Of devotion and disgust: Method,belief and power in anthropological research on religion

Motivation for the research

Even though India was always a land of Gurus, there has been a prominent rise in the popularity of guru religions and new age spiritualities, almost parallelly with the advent of the neoliberal outlook of the state, since the early 1990s following the economic policy of LPG (Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation).

Guru religion in urban India is not restricted to temples and traditional rituals, but is individually available, secularized and evokes rational choice making as a spiritual virtue. As a middle-class anthropologist some of whose family members are staunch devotees of Amma and who has been familiar with Amma and her ashram since the last couple of decades through her devotees and have seen their political viewpoints evolve in the process, this project was an attempt at deciphering the correlation between belonging to a certain class-caste habitus, being her devotee and developing a rightwing political bend. Somewhere it was also an attempt at understanding my own rejection of it all as a proclaimed atheist and a political moderate. Amma’s political and social influence and her traction with the upper caste, middle class urban devotees, has a parallel in the same population’s traction to the RSS’s (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) ideology and BJP’s (Bhartiya Janta Party) politics; Amma was also the C20 leader during India’s G20 presidency in 2023. The analogy that one of my respondents drew seems to have emerged more clearly recently, in the current political and social environment of India, than any other time. He had likened Amma to Krishna and India’s then PM (2023) to Arjuna and insisted that without dharma (referring to religion, especially Amma), karma (work – political work of nation building, in this case) cannot function; without Amma, he cannot function. ¹ Being a Hindu in India today is popularly made out to be more than just a matter of personal beliefs, into that of political orientation manifested in definitive display. Being Hindu and not believing or propagating the rightwing ideology is not looked at favourably.

My access to the field was made possible through some trusting family members and devotees. Once in the ashram, I was clearly asked by the head of the ashram about my research and purpose. I spoke frankly about my research project. As the conversation meandered to the politics of doing Sociology in India and my discipline’s infamous Eurocentrism, I was asked, “which university are you from?” Upon my reply, “Oh, not JNU?!” came his relieved yet sarcastic response. ² I gleaned from that first conversation itself that I wouldn’t have stood a chance at entering the field, had I been from the infamous, “anti-national”, “communist” university, a popular opinion among the devotees, as I figured out later.

The partnership between religion and politics in an old one and in the case of the middle class, urban Delhiites, this partnership is manifested through the tropes of seva (selfless service for others) and Sanskar (Indian culture – essentially the upper caste, middle class culture, with all its caste, class and religious boundaries at the core). Both the RSS and the guru’s ashram in Delhi uphold and propagate these tropes, among the same pool of people, one for the culturally right politics and another for culturally appropriate spiritual/religious practice and conduct. ³ While I write about these convoluted, yet strong connections in detail in my thesis, in this article, which is an introduction to the field, methodology, my location as an anthropologist and therefore to how I learnt what I learnt in the field, I would focus on the method of participant observation through the internal politics of the devotees – upper caste and middle class, urban, educated people, maintaining and strengthening their caste-class habitus through their ‘belonging’ with Amma.

Studying belief as an anthropologist

As anthropologists, we understand difference through belief. It is through the manifestation of belief patterns and systems that a lifeworld comes alive in the anthropological understanding.

If people’s belief systems can transform their worlds, then what does it take to evoke and keep the belief going? What better than anthropology could equip one to study this belief in the guru, which brings the apparently contradictory heuristics of wonder and rationality; play and penance; and spiritual and material to exist simultaneously and in harmony in her devotees’ lives? Belief as a heuristic in anthropology, beyond just its specific religious connotation, but trying to understand religious belief of a community is bound to open up windows into the intermeshed state of the community’s political, historical and social lives. In my field, for example, religious belief in the guru became my rubric of understanding the devotees’ sense of belonging to the guru and what this sense meant in their social relationships with each other and their sense of their habitus and their place in the world. As the devotees employed their belief to pursue the truth (spiritual) they wanted, I went about my field with my own belief system as a standard against which I read their religious belief, to understand their lifeworlds and consequently, better understand my own.

In this paper I argue that the method of participant observation is as contingent as it is strategic and that ethnographic fieldwork in a religious field cannot be undertaken justifiably by circumventing the question of personal religious belief, as it is indeed the status of the ethnographer’s belief which facilitates learning in and of the field. I will show that in my field, belief in the guru becomes a modality to partake in the power relations among devotees which characterize the public nature of the devotee gatherings and is a commonly accepted way of being acknowledged as a devotee.

Devotion and disgust

Three days after Amma’s Delhi program, as I was getting ready to wrap up a busy day at my institute, I received a message from a Delhi ashram resident, “Amma may give prasad4 for everybody in the ashram, today evening”, it was shortly followed by “looks like school ⁵ program”. Having attended the school program a couple of days before the Delhi visit, I knew that this was going to be like a small-scale devotee gathering, with Amma blessing everyone’s prasad plate, followed by group meditation. It is usual to not advertise these programs unlike the public darshans, ⁶ and the air of esoterism and secrecy maintained around them is both a source as well as consequence of internal devotee politics. So, receiving an intimation of the program was a privilege that I, as a participant observer, however reluctant or tired, could not ignore. I arranged to go to the ashram with Ritika, a devotee who lives in my neighbourhood and is always very keen to see her guru. When we reached, it was already time for prasad distribution and as in the school program, prasad plates were being brought in by the brahmacharinis ⁷ to Amma from both sides of the stage. Amma pulled them in and pushed them forward with both her hands alternatively. Her touch, in the process, blessed the plates. ⁸ The plates went in the direction of the waiting devotees where they were further circulated by other ashram volunteers.

After I was done with eating the prasad, I stood close to the stage observing the proceedings. One western ⁹ brahmacharini from Amma’s touring party approached me, holding up a plate to my chest which had leftovers of the prasad I had just eaten, rice, curry and chapattis all fused together in a slimy paste. I looked at her puzzled, this was not something I had seen before, not even in the similar school program. A little amused at my blankness, she said, “Amma’s plate”. I kept looking at her still unsure of what to do and now she checked me out from top to bottom in a quick glance and before I could do any further, Ritika, who stood a little away from me, overheard her and leapt on to the plate, taking a pinch to eat herself and feeding another to her young daughter. Egged on by the urgency that she had shown and the sense of satisfaction she seemed to have gained from getting to eat from her guru’s plate, the participant observer in me tried to follow suit, but failed. The very sight of the leftovers and the mess in the plate was viscerally revolting to me; I was disgusted. Still, worried about how I would explain my visible disinterest and disgust to Ritika and the brahmacharini who was offering the prasad to me, I tried to compensate for my lack of “devotion” with my duty as a participant observer, a peripheral figure, who had had the privilege of being allowed into the ashram and invited to such closed group events. I dug out a pinch full of the pasted food, raised it half to my mouth and getting overwhelmed by the disgust I had initially felt, immediately—and as I hoped—discreetly, wiped it back on the edge of the same plate and nervously looked away, unsuccessfully avoiding the flimsily cloaked disbelief on the brahmacharini’s face. I quickly scanned the crowd around me to make sure that no one from the Delhi ashram had noticed what I did. Since the privileges being offered to the gathering were uncommon, to refuse them would appear jarring if not offensive, I imagined. I felt out of place in an esoteric gathering, the “outsider” in me had surfaced and I could not mask her. It struck me that the same plate of leftovers had appeared very differently to me and the devotees. While my atheistic and secular disposition kept me totally disinterested and rather disgusted, the devotees saw Amma’s plate as a special blessing and a rare privilege, especially because there was only so much of it to go around. Earlier experiences of being policed and ‘politely warned/threatened’ in the ashram (discussed later), owing to assumptions about my research’s purpose, surfaced in my mind as I struggled to resume my composure and observe the events as I was meant to.

Reflecting on this experience threw up two very significant questions about my presence in the field. First, that of meaning-making sourced from belief, in a religious field and second, which pervades the first but still needs to be considered separately, that of power. With these two questions in the background, I wish to talk about the ordinary everydayness of fieldwork, where an ethnographer’s personal states of body and mind interacting with her respondents’ may shape interpersonal communications in a particular way, which becomes a source of emergence of specific anthropological knowledge. In my field, both belief and power shaped these internal states which in turn manifested themselves in interpersonal events and communications, which were sometimes sourced from moral dilemmas and at others from naivety or even moral rejection.

Disgust, belief and power: Ethnographic fieldwork in a religious field

It is (this) metonymic contact between objects or signs that allows them to be felt to be disgusting as if that was a material or objective quality. When thinking about how bodies become objects of disgust, we can see that disgust is crucial to power relations...The relation between disgust and power is evident when we consider the spatiality of disgust reactions, and their role in the hierarchizing of spaces as well as bodies.

The same plate of leftovers of the guru, which raised a visceral revolt in me was sought after by the other devotees in the hall. A few devotees at the back of the hall hustled to get to that plate fearing it would be fully consumed before they got to it. What disgusted me about that plate? Even before I was told that it was the guru’s plate, I was uncomfortable at the sight of the leftovers. As Ahmed (2014) puts it, it is the connection of an object with another object perceived as disgusting that makes that object disgusting. For me, the very thought that the food in the plate had been touched by another hand and someone else’s saliva was a disgust-inducing thought. At the same time, the fact that it was touched by the guru and could have her saliva was perceived as a blessing by her devotees. In this way, to a devotee’s mind, the guru was transferring her grace and blessing to her devotees. My disgust made me wipe the pinch of leftovers back to the plate and recoil from it. Even though I tried to keep my disgust a secret, my action had put my presence in the in-group, in jeopardy. This exposure made me feel vulnerable amidst a group of devotees whose expressed belief (in the act of eating from the guru’s plate) in the guru validated their presence in that hall and spoke for their acceptance by others like them. My disgust isolated me. Unlike Ghassem-Fachandi’s (2013) understanding of collective, expressed and vocalised disgust of vegetarian Hindus in Gujarat towards the meat-eating Muslims, which legitimises violence against the latter, my disgust was singular, unexpressed and silent. What was apparent was my reluctance. It was a moment of ambiguity between me and the brahmacharini, who got suspicious of my reluctance to eat from that plate. The feeling of disgust was internal and aroused a sense of vulnerability in me vis-à-vis the devotees whom I already knew; it put me in a spot where my intentions and inclinations stood in question. Closer to Tayob’s (2019) understanding of disgust among middle-class Muslims in Mumbai towards the improper ways of butchering animals during Bakra Eid qurbani, ¹⁰ as an embodied critique of the state systems’ apathy towards the living condition of Muslims, my disgust had put me in a position where the power that I may have held if perceived as a devotee was replaced by my critique of the very system of such commensality and intimacy with and belief in the guru. This critique too, however, was not clearly expressed. The power of a body who critiqued was outnumbered by the ones who believed and brought back the thoughts of having been held in suspicion by the ashram authorities earlier. ¹¹ Even though this critique could have carried some weight outside of that hall full of devotees, there in that moment it stripped me of any capacity to wield power whatsoever. A reflection on this moment revealed its layered nature constituting the politics of disgust, power dynamics in the field and belief in the guru. The moment challenged my Foucauldian understanding of the pervasiveness of power, of it being everywhere, with everyone, varying only in degree, capillary, shifting and rendering no one as completely powerless. My moment of disgust and other incidents from my field (discussed shortly), challenged my understanding of the state of ‘powerlessness’ as impossible. Whereas collective, vocalised and consistent disgust could become a tool for wielding power in a context, my singular and affective disgust became a moment for me to realise my isolation in an in-group, a situation of powerlessness among devotees, whose very belief, expressed in the eagerness to eat from the guru’s plate legitimized their participation in that event. If, according to the Foucaldian view, power varies in degrees, that moment for me was a moment of power at zero degrees. Can every attempt and effort translate into having power or being powerful? Does there not exist (even if only brief moments of) complete powerlessness? Even though the prerogative to remain in a situation or not might rest with one, it does not necessarily hold potential for moving things/wielding power in one’s favour.

Feeling the disgust and expressing it, however discreetly, did indeed evoke the power that I held latently. It lay in my prerogative of choosing a secular stance, employing the lens of an atheist to critique and reject the blessed leftovers. The incident evoked my power as a researcher as it made me feel exposed and vulnerable simultaneously, like the outsider I was, who was not supposed to be where she was. It was then a moment that questioned my power in the field, the researcher in me felt exposed – my ideological affiliations, which I knew were not welcome in that gathering were evoked. While I felt powerless and exposed in that gathering, it also evoked my ideological affiliation which held power too but elsewhere – the power of which indeed, gave me the wherewithal to enter a religio-political space to comprehend it. The power indeed of being able to critique and report it all; of being able to write and publish and be read and find agreement. But all of this was not going to help me navigate the field. There, I was peripheral and therefore the incident shook me and made me feel vulnerable and unsure.

If disgust marks boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable, civil and uncivil, what was it that made those leftovers evoke disgust for me and devotion for the devotees? As a heuristic what did disgust teach me? Belief in the guru or the lack of it was the provocateur of devotion or disgust. My disgust uncovered a latent and complex hierarchy in an otherwise equal feeling space, as it often does – creating and marking boundaries (Durham 2011). My disgust and then rejection of what was considered a blessing put me in a jeopardy. It unveiled my caste, class (through abhorrence of leftover food) and ideological (failing to look at it as a blessing) positions, amplifying the moment for me to help me read the layers of construction of my field.

On the face of it, it may look like the devotees are consuming a lesson in humility and castelessness with the pinch of those leftovers, as eating another’s especially a lower caste woman’s leftover may look like an equalizer. South Asian religious traditions have many such examples of non-upper caste gods – there’s a distinction between what is permissible for spiritual purposes and what is necessary for material existence. A lesson in humility that this may look like, therefore, doesn’t essentially cut across all aspects of devotees’ lives. I would evoke Lee’s (2021) caution here of “the pitfalls in theorizing caste and class hierarchy, of relying for data only on what is avowed, explicit and transparent to the self (2021, 311)”, to argue that even though this seemingly casteless act seals the belonging with their guru, this very belonging reinforces their caste-class habitus where disgust – both arising out of and leading to maintenance of social distance and difference, is experienced and practiced against the lower castes in subtle ways discursively through the unsaid hierarchy inherent in the very concepts of seva – the central religion tenet and Sanskar – the possession of upper caste, class habitus in order to qualify to practice seva.

Arguing for bringing in ‘personal belief’ as a central and not a peripheral concern for the production of anthropological knowledge about religion, I carve out the operation of belief and power in my field with help from some ethnographic vignettes.

The emergence of my field

The geographical centre of my field was the Delhi ashram of Mata Amritanandamayi. It is situated on a farm house plot, which a devotee gifted to his guru. Going to the field initially meant going to the ashram every day, picking up whatever seva work was available, other than one fixed work of tutoring open school students for social sciences. I took the opportunity to talk to whoever was willing to spare some time and sometimes sat doing mechanical work like cutting vegetables for meals, just observing daily activities around me. The ashram was very different on weekdays than what it was on a Sunday ¹³ , when it was teeming with people and activities. Organic vegetables from the ashram’s farm nearby were put on sale, people sat in groups cutting kilos of vegetables for the prasad after bhajans, ¹⁴ some sat chatting in the hall, catching up on their week and the office was abuzz with inquiries, while bhajans and havan ¹⁵ went on in the main hall with varied consortium of voluntary singers and musicians every week. Most devotees looked at me as a harmless and useful outsider, who they could use for random, minor errands, which I was happy to do, as those apparently insignificant tasks many a times proved to be connecting dots for me; and in whom they could confide their feelings of dissatisfaction with the organisation’s system at large as well as their deep love for their guru.

I was made very aware from the first day of my fieldwork that I was as observed in the field as I was observing the field. Being a researcher held around me a rather suspicious air, which I had to navigate and reach out to my respondents, repeatedly. As the power balance kept shifting throughout the duration of my fieldwork, I had to improvise and strategise and I often found myself checking internally for the rightful ethics of my method. My lack of belief in the guru or any other religious activity in the ashram, like the Sunday havans or the occasional pujas, ¹⁶ also meant that I had to keep stoking my interest in the field on a regular basis. As Karim noted, the fieldworker was caught up in a situation dealing with two kinds of reflexivity, the “self” as both “object” and “subject” and “other” as “observed” and “observer” (in Palriwala 2005, 157). I would decide to avoid certain monotonous work or people on certain days and choose to go sit with a more inviting and enlivening group of people on certain others. Very soon into my fieldwork I had decided that I would associate myself with Ayudh. Ayudh is a group of young volunteers under the age of 35, working towards realising the movement’s goals of social service and spreading awareness about Amma’s message of “selfless love and service for humanity.” Most Ayudh members were young, cosmopolitan and very dynamic people and were deeply religious, which paved the understanding of the religious habitus for my research (Verma 2024). Many of my initial misgivings about the field were eased by the contingent nature of the everyday as the field unfolded and I ended up learning deeply about my field and about my own personal limitations, apprehensions and biases, class being one of them, which helped me learn the field better.

Belief as belonging to the guru: participant overpowers the observer

Ayudh had to set up a cafeteria, where the members procure raw material, cook and sell food, whenever Amma visits. With planning and role allotting for the cafeteria and a play performance we exhaustively rehearsed for, the run up to the first day of the visit had been very hectic. Even though duties were allocated to all the members much before the day the cafe had to be set up, the casual nature of the initiative meant that there were a lot of delays in procuring material and utensils, withdrawal by members, coming in of entirely new people on the day itself, who had not attended any preparatory meetings despite regular calls but wanted to contribute and do seva and had to be accommodated.

Despite my best efforts, I reached the cafe around 9 am, two hours later than planned, but I was still one of the early birds. The cafe was yet to be set up and started. The few of us who were around, immediately got to work. Cleaning, chopping, mashing, arranging utensils, setting up the counter - everything that required to be done till the cafe was finally ready to take orders. The day went by in a frenzy. When I left at 10 in the night, my head was spinning and I could barely keep awake to drive myself home.

There was a lot of confusion about the role distribution in the cafe and the coordination among the various teams, as people kept coming in and going out, taking up whatever role they liked and taking breaks whenever they wished. Everyone worked to their best efforts but pleas of maintaining coordination among people working together were either ignored, taken offensively or forgotten after some little yet sincere effort put in. The difficulty of coordination overwhelmed me. I felt that the task was impossibly difficult, working with complete strangers, all having different styles of working, different efficiency levels and different talents. Also we were quite a varied age group, from 13 to 55 plus. All connected with only one centrality: their belief in Amma, a mental state I was not privy to.

The food court was in a compound opposite the ashram, where Amma sat on the stage in the main hall, hugging people who came to see her. We could catch snatches of what was going on inside the ashram, especially on the stage, through the LCD screen in the food court. At special moments like Amma’s arrival on the stage, the bhajans and her aarti, all of us left whatever we were doing to look at the screen. The customers also momentarily left all interest in shopping the merchandise or eating or pressing us to hurry up with their orders. The mood of devotion heightened at these moments. It seemed almost as though people were getting energised by just looking at Amma. Their facial expressions would grow devout, they would close their eyes in bliss at beholding their guru and fold their hands in reverence, raising them to their forehead and trying to retain that feeling by keeping still in that position for some time, before returning to whatever they were doing. In that environment of ubiquitous devotion, I too felt as if I was getting bouts of energy just by looking at Amma, which kept pushing me to go on with a smile on an otherwise exhausting and manically disorganised day. My field notes for that day started with the following statement, “it was a long day. My physical limits got tested over the two days, very similar to how Amma’s are when she sits for marathon darshans.” Reflecting on this sentence later, brought to mind the sense of empathy and mimesis that devotees experience with their guru. Something I had noticed during my initial days in the field, when in the middle of a composting lesson, Neeru ji had mentioned how wastage of food or water made her feel physically hurt. One of Amma’s famous quotes says that when someone wastes water or food, she feels like her physical body hurts. Was I being like a devotee? My observer’s lens had certainly blurred for a day, if not broken or lost its focus.

Later that evening, my daughter and my husband joined me in the ashram. To my surprise, my six-year-old got very interested in meeting and hugging Amma. I had never spoken to her about the guru. It must be the merchandise, especially the flower garland you buy for her as you go to see her, or the fact that it is a hug for everyone and she did not want to miss out on it, or maybe it was because her cousin was so keen on meeting Amma. As my mind raced through possible reasons for her unexpected interest, a smile broke on my face. I was happy that she wanted to see her. Why, I was not sure. My husband could see a change in my body language and general disposition especially in the way I spoke about the guru and Ayudh and he quizzed me about it. “It’s just the environment”, I covered up quickly, not willing to critically confront my feelings at the time as I felt that what I was going through was rather ineffable and wanted to stay in the zone longer, without trying to analyse it.

Other than the overwhelming feeling of devotion which I could not comprehend, I also felt as a part of a graded system, which I belonged to the periphery of. As we saw people from our own Ayudh group (some of whom had not worked for as long as others did, especially to plan and execute the café and the plays) going to the stage, getting special (out of turn and longer) hugs from Amma, or doing her aarti (considered a rare privilege), Divya, a team member and a young civil services aspirant from a small agrarian town (who is a part of Ayudh on her own accord and not because her Delhi based parents are devotees of Amma, which usually is the case) commented, “ye sab stage pe hain, hum to kahin nahi hain, bas yahin hain” (all these people get to go to the stage, and we are just meant to serve here). I was taken aback at the frank admission of hierarchy among the devotees by this young woman and at how it mirrored my own feelings at the time. To this, Rimpy, another young devotee, consolingly as well as self-soothingly responded “sab Amma ki kripa hai” (it’s all Amma’s grace) before she went back to mashing potatoes. I had also been feeling quite overused and under-acknowledged by the entire system. While earlier, I would just reconcile with my discomfort at the non-recognition of my hard work by thinking of it as my ethical duty, my obligation to my respondents, that day I too felt that I deserved to be acknowledged for the hard work I put in. But, as others, who probably felt that way too, I quickly and surprisingly found solace in the refrain: it is all Amma’s grace. As I was dealing with an internal surprise at this new, unfamiliar state of mind, I noticed that shortly after her very vocal protest about the unjustified hierarchy among devotees, Divya, who was sitting at the cash counter had suddenly gone into a meditative mode. She sat with a benign expression on her face, smiling with her eyes shut and back straight. She sat like that for a long time, regardless of many of us trying to wake her up from her trance-like state and get her back to work. At this point, I remembered Ritika narrating to me how some more active devotees think that Amma is their “property” and they try to keep their lobby closer to her by keeping the other devotees, who did not frequent the ashram much, outside the loop of information about her movement. Her long and bitter narration of the ugly devotee politics had ended with a reconciling last statement, “but Amma knows everything. We all have an individual relationship with her, these people cannot do anything about that.” This concluding line was a reiteration of her undying belief, which not only discredited the biased treatment meted out to her by other devotees but also reiterated her perceived equality in Amma’s eyes. That day, in the cafeteria, feeling similarly sidelined, unseen and overshadowed by who I thought were less committed than me, I too found my rescue in the same sentiment. Looking at the screen, I felt an unfamiliar welling of tears in my eyes every time Amma appeared or when I watched darshans in progress. I could not make sense of why I was feeling that way and I feared, but also looked forward to, breaking down in her arms and crying inconsolably, during my darshan the next day.

My everyday lens of the participant observer, who would look at devotee politics as politics among people who had differential resources and personalities to navigate this space, had been temporarily replaced by a typical devotee’s religious viewpoint, where one’s belief and the strength and endurance of it decided one’s power position among the devotees.

The contagion was facilitated by many other factors, like it being the most congenial and immediately available distraction amidst a crazy and unstructured work day and the way the bhajans sung that day were modified to appeal to the Delhi crowd culture with chants of the very familiar ‘jai mata di’ and ‘mata rani ki jai’. The juxtaposition of the stressful state of my body and mind with an overwhelmingly religious outer environment – familiar even though unsubscribed, and the months long anticipation of the day created an unfamiliar sensorium which caught me unaware. Months of tuning into the physical state of the sevaite had finally brought me closer to one’s mental state (Mahmood 2011). Being in that zone that day taught me that expression of belief in and surrender to the guru was a way, however subconscious, for the devotees to affectively belong to the community of Amma’s devotees and to claim their rightful place in the system, have expectations of the system and the guru. A system which operated on interpersonal power dynamics but which was made to look fair through their belief in the guru. The guru being the centrality, devotees were both the means to get closer to her as well as hurdles in each other’s way to her. Belief then was belonging beyond these hurdles and seva, its manifestation; ensuring devotees a place in the power play in a field where all Amma’s children were, in principle, equal.

As Asad tells us, operation of power and history colours the nature of belief and belief influences meaning making. Given that belief itself is a result of power dynamics, belief differentials have to be taken as contingent and open to variation and change. Asad emphasises, “it is important to keep clearly distinct that which theology tends to obscure: the occurrence of events (utterances, practices, dispositions) and authorizing processes that give those events meaning and embody that meaning in concrete institutions (1983, 245).” Power and authorization are what determine a certain accessibility of a religious experience, social world and spiritual world are not mutually exclusive but are embedded in each other.

Belief was clearly both a consequence of power dynamics in the ashram (though not just that), as well as a modality of engaging in it, as an equal. The equality that I talk about here is only in terms of the perception of the devotees, who believe that they are all equal for their guru, on a metaphysical realm, but the equality has to be asserted and claimed through the currency of belief. The production and sustenance of belief thus becomes a cyclical process, manifested in and reinforced through seva - a tangible marker of one’s spiritual growth as well as the pivot of one’s relationship with the guru.

My disorientation at being ousted from the religious habitus on the day I felt disgusted and rejected the leftovers of the guru, had been settled. If that day was a realisation that I was indeed an ideological outsider and the feelings of powerlessness that followed palpably brought out that power lies in belonging and belonging in belief, I had experienced that belonging and power this day. I am not sure though, if I would have still eaten those leftovers this day.