Aiming for the good life: A study of two BAPS-led youth programmes in India

Abstract

This article explores two youth programmes, YTK (Yuvati/Yuvak Talim Kendra) and IPDC (Integrated Personality Development Course), created by BAPS (Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha), a global Hindu community. Both programmes rest on BAPS’s vision of the good life while recognising globally circulating ideas of success that associate economic mobility with self-motivated and disciplined workers. In the context of neoliberalising India, BAPS programmes provide a toolkit for attaining devotional objectives and aspirational success where each depends on refashioning the self into an optimised ideal. BAPS’s emphasis on the continuous and affectively intensive work of self-making in order to attain devotional goals draws attention to the translatability of devotional labour to those market arenas that demand affective responsiveness and flexibility. The youth programmes highlight the global discourse of self-improvement, filtered through BAPS conceptions of self in relation to others and point to the continued salience of religion in entrepreneurial times.

In January 2020, while conducting fieldwork in Kachchh, the largest district of Gujarat State in India, I was invited to join a BAPS (Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha) young women’s gathering in the city of Bhuj. In the cool night, with dinner and tidying up chores completed, young women started to arrive in an open air space, only covered by a roof. The women sang devotional songs, with one playing the harmonium. I was then introduced and invited to give a motivational talk. Not sure what to say, I started by sharing how I became an American anthropologist working in India, a career choice not envisioned by my family’s Asian immigrant background. Given the age of the gathered women, mostly between 15 and 25 years old, I segued to the importance of being open to opportunities and not hesitating to ask questions or seek advice of mentors. When I finished, young women moved in closer, and their questions conveyed concerns about being successful in school, gaining university admission, and finding good jobs. What, they asked me, would support the achievement of their goals? A young woman, with intensity in her voice, spoke in English. She said that she has asked questions, followed career advice, and applied for many jobs but had yet to receive offers of employment. ‘I have taken 4 interviews with companies but after the interview, I am not chosen’, she said. ‘Why’, she wanted to know, ‘am I not able to land the job when I get the interviews?’ Demonstrating her tenacity, she had requested feedback on her interview performance: ‘I asked my interviewer if the reason [for not getting the job offer] could be shared’. The answer she received was, ‘you are a strong candidate, but you have to improve your English speaking and writing’. The young woman then repeated her question about finding success: ‘is it because of where I am from, or my imperfect English’?

The question, ‘what can I do to succeed’, is altogether common where success and job salary are measures of self-worth and economic mobility. The reality of who can compete for opportunities is complicated by who is excluded or included on the basis of existing structural obstacles. This includes class and ascribed caste categories; geographic location which mitigates or constricts access to specific kinds of education (e.g. English medium vs vernacular medium, private vs government school, urban vs rural location); family and school resources; and, those embodied mannerisms and behavioural codes that signal membership in the desired group (Babu, 2020; Bardalai, 2021; Desai, 2022; Highet, 2020; McGuire, 2011). The young Kachchhi woman’s earnestness of wanting to know how to acquire necessary qualifications for securing a job is, in other words, not unique to those living in Kachchh.

For analysts of economic and social transformation in India, the economic ‘opening’ of India since 1991 has contributed to a visible middle class alongside an emphasis on education as a means to achieve this status (Gilbertson, 2017; Jeffrey, 2010; Sancho, 2015a, 2015b). In this context, where aspirations may not be attainable due to many reasons, the lives of young people and their responses to the seeming expansion of opportunities have invited analytical scrutiny. Education has become, Mathew and Lukose (2020) observe, the training ground for shaping the kinds of self-driven and ‘enterprising’ subjects who can contribute to the economic liberal state. India’s continued economic growth has clearly not translated to opportunities for many young people whose class, caste, gender, English language facility, as well as geographic location are obstacles to their aspirations (Dubochet, 2023; Highet, 2020; Upadhya, 2013). Furthermore, as the popularity of coaching and certificate courses, personality development programmes, and self-help guru movements underscore, those who become aware of gaps in their education are seeking strategies to overcome the lacunae in their personal and educational backgrounds in order to attain upwards mobility (Gooptu, 2013). As young people expend their limited resources to achieve their aspirations, recent studies reveal their frustrations and disappointments when these remain out of reach (Bardalai, 2021; Desai, 2022; McGuire, 2013). Yet these studies also show that young people are not passively absorbing ideas of the aspiring self: they are aware of the need to take an entrepreneurial strategy to achieve their economic goals. Moreover, as Gooptu’s (2013) edited volume on the myriad manifestations of the ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘enterprising self’ shares, young people’s motivations to take charge of their futures are not isolated from factors of history, family, and social relations. Similarly, Cross (2014) and Upadhya’s (2013) research on neoliberal subject-making removes any ambiguity that youth are passively or unselfconsciously shaped by the dictates of the marketplace. Young people, in their quest to credential themselves and acquire the badges that open opportunities for mobility, are able to articulate their motivations for embracing self-improvement programmes and are keenly aware when their efforts have not produced the desired results (Bardalai, 2021; Cross, 2013; Desai, 2022; Highet, 2020). These entrepreneurial selves, as Srivastava (2022) and Cross (2014) argue, have their personal and relational reasons for aiming to make a new self. Youth in India who are undertaking the work of re-fashioning their selves are not, as Srivastava (2022) argues, mere neoliberal subjects being made but agentive selves finding new relationships in order to have a different future for themselves.

The project of becoming someone and deciding who to become, Freeman (2014) argues, is not separable from the realm of the economic. However, in the process of integrating the self with work opportunities, what emerges are ideas of self, social relations, and affective ways of being that may not mesh well with existing cultural attitudes and institutions. The new ways of conceptualising the self thus demand affective labour of their own to manage. In this article, I turn the focus to BAPS and its institutional responses to supporting young people who are juggling what Desai (2022) refers to as the affective dimensions of aspiration, that is, the hard work of aspiring. BAPS has created youth programmes, ‘YTK’ (Yuvati Talim Kendra and Yuvak Talim Kendra) and ‘IPDC’ (Integrated Personality Development Course), that provide an ethnographic context for exploring a global religious community’s initiatives to support youth who are at a stage in their lives when the possibilities for their futures seems wide. YTK and IPDC are intentionally designed courses to promote knowing the self and acquiring the tools of self-management and self-disciplining in order to achieve one’s aspirations. As we shall see, YTK and IPDC content taps into global discourses on self-improvement and translate these into two different initiatives, each designed to support the work of re-shaping the self in order to attain a desired outcome. This emphasis on self-improvement, when filtered through BAPS, provides a specific conception of a self that exists in relation to others and is malleable and therefore open to improvement and, ideally, good influences. YTK and IPDC’s toolkit for improving the self assumes an optimum type of self that is responsible, determined, and affectively oriented to others. From both programmes, the emphasis on the continuous and affectively intensive work of self-making draws attention to the translatability of devotional labour to those market arenas that demand responsiveness, self-control, and flexibility.

The data for this study come from two types of anthropological fieldwork, participant observation at specific sites and digital ethnography of Internet resources and WhatsApp-mediated conversations. ¹ For participant observation, my primary field site is the girls’ school setting where Yuvati Talim Kendra is based in Gujarat, India, and where every January, between 2016 and 2020, I had the opportunity to interact with YTK teachers and students inside and outside of the classroom. I had informal conversations with teachers and students and I was invited to speak to YTK students on an assigned topic followed by classroom discussion. I conducted no individual interviews of students though I had numerous informal conversations in various YTK settings on campus. My relationship to the senior leaders of YTK rests on my long-standing fieldwork on BAPS, and this afforded my access to the school where I lived on the YTK premises for varying periods during each January visit. The digital ethnography portion, particularly for the IPDC content, occurred during the coronavirus pandemic from Spring 2020 to Summer 2022. ² During this time, I relied on BAPS’s Internet sites for IPDC content. I had conversations and obtained additional IPDC source materials from BAPS interlocutors over the popular WhatsApp messaging service. WhatsApp also facilitated my continuing interaction with YTK teachers, including follow-up on ongoing teacher–student correspondence.

After a brief background on BAPS, I sketch the objectives and curriculum for YTK and IPDC. In the analysis section, I look at the similarity between the BAPS devotional self and neoliberal subjectivities. The techniques for self-disciplining open possibilities for other strategies for living in the world that underscore important social relations and desired affective connections. My focus on BAPS training programmes suggests that religious subjectivity is a significant arena for supporting young selves and their entanglements with the dictates of the marketplace. Looking closely at these youth initiatives provides one entrypoint for considering what BAPS programme developers and teachers feel are absent from pedagogical content for youth. To clarify, this article does not explicitly probe the personal dimensions of religious transformations that youth in YTK and IPDC programmes have experienced but considers how participation in these courses can catalyse certain attitudinal and affective outcomes. ³ By way of conclusion, I suggest that self-training initiatives such as YTK and IPDC convey the pervasiveness and reach of globalisation, here glossed as the market-driven impetus to seek self-improvement, become entrepreneurial, and participate in consumerism. BAPS’s participation in the educational marketplace demonstrates that religious organisations able to provide the infrastructure for the cultivation of entrepreneurial selves are likely to thrive.

BAPS: a global religion

The Hindu devotional community known as ‘BAPS’, or formally, Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, dates to 1907 CE, emerging as a breakaway sect from the older established Swaminarayan community whose historical origin, in western India, dates to the early nineteenth century. The new Swaminarayan community, under its founding guru, Shastriji Maharaj, placed emphasis on constructing temples (mandirs) that would concretely signify and distinguish its devotional teachings from the older Swaminarayan community. From its expansion out of India, initially through migration routes tied to the British Empire, and then to the United States following 1965 changes in US immigration policy, BAPS gurus, in succession, have promoted knowledge of the BAPS Swaminarayan self through BAPS devotionalism (bhakti) that rests on the relationship between devotee-guru-God. In BAPS, two important means for knowing about God and one’s eternal self is through service (seva) as means for reshaping the self and through interaction with ‘right’ company or satsang (Kim, 2016). These foci have translated into youth activities that, over time, have become institutionalised age-grade groups (mandals) with corresponding curriculum and activities disseminated through temples via monks (sadhus), volunteer teachers, and lay leaders.

One century after its founding, BAPS had metamorphosed from a regional devotional community into a global Hindu movement. It is recognisable by its network of temples including the monument-temple complexes known as ‘Akshardham’, built in Gujarat, New Delhi, and Robbinsville, New Jersey, that are major tourist destinations. BAPS’s headquarter in Ahmedabad, Gujarat oversees a transnational network of one million followers, thousands of large and small temples, about a thousand monks, and tens of thousands of volunteer devotees who dedicate time and resources to ensuring that BAPS traditions are sustained. BAPS’s website, multimedia, and social media are particularly deep in English language content. For anyone with Internet access, www.baps.org makes possible the ability to see, read, and hear the voices, images, and events of BAPS worldwide, including, for example, guru’s speeches; a youth mandal celebration in Ohio, USA; a temple ground-breaking dedication event in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates; and high-resolution photographs of the guru and his activities. Devotees and others can also learn about BAPS’s rituals, academic research centres, charitable and humanitarian work, publications, and ayurvedic products. Facilitated by its sophisticated use of the Internet, much of it programmed and run by tech-savvy youth working in Ahmedabad under the direction of sadhus, BAPS’s global dimensions are virtually mappable from a study of its website content (Kunze, 2021).

BAPS’s need to ensure the correct transmission of its teachings has been complicated and facilitated by its global expansion. Swaminarayan Aksharpith, BAPS’s internal publishing house, has increased publications especially in English and Hindi, in addition to Gujarati. Festivals, exhibitions, and activities for devotees are developed with the needs of diaspora members in mind. These material expressions are extensions of BAPS’s activities, calibrated to reach a wide audience; they encourage a positive emotional response and signal the openness of BAPS to attracting interested seekers. For youth in BAPS, the majority of whom live in India, their membership has exposed many of them to its transnational and diasporic dimensions. From weekly temple and mandal gatherings and over the widely used WhatsApp messaging ‘app’, devotees receive news about their guru and BAPS worldwide happenings. Many will also have interacted with the BAPS diaspora through relatives and friends, at large-scale BAPS festivals, and via social media channels. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the economically advantaged diaspora has significant purchase on the content of BAPS programmes and events in India. As we shall see, YTK and IPDC have been created for the Indian youth demographic and reflect, I argue, BAPS’s awareness of self-improvement discourses that contribute to globalisation in India. Here, the understanding of globalisation that informs this study is a discursively constructed one as much it is also a ‘moving target’ of multiple economic dynamics and behaviours. ⁴ Both YTK and IPDC convey BAPS’s vision of the good life while recognising globally circulating ideas of success that equate economic mobility with self-motivated and disciplined workers. In the context of neoliberalising India, these BAPS programmes provide a toolkit for attaining devotional objectives and aspirational success where each depends on refashioning the self into an optimised ideal.

‘YTK’: taking charge of life

BAPS inaugurated Yuvak Talim Kendra (Young Men’s Training Centre) in 2007 and, nearly a decade later, Yuvati Talim Kendra (Young Women’s Training Centre) in 2016. Both referred to as ‘YTK’, these two residential programmes, one for yuvak (young men) and one for yuvati (young women), offer content in the philosophy and core texts of Hindu traditions and BAPS devotionalism (bhakti), Swaminarayan theology (upāsanā), and ritual practices. YTK also teaches a syllabus that covers practical skills for living in the world with others. The young men’s course runs annually for 6 months between June and December in Sarangpur, Gujarat, and the young women’s 4-month course has two sessions every year between January–April and June–September in Gandhinagar, Gujarat.

There are some differences in the young men’s and young women’s YTK. The men’s course is taught by BAPS monks and is located at Sarangpur, the main BAPS training site for its monks. ⁵ I focus on the Yuvati Talim Kendra or YTK for young women as this was my primary fieldwork site. The women’s programme is based at a BAPS Swaminarayan all-girls school that was purpose-built near Gandhinagar, the capital city of Gujarat. On this campus (inaugurated in March 2016), around 100 yuvati are selected to join a YTK ‘batch’. ⁶ Coming mostly from Gujarat, the women have completed at least 2 years of college (equivalent to junior college). Like the yuvak in Sarangpur, yuvati are not all BAPS devotees; and, most are unmarried and therefore not yet managing their own households. For some, participating in YTK may be their first experience of living away from their parents and with unknown women. For others, YTK provides dedicated time to learn about BAPS bhakti and this, for some, delays pressures for finding a suitable ‘boy’ or job. What many of the yuvati may not have anticipated is the immersive experience of spending 4 months with roommates. Young women perform daily chores, go to classes, and participate in activities with their rooming group. (This is the same for the young men’s YTK course.) In addition to the devotional curriculum, yuvati take classes that blend devotional and moral teaching with lessons about self-care, management of interpersonal conflicts and relationships, and the public presentation of the self. Both the young women’s and men’s YTK do not overtly aim to either overturn or reify normative gender attitudes. The emphasis is on providing content that underscores the importance of strong communication, sharing of responsibilities, and sensitivity to the social dynamics in a family, in a job setting, and in one’s society. For example, assuming marriage is a personal goal, YTK women learn how to adjust to living with a mother-in-law and a new family; YTK men learn the importance of facilitating their bride’s comfortable reception into the marital home. Both women and men are enjoined to think sensitively and critically about good and bad family dynamics rather than assume their situations are unique or beyond remedy.

On the surface, the YTK programmes for men and women seem not so different from extra-curricular coaching classes or skills-focussed courses intended to support young people’s entry into the job market (Desai, 2022; McGuire, 2011, 2013). Looking more closely at the young women’s programme, the BAPS devotional content is significant. There is a dominant emphasis on theology and ritual knowledge and their practical application to issues of living in the world. While many yuvati have entered YTK without sustained exposure to BAPS devotional texts and theology, 4 months later, they are comfortable with daily rituals and the particular vocabulary and concepts of BAPS bhakti. YTK is thus unambiguously geared towards the cultivation of stronger commitment to BAPS bhakti and the tuning of its pedagogy to youth concerns that YTK teachers feel are important to address.

The YTK women’s core faculty are based at the girls’ school along with a changing roster of guest speakers invited from a range of professional fields and academic disciplines. Students receive exposure to teachers and speakers who have been chosen for their achievements in academia, corporate and legal, medical, government, and non-governmental organisations. Since the core faculty live at the girls’ school, and some of the guest teachers are present for multiple weeks on campus, yuvati are able to spend time with teachers in a number of settings outside the classroom. There are some fieldtrips particularly if the guru is in residence nearby but mostly yuvati spend the majority of their time on the YTK campus occupied from early morning to late night with studies, homework, and activities that foster relationship building, self-reflection, and developing comfort with sharing their thoughts with others.

One sample syllabus of YTK topics includes: communication and interview skills, managing one’s self image, time management, reading techniques, leadership skills, women’s health, and balancing family, friendship, and social media. As one interlocutor shared with me, the lectures are framed at the outset as content that facilitates a ‘smoother life’. Implied in this effort are what several teachers described as young people not having sufficient training in how to look out for others, or show patience, or demonstrate skills of communicating effectively. In different ways, through the classroom, group discussions, and reflective writing exercises, yuvati develop appreciation for the many reasons that may underlie their and other’s behaviour. One early morning, for example, a young woman came to the YTK director’s office and tearfully narrated a roommate disagreement. This was shortly resolved when the woman agreed to initiate conversation with her roommate rather than expect others in a position of authority to resolve the matter. YTK teachers have also shared a range of incidents where YTK students from upper-caste backgrounds have expressed frustration with the mixed composition of their study group. For example, yuvati from economically less-privileged backgrounds have experienced condescension due to their weaker English skills and lack of awareness of middle-class social conventions. By the end of YTK, teachers and students point out that yuvati have acquired affective sensitivity to interacting more thoughtfully with others. The teachers see this transformation as confirmation that the young women have absorbed BAPS teachings on the self in relation to their guru and God. They have learned to examine their reasons for behaving in particular ways with the intention of re-shaping their selves according to a different ideal, the one exhibited by the BAPS guru.

For all BAPS devotees, knowing the self is a central devotional objective connected to BAPS ontological categories. In YTK, women learn that the self, ātmā, is the eternal entity that is not the same as the corporeal self. ⁷ To know the self is the basis for becoming an ideal devotee, a process that is dependent on serving the guru and God. YTK guides students to connecting this core BAPS teaching to the pressures and contingencies of everyday life. How, for example, can the very elderly guru provide unwavering service to BAPS devotees and to God? What can yuvati learn by observing their guru; what can they learn from the teachers who daily demonstrate that finding contentment is less about acquiring status and wealth and more about forming a relationship with guru, being with right company, and serving others. The project of trying to access and appreciate this devotional goal of knowing the eternal self is repeatedly reinforced in YTK activities and most clearly through materials that bring attention to the BAPS guru and his service to devotees and the building of the BAPS community. Yuvati read about, listen to lectures, and watch multimedia content that show the daily work of the guru and his disregard of bodily needs despite his advanced age.

BAPS’s devotional teachings do not valorise the acquisition of material wealth or educational attainment as the measurement of devotional readiness to serve guru and God. Nevertheless, the YTK curriculum recognises that young people are experiencing pressures to gain material success. The men’s and women’s YTK curriculum includes exposure to best practices from the business world and management, including older but still-circulating best sellers such as Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989). In classes and over meals, discussion sessions, and in-between times, YTK faculty share life lessons from their career and personal life trajectories. These have included, for example, accounts of overcoming challenges through strengthened connections to the BAPS guru and god; learning how BAPS ideas of the eternal self provide ammunition to combat intrusive desires that interfere with attaining one’s goals; navigating domestic circumstances with compassion for family members who are not part of BAPS or who do not agree with marriage, career, or other aspirations.

Given the importance of voluntary service (seva), as exemplified by BAPS’s gurus, the ‘life skills’ curriculum focusses on service to others but not at the expense of ignoring one’s needs. YTK content emphasises the goal of living as a devotee who knows that her bodily self is but a temporary vessel that produces emotions and thoughts that can be counterproductive to knowing the ātmā, eternal self. In effect, YTK is a school for training the self, both the bodily and the BAPS devotional understanding of the eternal self, in order to live more contentedly in the world. YTK is what Cheryl Mattingly (2013: 309) calls the ‘moral laboratory’, that is,

a metaphorical realm in which experiments are done in all kinds of places and in which the participants are not objects of study so much as researchers or experiments of their own lives – subjects and objects. It is a scene of action in which the ‘new’ is inaugurated, where new experiences are created.

As a moral laboratory for learning about the self, YTK is a space that women enter and emerge not only changed in terms of personal characteristics, but in how they view their selves in relation to others.

Throughout the YTK curriculum, young women are encouraged to share their feelings openly and gain comfort in speaking publicly. From conversations with teachers, many pointed out that one of the noticeable transformations in many students is their personal growth not only as devotees but in their ability to verbally share their reflections. For many YTK women, publicly talking about one’s inner states, including devotional trajectories and emotional responses to life circumstances, is neither culturally familiar nor personally comfortable. At the conclusion of their YTK programme, yuvati submit essays on their self-assessment of ‘before’ and ‘after’ YTK. ⁸ These documents show that they have gained clarity about the Swaminarayan understanding of self; they have also learned how to speak and live with others. Some students noted their pressing need to seek employment, or repair relationships at home, but they expressed more confidence in their ability, after YTK, to handle anxieties and stress. Students also recognised changes in their ways about thinking about themselves in relation to family and society, including a shift from a more narrow range of desires and personal concerns to a wider angle appreciation of serving their community. Overall, the essays confirm yuvatis’ deepened understanding of BAPS devotional teachings and how this has enhanced their capacity to live with others. Many responses noted that ‘after YTK’, yuvatis felt much less hopelessness, anger, and depression at their circumstances. Some shared that ‘before YTK’, they considered their lives not worth living. ‘After YTK’, the same women write that they have acquired strength (baḷa) and stability (sthiratā) on which they will draw, especially in difficult times.

‘IPDC’: template for productive living

According to my BAPS interlocutors who are familiar with Yuvak Talim Kendra, it is this programme that attracted the attention of P P Savani University, a relatively new private university in south Gujarat. The university requested that BAPS monks who created the Sarangpur YTK programme develop a course for its students. The result is ‘IPDC’, or Integrated Personality Development Course, inaugurated on 3 July 2019. From conversations with BAPS devotees who are familiar with the development of IPDC, there was no expectation that BAPS’s collaboration with P P Savani University (PPSU) would necessarily go beyond one iteration. Much to the surprise of one interlocutor, the course was considered extremely successful by the first cohort of IPDC students and faculty who had voluntarily enrolled. In June 2020, another university, Gujarat Technological University (GTU), adopted IPDC for its students. Since then, many other institutions in Gujarat include IPDC as an online course offering.

The syllabi and language of the IPDC course materials are in English reflecting its content creators’ access to the global language of self-making and self-help resources. It is unlikely that all students at PPSU and GTU are comfortable with content given exclusively in English and the video materials, including BAPS-produced testimonials on YouTube, are in Gujarati. In an early BAPS video for IPDC, PPSU students speak with intensity about their transformative experience in the course (IPDC, 2020). All point to higher self confidence based on changes they made in bodily habits: they acquired productive study postures; discarded bad personal habits such as smoking; and, developed an increased tolerance and empathy for others.

The IPDC course materials for PPSU and GTU show the degree to which the BAPS creators have utilised numerous best practices in university syllabus design (Gujarat Technological University, 2020a, 2020b). Students are informed of the course rationale and outcomes; they are provided with a detailed breakdown of each lecture. There are ‘progressive assessments’ and students know how the course grades are assigned. GTU provides a webpage where students can find a course outline, FAQs (frequently asked questions), and a YouTube video link to watch a sample IPDC lecture (Gujarat Technological University, 2020a). PPSU has numerous YouTube videos in addition to the inauguration video that summarise the sections for each of the four IPDC semesters (P P Savani University, 2019; IPDC, 2020).

Looking at the IPDC syllabi for GTU, the ‘Rationale’ section states, ‘This course aims to help a person understand and know his or her purpose in life, get a positive thought pattern, gain confidence, improve behaviour, learn better communication and develop a healthy physique with morality and ethics in its core’ (BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, n.d.). The lecture titles for both the PPSU and GTU courses have a self-help orientation (facing failures, remaking yourself, handling social media – ‘the devil’, stress management); practical skills (teamwork, relationships, financial planning, the power of habit); and helpful entrepreneurial content (project management, event management, and entrepreneurship development). There are also lectures that affirm the importance of ‘faith’, the ‘logic of God’, of being an ‘ideal citizen’ who contributes ‘selfless service’, and ‘soft skills’ of self-awareness, emotional control, and a positive attitude. The IPDC acronym points to the curriculum’s emphasis on the ‘intelligence quotient, spiritual quotient, emotional quotient and physical quotient of youth’ (P P Savani University, 2019). ⁹ Much like the YTK programmes, the IPDC courses provide an organised study framework for self-improvement though this content does not overtly impose BAPS devotional concepts; rather students are introduced to language about the importance of an ‘integrated personality’ and how to achieve the integration of behaving, feelings, thinking (which includes sleeping sufficiently) that go towards a ‘harmonious’ and contented life (P P Savani University, 2019). Students know that IPDC content is directed towards making them ‘marketable’ and productive citizens of India. IPDC content is thus more explicitly aligned with the characteristics of neoliberal subjectivities than YTK content though both programmes recognise that youth feel the strain of aspiring to be something. Like YTK, IPDC content contextualises success as a holistic project where the self and its various capacities (intelligence, emotional, spiritual, and physical) require input from all angles, including the home, family, religious community, and teachers. As for role models and mentors, students in IPDC, early in their curriculum have a lecture, ‘learning from legends’, where they hear personal accounts from the sport, business, medical, and entrepreneurial world. In both YTK and IPDC, youth learn the importance of forming relationships with mentors and guides whose behaviour models what a nation, community, and family need: principled and confident selves.

This brief overview of IPDC materials permits a comparative assessment with what McGuire (2013) calls PDE or Personality Development and Enhancement programmes that initially emerged to support technology workers with subpar performance. PDE’s have expanded beyond the ‘tech’ industry, and their proliferation in India includes a focus on teaching young people the embodied behaviours and affective responses that signal their suitability for particular kinds of work and social spaces. McGuire describes the emphasis on gestures, postures, and verbal and non-verbal behaviours as ‘kinesthetic pedagogies’, the presence or absence of which are read as markers of belonging and hire-ability (McGuire, 2011, 2013). Similarly IPDC’s objective is to help students feel and embody the characteristics of the entrepreneurial self. The demographic who benefit from IPDC, based on video testimonials, are young people whose background may not have provided the ‘soft skills’ that would signal a readiness to be employed. IPDC content, again from the video narratives shared by its former students, suggests that exposure to the importance of bodily habits and a determination to adopt the postures of success produces positive results. IPDC’s purpose is to ready young people to be productive citizens and this is the language in the course materials. Yet, IPDC’s materials also reinforce the importance of knowing the end objective, of disciplining the self, and attaining mental stability in order to gain success. These personality characteristics are honed in the context of interacting with and serving others, a theme that is also present in YTK. YTK and IPDC are designed to offer a toolkit for self-shaping towards a desired goal, one that unfurls not in isolation but with a recognition that productive lives are those in co-existence with others. This framing for YTK and IPDC puts the onus for self-transformation on the agentive self who must be affectively attuned to living in sociality with others.

IPDC seems to fill a real need for students who have made it to the university but whose aspirational horizons are constrained by ascribed statuses such as caste and limited access to English medium primary or secondary school education. The intertwining of self-shaping and achieving success is transparent: knowing the self and its relationship to others in society can be translated to working with others towards a goal (project management); to experiencing failures as a basis for growth; to communicating clearly and comporting oneself appropriately in professional as well as family and other social settings. In its placement as a required course in Gujarat universities, IPDC appears to condone the expectations of the Indian government, companies, and neoliberal economies for youth who are productive, self-motivated, and self-regulating (Cross, 2014; Desai, 2022; Gooptu, 2013; Srivastava, 2022). This view, however, too easily elides the needs of less-resourced university students with the troubling assumption that youth are passive subjects rather than active agents of their economic futures. For youth of privilege, joining the economy and becoming financially secure is not seen as acquiescence to the marketplace. IPDC’s success in being adopted in local universities suggests that BAPS discerns the potential of young people to contribute to their families, society, and nation, were they to have exposure to the vocabulary, modes of comportment, and experience-based examples of success and successful individuals.

Change agents: youth, religion, and globalisation

YTK and IPDC programmes are aimed at different audiences, but both share the objective to guide young people towards a more satisfying life via the harnessing of emotions, behaviours, and actions toward a desired self-transformation. For YTK students, the project of self-shaping as well as the interpretation of success is connected to BAPS theological principles that require distinguishing between the devotional versus bodily self and directing energy to achieve this knowledge. For IPDC students, self-shaping involves gaining knowledge to position oneself effectively in the job market, a process that requires an openness to pursuing self-improvement. Both programmes rest on the assumption that the self can be optimised and the results can enhance one’s devotional and economic productivity.

The role of BAPS in creating YTK and IPDC draws attention to a religious community and its leaders’ support of young people who are finding their way in the globalising culture of neoliberalism. In shorthand, India’s economic growth is fueled by what Gooptu et al. (2013) describe as a culture of entrepreneurialism or the expression of energies by those who are aspiring, wanting, and being motivated to act. Those who want to participate in the marketplace and achieve class mobility have to become enterprising selves and take on the affective characteristics that will support their aspirations. To be enterprising, in other words, is a self-transforming undertaking where the results may be the seepage of market-oriented behaviours into other areas of life including kinship, domestic, and gendered spheres (Freeman, 2014; Muehlebach, 2012). Women, for example, who attended personality development and enhancement programmes to acquire middle-class embodied behaviours may find these are nevertheless critiqued by upper-class individuals (McGuire, 2011); and those who have sought English classes and other coaching courses find that these mark them as aspirants who are less fit than others for desirable jobs (Highet, 2020). YTK and IPDC operate in the horizontal layer of students who may not have had exposure to strategies for becoming enterprising and taking control of their selves. These programmes can be seen as a product of a neoliberal environment as much as the students they serve.

The question to probe at this juncture is what accounts for the coincidence between the emphasis of BAPS’s youth programmes on self-transformation and neoliberal pressures to pursue the same? Regardless of an individual’s desire to achieve knowledge of the devotional self, the reality for potential devotees is that they must work in order to materially sustain themselves. The synergy of BAPS’s youth programmes with characteristics of productive neoliberal subjectivity make it temping to assume that BAPS’s initiatives are politically motivated ones to support a neoliberal governmental position, that is, one that removes responsibility from the state to the bodies of the citizens and workers themselves (Muehlebach, 2012). Are the youth in YTK and IPDC unsuspecting subjects of a neoliberal political project? Srivastava has pointedly observed that the easier assumption of equating culturally specific subject-making to neoliberal agendas ignores the different histories and motivations that prompt individuals to embrace self-transforming projects. Young people can participate in what Srivastava calls ‘“pre-neoliberal” networks’ including the cultivation of subjectivities appropriate for those network and they can do this while also inserting themselves into ‘market processes’ and becoming ‘entrepreneurial selves’ (2022: 488).

Srivastava terms the ability of individuals to juggle the requirements for participating in these two arenas of self-making, ‘relational flexibility’ (2022: 488). This juggling of different subjectivities is not without tensions and contradictions as those performing relational flexibility are navigating cultural and historical parameters that may not overlap. For example, Freeman (2014) observes the tensions in the lives of entrepreneurial women in Barbados as they seek expressions of emotional closeness in their romantic partnerships much as the ones they have cultivated with their clients. For Freeman’s interlocutors, there are cultural barriers and historical factors that intervene in the women’s translating their successful affective modes of doing business to their kin, church, romantic, and friendship circles. In her fieldwork among women participating in NGO-sponsored workshops to re-tool their subjectivities, Desai (2022) highlights an oft-overlooked aspect of aspiration: youth in India living in precarity find that training courses and their teachers are helpless to mitigate barriers to economic success. For Desai’s interlocutors, self-improvement courses end up fostering affective states of aspiration that are perpetually in abeyance as they are not attainable. Some discover that having dreams of mobility can result in debilitating disappointment when these become unachievable. YTK and IPDC are courses that can provoke a heightened sense of what is possible. What tempers the affective work of aspiration in BAPS programmes is the emphasis on developing care and compassion beyond oneself. Success is not only economic: it can be quantified in terms of what someone gains from extending care to others. This brings the analysis of BAPS youth programmes to the question of BAPS’s relationship to globalisation, that engine of neoliberalism.

BAPS is a Hindu devotional tradition participating in and producing globalisation. Its youth programmes support the making of global subjects by providing students the opportunity to imagine themselves as members of a cohort much larger than their selves and families. These youth may not travel much beyond their local area and their economic mobility may be curtailed due to structural challenges and limited resources; nevertheless in the exposure to BAPS techniques for re-shaping the self, YTK and IPDC students gain information about lifestyles and behavioural habits of the successful. These students are ‘global subjects’ with the agency to create new subjectivities (Bayart, 2007). YTK and IPDC offer a nuanced awareness of the challenges that Gujarati youth face when aspiring to economic and class mobility. In this scenario, BAPS, or any religion sensitive to consumerism, becomes the catalyst for youth to acquire desired ‘global skills’ that they may not otherwise acquire from either home, schooling, or their local environment. ¹⁰ By providing the service of teaching global skills, BAPS fits the contours of a religion that, in its attunement to a consumer base, appears to be merging with neoliberalism. Religions, following Gauthier (2020), that have figured out branding, marketing, and the production of emotionally satisfying experiences, are contributing to the engine of neoliberalism. Likely leaders and devotees of BAPS will not see their devotional community as a product or engine of neoliberalism. Nevertheless, BAPS is a contributor to globalisation, as an instrument of globalisation. It occupies a notable role, of having created a Hindu devotional tradition that seeks to remedy the gaps and contradictions in daily living provoked by neoliberalism’s reliance on specific kinds of subjectivities. Through its youth programmes, BAPS does not seek to disrupt prevailing understandings of gender, class, or success: rather, YTK and IPDC offer a skill set for youth to balance their aspirations with the work of self-transformation that would support living in the world, successfully or otherwise.

Returning to the narrative of the young woman in Kachchh: for youth coming into contact with BAPS, there is the exposure, sometimes brief and at other times more sustained, to new ways of thinking and talking about their aspirations and frustrations and to understanding their lives as lived in relation to others. Subjectivities that emerge from being in BAPS are anchored to specific textual, ritual, and ethical teachings as they were in the pre-liberal past. But for all, devotee or not, BAPS today has not just waded but plunged into providing services that its consumer-devotees need. This means addressing the incommensurable between aspiration and reality that characterises many young people’s lives in India. BAPS youth programmes aim to support the production of new subjectivities, individual, devotional, and economic, for those who may not have the resources or requisite background for acquiring this knowledge. Indeed, an ideal outcome of the BAPS youth programmes are youth who embody an entrepreneurial self, taking control of what is possible and knowing what resources they can draw upon from within devotional teachings and self-help discourses to manage the challenges of being young in India. These youth, much like the women entrepreneurs in Freeman’s (2014) exploration of middle-class making in Barbados, are not reducible to neoliberalism; rather, from the twinning of self-shaping with the contingencies of the labour market, youth can form new entrepreneurial subjectivities of care, kinship, and self. This take charge and take care stance is one that Bayart (2007) sees as an artefact of globalisation, where the change in scale of connections and compressions supports new attitudes and ways of being as much as it curtail possibilities.

The transnational shape of BAPS is itself an outcome of globalisation, and its youth programmes, despite their current configuration to specifically address the demographic of youth in India, are infused with a sense of scale that is more than local or national. Bayart notes that considering the many definitions for ‘globalisation’, it is ‘first and foremost a change of scale in time and space’ (2007: 12). The young woman from Kachchh speculates what is lacking in her inability to get a job in her area of interest. Her intuition that she is lacking embodied knowledge including English makes this woman a global subject. She already senses that forces beyond her control have affected her aspirations – she is a global subject, aware of a subjectivity tied to something beyond her world and one that she does not yet possess. Nevertheless, she is determined to acquire and be this someone else. YTK and IPDC are accomplishing what Hillary Kaell (2020) describes as bridging the ‘immensity and particularity of being human’. BAPS’s youth programmes are initiatives that connect Gujarati young people to something beyond – the ‘change in scale’ – and that underscore the possibility of aiming for something immense over that which is too particular. The goals of knowing the self as not attached to the body (YTK) and the prospect of living a materially comfortable life through self-discipline and focus (IPDC) are made more conceptually and practically accessible via BAPS’s pedagogical efforts. Moreover, being attuned to the relationship of self to others in projects of self-transformation is a portable strategy for living anywhere in the world. For young people unable to move anywhere, the global self in search of the good life can be cultivated even when staying in one place.