Opinion With a pinch of ash
Making sense of Sathya Sai Babas immense power and following
It was humbling and moving. Our mortal god was mourning the passing of a godman. So it felt as pictures of Tendulkar paying homage to Sathya Sai Baba flashed across the world. It is always presumptuous to claim to know what faith is. It is even more presumptuous to second guess the pathways and motivations that lead to it. That is why both loud assertions on its behalf and equally vehement acts of debunking almost always strike a false note. Both claim more knowledge than they are entitled to. A genuinely deep struggle to make sense of the nature of our place in the universe is much too complicated to be reduced to simple dualisms of faith and reason. The course of any single life is itself mysterious enough,subject to contingency,shaped by causes we do not fully understand. To not acknowledge this is to be wilfully blind to the fact that the world is,for anyone who cares to reflect on it,experienced as a mystery.
The quest to come to terms with everyday mysteries can take many forms. Often it expresses itself in ways we exhibit gullibility,a suspension of minimal reflection that is self-defeating. This gullibility can sometimes be endearingly silly. Often it has dangerously legitimised abuses of power. There is often good reason to be sceptical of particular claims to the miraculous or the divine. But it is more difficult to debunk those claims than we think. The enduring following of men like Sai Baba demonstrates that incredibly large numbers of intelligent and clear-thinking people can inhabit different orders of causality with-out experiencing a contradiction. Perhaps there is a deeper truth in this more abundant view of what is possible. While disenchantment can seem heroic against the irrational exuberance of faith,the lack of enchantment can itself produce deep intellectual closures and premature condescension. There is something eminently understandable about the metaphysical impulses that drive us towards godmen. Chesterton,in his inimitable fashion,once said something to the effect that the whole secret of mysticism was that one can understand everything by the help of what one cannot understand. The morbid logician,on the other hand,seeks to make everything lucid and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious and everything else becomes lucid. In part,our fascination with godmen is the way in which they deploy a mystery in the service of something followers experience as some kind of workable clarity.
Nor is the worship of these godmen simply a form of idolatry,a cultural affliction that supposedly weighs on Hindus. On this reading we simply displace onto the living what was reserved for the idols. The superficiality of this charge rests on not understanding either idolatry or worship. As the philosopher Arindam Chakrabarti once brilliantly wrote,any act of worshipping so-called idols is not premised on regarding them as divine or even representing the divine. It is premised on something deeper. Abhinavagupta described this meaning of divinification or adoration as immersing any object in the I-ness of the worshipper. On this view,the I is the egoless Soul of the Universe which is found in the worshippers heart. True worship is not the recognition of an idol,or the elevation of your self. Far from being idolatry in disguise,worship is premised on dissolution of the ego.
But metaphysics apart,there is a more sensible,social reason to be wary of godmen. It is the concentration of power that comes with them that can be debilitating. Whatever the divine plan may be,concentration of power is not part of it. Trying to enlarge the scope of understanding and self-knowledge to come to terms with the mysteries of fate is one thing. Suspending reason is quite another. In practice,the line between extending reason and suspending it,between humility and abject self-abasement,between enchantment and credulity,turns out to be very thin.
It is also equally true that the impulses that often lead to following godmen are less than meta-physical. Nirad Chaudhari was onto something when he argued that in India religion is often the highest form of self-interested and egoistical quest we look to godmen to provide the plain old things: power,riches and glory. Not to put too fine a point on it,this was often the odour exuded by throngs of rich and powerful that surround people like Sathya Sai Baba. One good reason for staying away from him was that the whole spectacle seemed to thrive on legitimating of power: the famous vibhuti for the poor,diamonds for the rich. The Cosmic Power broker seemed to collude with the Earthly Power brokers.
People looked to him to solve problems no one else would solve. But often the motivations driving individuals also seemed less to do with a quest for self-clarification. They seemed a desperate attempt to cling on to the vestiges of material success. It was a form of hyper-attachment,and the insecurities it breeds drove them to want more. And Sai Baba,like so many others,seemed to oblige. Appearances to the contrary,the edifice seemed to prey on our fears,insecurities and vulnerabilities,even as it promised enlightenment.
There was often an explanation given for this. Creating an organisation and producing the conditions that serve the poor require the cooperation of the rich and powerful. There was a paradox here. The godman whom the powerful sought had to himself pander to power. And the vicious cycle of the legitimation of power continued. The extraordinary social service organisations that provided genuine relief for the poor cannot take away from the fact that,in its own way,this extraordinary power was not put in the service of questioning the basic premises by which we live.
But perhaps there is also more of an invisible force at work here than we recognise. For even in the hyper-materialist drives of many powerful people,somewhere there was an acknowledgement that they were less in control of the world than they liked to appear. Their insecurities made them,at least at this place,oddly vulnerable. Even in that materialism was some act of humility. Even those who had mastered their domain by their sheer hard work and genius had the nagging feeling that they were not ground of their own being. So when a mortal god pays genuine homage to a godman,we understand the real reason godmen exist: to remind us that we are,after all,human. It takes a godman to tame the illusion of invincibility we might otherwise have. We in turn have to take their invincibility with a pinch of ash.
The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhi
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