Yoga, Bhoga and Ardhanariswara by Saran Prem

Author:Saran, Prem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The Rajneesh Movement: Indic Individuality as Cross-Cultural

As a scholar in the field of Indic religiosity, I am somewhat put off by the blandly unintellectual and thus, untraditional propensities of many of the modern Indian gurus in the West, and of the equally anti-intellectual Western following that they attract to themselves. The very different case of the late Rajneesh has, however, continued to fascinate me and I have over the years sampled quite a bit of his voluminous published fare. During my stay in the Kathmandu Valley, when I once wandered idly into the Rajneesh centre in Kathmandu, I gathered that there is also another larger centre, a few miles outside Kathmandu; presumably, these local centre of the movement cater mostly to the Western seekers of the yogic wisdom of the Indian subcontinent.

A few days before I left the Valley at the end of my fieldwork, I also serendipitously came upon a left-handed Tantrika in his 30s, who claimed to have had the same guru as Rajneesh. Unfortunately, it was too late for me to recruit him as one of my informants; I also did not get the time to scrutinise his claim of being Rajneesh’s gurubhai (spiritual brother), though there is no real reason to dispute its plausibility. Again, while interviewing my eminent scholar-informant D.V.V. one day, he noticed the Indian paperback edition of one of Rajneesh’s books that I was carrying and suo moto made a brief comment about him. He said that Rajneesh was definitely a Tantric practitioner and one who had apparently achieved his spiritual goal.

I was curious and began to delve into the scholarly literature on the Rajneesh movement. I discovered that there were quite a few competent studies by established scholars, on the sociological and other aspects of this worldwide and contemporary movement, in addition to the sensationalising, journalistic reports on Rajneesh the ‘sex guru’. Seeing the nature of the demographic constituency that the movement appealed to, I began to wonder whether the modernist Western ideology of selfhood was not indeed ‘peculiar’, but in a very different sense from the self-approving one that Geertz had intended!

In what follows, I am not, of course, trying to make any tedious claim that the Indic type of selfhood is in some way special and worthy of emulation. I am rather trying to examine the suspiciously routine and just-so Foucauldian discursivity that underlies the dominant scholarly asseveration of the ideology of Western, atomistic individualism. Having already disputed its hegemonic and ideological force in the context of the cross-cultural study of selfhood, I propose here rather to uncover its power in the internal cultural dynamics of the contemporary West, as people in that part of the global ethnoscape (Appadurai 1991) increasingly react to other, non-Western cultural paradigms. In other words, I use the data on the Rajneesh movement in order to lay bare a subaltern (Guha 1982) conception of selfhood in the West, one that is subscribed to by sociologically mainstream elements of ‘the non-West in the West’, to use a suggestive term coined by Nandy (1983), that astute Indian critic of modernity/ Westernity.

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