Guru English

One had no idea from the title what the contents of the volume under review might be and I must admit that the introduction did little to enlighten me. Now that I have finished reading it I am still not clear quite what the phrase means, nor why it is what it is. "Guru English" serves as a capacious hold-all term to refer to the ways in which Hinduism has moved beyond its usual geographical borders, adapted to, first, the Raj, then the nationalist project, then the post-modern welter, all the while turning cosmopolitan and universal, repackaging itself in the process as a panacea for stress in the consumerist world of late capitalism. In other words Guru English is a discourse, a field of thought and practice that reinvents itself continuously. A long taken-for-granted tradition of Indian spirituality is seen here to have bloomed as an effect of Western Romanticism, which, seeping into India in the late 18th century looked at the past through a golden haze.

Different phases

Heavily grounded in contemporary theory, the study (part linguistics, part history, part sociology of religion,) takes the reader through not only the different phases listed above but describes eloquently and critically the personalities who "created", reformed, adapted, universalised Hindu thought and myth, spreading it abroad, very differently from the proselytisers of the Semitic faiths, but popularising it nevertheless, claiming a special standing for this 'religion' (which is no religion in any revealed sense), an applicability and relevance that can withstand the onslaughts of science, that is itself somehow scientific, has contained the germs of scientific thought from the very beginning. Hinduism takes scientific progress on board for the simple reason that it offers no belief system that can be disproved. Thus, in contexts where the belief system stands discredited, the heady mix of the philosophical, psychological and spiritual offered by charismatic gurus through yoga and meditation has proved to be a powerful draw.

~ From: Cosmopolitan Interconnections ~