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

Abstract

Darshan is a classical theme in studies on Hinduism. Recent studies have called for a retheorization, pointing to diverse forms of darshan or similar practices in other religions. However, such critiques do not adequately explore darshan in transnational guru-led movements where both gurus and devotees cross religious, social and cultural boundaries to inhabit and create new devotional lineages in unfamiliar lands. Based on fieldwork among a transnational spiritual community in India, this article shows how darshan in the community is shaped by the intersections of interpretations of neo-Vedantic and western esoteric thought. Thus, it is argued that darshan needs to be understood as historically and discursively shaped. The article also considers the wonder-ful nature of the experiences and politics of darshan. The inner transformation of devotees, it is argued, is paralleled by the exterior transformation of the abstract imaginary of ‘spiritual India’ into the concrete place of achieving spiritual communion with the guru and realizing oneself. The wonder of darshan in this context lies in the traversing of the multiple axes of interiority and exteriority.

Introduction

On my first field trip to Puducherry, India, strolling through the French Quarter, I decided to follow the throng of visitors to the grand Manakula Vinayagar Temple dedicated to the Hindu elephant god, Ganesha. A string of small shops outside the Temple were selling a variety of religious wares: incense sticks, flowers, figurines of deities, brass lamps, and photographs of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, including rows of images of just the Mother’s eyes.

The Bengali Indian guru Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), addressed as Sri Aurobindo, and his spiritual companion, the French woman Mirra Alfassa (1878–1973), simply called ‘the Mother’, were the founders of Sri Aurobindo Ashram (hermitage), a major spiritual and tourist landmark in the city today. I thought it interesting that the gurus had been seamlessly woven into the galaxy of deities displayed among the range of religious objects, for although less than 100 metres apart, the Temple and the Ashram seem to represent two ostensibly different religio-spiritual orders: the former, a typical Hindu establishment; the latter, a melting pot of spiritual seekers and devotees from all over the world drawn to the life and work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. ¹ What was even more striking was the photographs of the Mother’s eyes, enlarged and disembodied from the rest of her body, staring out intently from behind laminated frames. It took me a few minutes to realize the significance of these images. Here was the French Mother in the familiar Indian or Hindu iconographic mode of giving darshan through her all-powerful, all-seeing eyes.

Derived from the Sanskrit root word drs, meaning ‘vision’ or ‘sight’, darshan is commonly understood in scholarly work as ‘the intimate process of seeing and being seen by a deity’ (Lucia, 2014: 42). A classical theme in studies on Hinduism, the act can be understood as inhabiting and initiating a visual force field where the deity and devotee become mutually entangled in witnessing each other, albeit placed in a devotional hierarchy of authority and supplication. The notion of darshan and visual piety extends from idols of deities to human-guru-led movements. The term darshan also refers to philosophy and knowledge or insight. Through darshan of the deity or guru, the devotee may gain true insight into the nature of reality and the self.

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. Such an approach complicates the understanding of darshan by situating it at the intersections of various religio-spiritual paths. In the context of my study, such intersections further point to the intersecting trajectories of western seekers turning to India in their spiritual quest. The guru’s wonder-ful darshan creates new spiritual genealogies of guru devotee, bringing about a transformation in the beholder’s notion of the self. Such transformed interiority, I argue, is paralleled by the altered exteriority of a strange and exotic land, with the hitherto abstract imaginary of ‘spiritual India’ now rendered intimately concrete in the here and now.

For this article, I draw on fieldwork conducted in Puducherry between November 2013 and March 2015 among primarily North American and western European spiritual practitioners who had been living in or regularly visiting Puducherry for at least two decades. The fieldwork involved in-depth interviews, informal conversations and participant observation, including volunteering at the Ashram’s common dining hall. Most of my interlocutors considered Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as their gurus. Many of them were Ashramites (formal members of the Ashram), while others were associated with the Ashram in one informal capacity or another. Other than these participants, some of my interlocutors lived in Puducherry but were affiliated formally or informally with ashrams elsewhere in India. Others did not have an allegiance with any one ashram or guru but considered themselves spiritual seekers and spent extended periods of time across different ashrams in the country. In this article, I focus mainly on darshan of the Mother, but also extend the discussion to other gurus where relevant. I have used pseudonyms for all interlocutors whose experiences I narrate here. I also rely significantly on the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and their followers as textual resources. For my article, these are as central to a contextual understanding of darshan as my interlocutors’ experiences and narratives.

Darshan in theory: beyond ‘a single darshan experience’

It is impossible to begin a survey of scholarship on darshan without immediately turning to Diana Eck’s (2007) seminal monograph, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. In this slim volume, Eck proposes sight and seeing as being central to Hindu devotionalism. In the preface to the second edition, she writes: ‘When Hindus go to the temple, their eyes meet the powerful, eternal gaze of the eyes of God. It is called darsan, “seeing” the divine image, and it is the single most common and significant element of Hindu worship’ (Eck, 2007: 1]. ³ Eck continues by saying that not only images of Hindu deities ‘give darshan’ – that is, make themselves present for the devotee to ‘receive’ their sacred sight – but so too do saints, holy men and renouncers. She argues that darshan is an exchange of mutual gazing, ‘to see and be seen by the deity’ (3). The deity or holy man’s gaze ‘touches’ the beholder, where ‘touch is the ultimate connection by which the visible yields to being grasped’ (Kramrisch, 1946, quoted in Eck, 2007: 9). Also referring to the six systems of philosophy, or saddarsana, developed in the subcontinent, darshan connotes knowing or true insight.

Eck’s formulation of darshan as ‘to see and be seen’ has been hugely influential for subsequent theorizations in studies on Hinduism, guru movements and visual cultures. CJ Fuller’s (1992) ethnographic The Camphor Flame, a classic in studies on Hinduism, retains the conceptualization of darshan as primarily a vision-oriented practice; Klaus Klostermaier’s (2007: 274) authoritative A Survey of Hinduism tells us that ‘[a]lthough Hindus are quite often also truly appreciative of the beauty of the temple, the most important reason for going to the temple is the darśana of the mūrti: an audience with God’; and Gavin Flood’s (2004: 210) An Introduction to Hinduism locates darshan – that is, ‘blessings . . . received by his [the deity’s] devotees in the form of his vision’ – squarely at the heart of Brahmanical temple worship. In such accounts, darshan emerges as a ‘super category’, a catch-all for supposed pan-Indian or pan-Hindu devotional sensibilities (Cort, 2012). The ubiquity of rendering darshan as a typically Hindu or Indian ocular practice is also evident in the literature surrounding visuality, and is extended beyond idols of deities to darshan of or through varieties of visual media, including photographs of gurus (Babb, 1981; Elison, 2018), chromolithographs of deities, cinema (Pinney, 2004), architecture or urban spatiality (Elison, 2018), and the Internet (Scheifinger, 2009). Despite these important interventions in conceptualizing darshan, there are still limited attempts to ‘problematize the model of a straightforward mutual gaze between worshipper and icon’ (Cort, 2012: 7).

In Christopher Pinney’s (2004) influential text on visual cultures in India, the notion of darshan is included in his broader term – ‘corpothetics (sensory, corporeal aesthetics)’ (193). Pinney argues that ‘peasant visuality’ in parts of northern India demands that icons and images return the onlooker’s gaze, in keeping with the darshanic model of mutual visual imbrication. However, he also argues that such a practice is

on the face of it dissimilar to dominant class ‘Western’ practices, which privilege a disembodied, unidirectional and disinterested vision, but not strikingly unlike a whole range of culturally diverse popular practices that stress mutuality and corporeality in spaces as varied as those of religious devotion and cinematic pleasure. (193)

Pinney suggests linking darshan to visual practices elsewhere in India and other cultures. Further, his notion of corpothetics indicates a nod towards a broader sensorial landscape, of which darshan may be one inhabitant. Pinney’s suggestion to resist the creation of ‘a specifically Indian enclave of darshan-related practices’ (193) can be read as a caution against approaching darshan as an ahistorical category, ‘as it lumps together practices and theories from many centuries, from all parts of India and from a wide variety of sectarian, theological and philosophical perspectives into what we can call a single “darshan experience”’ (Cort, 2012: 6; my emphasis). Instead, following Talal Asad’s (1983) discursive approach to religious practices and beliefs in general, darshan too needs to be understood as historically and discursively shaped. To understand the practice as dynamic instead of a static, essentially Hindu practice, it needs to be reviewed by taking into account the various historical and discursive modalities of its production and performance along with the darshanic experience in any given context.

More recent critical approaches to darshan caution against considering the practice as germane only to Hinduism or seeing it in isolation of other religious practices. ⁴ Christiane Brosius (2005: 55) thus writes that, ‘[g]iven the cultural diversity of India, and its interactions with western and Islamic thought, the idea of a seemingly unchanging, purely Hindu manner of seeing is problematic’. As John E Cort (2012: 3) notes, ‘Babb expanded the field for understanding darsan by also discussing the evil eye – usually known by the Persian-derived term najar or nazar in North India’. Cort (2012: 9) himself goes on to study Jain darshan, where understandings and practices of darshan vary according to ‘sectarian and geographical variations’. However, while these are welcome critiques of the typical monochromatic lens through which darshan is perceived within scholarship, darshan is still usually framed as an Indian or subcontinental phenomenon, leaving unaddressed the transnational intersections of ideas, practices and histories that shape modern darshan in some contexts. In the following sections, I argue that the practice of darshan of the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram cannot be understood as simply a Hindu or Indian practice. Rather, it emerges as a modern practice, demonstrating the workings of a much wider landscape of interconnected religio-spiritual ideas. Further, the practice, in its revelation of the self’s alterity to the beholder, cannot be separated from the historical production of India as the very embodiment of radical alterity, while not being exhausted by a historical understanding of “spiritual India” either. The inner transformed interiority thus parallels the exterior transformation of the abstract notion of ‘spiritual India’ into the concreteness of becoming the site of personal revelation.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother ⁵

Aurobindo Ackroyd Ghose, who would later come to be known and revered as Sri Aurobindo, was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on 15 August 1872. When he was seven years old, his anglophone father sent Sri Aurobindo to England to be educated. He studied at King’s College, Cambridge, where, along with his studies, he began to develop more and more interest in India’s political situation. He adopted a strong critical attitude against British imperialism and was convinced ‘that India had to throw off the British yoke’ (Heehs, 2008: 30).

In 1893, at the age of 21, Sri Aurobindo returned to India and began working in various administrative positions in the erstwhile princely state of Baroda. Between 1893 and 1906, he improved his Bengali, began avidly to read the Sanskrit epics (especially the Vedas) and practised yoga. In 1906, he moved to Calcutta, where he took on the role as editor of the English-language anti-colonial newspaper Bande Mataram (Victory to the Motherland). In 1908, the British government charged Sri Aurobindo with sedition due to his involvement with the newspaper, and sent him to Alipore Jail in Calcutta. In prison, ‘Aurobindo passed his days in meditation and other yogic practices’ (Heehs, 2008: 173). On his release about a year later, in 1910, he and some fellow nationalists relocated to Puducherry, a French colony within largely British India, intending to concentrate on spiritual practice in exile. However, the plan to spend only a few months in exile was not to be – Sri Aurobindo spent the rest of his life practising yoga in Puducherry. It was here that he met the French woman who would go on to become his close spiritual collaborator and help him to lead the community of sadhaks (‘spiritual practitioners’) that came to be called Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

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. Between 1904 and 1908, she was an active member of the occult group known as the Mouvement Cosmique, founded by Max Theon (1848–1927) and his wife Mary Christine Woodroffe Ware (1843–1908). Even after leaving the Mouvement Cosmique, the Mother continued to engage with occultist and esoteric circuits in Paris. Her participation in these circles had a significant bearing on her and Sri Aurobindo’s subsequent corpus of teachings, showing a dynamic confluence of ideas cutting across geographical boundaries.

The Mother arrived in Puducherry in 1914 with her then husband, Paul Richard, who took her to meet Sri Aurobindo. She was immensely moved by this meeting, or darshan, and later described that, at her very first sight of Sri Aurobindo, she understood that he was the same ‘being of light’ whom she had seen at a young age (Pillai, 2005). Later, she recalled that, at that first meeting, all thoughts disappeared from her mind: ‘I was absolutely BLANK’ (The Mother, 1962: 288). To the Mother, there was no doubt that Sri Aurobindo was her ‘spiritual master’ (Heehs, 2008: 250). Given Sri Aurobindo’s growing number of devotees, the Ashram was established in 1926. The Mother looked after its everyday affairs, turning a loose body of devotees into the well-run institution that today has more than 1000 formal members of various nationalities.

The practice of darshan was, and continues to be, important in the life of the Ashram. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother gave darshan to devotees on their birthdays. Peter Heehs (2008) notes that it was the devotees who started celebrating Sri Aurobindo’s birthday, expressing their reverence and devotion towards the guru through customary practices. While Sri Aurobindo ‘was always reticent and reserved, never encouraging demonstrations of feeling’, the Mother ‘was happy’ with such devotional expressions (Heehs, 2008: 343). Over the years, other days, including the Mother’s birthday, were added as darshan days. Often, on these days, darshan was conducted in the outer room of Sri Aurobindo’s apartment where ‘he sat in silence as the members of the community and a few invited visitors passed before him one by one. Each was allowed a minute or two in his presence. No words were exchanged’ (Heehs, 2008: 356). After Sri Aurobindo’s death, the Mother continued to give darshan to people, and it was her darshan that my interlocutors spoke to me about. In order to better understand their experiences, I first turn to a brief overview of the gurus’ spiritual teachings.

Spiritual integrations in Integral Yoga

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother called their teachings Integral Yoga. They were both prolific writers and their thought shows a rich amalgamation of Vedanta or neo-Vedanta biological theories of evolution, modern psychology and occultism. It is beyond the scope of this article to dwell at length on or be able to do justice to the whole gamut of their thought, but I will point to some ideas that are relevant to understanding darshan in this context.

Indian classical texts, including the Vedanta, and the Vedantic notion of Brahman were some of the most formative influences on Sri Aurobindo’s thought. ⁷ Brahman refers to

a transcendent entity who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. This Brahman is all that is created and is yet beyond creation. It manifests in the universe through infinite forms. Vedanta describes Brahman as ‘Sachchidananda’, meaning that which possesses three attributes: Sat (Absolute Existence), Chit-Tapas (Absolute Consciousness and Energy/Force), and Ananda (Absolute Bliss). (Pillai, 2005: 122–123)

Sri Aurobindo stated that all creation was a manifestation of Brahman and all human consciousnesses were forever seeking union with this Divine force. ⁸ In The Life Divine, a treatise that was held in very high regard by most of my interlocutors, he wrote:

This becoming of the infinite Bliss-Existence-Consciousness in mind and life and body, – for independent of them it exists eternally, – is the transfiguration intended and the utility of individual existence. Through the individual it manifests in relation even as of itself it exists in identity . . . Sachchidananda is the unknown, omnipresent, indispensable term for which the human consciousness, whether in knowledge and sentiment or in sensation and action, is eternally seeking. (Sri Aurobindo, 2005: 48–49)

While all matter is a creation and manifestation of Brahman according to Sri Aurobindo, he located all matter and nature on an evolutionary plane of progression – from inert matter to plants, animals and eventually humans. Each category in this evolutionary scale represents or embodies a lower or higher stage of consciousness – (inert) Matter, (animate) Life and (the human self-conscious and reflexive) Mind. However, humans, in this typology, did not manifest Brahman in all its glory and complexity. There was to come another plane – the plane of consciousness called the Supermind – where the unity of spirit and nature, and man and divinity, would be realized. He described it as

divine Truth-Consciousness as the ancient mystics called it, a Supermind, a Gnosis, with which this world of a lesser consciousness proceeding by Ignorance is in secret relation and which alone maintains it and prevents it from falling into a disintegrated chaos. (Sri Aurobindo, 1999: 254)

The Supermind was thus at the pinnacle of the evolutionary schema.

The planetary evolution in the schema of Integral Yoga is accompanied by the evolution in individual human consciousness. Sri Aurobindo explained that

in the course of evolution from Matter to Life to Mind, human beings have acquired a physical body, a vital (emotional) body, and a mental body. The three planes, however, are but a part of a person’s consciousness, namely the outer ego that governs awareness in daily life. (Pillai, 2005: 130)

In order to move towards the plane of the Supermind, one has to learn through spiritual practice or sadhana to control the superficial outer levels of one’s consciousness and give free rein to the innermost kernel of one’s self – the ‘psychic being’.

A central concept of Integral Yoga, the psychic being clearly shows the influence of the Mother’s occultist ideas. The psychic being is that ‘which persists after death, because it is your eternal self; it is this that carries the consciousness forward from life to life’ (The Mother, 2003: 63). This notion, in turn, resonates with the philosophy of the Mouvement Cosmique, where the ‘psychic’ and the ‘soul’ were interrelated. For Max Theon, the soul was the ‘organ of the emotive and affective sentiments’, and central to a person’s spiritual evolution in subsequent lives (Theon, 1907, cited in Heehs, 2011: 237). In Sri Aurobindo’s writings, the notion of the soul is derived from fundamental Vedantic notions but ‘the psychic being or evolutionary soul . . . does not have any exact equivalent in the Vedantic tradition’ (Heehs, 2011: 237–238). In The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo gave a nod to the occultist meaning of the psychic being:

Even the ensoulment of the body by the psychic being follows, if the occult view of these things is correct, a similar outward process, for the soul as nucleus draws to itself for birth and aggregates the elements of its mental, vital and physical sheaths and their contents, increases these formations in life, and in its departing drops and disaggregates again these aggregates, drawing back into itself its inner powers, till in rebirth it repeats the original process. (Sri Aurobindo, 2005: 198n4)

As the spiritual practitioner learns to dull their physical instincts, curb their emotional impulses and quieten the rational intellectual flows of thought, the psychic being rises more and more strongly to the fore, manifesting the divine. The integration of a higher individual consciousness with the supreme plane of planetary consciousness is at the heart of the soteriology of Integral Yoga. Integral Yoga’s philosophy, however, is constituted by another kind of integration – that of ideas and beliefs spanning the religio-spiritual spectrum across India and Europe. It is this integration, I suggest, that helps us to contextualize darshan in the case of my research.

Darshan in practice: ‘That is obviously psychic’

Jerry was really, really tall – that was my first impression of the softly spoken, bespectacled man whose American accent had acquired the lilt that, I noticed, was common to those who had spent a long time in India. Jerry had been living in Puducherry as an Ashramite for around 40 years when I met him in 2013. On that afternoon, I was meeting him in the cool office of one of the Ashram’s buildings. In a room stacked full of the books of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, with their photographs lining the walls, I began asking him when and why he had travelled to India, and why he stayed on. Jerry came to India in 1971 like many others of his generation, disgruntled and disenchanted with his society, politics and life in general. ‘I was a dreamy, bright-eyed, tall young man who had just got off drugs’, he told me with a smile, as if amused at his past self, who was searching for meaning and trying to get his mind off drugs. He travelled to Amritsar, Delhi, Mussoorie and Rishikesh, where he lived in different ashrams. While in Rishikesh, he read books by Sri Aurobindo ‘and this lady he called the Mother’, Jerry recounted. Curious about ‘this lady’, Jerry decided to make his way to Puducherry. He planned to stay for three days and made an appointment to have the Mother’s darshan. Unbeknownst to him, it was to be a life-changing encounter: ‘I was blown away’. ⁹

On the designated day, Jerry arrived on time and joined the long queue of aspiring darshanarthis (those desiring darshan). As soon as he entered the room, he recalled, ‘it was like being in an electromagnetic field . . . she looked at everyone with this great [gestured with both hands to show something emanating from the eyes] concentration’ (original emphasis). As Jerry described his feelings to me, tears welled up in his eyes, his lips started to tremble, and his body seemed to become taut and charged. He went on:

When my turn came . . . what happened as I entered the room, I became aware of a tangible force field of entangled power that was really gripping and it sort of abstracted me. It threw my mind back upon myself, my mind slowed down, everything seemed to slow down with such a dense field of energy and consciousness . . . And then I turned and knelt down before the Mother . . . and I got lost in her eyes. (quoted in Ganguly, 2018: 1035)

I felt myself being caught up in the frisson. Jerry’s intensity while narrating his first darshan of the Mother was contagious in the classical Durkheimian sense, and his ebullience had the quality that may very well have been in Durkheim’s (1995) mind when he wrote about consciousnesses being open to one another during a gathering around the sacred. But almost unwilling to get totally caught up, I tore my eyes away from Jerry, noticing the small photograph of the Mother on Jerry’s table, a small glass idol of Ganesha and a few stray flowers. Jerry was speaking:

As I looked, I was looking into the clear blue sky and I seemed to go further and further into it and . . . there was a great sense of expansion and lightness . . . And pretty soon I am light as a feather and all stretched out . . . and also I could feel knocking at the door little thoughts but I did not want to think. I just wanted to be in this experience . . . After two or three minutes, I became aware that as I was looking at the Mother, so she was looking at me. And as soon as I became aware of this, I became aware of a stream of energy coming from her going through her eyes into mine, through my eyes down into my heart, filling my heart with the pure love within her [Jerry took a very deep breath and tried to calm himself at this point for he was overcome with emotion]. And the most beautiful thing is that I did not experience [her love] as impersonal love. I felt that [long pause as he steadied his voice] she knew me better than I knew myself . . . Somehow, there was no resistance in me to what she was seeing because, without thinking about it, in the course of only a few minutes, there had come about great respect for this person.

The Mother, in Jerry’s words, ‘plopped’ her hand on his head, a gentle yet firm tactile gesture of blessing, and gave him a small bouquet of flowers, yet another benediction. He smiled now, looking at me – by the end of the Mother’s darshan, all those years ago, he realized that she was his guru. As he neared the end of his account, his body became more relaxed and his shoulders dropped, even as he continued to smile brightly.

Jerry’s was one of the more detailed accounts of the Mother’s darshan, but several of my other interlocutors also spoke of having the Mother’s darshan, where their true selves were revealed to them. Another American, Shannon, who now lived in Puducherry, had travelled overland to India in May 1971. Not really looking to become a devotee of any guru, she hitchhiked to Puducherry with a friend and a Swedish man they had befriended on the road. While in town, she decided to have the Mother’s darshan. ‘I had that much sense!’, she joked. When she entered the room to meet the Mother, the Mother ‘was in a trance’ and did not open her eyes to see Shannon. Still, Shannon narrated, ‘it was like she held a mirror to my face’, and suddenly Shannon could see who she truly was ‘and it was not a pretty picture’. Simultaneously, however, she was ‘flooded’ by the realization that she did not have to continue being the way she was and that, for her, was an immensely liberating thought. Other narratives of people’s darshan of the Mother echoed the themes of realizing their true selves, experiencing the Mother’s love, and having their thoughts quelled in her presence.

Jerry’s narrative is a classic darshan narrative, where he became aware that just as he was looking at the Mother, so too was she looking at him. He was seeing and being seen, where her eyes poured love into his very being. In Shannon’s narrative, on the other hand, the Mother’s presence, even without her opening her eyes, became the path to self-realization. In the context of Sathya Sai Baba, Tulasi Srinivas (2010) argues that the notion of leela or ‘divine play’ is central to Baba’s darshan. Mundane seating arrangements during Baba’s public darshan that afford some a view of Baba from up close while others are relegated to the back rows are attributed to Baba’s leela. As is his sudden conjuring of divine matter, such as sacred ash. Miracles and mundane affairs are all attributed to the guru’s inscrutable divine play. Along similar lines, I suggest that the act of darshan cannot be thought of as simply involving the sensorial capacity of vision but must be included within the experience of the guru’s total presence – an affective and sensorial field through which the beholder emerges transformed.

The theme of transformation cuts across darshan narratives. The power of the guru’s vision is in bringing about true insight such that the guru’s gaze or presence intermingles with one’s own, and the receiver of darshan is able to traverse, really, the depths of their own being. Losing all sense of time and space, the devotee finds themself ‘challenged, taught, purified’ by the guru’s gaze, which harbours ‘no lie, no impurity, no hesitation’, as in the case of the Divine Light Mission (DuPertuis, 1986: 120). The hugging guru Ammachi’s devotees

relate similar experiences of the dissolution of individual boundaries, immersion in divine love, and cosmic awakenings . . . Devotees long for the darshan experience because of the potential for this type of transformative experience, the possibility of experiencing a glimpse into the cosmic reality of the divine, and the efficacy of darshan for catalyzing spiritual awakening. (Lucia, 2014: 43)

Similar accounts abound in Lawrence Babb’s (1981) study of the Radhasoamis and Srinivas’s (2010) work on Sathya Sai Baba. Yet it is important not to insert these into ‘a single darshan experience’, as Cort (2012) cautions. Just as Sathya Sai Baba’s darshan cannot be understood outside of the cosmology of leela and Ammachi’s darshan outside of the frameworks of the Hindu goddess and notions of sakti, the darshan of the Mother is an index of the larger soteriology and transnational theology of Integral Yoga.

In a letter dated 25 August 1934, one devotee wrote about his darshan experience to Sri Aurobindo:

On Darshan Day and the day before it I felt an intense love for you and for the Mother. It possessed my whole being for some time. There was a high and profound reverence for both of you and ‘a happiness that no worldly pleasure can give us’. (Sri Aurobindo, 2012: 128) ¹⁰

Sri Aurobindo’s (2012: 128) reply was short and succinct: ‘That is obviously psychic’ (my emphasis). In other letters in response to devotees’ questions, Sri Aurobindo explained that experiencing the Mother’s love was an indication of their own psychic being coming to the fore. This condition was to be distinguished from the ‘mental’ activities that beset people at all times, which was an impediment to the growth and manifestation of one’s true inner psychic being. The Darshan Message from 15 August 1953, a quote from Sri Aurobindo, reinforces this view:

There is one thing everybody should remember that everything should be done from the point of view of Yoga, of sadhana, of growing into a divine life in the Mother’s consciousness. To insist upon one’s own mind and its ideas, to allow oneself to be governed by one’s own vital feelings and reactions should not be the rule of life here. One has to stand back from these, to be detached, to get in their place the true knowledge from above, the true feelings from the psychic within. (Sri Aurobindo, 2011: 750)

In the world of Integral Yoga, the Mother is an embodiment and manifestation of the divine consciousness. Jerry’s and Shannon’s experiences of the Mother’s darshan are thus experiences of a spontaneous surrendering of their mental and vital planes to the Mother’s powerful consciousness, ‘the true knowledge from above’ that reveals and activates ‘the true feelings from the [beholder’s] psychic within’. Jerry’s mind slowed down and was thrown upon itself, for the clueless young seeker was transformed by and initiated into an Integrative experience. The transformation brought about by the Integrative darshan of the Mother was not simply limited to the beholder’s initiation but a continuous process of self-reflection and correction that had to be continued beyond the event of darshan. In recalling his first encounter, Jerry found himself present again in front of the Mother, his trembling and charged body experiencing darshan this time through his continued internalization of the Mother’s divine vision.

Pierre, a French long-time Ashramite, told me in a matter-of-fact manner about the many times he went to ask the Mother’s advice about a practical issue but when he came face-to-face with her, all his questions and thoughts disappeared, his mind becoming a blank. ‘That is how it is with the Mother!’, he laughed. Yet, in quelling the chattering mental plane, every time Pierre emerged out of such an experience, the answer would present itself, demonstrating the power of the Mother’s psychic consciousness and the openness of the devotee to his own psychic being. Again and again over the course of my fieldwork, my interlocutors would speak of the importance of going beyond the mental. More than once, I was advised and sometimes lovingly admonished to stop being ‘so mental’ and instead let the other realms of my being come to the fore.

The emphasis on quietening the mind or the realm of the mental is not unique to Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Learning to control the chattering of the mind is central to meditative practices in both India and other parts of the world. However, in Integral Yoga, the erosion of all thoughts is also connected with the evolutionary scale of inner progression. ¹¹ It is a technique for going ‘inward’ from the mental to the psychic being, and the Mother’s darshan can be seen as one of the crucial steps towards such an undertaking. As one French Aurovillian recalled: ‘One day we were sitting around her [the Mother] and she asked, “So, what about mental silence? What have you achieved? Have you succeeded?”’ (Marechal, 2008: 18). ¹² Thus, the workings of the psychic being attuned to higher consciousness in the Mother’s transformative presence recalibrates the typically Indian practice of darshan through modern occultist notions, intersecting with modern interpretations of Vedantic yoga.

The wonder of darshan

To be transfixed, to be transformed, to have all thoughts vanish and to really see one’s self all points to the wonder-ful experience of the Mother’s darshan. The wonderful, wondrous experience of the Mother’s darshan was crucial in situating western spiritual seekers within a genealogy of guru–devotee relations such that they viewed the Mother (and Sri Aurobindo) as their guru. These experiences, I have argued, cannot be divorced from the wider cross-currents of religious (and sociopolitical) thought and practices that were merging into what came to be known as Integral Yoga. Within the scheme of Integral Yoga, darshan of the Mother must be seen and understood not simply as the appropriation of an Indian or Hindu practice, but rather as a dynamic practice situated at the intersections of various spiritual and religious theories of life and being.

If, for some scholars, darshan has been held to be integral to Hinduism as one of the defining practices of Hinduism, constituting the interiority or essence of Hinduism so to speak, then resituating darshan by paying attention to its historical and discursive productions unsettles a clear internal–external or interior–exterior dichotomy. Having discussed this in the previous sections, in this section, I elaborate on my interlocutors’ experiences to argue that the wondrous capacity of darshan unsettles yet another binary of interiority and exteriority – the inner and outer geography of self and the space of India, hitherto an unfamiliar place, collapsing into each other.

The notion of wonder signals the extraordinary and the unexpected. Moments of wonder break through the fabric of the everyday and ‘wonder is experienced as elusive and ineffable’ (Srinivas, 2018: 6). For the theologian Rudolf Otto, ‘wonder returned one to a feeling of the “numinous” ([1923] 1958: 15–17), which encompassed, in alphabetical order, awe, bewilderment, curiosity, confusion, dread, ecstasy, excitement, fear, marvel, mystery, perplexity, reverence, supplication, and surprise’ (Srinivas, 2018: 7). Wonder characterizes the darshan experiences of Jerry and Shannon, rupturing their mundane worlds.

Although shaken by the Mother’s darshan, Shannon decided to continue with her overland travel. She travelled from India to Pakistan or Afghanistan (in recounting this, Shannon was not sure of which country) and had a strange, wonderful experience at the embassy there. Shannon had bought little badges embossed with photographs of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, pinning them to the inside of her bag. Sitting in the embassy, a fellow traveller noticed the badges and asked, ‘Is that your guru?’; without a moment’s hesitation, Shannon said ‘Yes’. As soon as she had replied in the affirmative, she realized that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were indeed her gurus and that she would come back to India, as she did several years after that first momentous darshan. As Srinivas (2018: 56) writes, ‘[w]onder becomes a key component, engaging the imagination to posit a different landscape’ – a landscape of transformed interiority.

Wonder, especially in anthropological work, is linked to alterity, where the unknown Other opens one to inexplicable emotions and passions and, through that, alternative ways of knowing the self and the world (Scott, 2014). In the case of my interlocutors, the unceremonious and unreserved recognition of their real selves through the Mother’s eyes changed the landscape of their interiority. In a provocative essay, Thomas Csordas (2004: 164) argues that ‘alterity is the phenomenological kernel of religion’. Whereas, for Otto, alterity is in the shape of the ‘wholly other’, in whose presence the mind is filled with ‘blank wonder and astonishment’, for Csordas, alterity is central to the very condition of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Otto, 1923, cited in Csordas, 2004: 166) – that is, Csordas (2004) argues that alterity is not external to the religious subject but ‘intimate’, ‘a primordial aspect of the self that is the existential ground for both its fundamental indeterminacy and the possibility of an intersubjective relationship – its own inherent otherness’ (169). Thus, alterity, for Csordas, refers to its own otherness and, by extension, wonder is not simply directed to the divine Other but ultimately captures the human capacity to realize its own otherness. A fundamental aspect of the ‘alterity of the self’ is ‘self-presence and presence to the Other’ (170). In the context of my interlocutors, the Mother’s darshan provided ‘an ideal Other to correspond to the moment of self-presence’ (170) – that which had so far remained unknown and undiscovered. The sudden rupture of the known, crucial to becoming-other and encapsulated in the experience of wonder, or ‘the position of radical uncertainty’ is not to be taken lightly; such uncertainties are generative of possibilities (Keil, 2017: 206). The immediate but absolute quietening of their mental plane and the opening of the psychic being revealed to Jerry and Shannon an ‘intimate alterity’ (Csordas, 2004) – another mode of being and belonging within a new-found spiritual genealogy of guru devotee.

Csordas’s (2004) essay highlights ‘the significance of alterity for the experience of religion’ (Hauser, 2004: 178; original emphasis) and is relevant to my study insofar as it helps in understanding the becoming-other to oneself – in that a hitherto unknown or undiscovered self is revealed through witnessing the guru. However, Csordas’s argument that the experience of alterity is the core of religion and something to be accepted and approached ‘in and for itself’ seems to bypass the historical and discursive shaping of experiences (Hauser, 2004: 178). In the context of my study, the experience of wonder-ful darshan cannot be dissociated from the long and complex genealogy of ‘spiritual India’.

In Turning Points, an anthology of the narratives of early Aurovillians, an Italian who came to India in 1967 at the age of 15 expresses his initial disbelief at the Mother’s spiritual powers:

Now, one of the fixed ideas I had was that a true guru must be an Indian. That lady, born in Paris, from a Turkish father, an Egyptian mother . . . But I thought, ‘Okay, let us see this old lady, she may be nice, she may be wise’ . . . The door opened, and . . . I have never been so astonished in my life, because I didn’t see a human being there. There was a sari, there were two eyes, a smile, but it was like a window onto the infinite. The first impression was infinity, infinite space. I couldn’t believe it. I had the impression I had lived all my life in a match box. And then, wave after wave after wave of love, like a tsunami of love. (Vijay, 2008: 79)

For the young Italian, the experience of darshan both made the Mother’s identity irrelevant and opened up an alternative vision of himself and the world. Yet Vijay’s earlier presumption that only an Indian could be ‘a true guru’ points to the simultaneous traversing of interiority and exteriority in or through darshan. The spiritual genealogy or landscape of interiority posits and imagines another genealogy – the exterior landscape of ‘spiritual India’ that is at once considered the true home of the (interior) soul. For many of my interlocutors, India was their true spiritual home. In their narratives, the recognition of their self through a new devotional, spiritual genealogy in the space of India was not incidental. Rather, they interpreted their own (interior) spiritual quest and (exterior) travels as signalling their ‘karmic connection’ with India and their gurus (Ganguly, 2018).

Let us recall the Mother’s first darshan of Sri Aurobindo – the wonder-ful experience of encountering the ‘being of light’ whom she used to see in her dreamlike visions. That she, a French national, should encounter him in the then French colony of Puducherry where he was in exile from the British speaks to both the genealogy of interior or interiorized spiritual ties and that of the exterior (asymmetrical) historical–social–political connections that make up ‘spiritual India’. It was through her darshan of Sri Aurobindo that the Mother recognized India, or Puducherry, as her true home, just as, for Jerry, Pierre and Shannon, there was no longer any question of India being their true home after their darshan of the Mother. ¹³ The wonder of darshan, then, is not only in finding one’s true self through the guru’s gaze but also in experiencing the gaze in India, the radical Other to the West.

In this schema of East and West, the shutting down of the mental in the presence of the Mother and her powerful gaze, and the opening of the psychic being, may be seen as more than just the evolution of individual consciousness; rather, it signals seemingly different collective ontological essences. For Pierre and many others, the West embodied rationality – in other words, the mental plane. ‘In France’, Pierre said, ‘if you try to talk about spirituality, people will push you away, saying, “What are you saying?!”’. While Pierre felt that India was now more ‘materialistic’ than the West, he was also convinced that India ‘had to go through this phase’ to return to its true core of spirituality. Thus, while people in India themselves, according to some of my interlocutors, might have become materialistic by running after money and careers, there remained in India, for them, a true spiritual essence. In learning to open their psychic being, they were thus not only learning to evolve on the interior path of individual spiritual consciousness but also moving away to inhabit a different exterior landscape now fused with their very being in its wondrous alterity.

The Romantic, orientalist creation of ‘spiritual India’ has been dwelt on at length by scholars (R King, 1999; U King, 1978; Lucia 2020; Van der Veer, 2014), and it is outside the scope of this article to delve into it in depth. However, the reification and exoticization of India’s ‘essential’ spiritual superiority persists. Amanda Lucia, in her work on predominantly white ‘yogis’ at transnational festivals such as Burning Man, writes:

religious exoticism entails the turn toward alterity primarily as a critique of one’s own positionality – a search for something else, something beyond the familiar. Alterity – that is to say, racialized Others and their cultural forms – becomes a tool instrumentalized to further self-critique and self-transformation. (Lucia, 2020: 37; original emphasis)

Thus, the revelation of ‘intimate alterity’, or becoming other to oneself, cannot be disassociated from the unfoldings of a longer and wider history of the alterity of the religious and ethnic Other in the contemporary. In saying this, I am moving away from a conception of alterity as primordial experience that is prior to the historical and discursive. Instead, I am suggesting that the powerful experience of darshan is animated, in no small measure, by the historical/discursive shaping of ‘spiritual India’. And yet this cannot take away from the wonder-ful experience of darshan that, in anthropological speak, made the strange familiar and the familiar strange for my interlocutors. Does darshan, in the ultimate instance, make the very categories of interior/exterior and strange/familiar irrelevant? To this I do not have an answer by way of a resolution, but point instead to the Mother’s continuing presence.

The continuing presence of the Mother

Long after their passing, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother continue to be present – indeed omnipresent – in the Ashram. Their photographs are everywhere – in the offices, guest houses, shops and devotees’ homes. The images establish ‘an aesthetics of presence’, where they are not representative of the deities, or gurus in this case, but the very embodiment of them (Davis, 1997). One of my interlocutors, a German woman who had been in the Ashram since the early 1980s, said that the ‘concept’ behind having their photographs everywhere was so that devotees could experience their gurus without having ‘to wait for the Darshan Days to be in their presence’.

The Mother herself stated that she was present in and through her photographs. In a conversation with a devotee, the Mother explained:

I am myself there in the photo . . . It is not a picture on a piece of paper, but a living Presence, a vibrant Force and an Entity or an Emanation which is projected and which has a power of action and formidable means of execution . . . there my Presence is living and a portion of myself is manifested in the photo. (Sarkar, 2009: 11–12) ¹⁴

The photographs thus establish Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as all-seeing gurus, and devotees continue to experience the wonder of the Mother’s gaze and overall presence years after her passing.

In one of my conversations with an Australian Ashramite, Jed, the topic of financial sustainability came up. Jed was forthcoming and explained that his mother regularly sent him money from Australia: ‘Mother takes care of me’, he said. At this point, sitting diagonally across from me, he glanced for a few seconds at the wall behind me, his gaze travelling above my head. I had not paid much attention to what was on the wall, and at the time presumed it must be a clock. Perhaps Jed, who was too polite to say so, was in a rush to finish our conversation so that he could get on with his business. So, I quickly wrapped up my questions and, as I made to leave, looked up at the wall to confirm my suspicions. There was no clock; instead, there was a large portrait photograph of the Mother. ‘Mother takes care of me’, then, served the double purpose of signifying his biological mother taking care of him and also the Mother’s constant care. Jed was always under her watchful gaze. The significance of (photographic) darshan as insight, as true vision, thus extends to the transcendence of time, to being able to see the devotee unhindered by temporal, biological and spatial limits, and reinforcing the genealogy of devotional ties between the Mother and Ashramites.

However, belonging to such a religio-spiritual genealogy is not always plain sailing across the divisions of national and ethnic identity. While the experience of the Mother’s darshan made such issues moot, as heard in the Italian man’s account in the section above, the everyday life of the devotees is not immune to such considerations.

One morning, I went to visit a Gujarati woman who had come to the Ashram as a 16-year-old with the rest of her family and stayed on with the Mother’s permission. Portrait photographs of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother hung on the living-room walls in handsome wooden frames, and volumes and volumes of their collected writings filled several bookshelves. Didi (‘Elder Sister’), as I called her, was telling me about her early days in the Ashram when the Mother was still alive and how the afterglow of those days continued to fill her life. But then, her face hardening and without naming anyone, she said that she found it unbelievable the way people those days spoke or wrote about the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Glancing up at their photographs, she said in Hindi: ‘Hum log unki tasveer kahin bhi rakhte hain kya? Par foreigner ye baat nahi samajhte [Do we put their photographs just about anywhere? But foreigners do not understand this]’. Didi implied that ‘foreigners’ could not possibly speak or write about their gurus in the same vein of unconditional devotion as the Indian devotee could. I interjected: ‘Par Mother bhi toh foreigner thi? [But the Mother was also a foreigner?]’. Didi shook her head and said with finality: ‘Hamare liye woh bhagwan hai. Ma sab janti hai [To us, she is God. Mother knows everything]’.

Didi’s assertion that only Indians could truly be spiritual was simply the other side of the coin and found purchase with many of my ‘western’ interlocutors – India’s ‘inherent’ spirituality. But Didi’s unreserved devotion to the French Mother points to the wonder of the Mother’s spiritual power, which seems to cut across all of the borders that, alas, continue to contain mere humans and define their identity. In the cross-cultural matrix of my study, for the Indian Didi and other Indian and western devotees (recall the Italian Vijay’s narrative above), did the Mother become God because she realized her spiritual destiny in India? Or did India emerge/become reinforced as spiritual especially when seen through the Mother’s eyes? These questions remain suspended between the historical/discursive and the experiential without the possibility of a straightforward answer, but precisely for this reason point to the need to complicate darshan.

Conclusion

Darshan is a classical theme in studies on Hinduism. In this article, I have attempted to review the practice in terms of its theological interpretations, phenomenological experiences and politics in the context of a transnational spiritual community. It has been argued that there is no one way to study or understand darshan, and the historical, social and political modes of its production necessarily change the form of darshan.

The experiences of the Mother’s darshan cannot be construed as the simple transposition of the classic Hindu practice. Rather, in this context, esoteric conceptions of the psychic being intersect with the usual understandings of seeing and being seen by the deity/guru. In the case of my interlocutors, the Mother’s darshan was a wonderful experience in its opening of the devotee’s psychic being, witnessing and presenting the alterity of their selves. Such revelation and transformation of the inner landscape, I have argued, parallels the transformation of the outer landscape such that the radical alterity of ‘spiritual India’ becomes, inevitably, the space of such interior transformations. The wonder of darshan, in the context of this study, is precisely in the straddling of these axes of interiority and exteriority, and their intersecting transformations.