Beyond the Babas: Unpacking India’s New-Age Spiritual Market

The rise of new-age spiritual entrepreneurs is the direct result of a society seeking human guidance in an era without spiritual giants.

Over the past few weeks, India has been witnessing back-to-back controversies connected with “Babajis” and “Matajis” – men and women claiming special spiritual credentials and, sometimes, healing powers too. In a relatively short span of time, these characters gained large followings, with political patronage across party lines arriving close behind, largely thanks to high-skilled use of social media platforms and celebrity-driven PR exercises. Now several of these characters criss-cross the country, often at the invitation of elected officials, and offer Katha-s (colloquial interpretations of scriptures) or Pravachan-s (sermons and spiritual counsel), frequently laced with pontifications on everything under the sun, from food habits to choice of partners. For brevity and easy reference, let us call them New-Age Spiritual Entrepreneurs (NASE).

At the moment, social media platforms are inundated with reels and posts that either decry or expose these fly-by-night “holy” individuals and their “spiritual” enterprises, the NASE-s. Many well-intentioned users, and some bad-faith (pun intended) ones, bemoan the mushrooming of these upstarts across the length and breadth of the country. Some decriers suggest a close link between the rise of this phenomenon and the current political dispensation that claims Hindutva as its ideological source code. In a developing country like ours, where religion has been a defining factor in shaping societal and historical experiences, establishing a correlation between politics and religion comes easily and naturally to commentators. But correlation implies not causation – at least not necessarily, not all the time. To understand the sociological causes behind the mushrooming of NASE-s, one needs to look deeper than this superficial linking of religion with politics. As a rule, political praxis follows and responds to the exigencies of time. Therefore, the apparent link between politics and the proliferation of NASE-s is more of a symptom rather than the malaise ailing our society.

Capturing a celebrity cricketer or film star with one or more NASE-s on camera, or digging out old photographs of them appearing together, and then conjecturing/complaining about the PR exercises they may or may not have been part of – all these ‘gotcha’ elements can fetch social media traction, or create newsroom sensation at best, but these cannot accurately characterise or explain the social problem at the root. In fact, the mushrooming of NASEs across the country over the last couple of decades is not explained entirely by the rise of social media, any specific political dispensation, or the generous flow of cash into the sector. This is because NASE, as an overall phenomenon, predates both the social media revolution and the alleged Hindutva upsurge in the country, and in several cases, an NASE has humble origins.

Market Imbalance

So what is it that caused NASE to grow at an almost exponential rate in recent years? I suggest that it is much more than a chance concurrence of the three factors mentioned above – namely, social media revolution, conducive political environment, and cash flow – and much less about some particular celebrity attending some particular Babaji’s durbar to give the latter a PR boost. Instead, it is about the average aspirational Indian, slowly but surely coming out of poverty, seeking spiritual food – something only a human guide, a ‘guru ’, can offer – without negating materiality as “impure” or a hindrance on the path to attain a spiritually fulfilling life. It is about such seeking, the resulting desperation of not finding anyone better. In other words, it is a supply-side problem in the country’s ‘social marketplace’, where we have disproportionately more aspirational citizens than we have spiritual leaders who can effectively guide them. And since Hindus are still the majority religious-identity group in this country, it should be recognised and acknowledged largely as a failure of Hindu spiritual leadership.

Who exactly are these “aspirational citizens”? We should not delude ourselves into thinking that only the country’s burgeoning middle class comprises the group seeking a specific kind of spiritual succour. The lower middle class, and even lower-income groups further down the economic ladder, are also showing a spiritual hankering. Of course, one can identify the more well-to-do sections of this demand-side demographic as largely defining the specific type of spiritual demand here, and the other classes following suit. The percolation of this demand down the various levels of social strata is duly facilitated by both mainstream and social media platforms, now more easily accessible to all classes than ever due to affordable, near-universal mobile internet connectivity.

What, now, is the nature of the spiritual demand that these groups have? We must recognise that their demand is not a trade-off between religious piety and material prosperity. Such a trade-off may have existed in colonial times and in the four or five decades following India’s political independence, but its character has changed in the recent decades. The middle class and several lower-income groups, galvanised by their new aspiration to attain spiritual guidance without dispensing with material pursuits, end up looking for an accessible ‘guru’ who speaks to them more directly and colloquially, without middlemen, appealing to established ethical and aesthetic standards in their specific cultural contexts. The inevitable result of such overwhelming demands in the social marketplace is the emergence of NASE-s.

Empty Throne

So far so good. The problem arises when the NASE comes with considerable business acumen but little first-hand spiritual insight. Human yearning for “food for the spirit” is such that no idea or image of God alone can satisfy it – it needs the human presence. Godly ideals can spread among the multitudes only when they are embodied in the human form, lived in the flesh and blood, and demonstrated through the trials and tribulations of human life. This holds regardless of religious or cultural location, but it is especially true for Indian civilisation, which has contributed to the world of religious ideas and ideals the unique concept of recurrent Avatarhood of God for the express purpose of humanity’s emancipation. India has a special hankering for God in the human form – be it in the mode of the Avatar (such as Rama or Krishna) or in the mode of the guru (such as Adi Shankaracharya or Swami Vivekananda).

It should also be noted that India has not been blessed with any remarkable spiritual figure of the stature of Sri Ramakrishna or Ramana Maharshi since their passing. There have been gurus who have mobilised specific sections of Indian society, even visionaries who have offered new spiritual interpretations of Hinduism’s age-old traditions, but hardly has there been the all-encompassing spiritual genius with the capacity to cater to one and all – not since the two giants mentioned above, who have been described as ‘Avatars’ by many a discerning soul. And it’s been some time since that. Naturally, present-day India has grown a deep hunger, an unquenchable thirst in her spirit. NASE-s have merely tried to fill in that gaping void. But this is one field where derivative skills yield no real results. In fact, they often do more harm than good.

It seems that India has to wait longer. There may yet come a time when the spiritual genius of India rises again and embraces everyone as per their need and capacity – spiritual as well as material, or better still, spiritual through the material – without evincing pride or prejudice.

(The writer is a Kolkata-based educator, writer, researcher and musician. Views personal.)