4 min readSep 7, 2026 07:35 AM IST
First published on: Sep 7, 2026 at 06:17 AM IST
It wasn’t “shakti” but “bhakti” that I heard when the schoolgirl Jaya Bhaduri sang “Hum ko mann ki shakti dena …” in the film Guddi. It must have seemed natural to me that the close-eyed obedience of the student was a form of bhakti. Our conditioning in the ritual of prayer is such that we internalise the priest’s instructions, the closing of the eyes, the folding of our hands, the semi-ceremonial opening of the eyes, so that it seems that what was in front of us appears slightly different now. This insight seems to be the ambition of the teacher in the classroom, and it is easy to make an analogical connection between prayer and the classroom period. When I say “prayer”, I’m thinking of the dialogue and discussion with oneself and life that Henri Matisse, in an extraordinary phrase about creative practice, called the “state of mind that approaches prayer”.
We imagine bhakti to be close-eyed adoration, the reason we dismiss the blind veneration of a political party with a catch-all phrase like bhakt. There are at least two elisions happening here. The first is the Bhakti tradition of literary and spiritual practice — bhakti, which originally meant devotion, worship, homage, piety, became critique, a resistance to the caste system, and to a monolingual culture of worship for the bhakti poets. It was also playfulness, the remnants of which we see in both the student and the teacher comically opening one eye during the prayer song in Guddi. Bhakti was — this scene reminds us — a critique of the idea of god and bhakti itself.
The other kind of elision has to do with the bhakt of the personality cult. Those who ridicule the andh bhakt are bhakts of another kind — an endorsement by a famous writer, a meeting with a well-known academic, among other teenagerish things, mark their behaviour. There’s an important difference between these two kinds of bhakts though — the andh bhakt wants to remain a bhakt, in the belief that they will be protected by the object of their adoration; the bhakt of academia and the literary world wants to be the recipient of such bhakti themselves. The andh bhakt worships the powerful, the academic-bhakt the powerless, so that both transform into a fetish. One wants to remain Hanuman, the other lives with the belief that it’s only a matter of time that they too will become Foucault.
Though Nietzsche dances in their classrooms, they ignore texts like Twilight of the Idols that criticise this neediness of the teacher to be the recipient of bhakti: “Thou seekest followers? Then thou seekest ciphers”. “Star professor” — a coinage that competes in cringe quotient with the “university don” of a previous era — should be an oxymoron in the classroom; but star professors — and everyone likes to think of themselves as one — lubricate the personality cult, seemingly unaware that it is a weapon of bullying and indoctrination. Ursula K Le Guin has spoken about the stranglehold of such a power equation: “I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people.”
Jacques Derrida had deconstruction, René Girard mimetism, “I have no logo, no brand. But a philosophy does not spread without a logo,” rued Michel Serres, an extraordinary thinker and teacher. Substitute “philosophy” with “philosopher” or “professor”, and it’ll explain why Serres — and various other writers, thinkers and critics — are not on the Humanities syllabus. “Stand out of my sunlight” — Diogenes, the “beggar philosopher” is said to have told Alexander when asked what he wanted. The young conqueror was so struck by the philosopher’s contempt and detachment that he’s believed to have said, “But as for me, if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.”
Instead of conquering the classroom like Alexander, I wish that teachers stood out of students’ sunlight.
Roy is a poet and writer. Views are personal
Instead of conquering the classroom like Alexander, I wish that teachers stood out of students’ sunlight. 
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