4 min readJan 10, 2025 08:53 AM IST
First published on: Jan 8, 2025 at 03:24 PM IST
A celebrity “spiritual leader” like Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev will have innumerable admirers and followers. Recently, Home Minister Amit Shah met with Sadhguru and reportedly discussed the role of Indian spirituality in transforming our society. The much-hyped guru appeared impressed in a post on X with Amit Shah’s “engagement and interest in the civilisational aspects of our nation.”
I believe I am not a spiritually impoverished person. However, this sort of affinity between religious gurus and the political class — particularly the ruling regime — unsettles me, and makes me somewhat sceptical about the rapidly flourishing “spiritual industry”.
Possibly, the steady rise of the spiritual industry is deeply related to the cultural/psychic/existential anxiety that the gospel of hyper-modernity with its characteristic obsession with competition, “productivity” and “success”, has generated. Psychotherapy and self-help books are always available. But then, neoliberal market fundamentalism has succeeded in creating and nurturing yet another industry that sells diverse packages of redemption — from “how to detox your mind in 10 minutes” to “five steps for Enlightenment”.
The managers of this industry have succeeded in reinventing and packaging all sorts of spiritual teachings — Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, Stoicism, Sufism, Taoism — to attract the rich/upwardly mobile — yet psychologically wounded — class. It is quite unlikely that any of these fancy babas and gurus will ever raise structural issues such as the insatiable greed that capitalism or neoliberalism has normalised, or the kind of alienation that the fetish of “economic productivity” has generated. Instead, with their oratorical skills and much-advertised “yogic practices”, they will plead for “inner engineering”. As consumers, you and I will be tempted to purchase diverse packages of instant salvation. When everything is an act of instant gratification, it is a matter of great thrill to buy a highly priced cup of coffee while waiting for the flight in the airport, and quickly looking at the pages of the new “Upanishads”.
This industry has a huge market. It is, therefore, not surprising that Sadhguru’s net worth reportedly runs into millions of dollars. He has invested heavily in real estate and other businesses. Furthermore, his YouTube channel with 11.4 million subscribers, we are told, is yet another source of income. Be “spiritual”, and lead a lavish life with a fleet of luxury vehicles. Indeed, it is a true model of “success” in the current age. However, this kind of mind-boggling wealth, far from liberating you, might intensify your fear: The fear of losing what you have, or the privileges associated with the “brand” you carry. Is it why these wealthy babas are compelled to remain close to power and accept the status quo?
It is, therefore, obvious that Sadhguru will find great spiritual strength in Amit Shah. Indeed, the “guru” is bound to praise our Home Minister’s keen interest in the “civilisational aspects” of the nation. But then, he is unlikely to tell the powers that be of the dangers of a particular ideology. Or speak to them by invoking, say, Rabindranath Tagore, and thereby see the flow of Indian civilisation as a confluence of multiple traditions.
It is high time you and I began to distinguish this sort of market-driven/neoliberal packaging of conformist spirituality from the emancipatory potential of what the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King (Jr) embodied as engaged religiosity for fighting injustice and exploitation and creating a peaceful, harmonic and egalitarian world.
The writer taught at JNU
It is not surprising that Sadhguru’s net worth reportedly runs into millions of dollars. 
Share
