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Book Review
Cosmopolitan interconnections
SUGUNA RAMANATHAN
GURU ENGLISH — South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language: Srinivas Aravamudan; Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 395.
One had no idea from the title what the contents of the volume under review might be and I must admit that the introduction did little to enlighten me. Now that I have finished reading it I am still not clear quite what the phrase means, nor why it is what it is. “Guru English” serves as a capacious hold-all term to refer to the ways in which Hinduism has moved beyond its usual geographical borders, adapted to, first, the Raj, then the nationalist project, then the post-modern welter, all the while turning cosmopolitan and universal, repackaging itself in the process as a panacea for stress in the consumerist world of late capitalism. In other words Guru English is a discourse, a field of thought and practice that reinvents itself continuously. A long taken-for-granted tradition of Indian spirituality is seen here to have bloomed as an effect of Western Romanticism, which, seeping into India in the late 18th century looked at the past through a golden haze.
Different phases
Heavily grounded in contemporary theory, the study (part linguistics, part history, part sociology of religion,) takes the reader through not only the different phases listed above but describes eloquently and critically the personalities who “created”, reformed, adapted, universalised Hindu thought and myth, spreading it abroad, very differently from the proselytisers of the Semitic faiths, but popularising it nevertheless, claiming a special standing for this ‘religion’ (which is no religion in any revealed sense), an applicability and relevance that can withstand the onslaughts of science, that is itself somehow scientific, has contained the germs of scientific thought from the very beginning. Hinduism takes scientific progress on board for the simple reason that it offers no belief system that can be disproved. Thus, in contexts where the belief system stands discredited, the heady mix of the philosophical, psychological and spiritual offered by charismatic gurus through yoga and meditation has proved to be a powerful draw.
Raja Rammohun Roy, Keshub Chandra Sen, Vivekananda, Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Gandhiji, Tagore, Aurobindo, J. Krishanmurti, Mahesh Yogi, and Rajneesh are only some of the many figures whose influence is discussed. Each chapter also has a section analysing chosen literary texts that bear witness to the melding of East and West through this ‘cosmopolitan’ South Asian religion. A first chapter gives us Orientalists and Vedantists; the second walks us through Bankim Chandra’s literary works, Kipling’s Kim (an odd inclusion, one thinks, but he makes a convincing case) and Aurobindo’s dream of a mystic fellowship. The third chapter is a study of theosophy and theosophists; the fourth of a Hindu Sublime with Gandhiji and Tilak and what the Gita had to say to the genocide of the 1940s.
The fifth chapter, titled “Blasphemy, Satire and Secularism” has a masterly and insightful response to Rushdie and The Satanic Verses. He writes of a clash here between secular literature as a modern epistemic category and the political doctrine of secularism which could not tolerate it in India. The clash between Islam and the West is explained in terms of “free speech” and “democracy”, as sacred to the West as the prophet is to Islam. The final sixth chapter deals with the holy men of our time, who accurately judge the quality of the historical moment and offer meditation as a technique and practice to a weary West.
A work meant for those interested in cultural studies with an Indian slant, this book is original in its selection of theme and texts, highly incisive and objective in its analysis, and extraordinarily well written. As it is impossible to give a sense of its intellectual richness in a short review, I shall restrict myself to one of the high points in the course of reading this book. For me personally it was the discussion of that famous moment when Oppenheimer recited verses from the Bhagavad Gita after the atom bomb was dropped. What indeed is the ethical stand taken? The question is not, perhaps never can be, satisfactorily answered.
Penetrating analysis
What Srinivas Aravamudam gives us is the way in which Hindu thought can be harnessed to the creation of “a quasi-religious awe around nuclear power.” This book, despite my reservations about the title, is penetrating, relevant and interesting. I recommend it strongly to serious readers but warn them not to be discouraged by the wordiness of the Introduction.
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