The Mother’s children: The making of memory and intimacy at the Gurus’Samadhi

Abstract

Tombs of gurus and religious leaders are central to the consolidation of religious communities through memorialisation and the public performance of rituals. In Hindu and neo-Hindu religious movements, the guru’s samadhi is one such important sacred space. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article focuses on one Ashram in India and the importance of the Samadhi shrine in the life of its members. The article argues that the Samadhi constitutes the spatial heart of an otherwise spatially dispersed Ashram. It is at the Samadhi that the devotees become present to the gurus and one another, creating a community of devotees through both a linear ‘chain of memory’ and lateral ‘intimacy grids’. At the same time, the creation of such a community grapples with the wider locational specificities of the Ashram and the politics of making it a home.

The wonder of darshan: Going beyond the local and the national

“…Simultaneously, India in general seemed to pulsate with a spiritual beat, so to speak, precisely when inhabited in and through the Ashram. I discuss the locational specifics of the Ashram, as well as the travel-movementhome-exile continuum, elsewhere (Ganguly, 2022). 14.…”

“…Blanche Rachel Mirra Alfassa, or the Mother, was born on 21 February 1878 in Paris to Jewish parents; her father was Turkish while her mother was Egyptian. By her own admission, she started having paranormal experiences in her childhood, often seeing an entity or ‘a being of light’ (Nahar, 1997, cited in Pillai, 2005: 277; see also Ganguly, 2022). 6 Around the same time as Sri Aurobindo was beginning to develop his interest in spiritual practice in India, the young Mirra Alfassa began participating in the esoteric and occultist spiritual milieu in Europe.…”

“…Despite recent calls to retheorize darshan , it remains underexplored in the context of transnational guru-led movements where the guru and/or devotee transcend religious and geopolitical borders to come to inhabit new spiritual genealogies in unfamiliar lands (on guru-devotee and spiritual genealogies, see also Ganguly, 2022). 2 In this article, I argue that it is important to take into consideration the wider religious, social, political and historical contexts that shape the practice and theology of darshan in transnational spiritual communities.…”

“… 2. By ‘spiritual genealogies’, I mean ‘an alternative line of descent within which my interlocutors resituate themselves through their “connection” with the gurus’, as encapsulated in their frequent allusion to themselves as ‘the Mother’s children’ (Ganguly, 2022:166). When referring to the ‘genealogies of spiritual India’, I mean genealogy in the Foucauldian sense of a non-linear understanding of the past bearing on the present (Ganguly, 2022). …”