Gurus: Mapping Spirituality in Contemporary India
An enigmatic figure, immune to pleasure and pain, indifferent to social conventions and contemptuous of death – this was the typical account of the “sage” of India recorded by the Greek historians who chronicled Alexander’s campaign in the Indian sub-continent, as Wilhelm Halbfass (1988) informs us. Thus the figure of the “wise man” or the “guru” was and remains the figure both of fascination and incomprehension, of longing and aversion, functioning from antiquity to the present as the concentrated essence or fulcrum of Indian religions and as the vector for the European and then the Western understanding of the latter.
In more recent times the celebration of the individual linked seamlessly to the celebration of accessible and democratic social networks and the celebration of capitalism itself also converges in the contemporary guru as the celebrity par excellence. The historical moment of the 21st century – where the very term “guru” has acquired an uncritical polysemy that effortlessly moves between the boundaries of the “religious” and the “secular”, between the ashram and the market place – seems to be an apt moment to revisit again, in depth, contemporary South Asian and Southeast Asian religious traditions linked to living, charismatic founders. Even while focusing on the contemporary, the conference will also seek to trace the genealogy of the guru thus enabling us to map carefully, in several of its stages, one important vector in the creation and diffusion of Indian religious communities within the Indian sub-continent and outside it, in the diaspora and, more generally, in the global landscape of “spirituality”.
This conference is particularly designed as a tribute to Vasudha Dalmia, who recently retired from Yale University after a long an illustrious career both in Europe (Tübingen University) and North America (University of California at Berkeley and Yale University)