Introduction
India's elite and the masses alike are inordinately preoccupied with material success and well-being. This commonplace disposition is not surprising given the recent economic changes that have brought forth a ‘movement toward a new, externally oriented, consumption-led path to national prosperity’.Footnote 1 India's participation in the global economy, a result of the new economic policies, facilitated its exposure to, and in some cases adoption of, various cultural influences, including those in the sphere of personal consumption that gave rise to ‘a new consumerist ontology’ among the more prosperous, educated middle-class citizens’.Footnote 2 The new consumerist ethos is premised on the availability of a wide choice of goods, services, lifestyles, identities, and an overall orientation towards the self wherein ‘loyalties are freely chosen and freely left’, with immediate self-gratification as a salient feature of that process.Footnote 3 Religion has been affected by these changes as well: economic liberalization and the rise of consumer culture, with the cult of the Individual at its core, have impacted the religious domain by allowing personal choice to be the guiding principle in finding satisfaction in religious life. The cumulative choice of middle-class Indian citizens has revealed a growing trend towards the rationalization and internalization of faith, and the overall striving towards self-fulfilment rather than partaking in a collective identity or seeking community affirmation in religious life. Several social scientists interpret these phenomena in the light of secularization.Footnote 4
However, it would be erroneous to suppose that this process is an all-out secularization wherein most interaction takes place in ‘a god-free zone’.Footnote 5 Based on my fieldwork evidence, I argue that the secularization process may equally carry within it the seeds of intensified religiosity and that the sacralization of certain domains of human life may happen in parallel with secularization. Commenting on the contemporary developments in Indian religiosity, social scientist T. N. Madan writes that religious life in India is characterized by two processes taking place at the same time:
There is the slow but steady process of secularization in evidence everywhere: religious values (e.g., purity and pollution) are being diluted or displaced by secular values, and religious practices are being abridged or abandoned. . . .At the same time, a heightened religiosity is also in evidence everywhere. New religious cults and movements, militant religious fundamentalism, have found support even among people with a so-called modern education.Footnote 6
This may sound paradoxical only if one conceptualizes these two processes as dichotomous, in opposition to each other, rather than as dialectical, yet complimentary, parts of one religiosity continuum.Footnote 7 In a recent work on Hinduism, Stephen Jacobs refers to Hinduism as comprising a multiplicity of diverging and overlapping styles of religiosity, likening this complementary diversity to a rope consisting of various threads making up one whole.Footnote 8 The two main strands he singles out are the more rational, secularized, ‘decorous’ religious disposition of the educated urban middle classes and the popular, ‘exuberant’, less rational religiousness of the less educated strata and rural population.
A good example of accommodation and integration between exuberant and rational dispositions is the Radhasoami movement, vividly described by Mark Juergensmeyer in his anthropological work on the religion.Footnote 9 The Radhasoamis have successfully sought to reconcile their secular and transcendental needs by integrating religious beliefs and practices, derived from medieval Hindu saint cults, with post-Newtonian science and modern life. Christiane Brosius, following Heelas and Woodhead, diagnoses the phenomenon of neo-Hindu movements, of which the Radhasoamis are a part, in terms of ‘global spirituality’ characterized by the ‘devotion [that is] simultaneously privatized and commercialized’.Footnote 10 Similarly, I argue in this paper that the religious orientations of the middle and upper-middle class entrepreneurs fall into the above-delineated trend of neo-Hinduism, informed by certain characteristics of global spirituality, with varying degrees of integration between sacred and secular elements.
This paper examines three case studies that demonstrate a range of religious dispositions. The first case study is more particular in that it is perhaps more unusual for India. It illustrates how an apparent religious vacuum that may be taken for an overtly atheistic disposition may manifest itself with what sociologist of religion Roy Wallis (1984) referred to as a ‘non-religion of efficacy’. Non-religion of efficacy ‘lacks most of the features associated with religion’,Footnote 11 and it takes place when a more secularized and individualized conception of the divine is employed to attain world-affirming, pragmatic ends.Footnote 12 The first case study examines common in the West, and now spreading to Asia, ‘non-religions of efficacy’—personal growth and self-improvement programmes organized by Landmark Education, a ‘salvational movement’ and a commercial organization running ‘personal development’ training courses around the world.Footnote 13
The other two case studies consider the episodes of business owners’ lives who displayed religious dispositions akin to the tradition of neo-Hinduism, incorporating therapeutic, rational, even scientific elements, into its fold. Although none of my cases is representative of a new religion per se, or of a mass movement in the Hindu tradition, each of them illuminates a specific facet of the contemporary Hindu world and a particular character of ‘the religious’ in each instance, and can be seen as emblematic of a middle-class Indian entrepreneurial sensibility. I begin with the ‘non-religious’ case of Abhishek and move progressively towards the more revitalized, explicit forms of religiosity.Footnote 14
Non-religious self-efficacy: Landmark Education and the New Age Movement
Abhishek is a typical representative of a new generation of the entrepreneurial class in India—middle-class (both parents are high school teachers), young (29 years old), well-educated (Delhi Institute of Technology), a ‘self-made’ businessman, driven and willing to adopt ‘good business practices’ to move his business along on the path to success. His small firm of 17 employees specialized in online software testing, and many of his clients included international companies that provided him with regular feedback on his services. Abhishek seemed to have adopted a new attitude not only in the conduct of his business—various international quality certifications; SAP accounting software; access to global venture capital—but also in religious matters, which he preferred to refer to as ‘self-development’.
Abhishek was from a Hindu family, but he did not think he was at all religious (though he never expressed he was an atheist): he did not believe in God, nor did he perform any rituals (except for participation in family pujas) or read sacred texts, he had no guru.Footnote 15 He did not do ‘anything special’, he told me, apart from occasional yoga and meditation he had learned at a Landmark Education course. Abhishek shared with me that he believed in the power ‘not of gods but of the self’, self-sufficiency and self-reliance. It depended on him to effect changes in his life. This realization of self-efficacy occurred to him during a Landmark Education basic course, introduced to him by one of his American media clients.
Landmark Education is an ‘international private company, head-quartered in San Francisco. . .it specializes in delivering personal growth, self-help, self-improvement workshops, courses and trainings’, as stated on its website.Footnote 16 It was founded by Werner Erhard, an American interested in Eastern philosophical traditions and techniques of self-development. Over time, the present organization grew out of Werner Erhard and Associates and Erhard Seminars Training, both offering ‘the best and quickest opportunities available to radically alter one's life’ and made it possible for Americans ‘to enjoy a new level of spirituality, empowerment, perception and enhancement of their personal enlivenment and contribution’.Footnote 17 Judging by a wide range of feedback about the organization and its programmes, many people believe it to be an alternative to religion because it serves as ‘a platform for life-transforming realizations’.Footnote 18
The focus on ‘empowerment’, ‘fulfillment’, ‘spiritual dimensions’ and on the ‘self’ that is ‘of worth and can be enabled to make positive and worthwhile achievements’, are concepts and methods central to the New Age Movement which consists of a hotchpotch of practices, beliefs, teachings, and technologies of self-development.Footnote 19 The New Age Movement, in general, and Landmark Education, in particular, borrowed profusely from Eastern religions, Zen Buddhism and Vedanta, and employed various methods of discipline fostering self-improvement and self-mastery.
When I pointed out to Abhishek that Landmark Education was influenced by Eastern religions, including Vedanta, he strongly objected to the idea that a Landmark Education course may have any religious content. ‘It offers a life philosophy’, he said. ‘Far from being a religion—there is nothing religious about it—it's about transforming one's life, taking charge of it by “deprogramming” oneself—getting rid of the prejudices imposed by society, family, life experiences and looking at everything with new eyes. I want to live in accordance with Landmark's motto: “Live a life of power, freedom and self-expression”.’ Herein lies a remarkable characteristic of Abhishek's discourse—it is replete with references to the transcendental realm, or processes that belong to the religio-spiritual domain, but he is either blissfully unaware of that fact or reluctant to admit it.
Landmark Education draws on the ‘miraculous’ rhetoric to attract new participants, preferably through referrals and word-of-mouth, and promises to ‘create breakthroughs in aspects of their life that are important to them’, as it is ambitiously claimed in its brochure. Abhishek confirmed that the miraculous promise worked for him after the three days he had spent in a Delhi conference room—those three days ‘transformed his entire life’. He planned to do more advanced Landmark Education courses in the future.
Landmark employs the so-called ‘truth process’, or the confessional mode, with moderators shouting frequently at participants, in order to facilitate the process of transformation. Abhishek told me it was the most difficult part of the course and yet the most essential. It was difficult for him as well as many other Indians to open up intimate details of their lives in front of 70 other people who were ostensibly strangers. He had to talk openly about his fears, insecurities, ‘sharing, loving and personal journeys’, and conjecture in front of the audience why ‘certain things went wrong’ in his life.
Confessional self-exposure, facilitated and accompanied by cherry-picked ideas from existential philosophy and motivational psychology, had a cathartic effect on Abhishek and other course participants. Over three days, Abhishek and the rest were educated in a mix of philosophies, psychology and religious theories, illustrated by readings from books, plays and even a detailed description of the entire plot of Citizen Kane. Those philosophies and exposing strategies aimed to make participants aware of their attitudes to life in order to affect change: they had to undergo the ‘fear process’, by acknowledging fearful feelings, by ‘staring straight right in the face of mental anguish’, as Abhishek eloquently commented.
Abhishek also shared with me that the course leader-moderator ‘guaranteed [to participants] that the beginning of this self-mastery would bring about futures greater than [they] could imagine’. The leader also emphasized that ‘Landmark was so powerful that it could achieve world peace if used correctly’. According to the facilitator, a ‘greater future’ could be brought about, but only if one experienced a ‘paradigmatic shift’ in thinking, and adopted new opinions and experiments with different courses of action. The moderator's comments bring to mind a thinly disguised promise of salvation, achieved through self-perfection under the guidance of an authority (a ‘leader-moderator’). In my respondent's view, intimate sharing, acknowledging his mistakes and erroneous assumptions of his thought process, brought an insight into the nature of the Self and his own behaviour, in other words, what leaders of Landmark Education seminars frequently referred to as ‘getting it’. Abhishek apparently ‘got it’ as well. Writing about the Landmark Forum, sociologist of religion George Chryssides explains that:
. . .‘Getting it’ is then enlightenment, finding one's true Self, and assuming responsibility for decision-making, realizing what one's assumptions have been, and that one has been limited in the past by narrow thinking, a restricted view of one's self and the options that lie open. . . . ‘Getting it’ entails an expanded experience of happiness, love, health, and full self-expression.Footnote 20
What else does the above excerpt convey if not a sense of the religious, a possibility of epiphany? In my view, these breakthrough insights are akin to the ‘imagistic mode of religiosity’, so well explicated by anthropologists Harvey Whitehouse and James Laidlaw.Footnote 21 The imagistic mode is characterized by the intense emotionality brought about by episodic, frequently traumatic, events that happen, for instance, during initiation rites. This intensity induced by the shock from the moderators’ shouting and sometimes verbal denigration, confessions, combined with cathartic effects and the search for self-perfection—all these ‘imagistic dynamics’—bring to mind initiation rites and the passionate, emphatic mode, in which they are frequently carried out. It is this particular combination of religious elements (confession, quest for salvation, drive for self-perfection), moods and effects, performed in a secular context that, employing the rhetoric of self-fulfilment and self-responsibility, make the Landmark Education process a quasi-religious phenomenon, a salvational movement. In spite of the fact that the organization presents itself as a secular programme for ‘personal growth’, Abhishek's affirmation of and participation in its ‘non-religious’ self-improvement regimen, make Landmark's methodology a particularly efficacious contemporary form of religiosity.
Abhishek's enthusiasm for the ‘project’ stemmed from what he claimed the ‘real’ changes he was making in his life due to the Landmark Education course. He believed that as a result of the course he became more efficient. In his opinion, he began making better decisions with regard to his business, empowered by the Landmark method of approaching problems with an ‘empty, Zen-like mind’, without the mental biases formed in advance. He told me at the time he was trying to incorporate another Landmark method, namely, to get in the habit of questioning his preconceptions and habitual ways of doing things, by what he referred to as ‘shifting his paradigm’ in order to see situations anew. Abhishek told me that his father, however, disapproved of the course and its ‘breakthrough methodology’. ‘You should approach everything with a Hindu not a Zen mind’, he half-joked and advised Abhishek to take instead a workshop organized by The Art of Living FoundationFootnote 22 that employed ancient ‘Hindu’ techniques to make sense of the world, deal with stress, trauma and a range of other psychosomatic and psychological issues.
Abhishek told me that his father's lack of understanding of the purpose of the course—‘it was not about religion but about self-mastery’, he reiterated—bothered him and that he set his mind on changing his own attitude, if not his father's. In his opinion, the misunderstanding was caused by generational differences in values and societal expectations of relations between parents and children. Expectations are to have respect towards elders and one's parents, a reverent attitude that frequently translated into uncritical pandering and obedience, in Abhishek's opinion. My informant thought that although he loved and respected his father, he could not justify obeying him or listening to his often ‘out-of-touch-with-reality opinions’. ‘I run my own company, I take responsibility for other people, but sometimes my father treats me like I am still a teenager’, Abhishek complained. Later in our email communication he told me he tried to resolve the issue by drawing on Landmark Education methods such as attempting to ‘de-condition’ his father—highlight his limited perspective—with an honest ‘confessional’ discussion about their disagreements, by laying bare his father's and his own prejudices. I am not sure if Abhishek succeeded (three months later he still complained about his father's biases and unfavourable view of the Landmark Education course) but what has become clear to me is that Landmark-type ‘personal growth’ courses may not after all represent a plausible transformational source for the wider society, as it may have a particular appeal only for young educated urbanites. This may be due to the fact that older generations perceive self-transformation as closely tied to the notions of the religious lodged in the familiar contexts of Hinduism and removed from the secularizing tendencies of the neoliberal version of modernity.
My purpose in describing Abhishek's case has been to present an alternative to the mainstream religious market in India that so far has been deemed as strongly dominated by Hinduism (and other Indic religions). I do not showcase it as representative of any mass movement that has been hidden from the anthropologist's eye. Rather, I take it only to indicate one sort of message about a direction that the religious orientations of young entrepreneurs may take in post-liberalization India. The message is that a particular category of economic actors (young, first-generation, urban entrepreneurs) may opt for religiosity that is akin to non-sectarian, universal spirituality, i.e., New Age Movements, as opposed to mainstream Hinduism. This is due to two factors. First, it corresponds better to their need of self-fashioning in the service of material and worldly success. Secondly, the New Age Movement and Landmark Education in particular, as varieties of the apparently non-dogmatic ‘non-religions of efficacy’, may provide a new kind of meaning in line with their pragmatically-oriented lifestyles, for which entrepreneurial actors like Abhishek are cultivating a new capacity that they invest in the changing world. Another interesting point about Abhishek's case is that it shows how difficult it can be to delineate the edges of religion—what can be considered as ‘religious’ and what can not.
Mercury Advertising and the spiritual life of a firm
The first time I met the owners and partners of Mercury AdvertisingFootnote 23 (Mercury from now on) I noticed how striking they were in their appearance: two of the partners looked like young sadhus (holy men), with their hair and beards long, wearing colourful Indian kurtas and Rudraksha-beaded bracelets.Footnote 24 The men were owners and creative directors at Mercury, responsible for the textual and visual executions of business projects. The original founder and one of the firm's four partners, Tarun, was my main contact at the firm. His official title was ‘director for integrated ideas’. In the mid 1990s, Tarun partnered with Ani, another ‘excellent creative’ in the field of illustration and photography, to set up Mercury Advertising. Apart from their passion for creativity, ‘original communication solutions’, Tarun and Ani shared a deep interest in spirituality and, in fact, it was their veneration of the same guru—Sri Sri Sitaramdas Omkarnath—that brought them together. They first met at a satsang (a gathering for devotional singing) 12 years before. Tarun and Ani told me that the extent of their friendship went beyond the corporate confines of the firm, even though for them it represented a second home they often organized corporate and social events ‘with a spiritual twist’. The two of them went together on silent retreats and pilgrimages, and organized family trips to sacred places in northern India. In their words, ‘they enjoyed a special, deeply spiritual bond’. Their guru Sri Omkarnath was their major source of inspiration. Tarun commented: ‘Thanks to our guruji, we have been working together and “creating magic” for our clients for twelve years now’.
The company's other co-partner, S. Raj, was to a certain extent more extreme than the other co-owners. His official position was that of ‘director of knowledge and culture’, but he referred to himself as the ‘jack of all trades’—a writer, poet, storyteller, an advertising man and business strategist. In his own words, he was ‘first a seeker and spiritual worker, a follower and an instrument, of Sri Sri Sitaramdas Omkarnath’. In our conversations, he emphasized his role of a ‘creative worker’ who was accidentally at the service of business and commerce. Spirituality and creativity were the milieu he felt most comfortable in and wished to dedicate more time to both types of activities. During our meetings, he reiterated that ‘this life is a preparation for the next one. The best way to prepare for it is through devotion to the guru and by doing spiritual works’. The extent of Raj's ‘spiritual works’ had a wide range: from japa mala (chanting) to meditation and yoga to translating spiritual texts and going on pilgrimages organized by Sri Omkarnath's devotionalist order ‘Divine Life’. In his words, his life was a ‘spiritual quest and the rest flowed naturally out of it’.
Sri Sri Sitaramdas Omkarnath, although dead for many decades, was nonetheless designated as the ‘official guru and head’ of the firm. Mercury's co-founders Ani and Tarun became certain when they joined the ranks of Sri Omkarnath's devotees that not only individuals needed a guru to guide their lives but also corporations—gurus were the source of life-giving energy for everything, including companies and organizations. Such a generous appointment and endowment of the past guru with so much power (at least in theory) was motivated by the owners’ belief that the business existed and prospered in large part because of their guruji's generous blessings and his imbuing the firm with his divine energy, as if he were alive and present. Allegedly, time and space were no obstacles for godmen like Sri Omkarnath and, ‘a disembodied spiritual entity’, he looked after Mercury's people and business. The proof of his guidance was the mental insights and illuminations regarding business affairs and management the partners claimed they received from time to time, especially during tough times or in difficult business situations. They claimed their guru was a powerful mystic endowed with miraculous powers that reached out from the past and touched the lives of many in the present.
Worship of godmen, charismatic gurus, and transnational religio-spiritual movements such as the Radhasoamis, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Divine Light Mission, and the Art of Living among others, represent new forms of modern urban Hinduism.Footnote 25 Apart from very popular transnational guru-centred charismatic movements (for example, Sri Sathya Sai, the Divine Light Mission, and The Art of Living), there are other ways of approaching the divine in the milieu of urban middle-class Hindus, the most common of them are: temple worship; religious tourism; bhakti (devotion); seva (voluntary service); and meditation and yoga.Footnote 26 However, transnational religio-spiritual movements led by charismatic gurus have a wide popular appeal in particular amongst ‘mobile’ upper-middle- and middle-class Indians, at home and in diaspora.
The phenomenon of guru faith has been analysed from different perspectives in anthropological literature. Most anthropologists present guru faith in terms of ‘infantilization’ or ‘submission’Footnote 27 on the part of devotees, or alienation and anomie amongst the educated urban middle-class guru followers.Footnote 28 Some studies set the phenomenon of guru faith against the context of ‘late capitalism’, modernity and their contradictions.Footnote 29 For instance, in a relatively recent study of guru faith and its specific instance of Sathya Sai Baba, scholar of religions Hugh Urban suggests that Sai Baba's strong appeal is due to his miracle-working that can be interpreted in the light of ‘cultural contradictions of late capitalism’.Footnote 30 Urban argues that ‘voicing deep fears about the erosion of traditional values, [the] breakdown of social structure and the loss of religious faith, guru is an icon of the deep contradictions at the heart of the late capitalist order’.Footnote 31 Maya Warrier, on the other hand, examines popularity and the teachings of female guru Mata Amritanandamayi along the lines of the possibilities of, for example, choice and flexibility, modernity brings into the religious domain.Footnote 32 Similarly, Mark Juergensmeyer's extensive study of guru bhakti of the Radhasoamis discusses their religion in terms of its relation to modern lifestyles and today's context that requires flexibility.Footnote 33Guru devotion offers possibilities of fashioning any kind of lives its adherents envision for themselves, without much rigid prescription and proscription in the way of exercising their choice.
The specific evidence that this case study provides with regard to the relation of guru bhakti faith to modernity supports the latter category of studies (Warrier and Juergensmeyer) that argue against the ‘alienation’ thesis and for the ‘flexibility-and-choice’ perspective. Mercury entrepreneurs, as well as other businessmen I interviewed, did not display anxiety about a rapidly changing, highly competitive social world—and the need to validate their own prosperous (or not so successful) position within it. In the case of Mercury, it may be appropriate to analyse guru faith in terms of it being a conduit to the sacred domain that impacts its devotees’ secular affairs through their imaginary constructions of the divine and imbues its management's modern business practices with a special kind, creative, ethos that simultaneously harnesses sacred and profane, capitalist forces.Footnote 34 For Mercury partners, spirituality and creativity are coterminous as they belong to the same source—the guru—and the spiritual domain harbours manifold possibilities for artistic and commercial co-creation. The partners believed their ability to create original, commercially viable ideas depended on their connection to their spiritual teacher who allegedly provided access to the source of divine, creative energy.
As guru is a source of transcendental magical power bestowing creativity (and prosperity) on Mercury's partners, so creativity—a condition of being able to manifest ideas and images—is imbued with divine power. For instance, the firm's mission is captured in a succinct motto: ‘Creative is Absolute. We Seek Truth Through Creativity’. For Mercury's partners and staff, the creative domain harbours Truth and is the direct manifestation of the spiritual domain. These two elements—creativity and Truth—are entangled in one powerful imperative and, with the guru's blessing, are aimed at bringing forth the prosperity of the enterprise. The company's mission and vision statements express lyrically, and somewhat cryptically, the paramount importance of the guru as a source of divine inspiration:
At Mercury, our inspiration comes from our Guru and he is the Head of our firm. The Guru's words are timeless, they touch our souls and bring forth the creative magic from within that we may capture the glimpses of Truth in the same way that a lake reflects the moon. . . By adopting a certain detachment from the ups and downs of business fortunes, we try to calm the surface of the lake so that it might reflect the moon more clearly.Footnote 35
Mercury's partners confided in me that managing a business enterprise was in fact a spiritual exercise, ‘part of the quest’ and with the guidance of the guruji, by virtue of his wisdom, they were advancing on the spiritual path. ‘It is not what you do but how you do it’ (Tarun's emphasis), Tarun and Ani mentioned it a few times during our discussions. In their opinion, Mercury's team is ‘a group of seekers, for whom work is worship, their sadhana (spiritual practice)’. Mercury thus differentiates itself from other firms, implying that its ‘main business’ is not a commercial enterprise but a spiritual quest and the rest, in a way, is accidental and secondary to this main purpose. Approached as a sacred quest, business partook in the realm of the divine and could be an equally suitable domain for searching Truth, as any other sphere in life—‘everything is God's playground’, Raj declared. Furthermore, the company's vision statement somewhat immodestly hinted at the fact that Mercury had created an enterprise that connected the transactional with the transcendental, thus positioning itself as a mediator, authorized by their guru, between the commercial and the religious domains:
Unlike the religious organization, which reaches down to touch the world, we at Mercury believe, the business firm is rooted in the world of business and transactions, yet reaches up towards Truth beyond this dimension. This calls for a clear vision that touches both the realm of Transactional Reality and the world of Transcendental.
What made it easy for the Mercury partners to claim the above is their clever strategy of equating business with work and work with worship, making it a logical conclusion that ‘business is worship’. The overall effect is that of the ennoblement, or even sacralization, of their enterprise and of business in general:
The attitude of Work is Worship at Mercury means that we offer only the very best. We do it for Him and no one else. Work is worship not commerce; however we also Work at commerce. What this means is that (1) we may sell our products, but when we work our aim is not to create merely a saleable product, but something worthy of offering to the Lord. It also means that (2) our marketing department also considers work as worship. It is a philosophy that unites us all.
The above conceptualization of work and the interconnections between work (business) and worship are similar to Weber's Protestant ‘worldly asceticism’. Work in general and commercial activity in particular are portrayed as being given religious sanction and ‘authorized’ by the guru. Work should be done with dedication as it is, ultimately, for the Lord (or guru). Approaching one's labour as if it were an offering to God also implies a certain attitude—veneration and commitment to one's task or enterprise. This ‘ethically loaded’ conception of work/business is central to the Weber thesis which postulates that certain disposition in a productive activity, i.e. rationality, calculation, dedication, and commitment, with a sanctioned religious sentiment, is conducive to accumulating wealth and, ultimately, the development of capitalism.Footnote 36 In the case of Mercury, their ‘worldly ascetic’ disposition contributes to the building of their firm's success and, in the final analysis, to a neoliberal consumerist economy in India.
Mercury's partners’ devotion to the guru, their insistence on business being first and foremost a creative enterprise, their staff's commitment to their managers’ mission were embodied in the daily and weekly routines. They started every working day with chanting the guru's name three times as well as the name of Lord Krishna. Sometimes the recitations alternated with reciting the mantra ‘Om Nama Shivya’. After that they would make offerings of marigold garlands and incense and only then the day began. As one of the firm's young employees explained it:
Chanting and prayers focus the mind on the ultimate goal—serving the guru—without that art is not possible for me. . . .I always leave [the] office in a better mood than when I start work because the atmosphere at Mercury is charged with joy and there are always cool ideas in the air. Satsangs we sometimes sing in the office remind me of another important dimension in life apart from my art.
Everybody at Mercury agreed that the spiritual regimen played an important role in ensuring the flow of creative ideas. ‘It energizes our work, and ensures we always have projects and clients’, commented another employee.
Judging from Mercury's corporate spiritual regimen and its mission statements, containing in miniature their philosophy of working and conducting business, Mercury's partners might seem uncharacteristically otherworldly businessmen, preoccupied solely with serving their guru and doing their ‘spiritual works’. This, however, would be an inaccurate picture of how they actually are in the world. Deeply spiritual, the partners are not otherworldly, but very much ‘tuned in’ into the demands of their business and have a strong sense for commercial opportunities. Every Tuesday after a collective chanting of the mantras and incense offerings to both Sri Omkarnath and to Lord Hanuman,Footnote 37 Tarun briefly reminded his staff of Mercury's main principles of work, based on the spiritual principle that ‘work is worship’. Then everybody went back to their projects to produce ‘for the guru’ whatever they had to—concepts, images, texts, client calls, or whatever else, as if they were offering it to Him and not to their clients. The team of ‘young creatives’ were given a lot of freedom—what to do and how to do it, even at what time to come to work. Although there was virtually no monitoring from the management, they had to create value for the firm, i.e., produce original concepts and images to keep clients satisfied and coming back, to ‘generate recurrent business’, in Tarun's words. At the end of each month there was reporting and evaluation and those who did not ‘create value’ for the firm, or did not reach consecutively the assigned targets, eventually had to leave, ‘divine enterprise’ or not.
Mercury's owners believed that through their devotion to Sri Omkarnath they were directly connected to their guru's disembodied spirit that generated a particular kind of energy, bringing forth creative ideas and making their business successful. The firm's devotee staff believed themselves to be tapping into a source of creative power through the intense worship of guru Sri Omkarnath. The relationship between devotee and guru, in the words of Lawrence Babb, ‘is charged with a very special kind of energy’Footnote 38 that has a regenerating quality—it transforms divine energy into a creative one, which in turn generates good fortunes in the economic sense and otherwise. Although Mercury's owners may appear to be using the relationship with their guru instrumentally for its transformative power to attain certain pragmatic ends—as it supposedly ‘inspires’ them literally to manifest ideas for their advertising business—it would be erroneous to interpret their religious practice singularly in instrumental terms.
Bringing into focus the Weberian-like nature of Mercury devotees’ faith that sanctifies work and material success, it is evident that attending to the sacred comes first to Mercury's owners and the commercial success is subordinated to their spiritual needs. The spirituality of Mercury's entrepreneurial partners is transformative at the personal and social levels, and is an indispensable part of their sense of selfhood. It plays a central role in the partners’ lives and seems to have taken precedence over other activities and facets of their identities—of businessmen and ‘creative workers’. Mercury's partners can be seen as ‘modernized’ renouncers, with a contemporary ethical and spiritual vision, which allows them to be successful participants in India's new economic order and at the same time be reflective, pious practitioners of a Hinduism that fully reconciles rational and ‘exuberant’ modes of religiosity, and accommodates transcendental needs with commercial goals. The partners’ religious beliefs blur a sharp boundary between the abstract sacred domain and the secular business enterprise, and further attenuate a thin line between spiritual practice and creativity.
The Body Clinic's spiritual materialists
The third vignette concerns a female entrepreneur who, together with her family, attempted to ‘recruit’ her personnel into the fold of their spiritual reading circle in order to facilitate a better understanding of the connection between spiritual practice and the firm's corporate goals.
I contacted S. Divya, the owner of the Body Clinic, a firm specializing in ‘nutrition, beauty and well-being’, after I had come across an announcement in a newspaper of the firm's expansion. Divya, a relatively young energetic woman, was the sole proprietor of the company of about 300 persons and national branches in India's main metropolitan areas. Divya was the founder of the business and her family members occupied various key positions within the company.Footnote 39 Her husband was a part-time chief accountant at the firm (he was semi-retired), her mother a vice-president of human resources, and her 25-year-old son an executive manager for business development. Divya, however, started the company herself without any help from her family as nobody at the time believed it would turn out well. Prior to establishing her business, Divya worked as a nutritionist at a spa in a luxury hotel where she accumulated a rolodex of clients whom she later transferred to her own firm. When she realised the services were in high demand amongst well-to-do Indian women Divya decided to venture out on her own. She secured a loan from a bank relatively easy. At the time (early 1990s), loan allocation among female business owners was a government policy, a way of encouraging entrepreneurship among women as there were very few female entrepreneurs. Since Divya did not know much about finance, accounting or other aspects of the business, she focused on hiring experienced personnel who could execute her business strategy. The main thing she told me was to have a vision and a ‘business common sense’, not the technical knowledge of financial ins-and-outs. It all worked out very well for her. In time, she paid back the loan and began reinvesting profits into new equipment, went for training to Germany and brought new technology for slimming and various similar gadgets from Europe.
Although Divya seemed to be following a conventional path to success in business—by being shrewd, keeping costs low and offering the best-value product in Delhi—her career choice was far from ‘conventional’. Being a business person, an entrepreneur, is considered to be the prerogative of a man in India. Women, especially from upper castes and more so in the past, were not encouraged to have careers. Their identities and activities were predominantly associated with the domestic sphere—love, marriage, motherhood and taking care of the household—and very rarely a professional arena or religious calling served as a means for an Indian woman's self-fulfilment.Footnote 40 In Divya's case, her family environment was relatively liberal, she told me and her parents encouraged her to explore various career paths until she found a profession to her satisfaction. This is not a common case in India as middle-class parents usually either encourage their offspring to take on prestigious white-collar professions such as engineering, law or medicine, or insist that they follow in their parents’ occupational steps.Footnote 41
Divya attributed her success mainly to two things: passion for the subject of nutrition and skin care, and a ‘good business sense’. Her mother, Mrs Gupta, however, begged to differ. In her opinion, it was her regular propitiation of gods and tireless praying that brought success to her daughter. Mrs Gupta's conviction was that religion served as a solid foundation for successful functioning in the world, and the excellent performance of her daughter's firm as well as their personal wealth reassured her that she was not incorrect in her thinking.Footnote 42 Divya, with Mrs Gupta's encouragement, began organizing ‘spiritual evenings’ where the staff from Body Clinic and a few of the Guptas’ extended family and friends attended to bring back religion into their lives in an informal social setting that was as much about religion as it was about socializing and enjoying oneself. The attendees were young people for the most part whose religious lives were ‘non-existent’, as they told me, and who, although curious about certain aspects of religion, wanted to live full lives, without any dramatic measures such as renunciation, fasting or any ascetic practice. According to some of them, the acceptable repertoire of religious practice for them was devotional singing, meditation, mantra chants, and occasional reading of Hindu texts.
The attendees took turns reading excerpts from the Hindu texts (at the time of interview they were reading the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishadic scripture of liberation) and discussing them at the Guptas’ house. Sometimes, particularly during religious holidays, Mrs Gupta organized satsangs as well. Divya and Mrs Gupta believed that the combination of reading spiritual texts and participating in satsangs provided a context where Body Clinic's employees could develop a deeper understanding of Hinduism and share their interest in the tradition, which was supposed to strengthen social relations within the firm. Apart from building up the ‘social muscle’ of the staff, the ‘commander-in-chief’ of human resources (Mrs Gupta) thought it would help the firm's overall economic well-being if the team were forearmed with the knowledge of the Sutras (sacred verses). Mrs Gupta believed that the Sutras, as part of Vedanta, contained morsels of practical wisdom and if correctly understood and incorporated into one's life could improve one's well-being (khushi) and, with time, an earnest practitioner could even attain enlightenment (moksha).
I attended a few bi-weekly evening readings at Divya's house. Here I draw on my experience of these evenings as well as one extended reading event at the Guptas’ house just before Diwali, a major Hindu and Jain festival.Footnote 43 The Guptas lived in a very nice house for wealthy Indians—a three-storied building of red brick, well-kept and decorated with rosewood furniture, fine carpets, porcelain and crystal vases, fabrics and contemporary Indian art. For the occasion, the spacious living room was decorated with colourful powders, marigold garlands, candles and kandils (colourful paper lanterns). There was a long table in the middle of a spacious dining room laid with traditional north-Indian dishes and non-alcoholic beverages. A servant made rounds with a tray of Indian treats and cocktail snacks.Footnote 44 A Brahmin priest was going to officiate at the event with a puja (ritual), and he was making some preparations at a make-shift altar. There were about 46 people in the room, men as well as women, some talking amiably, others cautiously looking around (for many it was their first meeting). The excitement in the room was palpable. Divya and her husband were at the entrance to the living room where the event was held, welcoming the arriving guests. When the ceremony began they sat on a sofa together with their son and daughter-in-law; Mrs Gupta ensconced herself in a plush arm-chair next to the rest of her family. At about seven o'clock, bells and conch shells sounded to announce the commencement of the meeting. The attendees sat in chairs arranged in a semi circle, with the priest and the mini-altar in front of them like in an amphitheatre, and Mrs Gupta and her family on their right. Latecomers sat on the floor or stood behind the ring of chairs. Sitting arrangements did not indicate hierarchy and status in an obvious way, apart from the fact that Mrs Gupta, as the oldest member of the audience and leader of the reading group, was seated apart from the rest of the audience and next to the puja altar.
There was a small platform where the priest was seated, he chanted some hymns from the Vedas, and then began administering the offerings of rice grains, fruits, Roti bread and sandalwood incense, accompanied by prayer recitals in Sanskrit. The ceremony was supposed to endow the event with auspiciousness and invoke the blessings of the gods.Footnote 45 This went on for some time, and after that Mrs Gupta gave a talk about her own spiritual journey and the importance of being aware of the ‘inner, pure, omnipotent light’ that each person carried within, but buried deep in the layers of ‘weak flesh’. She noted there was a direct link between spiritual practice, aimed at ‘awakening to one's true nature’, and outcomes in one's life, including material conditions, and how it was important to get to know one's ‘true self’ in order to understand the infinite, eternal atman (cosmic soul) and the ‘oneness of all things’, material and spiritual. She emphasized that being religious did not mean temple attendance or image worship, although beneficial, they were not ‘really’ central to one's religious life since one could just ‘sit quietly, eyes closed, and invoke the name of Ram’.Footnote 46 Continuous repetition of God's name, she said, calmed the mind and purified one's thoughts, and pure thoughts in turn were supposed to ‘burn through the layers of impure, karmic matter, getting one closer to the source of the inner light’. Mrs Gupta's philosophical references to Bhagavad Gita and the focus on the transformative techniques of purification, carried out by the repetition of sacred mantras, point to the Vedantic origins of her off-hand teachings. Linking Vedanta teachings, mantra recitations, and other spiritual practices, with well-being and economic prosperity, reconciling secular and sacred elements, allows one to place Body Clinic's owners’ religiosity into the eclectic, ‘flexible’ category of neo-Hinduism.
I asked a few attendees of the spiritual reading group about the reasons they were participating in the activity. Responses were somewhat varied: several participants wanted to ‘revise’ sacred Hindu scriptures and it was ‘the right environment’ for them—not too formal and scholarly; others said they wanted to combine ‘pleasure with purpose’—socialise in a beautifully-decorated place and at the same time discuss ‘higher matters’. Yet others thought that by emulating the Guptas in their spiritual practice they had a chance to understand the ‘secret’ of their success and perhaps tap into that metaphysical source of wealth themselves. I noticed the young audience was hanging onto Mrs Gupta's every word when she held forth on the virtues of reading the scriptures, spiritual observance and success in life. They did believe in a direct connection between the spiritual domain and the material—harnessing the former and accumulating ‘positive spiritual energy’ facilitated transformations in other spheres of life and, ultimately, control over them. But their immediate goals were down-to-earth and manageable. Body Clinic's young professionals aspired to have ‘fruitful lives’ in a particular sense—along the same lines as the Guptas—hoping to attain a higher level of financial success that could be achieved and secured in part through the adoption of a particular spiritual regimen.
Lawrence Babb, a scholar of religious movements in India, referred to such a process of imitation as ‘spiritual mimicry’,Footnote 47 in which the aspiring young professionals engaged in the hope of reproducing the tangible benefits (i.e., economic security and professional success) that their employers had attained supposedly due to a particular spiritual regimen. The ‘spiritual mimicry’ of Indian middle-class professionals (Body Clinic's employees) is influenced by the specific religio-spiritual needs of the new social and economic elite (Body Clinic's owners) who have emerged as a result of contemporary socioeconomic changes, a gradually developing market economy, proliferating consumerism and individualism, and the growing importance of media culture. The transformation in religious attitudes, affected by an emergence of ‘flexible’, eclectic lifestyles among the urban middle and upper-middle classes, is about combining therapeutic, quasi scientific and traditional religious elements (e.g., temple worship, bhakti, pilgrimage, guru devotion, scripture study, etc.) what anthropologist Christiane Brosius termed in her work on the contemporary Indian middle class a ‘flexible and easy-to-apply spirituality’.Footnote 48 The religious disposition of Body Clinic's employees is of this ‘easy-to-apply’, hybrid variety wherein a rational approach (studying and discussing Vedanta teachings) is mixed indiscriminately with affective elements (mantra chanting and Rama worship), allowing them to learn about Vedanta theology and chant Rama mantras whilst enjoying exquisite canapés and plotting professional advancement.
Conclusion
In this paper I have attempted to outline three case studies that represent the variety of religious experience amongst Indian first-generation entrepreneurs (and young white-collar professionals in the case of Body Clinic and Mercury Advertising). My findings show that their religious repertoire ranged from the more personalized and secularized conceptions of the divine, as in the case of pragmatic, world-affirming ‘non-religions of efficacy’, to neo-Hinduism.Footnote 49 Neo-Hinduism, a variety of modern urban Hinduism practiced by some of my respondents, accommodates into its fold a mixture of western psychology, scientific worldview, saint cults, Vedanta teachings, temple worship, and guru devotion, among other religio-spiritual practices. Integration of the secular and the sacred, ‘flexibility’, eclecticism, and the sanctioning of bourgeois values, especially those that pertain to work and success, are the hallmarks of neo-Hindu religious dispositions.
This study analysed a variety of entrepreneurs’ religious orientations: a secularized and individualized quasi-religious disposition, a combination of salvational rhetoric and psychotherapeutic self-inquiry (Abhishek); ‘exuberant’ guru worship that endorsed enterprise and creativity (Mercury Advertising); and a more balanced, rational-affective religious practice (Body Clinic). Founded on the pillars of practical spirituality, this kind of hybrid sacred-secular, ‘flexible-and-easy-to-apply’, bourgeois neo-Hinduism allows its adherents to nurture the experience of the sacred and rationalize it in terms of scientific explanation, therapeutic benefit, well-being, and moral purification, while simultaneously affirming, or accommodating, respondents’ aspirations of wealth and worldly success.
The process of affirmation or accommodation affects one's religious choices, but it is not only that religious practices slowly adapt to new lifestyles and values. Religious sensibility and practice can and do disrupt, as some of the presented case studies show, the habitual notions of the religious and the secular, by intruding into the unlikeliest contexts of everyday life, i.e., the corporate or business setting, and by blurring the boundary between the real and imagined, factual and perceived, sacred and profane, by employing explicit religious-spiritual techniques or by imbuing them with secular meaning.
