however was the birth of the religious order called the Ananda Marg, which was virtually at our doorstep. A decade or so earlier, a railway accountant named Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar had founded the religious Order under a banyan tree on our golf course. It had grown rapidly, amid thrilling rumours of mysterious deaths within the Order, for which Sarkar was imprisoned in 1971. The Ananda Marg stayed with us as we shifted, first to mofussil West Bengal and then to Kolkata, its blood-soaked trajectory a talking point in railway homes. Invariably, it was viewed through a political rather than religious prism, the focus of discussion being its violent
confrontations with the government.

Ours was a hybrid upbringing, reflecting the familys diverse cultural influences. My mothers village near Lahore (Pakistan) was half-Muslim, half-Sikh and she grew up in Raj-style Shimla (where we spent our summers). My fathers turntable played Shamshad Begum and
Mohammad Rafi, while we thrilled to Bob Dylan and Janice Joplin and secretly drooled over Donny Osmond. Our Hollywood, Beatles and Marvel comics-tenderised minds were absurdly innocent of caste and creed. We grew up without ritual, other than the mandatory sewa (service) of cleaning up or serving meals at a public affair like the Akhand Path (recitations from the Sikhs religious book, the Guru Granth Sahib). Festivals like Holi, Diwali, Christmas and Eid were wholly and solely holidays, marked by an hour-long reading of the Guru Granth Sahib in the evening. We fidgeted through the prayer and scampered off the moment the gutka (prayer book) was stowed away. Prasad at the Gurudwara was a ghee-laden delight shared with friends of different denominations, equalled only by the thrill of dipping two fingers in holy water and crossing ourselves as we entered the cave-like discomfort of the school chapel. We could recite Our Father and the mool mantra (a short Sikh prayer) with equal facility.

In our pre-Google universe, Guru meant a knowledgeable person. It was my fathers sobriquet, bestowed on him by family and friends, a laughing acknowledgement of his vast and eclectic store of learning. He was Guru papaji to his siblings, Guru to his friends. Dinner-table
conversation ranged from space travel, prime numbers, German engineering, British food, the Mahabharata and Archie comics. When I demanded proof of God, he launched into a tangential discussion on the multiverse. If a 3D being manifested in a 2D universe, would it not appear miraculous, indicative of a higher power? I remember him punching a hole through a Mobius strip to illustrate the point. He talked of quantum mechanics and the Observer effect and Werner Heisenbergs uncertainty principle. I guess the takeaway was the subjectivity of spiritual experience.

Some decades later, I was presented with the idea of writing a book on modern Indian gurus. My reporters antenna crackled, as I considered a crack at assaying some of the best known, least understood and most picturesque characters in the country. Each was a stand-alone story, one that made for goodand hopefully readablecolour copy. Who were these godmen, really? Ambassadors of the divine, wise folk, healers who helped people negotiate the pain of existence, or just regular Joes with an odd job description? What fascinated me was the phenomenon, the way technology and markets had replaced the traditional family/village mystic or shaman with messianic rock stars.

The multiplier effect of mass communication gives the modern guru fantastic and unlimited reach. He (or she) thrives on material wealth and temporal power, influences national politics and local economies. On the flip side, gurus have been de-personalised into brands, but even that has its advantages. Modes of spiritual satisfaction are available to all, in whichever shape and form the end-user prefers: sermons ( pravachan ), community prayer (satsang), meditation, yoga, Ayurveda, even advise on family matters. It boggles the mind to imagine what Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar could have done with several such programmes on cable TV, which regularly beam words of wisdom into our homes!