Written by an Indian Who Fears for the Welfare of Her Country

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One of the funniest stories by the late Indian writer R.K. Narayan is a true one, set in America. The story, recounted in an essay from his book Reluctant Guru, unfolds during the author’s stint in the 1960s as a visiting professor in the Midwest, where he is treated on arrival as a sort of saint.

He blames themes in his work for the confusion — the occult, afterlife, holiness — but also his Indianness.

So strong was the “belief in my spiritual adeptness,” he writes, that he began to relate to his most celebrated work, the novel known as Guide, once subtitled “Story of a Reluctant Guru.”

In the essay, whose title echoes that phrase, Narayan identifies with “Raju, the hero of my Guide who was mistaken for a saint and began to wonder at some point himself if a sudden effulgence had begun to show on his face.”

He ends with the tale of a 4 a.m. phone call from a young Indian colleague, demanding a prediction of the fallout after a shake-up at the university. Why, Narayan asked, such a question, at such a time? “Don’t you get up at four for your meditations?” came the reply. “I thought at this hour you’d be in a state of mind to know the future.” Narayan reads the call as a new measure of just how far an Indian man can go in pretending to be superhuman. “Evidently this scientist had caught the general trend in the atmosphere,” he writes. “While I could appreciate an average American’s notion that every Indian was a mystic, I was rather shocked in this instance, since I expected an Indian himself to know better.”

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Even Indians can fall for the mysticism of an Indian man who looks the part. That point clarifies just why the focus on Sheela perturbs me so much: Bhagwan’s legacy informs a larger story, on what we allow a certain sort of man to get away with, in America, India, wherever. Perhaps there’s a cautiousness among sensitive folk in questioning a brown man these days. Reading reviews of the Netflix series though, I feel I am witnessing a repeat of Osho’s vanishing act, of the man behind the Oz curtain.

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In ancient times, the guru worked mainly for shishyas, or students, imparting knowledge, serving the people around him. Mega-gurus like Osho are just the opposite, taking rather than giving. Still, one deduces from Wild Wild Country’s reluctance to question the implications of his legacy, Osho is exempt from reproach, no matter the lack of depth his actual filmed speeches reveal. A student of the hypnotic induction used by cults, Rajneesh perfected “the art of being vague, while pretending you are being profound,” as one critic noted in an epic, damning New Republic analysis of Osho’s empire. In this ability to elide critique, he paved the way for what one might call “having it both ways” gurus, from Sri Sai Baba, whose closed chambers held nearly 100 secret kilos of gold found after his death, to arguably the most powerful guru in India today, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev.

These gurus twist the notion of divinity to serve material ends, dismissing the concept of god even as they situate themselves as living gods. They do so through various means — Sai Baba was known to produce gold watches through sleight of hand, a masterstroke that guaranteed followers, as well as debunkers. Osho introduced a different kind of magic trick, continued by Vasudev today. Call it “simple psychological projection,” a phrase he himself used, contemptuously, to belittle belief in god.

Arguably no religious tradition enshrines the act of projection as Hinduism does. Hindus see meaning in a slab of stone. Priests spend their days tending to these mute icons, washing them, dressing them, offering them food. In return, the idols technically do nothing, though the faithful would argue the work they do occurs at the cellular level — of a life, mind, soul, planet.

My experience of the Hindu act of projection occurred in a temple, perhaps the most famous in the world, known as Tirupathi. When I went I was hormonal and 14 or so, with a spotty face and resentment in my veins at having to go with my family in public anywhere. I hated the masses of people, whom I imagined stared only at me, as if they’d received warning ahead of time that a profoundly awkward teen from America who didn’t quite belong here or there would be approaching.

When I learned the entire trip, the hours of driving, the subpar toilets, the extended family time, the crush of human mass — all of it was for a single moment of glimpsing an idol — I felt simultaneously in awe and contempt, of the scope of human emotion, the need for salvation, or security, or change, so strong we enter into arrangements that require imagination to make sense.

We stood in a line for hours, my limbs pressed by women as if to erase me. Then I saw the idol. He is Venkateshwara, the god of my own family’s house, and so I have seen him many times before and since. But no view has been like that long-awaited one at Tirupathi. All around the sensation enveloped me, of people staring, crying, sending their needs and wants to the stone slab and seeming to gain relief in return. I felt conscripted in a double conversion in that halt in time: of the slab to a god, of myself to a worshipper.

Osho mocked the sort of projection that converts stone, but he benefited from its force.

A soul in belief is a delicate thing — it can be exploited or liberated, depending on circumstances. The stone, the object on which projection occurs, remains a neutral party. A guru, a living idol, requires constant maintenance.

Osho usurped the idol’s position while nursing a respect for cash, calling himself the “rich man’s guru,” and reportedly amassing more Rolls Royces than anyone in the world. Jaggi Vasudev, his closest modern analogue, opts for motorcycles.