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

I Introduction

‘Where is Sri Aurobindo Ashram ¹ [hermitage]?’—a first-time visitor or devotee may well ask of someone on the streets of Pondicherry ² , India. As a response to that question, they will most likely be directed to the unpretentious Ashram main building. In their essay, Ann Gleig and Charles Flores write:

First-time visitors to the Sri Aurobindo [A]shram in Pondicherry might well have a difficult time locating it. While they would reasonably assume that the ashram of one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century India would be easily found, it is quite possible, particularly if they are visiting in the hot season when temperatures reach 40 degrees Celsius and the numbers of visitors drop, that they could walk straight past the side or back of the unassuming ashram building. (Gleig and Flores 2014: 38)

While Gleig and Flores (2014) are right in noting the unassuming character of the main building, one of the reasons why it does not stand out is because it is one of the many Ashram buildings spread throughout and primarily, the ‘French Quarter’ of the city. Distinguishable by their sombre grey colour, the Ashram’s many guest houses, the Ashram school, the common dining hall, the printing press, the handmade paper factory, bakery, clinic, grocery stores, library, and boutiques form a diffuse but ostensible spatial presence in the city. These are important not only for the economic life of the Ashram but also because formal members of the Ashram, called Ashramites, and devotee-visitors who stay for an extended period are expected to work voluntarily, that is, do karma yoga in one or more of these Ashram units called ‘departments’. To that extent, these are an integral part of the Ashram. The answer to the question ‘Where is Sri Aurobindo Ashram?’ is then not all that simple in terms of its geographical location. Yet, it is perfectly understandable why one is directed to the unpretentious Ashram main building, the seat of the deux loci, when asking for directions to the Ashram. This is the spatial kernel of the Ashram, for, here lies the Samadhi or the tomb of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother ³ , the founders, and gurus of the Ashram. The Ashram’s spatial diffuseness is cohered and affectively centred on the spiritual heart of the Ashram, the Samadhi.

Samadhi refers to ‘meditative absorption or contemplation’ in Hindu and Buddhist traditions (Sarbacker 2005). My interlocutors would refer to the event of Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s passing as their having attained samadhi while the usual terms ‘died’ and ‘passed away’ were retained for ordinary lay people. Mark McLaughlin (2014) notes that commentators such as Vacaspati Misra interpreted yoga as samadhi:

In this context, samādhi, the state of ultimate absorption in the absolute, is attained by ‘putting’ or ‘placing together’ (sam-ā-√dhā) the senses and breaths, which still the mind to the point of ceasing all mental flux. It is thus possible to gloss yogayukta ⁴ as “yoked to samādhi”. (McLaughlin 2014: 136)

When a spiritually advanced or realised person such as a yogi leaves their body, that too is referred to as samadhi. McLaughlin further states, ‘By the thirteenth century the practice of the realized sage leaving the body and the place of internment of the body are both referred to by the term samādhi’ (ibid.: 144). It is in this sense of samadhi as the material sacred space of internment of Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s bodies, and consequently, the spatial heart of the Ashram, that I write of the Samadhi ⁵ in this article.

Sacred built spaces or geographies of ashrams, temples and Sufi shrines lead to the creation of affective communities of devotees and seekers. Devotees of Sathya Sai Baba at Puttuparthi, for instance, are overcome with feelings of intense happiness, peace, and rejuvenation as soon as the gate comes into view, the first in an anticipation-building series that opens into the final chamber of the sanctum sanctorum (Srinivas 2009: 310). The sacred space of the Sai Ashram is meant to enclose devotees in the world of Sai devotion and love. Specifically, when gurus and pirs have left their mortal bodies, their tombs are considered to be charged with contagious sacred energy that embraces one and all. Thus, Swami Muktananda of the Siddha Yoga Movement wrote, ‘The tapasyā of these great beings after realization of Brahman is not for their personal use, because they have nothing left to attain. It is for the benefit of others. This power remains in their samādhi shrines’ (cited in McLaughlin 2014:165).

Similar narratives of a charged sacred space also mark Sufi shrines or dargahs. Following from what Anna Bigelow (2009) writes in the context of Haider Shaikh’s tomb in Malerkotla, such shrines are powerful spaces that memorialise the saint or guru, and in doing so, continuously weave a religious allegory that situates the gurus, devotees, seekers within a common world which is also at once un-common to those left out or expelled from within its folds. Memorialisation of the gurus at Sri Aurobindo Ashram continuously forges intimate ties between the guru and devotees, and among devotees ⁶ , creating a religious genealogy or what Danièle Hervieu-Léger (2000) calls, ‘a chain of memory’. In this article, I argue that since the gurus’ death, the Samadhi serves to not only keep the gurus alive for their devotees but also makes the devotees present to one another, enabling the continuous consolidation of an otherwise loosely knit community of ‘the Mother’s children’. I specifically mobilise the notion of intimacy here, drawing from the work of Elizabeth Povinelli (2002), to suggest that along with the linear chain of religious memory, devotional intimacy in the Ashram also signals lateral, non-hierarchical, and affective modalities.

The first two sections in the following account afford a phenomenological approach toward memory and intimacy. The next section situates memory, memorialisation and intimacy within the political arena. Here, I place my interlocutors’ narratives and experiences of feeling at home in the Ashram and at the Samadhi within a broader history of turning Eastward on one’s spiritual quest such that individual biographies are understood as being informed by the contingent pushes-and-pulls of history. I further argue that the spatial privileging of the Samadhi and the articulations of devotional intimacy at the sacred site are related to the wider locational characteristics and manifestations of the Ashram alongside the politics of making and being at home and in exile. I hope that the article will contribute to a review of notions of spiritual longing beyond the familiar post-colonial frames of critiques of Orientalism and neo-Orientalism. Such critiques are, of course, necessary and well-founded, but do not always capture the complex modalities of intimacy and the intense feelings of finding and being at home in the ‘exotic’ elsewhere. Without eschewing a critical approach to the making of ‘spiritual India’ that is at the centre of my interlocutors’ spiritual quest, I have also tried to take seriously their own narratives and experiences of their heart’s longing.

II The Ashram

The Ashram is founded on the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and his ‘spiritual collaborator’, the French woman Mirra Alfassa, addressed as the ‘Mother’ by devotees. Sri Aurobindo was born Aurobindo Ackroyd Ghose in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on 15 August 1872. His father, an Anglophone doctor, sent Aurobindo at the age of seven to England to be educated there. Sri Aurobindo returned to India in 1893 at the age of 21. He worked in various administrative positions in the kingdom of Baroda. While in Baroda, between 1893–1906, he tried to improve his Bengali, voraciously read Sanskrit epics and became interested in the Vedas, practised yoga, and spent as much time in Bengal as his work permitted to participate in revolutionary political groups concerned with India’s liberation. Subsequently, in 1906 he moved to Calcutta where he became the editor of the English-language anti-colonial newspaper Bande Mataram.

Given Sri Aurobindo’s political activities connected with the newspaper, Bande Mataram, the British government charged him with sedition, and he was sentenced to a prison term in May 1908 where he would spend a year in captivity. Sri Aurobindo was sent to Alipore Jail in Calcutta where he said, he had many spiritual experiences in his solitary cell that confirmed to him the significance of his yogic sadhana (spiritual practice). Released about a year later, Sri Aurobindo was under the strict scrutiny of the police, which continued when in 1910, Sri Aurobindo and some fellow nationalists decided to move to Pondicherry, a coastal town in Southern India under French rule. Sri Aurobindo had also become more and more involved in his sadhana and intended to spend his exile in Pondicherry in solitude to concentrate on yoga. What had begun as a plan to spend only a few months or a year in Pondicherry eventually turned into a lifelong project of doing yoga and led to the subsequent establishment of Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

It was in Pondicherry that he met Blanche Rachel Mirra Alfassa, born on 21 February 1878 in Paris. As a young woman, she joined the occult group, Mouvement Cosmique, which also strengthened her interest in the Jewish kabbalah and ‘Eastern spirituality’. She claimed to have had several paranormal experiences from a very young age, including having visions of extraordinary, human or celestial, beings (Pillai 2005). In 1911, she married a French lawyer and journalist Paul Richard with whom she travelled to Pondicherry in 1914. She was profoundly moved by her meeting with Sri Aurobindo and later described that at her very first sight of the latter, she understood that he was the same ‘being of light’ that she had seen in her visions since a young age (Nahar 1997 cited in Pillai 2005: 277). Apparently, she felt silence engulf her as not a single thought entered her mind; a narrative very similar to some of my interlocutors’ narratives of meeting the Mother for the first time when, they said, all thoughts simply disappeared from their minds as her eyes held theirs. To the Mother, there was no doubt that Sri Aurobindo was her guru. Later, she wrote, ‘As soon as I saw Sri Aurobindo I recognized in him the well-known being whom I used to call Krishna […] And this is enough to explain why I am fully convinced that my place and my work are near him, in India’ (The Mother 2004 [1980]: 39).

As Sri Aurobindo’s devotee base grew, the Mother took on the responsibility of establishing the Ashram in 1926, managing its affairs, and continued to do so after Sri Aurobindo’s death in 1950 and until her passing in 1973. Today the Ashram has about 1,500 Ashramites of various nationalities including Indian, French, German, British, and United States’ citizens among others.

This article is based on fieldwork done between 2013 and 2015 among primarily North American and Western European Ashramites and devotees of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in Pondicherry. Most of my interlocutors had travelled to India for the first time between the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s or the beginning of the 1980s in search of ‘their’ guru, riding on the high tide of the counter-cultural experimentation with ‘Eastern spiritualities’. Many of them have been living in the Ashram since the time of their first arrival. The American Ashramite, Jerry, for instance, arrived in Pondicherry in 1971 in his early 20s, and following his darshan (sacred beholding) of the Mother became convinced that he had finally found what and who he was looking for. When I first met Jerry in 2013, he had lived in the Ashram for 42 years, and in this time, he had never once travelled back to the United States. The two German women I mention in this article, Eva and Yvonne (not known to each other before arriving at the Ashram) both roughly in their late 50s, have been Ashramites for 30 years. Neither of them had met the Mother in person, yet they, like many of my other interlocutors, felt an undeniable ‘connection’ to her, Sri Aurobindo, the Ashram and India in general. Eva, Jerry, and Yvonne, had all left their homes, that is, the place of their birth and life, and travelled to India in search of a spiritual home.

Apart from the Ashramites, there are the non-Ashramite devotees who are affiliated with the Ashram in various capacities, volunteering in one or more of the Ashram departments, partaking of meals in the common dining hall, and as such participating in and contributing to the broader, amorphous community of devotees. The American man in his mid-40s, Frank, featured in this article, is one of many such people. When I met him, Frank had been living in Auroville, a cosmopolitan township founded by the Mother in 1968 and located around 12 km away from the main Ashram, for more than a decade. He was also affiliated with a private research centre in Pondicherry, founded by an ardent Indian devotee of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and would commute to and from Pondicherry every day, working at the centre and visiting the Samadhi. Over the course of my fieldwork, I also became familiar with Western regular devotee-visitors, who visited the Ashram every year, some twice a year or more. I do not distinguish between the different categories of people based on the length of their stay in the Ashram or Pondicherry, or the nature of their affiliation with the Ashram that is, whether they are Ashramites or non-Ashramite devotees. Instead, insofar as they all claim a sense of belonging to the religious genealogy traced back to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, they remain for me (as for themselves), ‘the Mother’s children’.

III Linear memory and lateral intimacy

Long after their death, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s presence continues to be felt by their devotees who often refer to themselves as the ‘Mother’s children’ ⁷ and ‘instruments’ of the Mother’s divine will. Such narratives produce and reproduce a community of people in an Ashram where its spatial diffusion and lack of insistence on ostensible rituals, for the most part, means that many long-time Ashramites who volunteer in one or more of the Ashram departments can go several days, even months, without meeting or having a sustained conversation with those working in other departments. Often my interlocutors would remark in a tone of astonishment that I knew more people in the ashram than them after having lived in the ashram or being associated with it for decades. Such statements were, of course, an exaggeration and reflected indulgent amusement on the part of my interlocutors. Yet, it is also instructive in that it points to the everyday life of the Ashramites.

As mentioned before, Ashramites are expected to do karma yoga that is, yoga through work. Many of the Ashramites I know worked in more than one department and their routine entailed going from one department to the other, eating at or collecting their food from the common dining hall, going to the common playground for their everyday sports routine, and of course, visiting the Samadhi. While these are collective spaces, there is an emphasis on silence or ‘concentration’, the aim being to practise meditative contemplation while being immersed in the most mundane and ordinary chores. The ground floor of the common dining hall, thus, has boards with ‘Silence’ written on them, and talking is frowned upon. At the playground, while there is much talking and camaraderie, sports is also serious business and thus highly disciplined. In the work units too, one is expected to carry on their work silently as much as possible. Of course, Ashramites have friends and social relations within the Ashram, but all things considered, it is ‘a loose-knit community of like-minded people’ in the words of an American Ashramite.

Narratives of being the ‘Mother’s children’ become especially significant in creating a sense of community and affective coherence, however tenuous, since devotees and members may be familiar strangers to other Ashramites and devotees and in the absence of successor gurus. Such narratives are powerfully facilitated by the material omnipresence of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo through photographs, quotes from their texts, and most importantly, in the form of their Samadhi. It is here that Ashramites, who might go days on end without meeting one another, become present to the gurus and one another as devotees, even as the gurus’ authority is reinforced through the devotional praxis of visiting the Samadhi. Sacred spaces of internment are widely accepted as important sites of religious memorialisation, allowing the creation of a ‘chain of memory’ (Hervieu-Léger 2000) ⁸ .

Hervieu-Léger argues that the religious rests centrally on tradition, ‘that is to say reference to a chain of belief’ which is, ‘immediately associated with the problem of collective memory’ (ibid.:123). For Hervieu-Léger, religions are characterised by collective belief in a common lineage, and its continuity is maintained through acts and practices of, ‘recalling a past which gives meaning to the present and contains the future’ (ibid.:125). Insofar as shrines are, ‘a spatial expression of […] cultural memory’, they can be thought of as important to the construction and continuity of religious lineages, where embodied devotional praxis is crucial to such maintenance (Bigelow 2009: 437).

However, Hervieu-Léger then falls into the familiar conundrum of modern vs traditional societies to argue that since modern societies are characterised by rapid changes, these have led to collective amnesia as opposed to past tradition-based societies characterised by anamnesis. In the past, ‘societies reinforced religious memory by defining their identity as a living lineage of belief and through acting out their belief in rituals. What seems to have happened, according to Hervieu-Léger, is that change in the modern world fragmented or obliterated memory of the past and tradition, both of which were so central to making religion real for believers’ (Langham 2003: 694).

Such an assertion implicitly posits that the non-West remains religious while the West has moved on to secularity. As Saba Mahmood argues:

To secure secularism as a uniquely Christian (or, for that matter, Western) achievement is not simply a documentary exercise. Rather, it is to engage in a practice through which the “North Atlantic” has historically secured its exceptionality—the simultaneous uniqueness and universality of its religious forms and the superiority of its civilization. (Mahmood 2010: 289–90)

Arguments about religious memory seem to rest on a problematic presumption of memory being linear and an equally problematic unilinear teleology of world history, of societies as these move from tradition to modernity and consequently lose touch with the past.

This is not to say that the schism between the past and the present, between tradition and modernity is not acutely felt. In fact, most of my Western interlocutors, who began experimenting with Eastern religions in the 1960s and 70s, described the break from the past experienced as existential angst to be the primary reason for their journey to India and subsequently Pondicherry. However, to accept this phenomenological experience of a lost past as a historical fact about an irretrievably lost past is something that needs to be examined. Further, in invoking and lamenting the lost past, modernity keeps ‘tradition’ very much in the vicinity of the imagined and felt, and therefore continuously remakes it through, for instance, memorialisation—shrines, war memorials, museums, and so on.

Hervieu-Léger (2000) highlights the importance of memorialisation for moderns: ‘Accelerated change […] paradoxically gives rise to appeals to memory’, but then she notes: ‘If one can describe societies of the past as societies of memory it is precisely because in them memory was compact and present in every part of life; they had no need to call it up’ (Hervieu-Léger 2000: 141). For Hervieu-Léger, it seems, there is an authentic past to which we no longer have recourse and all modern memory-making is a ‘plurality of specialized, fragmented memories such as family memory, national memory, class memory, and even religious memory’ (Langham 2003: 694). This insistence on a lost unified past is itself a modern lament (Versluis 2006) and relies too heavily on a Eurocentric notion of arboreal ‘genealogical grids’ (Povinelli 2002). And so while rejecting the linear temporality of Hervieu-Léger’s argument, I nonetheless retain the aspect of ‘religion as a chain of memory’ to foreground the making of the religious lineage or genealogy within which my interlocutors come to situate themselves and others, recrafting their own biographies.

As I have written elsewhere (Ganguly 2018), my interlocutors would frequently take recourse to narratives of having a ‘karmic’ that is, past life, ‘connection’ with their gurus and India. Interpreting the inexplicable but undeniable sense of belonging that they felt immediately upon meeting the Mother, or upon arriving in India generally or the Ashram specifically, as the unfolding of their previous lives’ ties in this life, they recrafted their biographies through a different line of descent—the religious genealogy of belonging to their guru and India across lifetimes or since time immemorial. I use the term ‘genealogy’, in the first sense, to refer to the alternative line of descent within which my interlocutors resituate themselves through their ‘connection’ with the gurus. ⁹

When I asked Jerry how he explained his feeling of being at home in India and the Ashram, Jerry joked, ‘maybe a stork dropped me in my place!’ (emphasis added). While this was said in jest, the allusion to the familiar American metaphor of birth also highlights the genealogical power of the guru-devotee relation through which the latter is reborn in their place. The phrase, ‘the Mother’s children’ is instructive of these ties that bind which, for my interlocutors, are timeless and at once more powerful than their biological lineage. Jerry recalled the time his siblings and mother came to visit him at the Ashram:

They would meet me at the Samadhi, right. I would go and put my head on it…. The second day he (Jerry’s brother, John) actually comes up to the Samadhi, reads that prayer which is inscribed on the side and the third day he puts his knee down, his head on the Samadhi. And that evening, we’d go out for you know beer and fish. John poured out the beer and (proposed a) toast. So, on this particular night, we are raising our glasses, John says (Jerry imitates a serious tone), “I propose a toast to the Mother!” I looked at my mother and there was a look of real alarm and dismay on her face. I felt a little sorry for her and I said (in a mock serious tone), “let’s make it a toast for all mothers!” ¹⁰

The inexplicable feeling of finding the ‘true’ spiritual home in the elsewhere of India is thus transformed into a ‘naturally’ inevitable event, mimicking and simultaneously transcending genetic, familial ties, revealing the inherent inadequacy of the biological lineage that might compete for claims to true belonging.

However, the ‘natural’ connections forged through the religious genealogy requires, indeed demands, practice and a community of fellow devotees remembering and memorialising the gurus. At the Samadhi in Sri Aurobindo Ashram we find a continuous consolidation of the religious genealogy of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as gurus, and the bowing, kneeling, and supplicating by men and women as their devotees who share a common world of devotional intimacy. This practice is not one simply meant to be entered into from the outside, nor is the religious genealogy simply handed down and reinforced through great authority. Rather it is energised by the intimate relationship between the gurus and devotees and by extension among devotees.

In her essay on land right claims by Australian aboriginals, Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) argues that the Australian state’s demand, rooted as it is in its settler-colonial past, for recognising land rights primarily in terms of linear ‘genealogical grids’ exists along with more complex forms of lateral relationality that she calls ‘intimacy grids’. Although seemingly opposed to each other at first glance,

[B]oth genealogy and intimacy have emerged as semiautonomous foundations for legitimating sex acts and other forms of corporeal sociality […]. Sociality seems unthinkable not only without one or the other of these two grids, but without them working as twin pairs, intertwined, twisting, struggling against each other. (Povinelli 2002: 235)

In the context of my article, however, I argue that both genealogy and intimacy are co-constitutive (not semiautonomous) since the creation of religious memory, without a biological descent line, depends on the realisation of one’s innermost emotions, desires, and aspirations. Through narratives of karmic and past life connections with the Mother and the Ashram, devotees recognise or re-cognise the Mother as their guru because of a soul connection traversing multiple lifetimes. The relation between the guru and devotees, and by extension among devotees, is the exterior realisation of, in Habermas’s words, ‘saturated and free interiority’ (Habermas cited in Povinelli 2002: 218). ¹¹

One of my American interlocutors, Frank, now living in Pondicherry, had spent several years at the Sri Aurobindo centre in Lodi, Northern California, and the Matagiri Sri Aurobindo Centre, New York state, before he came to India. During a conversation one afternoon, after Frank’s usual Samadhi visit, he began telling me of a dream where he had seen the Mother on the day of her mahasamadhi, that is the day she passed away.

Frank had gone to the Ashram in Matagiri on the Mother’s mahasamadhi day. That night, he dreamt of the Mother in her mahasamadhi. In the dream vision, he saw her body reclining, her head and a portion of the torso resting upright. But it seems there was a prelude to entering the room where the Mother was kept; there were several women sitting knitting and one had to complete some formalities before they could enter and see the Mother. A distressed Frank, in his dream, insisted vehemently, ‘But I want to see my Mother’. He was then allowed to go in without having to complete any of the formalities.

The place he entered in his dream was very much like the Ashram’s main building. He had to go from the rear and enter it, much like the place near the present-day meditation hall. Close to what is the bookshop today, a woman was standing handing out tulasi leaves (Indian basil considered holy by Hindus) to people which were apparently for laying on or offering to the Mother’s body. What was interesting is that Frank had never before seen tulasi leaves being handed out anywhere, nor did he know the layout of the Ashram in which he saw in his dream, for he had not yet been to India or Pondicherry. The Mother appeared in his dream on her mahasamadhi day with a ‘radiant body’, he said with a smile.

Narratives of being visited by gurus in dreams are frequent in religious storyscapes (Visvanathan 1998) and they signal the inclusion or at least initiation into a religious genealogy. Dream visitations are a powerful sign of ‘being called’ by the guru which, in turn, is a sign of being recognised by the guru; such recognition is timeless and eternal (Ganguly 2018). Frank’s narrative is particularly powerful in that the Mother chooses to visit him on the day of her mahasamadhi. Thousands of miles away in Matagiri, Frank could not possibly have paid his last respect to the Mother in person but in deference to his devotion, the Mother presents herself to him. I suggest that this provides an instance of both a linear genealogical grid and a lateral intimacy grid.

Even as I interpret Frank’s narrative for the purposes of my argument, it must be admitted that dreamscapes resist a straightforward inclusion in the telling of the mundane. However, for Frank and several other interlocutors, dream visitations by gurus were understood as part of their ‘connection’ with the guru; as yet another manifestation of the undeniable bond of intimacy between the guru and devotee. One the one hand, signalling a state of interiority, Frank’s dream narrative points to the power of intimacy. It is, after all, not only the guru who calls the devotee but the guru too may be summoned by the latter through an ‘inner’ call. On the other hand, dreams also blur the boundary between the oneiric and the non-oneiric, and the private and the public.

In her essay on a Muslim amil (healer) and a Hindu guru who appears in the amil’s dreams, Veena Das (2012) shows the ways in which dreams and reality coincide. For Das, one of the central questions is how dreams find, ‘a footing in the world’ through language (ibid.: 146). There are no easy answers to the question she poses, and she argues that the amil’s dreams, as her own, reveal not so much layers of one’s psyche, but, ‘the troubled relation that language bears to the world’ (ibid.: 147). This observation takes her beyond simply a semiotic approach to dreams. Instead, even as she situates dreams within a larger world of real events and figures, both dreams and reality are understood to constitute and rupture each other. It is outside the scope of this article to dwell at length on the issue of dreams and language but, following from Das, I suggest that dreams be understood as constituting and constructing the religious genealogy that my interlocutors inhabit in both extraordinary (across lifetimes) and quotidian (real time) ways. In that, dreams are no less real than the waking world.

Let us also revisit the Mother’s certitude, upon meeting Sri Aurobindo for the first time, that he was the entity whom she had been seeing in her visions ¹² ever since she was a child. The dream world and the mundane seeped into each other, not as mere coincidence, but as a continuous unfolding, where the real is brought to bear upon dreams and vice versa. Dream narratives are thus not simply narrations of the real (or not) but ways of re-membering the past and the present.

In the Mother’s case, the realm of private interiority, as manifested in the dream world collapsing unto the real, was equally intertwined with the public work of forging a community of spiritual practitioners. In the context of ‘diasporic intimacy’, Svetlana Boym writes, ‘Intimacy has its own historical topography. In the Western tradition, it reflects the colonization of the world by a private individual’ (Boym 1998: 500). Yet, Boym goes on to state, ‘Intimacy is not solely a private matter; it may be protected, manipulated, or besieged by the state, framed by art, embellished by memory, or estranged by critique’ (ibid.). Laurent Berlant writes along similar lines, ‘But intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way […] the inwardness of the intimate is met by a corresponding publicness’ (Berlant 1998: 281). As we shall see below, devotional identity is publicly crafted and reinforced through the performance of various kinaesthetic ritual practices at the Samadhi. In turn, such publicness is a testament to the intimate relationship between the self and the gurus. The intertwining of intimacy and religious memory points toward the public articulations of intimacy as well as toward building up of relationality between the self and intimate others.

IV The Samadhi at Sri Aurobindo Ashram

The Samadhi is housed in the Ashram’s main building, a conglomeration of four different structures—the Library House, Rosary House, Meditation House and the Secretariat. These were joined together in a single building over many years starting from the acquisition of the Secretariat and Library House in 1929 (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 2008). Sri Aurobindo and the Mother stayed in the rooms upstairs in the Ashram’s main building while some of their followers lived in the rooms downstairs.

Today, as one enters the Ashram’s main building, a short walk leads the devotees and visitors to the white marble Samadhi. The Samadhi is at all times covered in a profusion of flowers sourced from the Ashram’s gardens, an earthen vessel with tulasi leaves immersed in water is kept next to it, incense sticks impart gentle fragrance, and a majestic tree called the Service Tree spreads its leafy canopy over the Samadhi. There is hushed silence as devotees and visitors file in to pay obeisance. At any given time, it is common to see people sitting quietly and meditating around the tomb, and I often found this to be a welcome break in my routine that meant walking from place to place on hot sweltering mornings in Pondicherry.

Visiting the Samadhi at least once every day is probably the most important ritual in the devotees’ and Ashramites’ lives and is particularly significant given the absence of other such visible rituals. While no rule insists that Ashramites visit the Samadhi every day, most of my interlocutors would do so unless they were ailing. For instance, Eva, a German Ashramite, would go to the Samadhi every morning just before 10 am; the American long-time devotee Frank’s usual time was just around 2 pm, and another German Ashramite Yvonne would go in the early evenings. Jerry said that he goes to the Samadhi every morning just before collecting his breakfast from the dining hall, ‘It (that is, visiting the Samadhi every day) is pretty big for me in fact. You kinda offer yourself (to the gurus, in the spirit of surrender ¹³ ) before the day officially begins’.

Tactile, kinaesthetic movements ¹⁴ are integral to almost all religious and/or spiritual traditions—bowing and touching the idol of the deity in temples for instance, or touching the cross in cathedrals; pilgrimage to sacred centres involves the physical incorporation of pain and hardship; swooning, crying and involuntary body movements are common in narratives of devotees when they behold the deity or guru. At the Samadhi in Pondicherry, devotees and visitors engage in such kinaesthetic, somatic practices of touching, kneeling, and gazing at the Samadhi for several minutes before peregrinating clockwise around it.

In the months that I spent in the Ashram and at the Samadhi, it became possible to sometimes spot the difference between tourists and/or first-time visitors from others. Sometimes preceded by a tourist guide, a file of visitors would quickly make one mandatory round of the Samadhi, looking around at others kneeling at it and sitting in the surrounding premises meditating. For my interlocutors, kneeling at the Samadhi with their forehead or hands touching it for a good while, leaning onto it in an embrace-like gesture, or simply standing and looking at it with one palm resting on the Service Tree were all important tactile practices that formed part of their performance of intimacy with the gurus, in keeping with devotional ‘notions of the proximities and potencies of various bodies’ (Povinelli 2002: 227). Thus, Eva, who had to walk with a stick after having battled a tumour in her spine, would stand in quiet contemplation at one corner, facing the Service Tree, her eyes open and looking straight at the Samadhi. Eva rued that she still could not kneel for more than a minute or so because her knees would hurt but she felt that she could kneel a bit longer with each passing day, and said a bit wistfully, ‘I hope it improves’.

Yvonne, another German Ashramite, would slowly fold her legs to kneel at the Samadhi and bend her head leaning forward slightly, sometimes tenderly touching and arranging the flowers on the tomb. Frank would kneel and touch his forehead to the Samadhi, his palms resting on the cool marble surface for several seconds before getting up to walk around it. For devotees, the bodies of the gurus, and by extension the Samadhi, are animate, lively matter. In Jerry’s words, the Mother’s presence at the Samadhi, ‘is pretty powerful’. Memorialisation, thus, invokes the living presence of the gurus, making the Samadhi the embodiment of a material and yet an abstract idea.

Udar Pinto (1907–2001), a trusted long-term devotee and an aeronautical engineer by training, who had built the casket for Sri Aurobindo’s body around which the marble structure was built, wrote of the time when he was asked by the Mother to lift Sri Aurobindo to place him in the coffin:

When I lifted His body to place it into the coffin, the whole body was lying in the liquid that had come out of it. Normally such liquids have a very foul smell, but, in this case, the liquid had a celestial perfume that was really wonderful. My whole body, my clothes and all, were soaked with this liquid and it was so good that I did not change my clothes or even bathe for some days, to keep all that wonderful perfume on me. (Pinto cited in Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 2008:112)

I read Pinto’s narrative, that of the devotee being (in)fused with the corporeal presence of the guru, in terms of what Csordas calls ‘intimate alterity’ such that the relation with the gurus,

[…] Is a genuine intimacy with 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…In this sense, to speak of intimacy with oneself is not to speak metaphorically. It is instead to say that the capacity for intimacy begins with an existential coming to terms with the alterity of the self. (Csordas 2004:169)

I suggest that the Samadhi serves the same function today in bringing the gurus and devotees together in a state of embodied intimacy where:

Intimacy […] has come to be characterized by a form of pronominalized interiority. As numerous people have noted, the intimate interiority is characterized by a second-order critical reflexivity, by the I that emerges in the asking of the question, What do I feel toward you? […] Who am I in relation to you? (Povinelli 2002: 230–31)

The intimate alterity that Csordas (2004) speaks of, which is both the foundation and result of the pronominalised interiority that Povinelli so beautifully spells out, is always an arriving toward the personalised through complex genealogies that one steps into through the accident of birth and history, and attendant personal desires and quests.

Let us return to the complex forms of mnemonics in Frank’s narrative recounted in the section above. His dream vision is not incidental nor unique in its singularity ¹⁵ ; rather it is the lament of an entire generation of Americans and Europeans soul searching and invoking a deeply felt lost religious or spiritual past. Thus, they arrive toward intimacy through the construction of a religious genealogy that is itself situated within imaginaries of universal, timeless ‘Eastern spiritualities’, a mystical landscape dotted with gurus, seers, and saints. I shall elaborate on this in the next section, not to reduce the phenomenological to the political but to point to the ways in which memory and intimacy are located in both the individual and the collective.

The Samadhi is also the ground for extended devotee selfhood where through the embodied presence of the gurus and the devotee’s embodied presence to them, the devotee is finally present to herself, as is everyone else. Sometimes, as Yvonne or Frank or any of my other interlocutors stood up and completed a peregrination of the Samadhi, if I were there too, they would catch my eye and smile in acknowledgement; we were witnesses to each other’s devotion, just as we had witnessed and been witnessed by the gurus. Through tactile, bodily practices of touching the Samadhi and thus merging with the embodied presence of the gurus, the distinction between self and other is, temporarily dissolved, creating a community of the ‘Mother’s children’. A disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother writes:

Mother has said that the Samadhi is a place of realisation. A young unmarried girl during her first visit to the Ashram was part of a group going to Sri Aurobindo’s Room. As the room would be open only at 11:45 a.m. and there were fifteen minutes more, she sat at the Samadhi and simply became lost within. The party became concerned after it passed 11:50, but still she did not open her eyes. As it was not proper to disturb someone lost in meditation, nothing could be done. The silent calls of the party finally made her open her eyes, and she got up. She explained, “I was lost in ecstasy and had no desire to open my eyes. As you called out my name I awoke and came away.” Indeed, no one had called her name. She ‘heard’ the calls of the party. She heard like that because she was at the Samadhi. That is the power of the Samadhi. ¹⁶

The author provides no larger context to the story. We have no idea who the ‘girl’ is or who the other people were except that they were devotees. This only serves to highlight the power of the Samadhi in its capacity for self-referentiality such that in the devotees’ experience or in the case of the devotee-reader, none of these details (should) matter. Instead, we have here an unencumbered-with-details story of the Samadhi’s power. Self-realisation at the Samadhi, in the case of this story, extends to encapsulating the ‘call’ from others, a physically inaudible call that nevertheless reaches the young woman because of the affective intimacy that binds them all together at and through the Samadhi.

The gurus’ material omnipresence then is crucial to imparting a sense of cohesion and thus imposes a transcendental order of meaning which at once also serves to rein in the spatial expanse of the Ashram in the city. While the Ashram as such and the Samadhi specifically as its spatial-spiritual heart is central to the genealogical and intimate relations between the gurus and their devotees, one cannot ignore the politics of intimacy.

V Arriving toward Home

Tulasi Srinivas argues that for devotees, the Sai Ashram at Puttuparthi serves, ‘as a spiritual home, a refuge in their everyday lives of spiritual exile in the rapidly globalizing world’ (2009: 328). Sacred spaces such as ashrams are spaces of intimacy insofar as they provide a spiritual sanctuary, a home, in the midst of everyday anxieties. As Svetlana Boym argues, ‘The notion of intimacy is connected to home; intimate means “inner most”, “pertaining to one’s deepest nature”’ (1998: 499). Time and time again, my interlocutors too, in recounting their arrival to Pondicherry and the ashram spoke of a deep sense of having, finally, reached home.

In this section, I discuss narratives of finding and making home in the Ashram and in India, as well as of exile, pointing to the ambivalences of intimacy. Both home and exile operate along the twin registers of the spiritual and the material in this context. One’s innermost desires, always already anticipated once situated within their recrafted biographies, materialise as the fruition of an ‘internal prophecy’ in the Ashram in India. ¹⁷

The usual travel trajectory is that of leaving home/the familiar, journeying into the strange unknown, and then returning home. In contemporary travel,

The very idea of leaving home – traveling – to find home has not gone unremarked by those caught up in following the figure of the journey and the ways in which it redoubles the narrative trajectory of the will to knowledge. “Home” marks the necessary starting point and point of return without which travel is unimaginable. (Ivy 1995: 30)

However, in my interlocutors’ narratives, the home of departure is not that of return, it is one which is permanently and wilfully left behind, ‘in order to discover an even more fundamental home amidst the strange’ (Moran 2004: 111).

Edward Said (2001) writes, ‘exile […] is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home’ (Said 2001: 173). My interlocutors spoke of their lives ‘back home’ as if they were in exile there while here, in India, was/is home. Their narratives of alienation from their own society portray their lives there as exilic, that is, ‘in a discontinuous state of being’ (ibid.: 177). Whereas for the political exile, the subject of Said’s essay, the return home is indefinitely deferred, for many of my interlocutors, the exilic condition of living in an unhomely place ended with the journey into India rediscovered as home. It is here that the self is fully realised, through meeting the guru, and India is rediscovered as the true home through the rediscovery of the self in a simultaneous interlocked mapping of outward travel on the landscape of inner journey, and vice versa.

Jed, an Australian Ashramite, one of my several interlocutors who travelled overland, spoke about his travels through Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand on his way to India. He said he lived in Phuket for a few months. It was a beautiful place, he said, where the ocean was crystal clear. ‘But that did not hold me…. My objective was to go to India’. He trekked through the Himalayas in Nepal, but all its grandeur too, he said smiling, ‘could not keep me’. Finally, he entered India in 1979, and reached Pondicherry in August of the same year. The Mother had ‘left her body’ the previous year and so Jed had missed meeting her in person. But when he entered the small Meditation room in the Samadhi complex, next to the tomb of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, throwing his head back slightly as if mimicking being hit by a wave, Jed said that he felt ‘her presence was still very strong’. Then, ‘I stayed put’.

Francois, an Indian man in his 50s who had demanded a French name from the Mother when he was young, also recounted feeling a strange sense of being at home the moment he set foot in the Ashram. The suave and sophisticated Francois, a long-term devotee, is originally from the state of Uttar Pradesh. His parents brought him to the Ashram when he was very young, and they were meant to return in a few days. But he simply refused to leave. He came to Pondicherry at the age of five. Eyes shining, he recounted that he had never been away from his mother even for a moment since the time he was born. But when he stepped out of the train, ‘I felt this was home! Why didn’t they bring me here before?!’ It was as if the umbilical cord just snapped. ‘I still remember distinctly, the smell of the bread and the banana’, his first breakfast in the Ashram.

On the day when they were supposed to return home, he climbed up a mango tree to hide because he was afraid that his parents would take him back with them. His father was flabbergasted because until then he had never wanted to be away from his mother. Francois was the last surviving of her eight children. His older sister, whom he had never met, passed away at the age of about fourteen, something that had deeply affected their mother. His sister too had come to Pondicherry and she was allowed to stay in the Ashram for a week. She did not want to go back but her parents took her away and she kept crying on the train, refusing to eat anything. Three or four days after reaching home, she passed away. Francois could not help but feel that he was born as the reincarnation of her soul.

Throughout my fieldwork, I heard many such stories of one’s innermost desires, even those unbeknownst to oneself, coming to fruition at the Ashram, a microcosm of and in India, the true home of the soul; the land of Krishna whom the Mother dreamt of and then saw in the body of Sri Aurobindo, and the adoptive land of the Mother who visited Frank in his dreams in the United States and renamed an Indian boy ‘Francois’. These trajectories point to the ongoing construction of a religious genealogy and devotional intimacy along the axes of ‘home’ and ‘exile’. An overwhelming majority of my interlocutors felt that India was the true home of spirituality lost to them in the West and thus arriving in India or specifically, the Ashram marked the end of their spiritual exile and the beginning of coming home to themselves. As one of them said, ‘Something is missing, from our point of view in the West’.

The nostalgic yearning for a return to a spiritual homeland implying a critique of modernity, dissatisfied with what it seems to offer, is anything but new. Romantic Orientalist representations of India as the cradle of civilisation provide the historical backdrop to contemporary nostalgia for ‘Indian spirituality’ (King 1999; Halbfass 1988). Much of the contemporary discourse surrounding India’s spiritual heritage, rather than departing from Orientalist conceptions, continues to take recourse to it even though the historicity of the discourse is effaced or rarely acknowledged in everyday talk ¹⁸ . In the Mother’s case, her profound meeting with Sri Aurobindo whom she encounters as the living memory of her visions of Krishna emerges as a synecdoche for the fin-de-siècle Western imaginary of, for instance, the great Himalayan mahatmas called upon by the occultist and Theosophist Madame Blavatsky. Such imaginaries continued to influence the formation of neo-Vedanta, modern neo-Hindu guru movements, and their reception in the West well into the 1960s and ‘70s.

While a detailed exploration of the Western imaginaries of Indian gurus is outside the scope of this article, it is important to mention that my interlocutors’ journeys to India in search of a guru are located within a long and complex history, or rather genealogy, of the Euro-American and Indian nationalist consolidation of neo-Vedanta as the heart of ‘Indian spirituality’. The belief in karma and emphasis on texts such as The Bhagavad Gita, among other things, is very much part of my interlocutors’ spiritual vocabulary. As my interlocutors come home to themselves in the Ashram or specifically at the Samadhi by situating themselves in a religious genealogy, their continuous realignment has to be seen as animating and being animated by a longer genealogy of neo-Vedanta and modern Indian guru movements; flows of knowledge crisscrossing across the East and the West. Sri Aurobindo arrived to the Vedas, for instance, in England through Max Mueller’s translation of the Vedas. That an Indian boy should want to be renamed Francois, then, is only another fitting story of arrival.

It bears mentioning that a study of the construction of ‘spiritual India’ requires a genealogical approach in the Foucauldean sense (Foucault 1984); one that does not posit the biographies and narratives of people such as my interlocutors as simply a faithful regurgitation of a historical past. Rather, the vicissitudes of personal lives play out as emergences in the genealogy of the making of ‘spiritual India’ ¹⁹ . Finding and being at home in the Ashram and in the gurus’ presence in India cannot be divorced from but not entirely explained (away) either by such a genealogy. Let me dwell on this a bit more now by turning to the locational specificity of the Ashram.

Insofar as the Ashram as spiritual home is located within contingent and complex histories, what it means to be at home and when such claims of belonging might get challenged are questions that remain central to individual biographies of intimacy. As feminist scholars have pointed out, the home is a fractured space and intimacy inherently ambivalent (Kaplan 1996; Massey 2001[1994]). In December 2014, when I was in Pondicherry doing fieldwork, the Ashram found itself in the midst of a controversy concerning five sisters who were all Ashramites, originally from Bihar, and had been living in the ashram from a young age. The Prasad sisters and their parents had been fighting a legal case against the Ashram for more than a decade. In July 2014, the Supreme Court directed them to leave the ashram. However, they continued to live in its premises and matters came to a head on 17 December when the sisters were evicted from the Ashram. The next morning, I was aghast to read in The Hindu ²⁰ that two of the sisters and their mother committed suicide by drowning themselves in the sea. The other sisters and their father were saved before they could drown themselves.

The sisters had been brought decades ago to the Ashram by their parents who were ardent devotees. In a news article from 2013, one of the sisters is quoted as saying in response to why they continue to stay in the Ashram despite their allegations of sexual harassment against some Ashramites, ‘The ashram belongs to inmates like us and not to the trustees who have been misusing their authority’ ²¹ . It would not be far off the mark to interpret this statement as a disputed claim to ‘true’ belonging; Who is the true spiritual insider versus outsider? Who is able to truly embody the love and devotion that behooves a devotee? Who is supposed to be the rightful inhabitant of the Ashram, the home? These questions also take us back to the notion of religious genealogy. By claiming belonging to the Ashram, the sisters claim their place in the chain of memory with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother at its apex as their gurus such that the authority behind their claim of inhabiting the Ashram derives from inhabiting this sacred genealogy.

However, these questions cannot be heard merely as articulations of affect or affective choice. As Povinelli notes, ‘there is a blurring of choice and compulsion’ in the context of love or intimacy (Povinelli 2002: 228). In a blog piece written about a year after the article cited above, one of the surviving sisters is reported to have said from her hospital bed, ‘If we are chased out of our homes, where else can we go. I am 55 and have spent the last 35 years of my life here…. We are not in touch with any of our relatives and have nowhere else to go’ ²² . While at first glance, the sisters’ uprootedness and hence forced exile stands in contrast to my interlocutors’ end-of-exile in the spiritual home, the home, in principle, ‘is not opposed to uprootedness and defamiliarization but constituted by it’ (Boym 1998: 499). By extension, home and nostalgia too are inseparable. After all, ‘Nostalgia (from nostos—return home, and algia—longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy’ (Boym 2001: xiii). Going by Boym’s understanding, my Western interlocutors’ feelings of finding home in India can be seen to be propelled by a nostalgia for a lost spiritual past (Ganguly 2018). Theirs comes close to what Boym calls ‘reflective nostalgia’, the kind of longing that looks back at the past but attempts to resuscitate it with an openness to new future possibilities ²³ . Where it differs from Boym’s characterisation is that for her reflective nostalgia defers the homecoming. For my interlocutors, the ‘return’ home—as in the return of the soul on the karmic plane of past life connection—could not have come sooner.

But what of the sisters, and the transposition of the question of longing into that of belonging? Boym writes, ‘Algia—longing is what we share, yet nostos—the return home—is what divides us’ (Boym 2001: xvi). The tragic step taken by the sisters and their mother indefinitely suspends any possibility of reconciling longing with belonging, even as it constitutes the ultimate act of claiming the Ashram as home.

Further, notions of uprootedness and defamiliarisation take on added salience in this context because of the contingent, circumstantial nature of the Ashram’s emergence. As a place under French rule, Pondicherry offered political sanctuary to Sri Aurobindo when he was being persecuted by the British, and the opportunity to continue his sadhana in peace. Later, Sri Aurobindo spoke of his move to Pondicherry and withdrawal from politics as based on an inner adesh (command) that guided him toward absolute concentration on his sadhana (Heehs 2008: 209). Nonetheless, his move to Pondicherry as a political exile is instructive of the spatial context of the Ashram. I argue that the Ashram is exilic in its very conception in that its emergence was contingent and circumstantial rather than standing testimony to Sri Aurobindo’s affective ties with the place. This locative dissonance erupted to the forefront following the tragic news of the sisters’ death and attempted suicide.

On the afternoon of 18 December 2014, a general sense of foreboding had taken over the Ashram stemming from the suicides’ aftermath. Gates of Ashram-run guest houses including the one where I stayed were locked and guests were advised to stay inside. A few policemen stood guard outside some of the guesthouses, some departments were closed, and the Samadhi building was barricaded with policemen around it. I heard that ‘miscreants’ were pelting stones at the entrance of the Samadhi building. These accounts were later corroborated by newspaper reports that confirmed such pelting. ²⁴ Bhola, the receptionist at my guest house told me with great concern that the Mother’s symbol on the top of the entrance gate of the Samadhi building had been damaged in the process. However, the next day when I went to the Samadhi, the symbol looked unharmed to me. The rumours and the events of stone pelting and calling for a bandh in the city point to the locational dissonance of the ashram in bringing out the strong insider/outsider sentiments concerning the Ashram and locals. In the words of a Tamil interlocutor, the Ashram is ‘an island in the city’.

Of course, this is not to suggest that there is an absolute lack of assimilation—the Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s photographs are sold outside temples along with lithographs of Hindu deities; often displayed in shops, restaurants, and petrol pumps; and insignia such as rings and lockets with the Mother’s symbol is worn by locals. The writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have also been translated into Tamil to make these accessible to the local Tamil population, and on my last two visits in 2017 and 2019, I had a distinct impression that considerably more Tamil people were visiting the Samadhi (see also Pillai 2005). Yet, the rumour about the desecration of the Mother’s symbol at the Samadhi entrance following the sisters’ death and events around it must be considered as a jagged line cutting across both linear religious genealogy and lateral intimacy grids.

VI Conclusion

It was sometime in January 2015, and Yvonne had come to meet me in my guest house. A few days ago, I had asked her what she thought about the present circumstances that seemed to engulf the Ashram and its people. For Yvonne, the misfortune that had befallen the Ashram, was a result of ‘asuric ²⁵ forces’, a battle between good and evil. Yvonne did not mean that the sisters were evil. She simply meant that the present circumstances represented a Manichean war and everyone was in the throes of these forces. It was only inevitable, according to Yvonne, that the world would go through these troubled times before divine forces can reign supreme again. That evening, revisiting my question and her own thoughts on it, she said she had been thinking about what I had asked her a couple of days ago. She wanted to tell me that she was not fazed by what was happening because really it was quite simple, ‘Mother takes care of us. We are all her children’.

The phrase stayed with me and made me rethink the lives of the people in the Ashram and the life of the Ashram as such. Throughout fieldwork, it had become clear that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were very much present in the lives of their devotees and constant reference to them was apparent in their photographs, texts, and most of all the Samadhi. The significance of the latter, I have argued, cannot be properly understood without understanding the spatial configuration of the Ashram, and the intersections of religious memory and intimacy that emerge in the expressions of devotion at the Samadhi. It is at the Samadhi that the community of the ‘Mother’s children’ becomes patently visible to outsiders as well as insiders.

Yet, insofar as memory and intimacy, in their public and private articulations, are contested and disputed domains, there are bound to be conflicts over issues of rightful claims to belonging and certainly such conflicts can also be tied to wider locational politics. I never got around to asking Yvonne who was included in the ‘us’ and the ‘we’ of ‘Mother takes care of us. We are all her children’. Perhaps she would have said all those who truly surrender themselves to the Mother. But while the Mother’s grace may be bountiful, for her mortal children this world remains a place fraught with tensions and tragedies, even as these are perhaps transcended, however temporarily, at the refuge that is the Samadhi.