Rhetoric of Technoscience in North IndianVernacular Asceticism

Antoinette E. DeNapoli

ContentsIntroduction: Religious Imaginaries of the “Modern” and the Rhetoric of Technosciencein Contemporary India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Performing the Modernity of Dharma Through the Rhetoric of Technoscience: The Caseof a North Indian Female Guru . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6“You Can’t Carry a Corpse Around for Long”: Reimagining Hindu Dharma for Today’sTimes Through the Story of Shiva and Sati . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9“The Greatest Love Story on Earth”: Reimagining the Dharma-Technoscience RelationshipThrough Indic Concepts of Divinity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13“You Can’t Leave the World Without Giving”: Accountability, Responsibility, and Rethinkingthe Modern in the Renunciant Rhetoric of Technoscience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16Conclusions: The Hindu-Inspired Modernity that a Female Guru’s Performing the Rhetoricof Technoscience Creates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

AbstractThis chapter fills a lacuna in the current scholarship on the religion and sciencedialectic in respect to the dharma traditions of the Indian subcontinent by callingattention to a specific ethnographic example of the ways that Hindu renouncers(sādhus) make sense of that interface. Through case study analysis, the chapteralso spotlights a phenomenon termed “experimental Hinduism” which, is illus-trated by sādhus’ performance of religious narratives to reconceive the dominantparameters of Hinduism (dharma) and include in that fluid category the notion oftechnoscience. Based on extensive ethnographic research conducted with sādhusin North India, the chapter argues that their understandings of technoscience asthat which is derived from, rather than opposed to, Hindu cosmological visions of

A. E. DeNapoli (*)Department of Religion, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USAe-mail: memsahb2007@gmail.com; a.denapoli@tcu.edu

# Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018S. D. Brunn et al. (eds.), Handbook of the Changing World Language Map,https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73400-2_26-1

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the evolution of divine manifestation in the world allow for the expansion of theconceptual boundaries of Hinduism. Through performance of the “rhetoric ofrenunciation,” such as their stories (kahāniyān) and devotional expositions(dharma-kathā), in which their application of modernist scientific language isamplified and made plausible for Indic conditions, sādhus resignify Hinduism bysituating its foundational concepts of dharma, Brahman, and sakti in the moderncontext of technoscience. Using performance studies-centered theoretical frame-works, according to which aesthetically heightened speech practices become themeans to construct worldviews that support or challenge cultural institutions andideologies, the chapter shows the sādhus perform their rhetoric to create dharmicinterpretations of the religion-technoscience interface. In addition, the synchro-nizing of technoscience with dharma that their performances create makes itpossible to fashion dharmic notions of the “modern” in contemporary India.

KeywordsHinduism · Modernity · Technoscience · Performance · Storytelling · Gurus ·Sādhus · Social change · South Asia

The meaning of dharma is to always be new. Every day is new. Every day is modern. We arealways modern, because the necessities of human life change daily. Bhuvneshwari Puri GuruMa 2015

Introduction: Religious Imaginaries of the “Modern”and the Rhetoric of Technoscience in Contemporary India

The Indian subcontinent has undergone dramatic sociocultural, economic, environ-mental, technological, and historical changes in the current globalizing milieu of thetwenty-first century. Many of these transformations have been in the STEM-relatedfields, which academic discourse has generally grouped under the umbrella categoryof “technoscience.” The Indic religions, or dharma traditions, of South Asia andSoutheast Asia have played a key role in making sense of the meanings, applications,and consequences of technoscience for human life and flourishing across historicalmilieu (Brown 2012; Jain 2011, 2016; Paranjape 2008). Wrestling with the uncer-tainties of technoscience and humans’ increasing use and dependence on it has pushedthe dharma traditions in Asian and diasporic contexts to experiment with their dom-inant definitional boundaries in new and creative ways and, by addressing the chal-lenges of contemporary life wrought by the (intended and unintended) results ofglobalization (Darlington 2012), establish religious traditions that possess the moralpower and the social capital to direct, and not only respond to, the course of modern-ization (Chandler 2004; McMahan 2008; Rocha 2012; Tanabe and Reader 1998).

This chapter investigates the religion and technoscience interface with respectto contemporary Hinduism, one of the many vital dharma traditions of the Indiansubcontinent, as experienced and “performed” by renouncers (sādhus) residing in

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different regions of North India. As a class of religious practitioners, sādhus followan unconventional way of life, leaving behind the normative worldly expectations ofmarriage, family, and householding in order to devote themselves permanently to theworship of the divine (Olivelle 1992). The radical way of life practiced by sādhus istermed renunciation (sannyāsa). In whatever way that sādhus embody their renun-ciation – and there are as many ways to live sannyāsa “on the ground” as there aresādhus – its goal typically emphasizes realizing the presence and power of the divineAbsolute through the means of sacred experiences of divine union or communion.

In the religious worlds of renunciation, whether illustrated by religious textualwritings (Olivelle 1992, 1996) or performed by means of everyday ritual, social,bodily, and religious practices (DeNapoli 2014; Dobe 2015; Flood 2004), breakingfree from the “world” becomes the means to break free from the gripping cycle ofrebirth (samsāra) and achieve liberation from existence (mokṣa), the summumbonum of sannyāsa. The specialized Indian and, more specifically, Hindi languageterms for renouncers across the continuum of sects and traditions are sannyāsī(masculine) and sannyāsinī (feminine), yogī (m) and yoginī (f), and bābā (m;literally, “holy father”) and mātārām/mairām (f; “holy mother”). To minimizesemantic confusion, this chapter uses the generic term “sādhu” to describe therenouncers for the fact that many of them, too, employed the term in their ownself-representations. The feminine form of sādhu is “sādhvi”; however, none of thesādhus characterized themselves through the use of that term, preferring “sādhu”instead, as “sadhvi,” according to the sādhus, describes married women who becomepossessed by goddesses and perform ritual healings in temples and shrines. Conso-nant with the demanding requisites of renunciant life, the sādhus with whomI collaborated have left behind traditional kinship relations and the ritual responsi-bilities that once structured their worlds; they lead lives of celibacy, simplicity,purity, and voluntary poverty. The literature on renunciation has brought to lightsādhus’ reconceiving of Hinduism’s boundaries through rhetorical practice. How-ever, it has not addressed the ways those practices not only provide unorthodox sitesfor responding to the global issues of technoscience, human rights, feminism,development, and sustainability but also made it possible to reinterpret the meaningsand roles of Hinduism by bringing these modernist discourses to bear on itsdefinitional parameters (For an example of a sadhu-guru who performs religiousnarratives in order to bring normative religious understandings in line with modern-ist feminist visions of women’s equality, freedom, and rights, see DeNapoli 2016c).

This chapter fills a lacuna in the current scholarship on the religion and sciencedialectic in respect to the dharma traditions of the Indian subcontinent by callingattention to a specific ethnographic example of the ways that Hindu renouncers(sādhus) make sense of that interface. Through case study analysis, the chapter alsospotlights a sociocultural phenomenon that I have termed “experimental Hinduism.”This phenomenon is illustrated by the sādhus’ performance of devotional narrativesto reconceive the dominant definitional parameters of Hinduism and include in thatfluid category the notion of technoscience. Based on extensive ethnographic researchconducted with sādhus in North India, the chapter argues that their understandings oftechnoscience as that which is derived from, rather than opposed to, Hindu

Rhetoric of Technoscience in North Indian Vernacular Asceticism 3

cosmological visions of the evolution of divine manifestation in the world allow forthe expansion of the conceptual boundaries of Hinduism. The chapter contends thatthrough the performance of their “rhetoric of renunciation,” such as their stories(kahāniyān) and devotional expositions (dharma-kathā), in which their applicationof modernist scientific language is amplified and made plausible for contemporaryIndic conditions, the sādhus resignify Hinduism by situating its foundational con-cepts of dharma, Brahman, and sakti in the modern context of technoscience. Usingperformance studies-centered theoretical frameworks, according to which aestheti-cally heightened speech practices become the means to construct worldviews thatsupport and/or challenge cultural institutions, lifeways, and ideologies (Bauman1977; Brown 2003; Gold and Raheja 1994; Schechner and Appel 1990), the chaptershows that the sādhus perform their renunciant rhetoric to create dharmic interpre-tations of the religion-technoscience interface. In addition, the synchronizing oftechnoscience with dharma that their performances create helps them to fashiondharmic notions of the “modern” in contemporary India.

Performing the rhetoric of technoscience, the sādhus emphasize a tripartite set ofmotifs: change as the nature of dharma, change as the inherent property (“DNA”) ofa continually evolving Brahman (god) and manifest creation, and the relationshipbetween technoscience and the world of nature, inclusive of humanity, as symbiotic.That is, envisioning the emergence of innovations in the vast fields of technoscienceas the manifesting of an ever-expanding Brahman conceived to be the ultimatepower of emergence experienced in and through creation, and associating infinitehuman creativity as seen in those fields with the infinite creativity of Brahman, thesādhus perform the rhetoric of technoscience to widen what and how Hinduismmeans in the global twenty-first century. But just as significantly, they legitimate themodernity of dharmic identities and infuse changing sociocultural contexts withreligious meanings and values that locate the sādhus and their devotional commu-nities within a sacred Hindu cosmos.

The sādhus’ performances of the rhetoric of technoscience illustrate a powerfulrhetorical technique for engendering Hindu-inspired “social imaginaries” aboutmodernity, modern India, and modern Indian identity. As we will see, their concep-tions of the modern underscore that Hinduism (or, as the sādhus say, “dharma”)is the ultimate source and foundation for what constitutes the “modern” in contem-porary India. My use of the term “social imaginaries” is derived from the signal workof the social philosopher Charles Taylor, who, in coining this concept, defines it as“the way we collectively imagine, even pretheoretically, our social life in thecontemporary...world...and our social existence” (Taylor 2004: 50–51).

Thus, social imaginaries create and communicate not only shared (and dominant)visions of order, (the relation between) public and private life, governance, and,in Taylor’s words, “human flourishing” but also shared understandings of the selfand its sense of “embeddedness” in the larger body politic of the nation. Since India’sindependence from British colonialism in 1947, the Indian Congress Party, aswitnessed in the extended political leadership of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, hasshaped the dominant social imaginary of the modern “Indian nation” as a seculardemocracy established on the principles of equality, liberty, and (moral and

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economic) order. Not surprisingly, such an imaginary has been crafted in directconversation with dominant western social imaginaries of/for the modern and,by implication, Indian modernity (indeed, many of the leaders of the CongressParty were educated in elite institutions in the west). However, with the defeat ofthe Indian Congress Party under the waning leadership of Sonia Gandhi and her son,Rahul Gandhi, in the national elections in 2014, and the meteoric rise and, lateron, inauguration of then Gujarat’s chief minister Narendra Modi to the position ofIndia’s prime minister in May of 2014, a competing social imaginary has emerged onthe Indic cultural landscape. In this framework, the rhetoric of dharma and techno-science are being strategically intertwined in various ways to generate culturalunderstandings of the modern as in sync with the religious wisdom traditions ofSouth Asia. As Indian media sources have indicated, Modi’s leadership has pavednew and controversial pathways in the reimagining of the modern Indian nationthrough the use of dehistoricized notions of yoga, Ayurveda (and other Indiansystems of healing), and dharma in the context of “technoscience” (Chari 2014).

In contrast to “top-down” nation-state-based political representations of thecompatibility of religion and technoscience in Indic cultural contexts, it is worthexamining “bottom-up” understandings of this interface in the rhetorical practices ofthe sādhus. This rationale becomes heightened in consideration that sādhus havetraditionally been itinerant wanderers – textual injunctions admonish that, exceptingthe rainy (or monsoon) season, they cannot settle in any place for more than 2 weeks(Olivelle 1996) – and their peripatetic lifestyle has helped them to transmit throughtheir practices religious teachings and inspire the moral commitments of Indiansacross caste, class, gender, and educational lines. As the spiritual virtuosi of India,whose respected social status and the cultural prestige ascribed to that status providethe means by which they command reverence, their influence on shaping everydayIndic understandings of the religion-technoscience dialectic has gone unexamined.The question we will consider in this discussion is: How might sādhus draw fromtheir extensive knowledge of dharmic teachings and perform the equivalence ofdharma and technoscience to construct a Hindu-inspired model of the “modern”?

Against this backdrop, the sādhus’ performing of their renunciant rhetoric to alignHindu dharma with technoscience and the modern represents at the local, and oftenunderrepresented, levels of renunciant experience and practice a microcosmic exam-ple of macrocosmic sociopolitical transformations occurring in a rapidly changingIndian subcontinent. The ways that the sādhus performatively architect the notion ofthe modern have to do with challenging western social imaginaries of the signifi-cance of the individual (or, as Taylor says, “disembeddedness”) by emphasizing theembeddedness of Indians, regardless of religious affiliation, in their everyday socialworlds of caste, community, and dharma as “authentically” Indian, by representingdharma as the authentic “technology” and, therefore, panacea for healing psycho-social fragmentation and achieving mind-body wholeness. In the next section, wewill examine the specificity of the religion-science relationship by examining therhetorical performances of a female guru.

Rhetoric of Technoscience in North Indian Vernacular Asceticism 5

Performing the Modernity of Dharma Through the Rhetoricof Technoscience: The Case of a North Indian Female Guru

There have been many debates recently about the relationship of Hinduism(or non-western traditions) and “science” in the discourse of Asian studies, religiousstudies, and modernization and globalization studies (see Bilimoria and Rayner2014; Brown 2012; Chandler 2004; Dorman 2011; Heifetz 2016; Jain 2016;Paranjape 2008). By turning to Indian classical texts, philosophical discourses, andthe writings of modern (ca. nineteenth and twentieth century) scholar intellectuals,much of this scholarship interrogates the binary assumptions implicit in westerndiscourses on the relationship of religion to science and teases out the epistemolog-ical compatibilities of Hinduism and science. For our purposes, I wish to show somecontemporary ways in which the arenas of Hinduism and science can work togetherby calling attention to a female sādhu’s performance of the rhetoric of technosciencewithin a North Indian Hindu devotional community. Bhuvneshwari Puri Guru Ma(henceforth, Guru Ma, a respectful form of address used by the devotees of hercommunity), a 31-year-old (ca. 2017) female Hindu sādhu and the guru of apredominantly middle-class community in Rajasthan, often announces in the publicreligious teachings (dharma-kaṭhā) she gives across India that she is “a modern[adhūnik] sādhu.” She also says that the modern Hindu dharma she teaches repre-sents not only a “way of life [jivanselī ]” but also “the best life experiment [prayog].”In many of her kaṭhās, Guru Ma performs the rhetoric of technoscience to emphasizethe relevance of dharma to contemporary Indian life and to her devotees’ lives, manyof whom work in STEM fields. She says that “dharma is the best technology” and“science is the deepest dharma.”

Here, we will explore what Guru Ma means by her use of the term “modern Hindudharma” and how performance makes it possible for her to tell familiar religiousstories, such as those about the Hindu deities Shiva and Shakti, in ways thatcommunicate new ideas and generate new (or alternative) knowledge for what“counts” as Hindu dharma and the modern in the contemporary Indian landscape.The narratives she performs frame dharma in relation to transnational issues ofmodernization (adhuniktā) and, relatedly, to science (vijnāna) and technology(taknīq), which I have termed “the forms of the modern” (DeNapoli 2017).By crafting a relationship between dharma and the modern through storytelling,Guru Ma reimagines these categories in the terms that help the people of hercommunity lead better lives and become more aware of their consumerist lifestyles.Her stories perform the possibility of a Hindu-inspired modernity as an alternative tothe dominant westernized models, which she criticizes her devotees for uncriticallyappropriating. By the same token, since the stories she tells about modern Hindudharma also articulate her views about the responsibility of “modern sādhus” tosociety, they adapt what renunciation means by virtue of dealing with the fact andreality of social change (see Darlington 2012, for an example of Thai Buddhistmonks who perform traditional rituals in new social contexts to introduce newconcepts and provoke change that serves local interests rather than government-based agendas).

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The data for this chapter is based on an ethnographic research study of renunci-ation and social change conducted between 2013 and 2015 in the adjoining NorthIndian states of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan and in the Union Territory of Silvassa(Dadra and Nagar Haveli), with sādhus, men and women, from the Shaiva(Dashanami and Nath) and Vaishnava (Tyagi, Sita Ram, and Vairagi) traditions.This chapter concentrates on the rhetorical practices of Guru Ma, whom I metin Rajasthan in the year 2015. This chapter presents her views of dharma as a casestudy illustrative of larger sociocultural patterns of renunciant understandings of thereligion-technoscience interface in North Indian contexts. Guru Ma, originally fromthe Central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, leads a predominantly high-casteconstituency, one which is made up of, as she claims, “at least 10,000 devotees,”many of whom live in various regions of North India and some of whom live in otherparts of Asia, such as Japan.

The modern (or modernized) Hindu dharma that Guru Ma constructs throughnarrative (kathā) performance shows how, and the extent to which, various NorthIndian sādhus and their communities, by addressing “the cultural programs ofmodernity” (Chandler 2004: 4), such as those concerned with, in the examplesfeatured here, modernization and technoscience, “are imprinting their own uniquestamps on modern global culture” (Ibid.). In effect, sādhu gurus like Guru Macontribute to the fashioning of what political scientist S.N. Eisenstadt (2000) hascharacterized in the language of “multiple modernities” (also cited in Chandler 2004:4). My analysis of the (version of) modern Hindu dharma that Guru Ma selectivelyconstructs through dharma-kaṭhā performance draws from and expands on a grow-ing lineage of recent scholarly work on Buddhism (Chandler 2004; Darlington 2012;McMahan 2008; Nelson 2013) and Hinduism (Goldberg and Singleton 2013;Heifetz 2016; Jain 2016; Srinivas 2010; Waghorne 2013; Warrier 2005) that exploresthe interaction of religious and modernist discourses in transnational contexts andsheds light on the “complex interrelation of continuity and innovation” (Chandler2004: 7). To that extent, much of this scholarship calls attention to what the scholarof Buddhism David McMahan (2008) has described as the “dynamic processof tradition-in-change” (179). He says that “The reconfiguration of traditionaldoctrine and practice in response to novel historical circumstances is the norm inthe development of religions” and that the elements of those traditions (such as texts,doctrines, and rituals) “are never static but are repeatedly reappropriated to deal withchanging situations” (Ibid.).

The chapter argues that Guru Ma’s modern Hindu dharma gives expression to“experimental Hinduism.” This concept calls attention to the creative reimaginingof the interpretive boundaries of Hinduism and the reframing of Hindu ideas andpractices that occurs when people like Guru Ma and her devotees construct theiridentities and negotiate their place in the world in light of what the scholar ofBuddhism Stewart Chandler has called the “intersection of competing forces: tradi-tion versus modernity, homogenized versus multiple identities, sacred versus secu-lar, and local versus global” (2004). My use of “experimental Hinduism” builds offof the historian of religion Patricia Ward’s (2009) idea of “experimental theology”and, more specifically, the anthropologist John K. Nelson’s (2013) notion of

Rhetoric of Technoscience in North Indian Vernacular Asceticism 7

“experimental Buddhism,” which describes Japanese Buddhist temple priests’innovative methods of social activism to address contemporary problems and keepBuddhism relevant in the society (see also Darlington 2012). The case of experi-mental Hinduism described in this chapter spotlights an emerging cultural phenom-enon, in which sādhus, who have sometimes been said to be “out-of-sync” withmodernity (Alter 2013), “critically examin[e] their traditions in light of contempo-rary situations” (Darlington 2012: 14) and, by adapting familiar religious stories tonew social contexts, evoke awareness of the problems created by modern globalculture and revise popular perceptions about religion and the changing worlds theylive in. The particular issues that Guru Ma talks about in her dharma-kaṭhās have todo with the mental, spiritual, and physical problems – which Charles Taylor hasaptly summarized as “the crisis of identity” – stemming from the international spreadof modern capitalism (i.e., “global capitalism”), consumerism, rapid industrial andeconomic growth, and the emphasis on individualism and decreased communityengagement (2004).

From this angle, all of Guru Ma’s performances examined herein strengthen therelevance of dharma, and by implication, sannyāsa in a changing Indian society, andenact the sādhus’ theologizing of the modern in contemporary India. For Guru Ma,reimagining the modern is related to her understanding that what and how dharmameans in the world, in which she includes past, present, and future, remain indeter-minate and contingent on account of the ever-changing conditions and circum-stances of people’s lives. More specifically, as the universal force, power, andenergy (urjā) of infinite creativity, intelligence, and expansion, dharma, as GuruMa says, encompasses more than the finite human capacity to know, represent, andexperience it through the use of symbols (pratīk), stories (kaṭhā), rituals (anuṣṭhān),rules (niyam), and rites (sanskāra). Associating dharma with the supreme femalepower of creation (sakti), and with the divine “cosmic body” (brahmānd) of god(Brahman) and goddess (Shakti), Guru Ma says that dharma “has many forms,” inwhich she includes science and technology, and that such forms mirror the infinitelyexpanding potentiality of dharma in the universe. Her idea of the modern carriesdual semantic overtones related to dharma’s purported infinite possibilities. On theone hand, the modern describes the present moment or situation and the changeshappening in that milieu. On the other hand, it refers to an attitude of being “open”to change in its many varieties and seeing it as an opportunity to transform outdatedor limiting modes of thinking and acting in the world. On this point, and to clarify,her dharmic vision of modern characterizes an atemporal style of thinking in that aperson can be “modern” in ancient times or “antimodern” in current times (Lyotard1984, cited in Esposito et al. 2015). Guru Ma’s understanding of the modern withrespect to being open to the diversity and plurality of human interpretations ofdharma and human conceptualizations of the world compares to French philosopherJean-Francois Lyotard’s (1984) idea of the “postmodern” with respect to “adecentered style of thinking that invites pluralism and rejects imposing a singletruth on all” (cited in Esposito et al. 2015: 30).

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In Guru Ma’s rhetoric, we neither find claims to Vedic rocket ships nor thenotion that modern science is anathema to Hinduism. Rather, we locate a twenty-first-century Indic approach that promotes a relational epistemology betweenHinduism and modern science in its attempt to enfold the latter within an updatedvision of the Hindu “sacred canopy” (Berger 1967). Even as Guru Ma’s perspectiveparallels approaches demonstrated by nineteenth-century Hindu thinkers, likeRamakrishna Paramahamsa and Swami Vivekananda, and the twentieth-centurythinker Aurobindo Ghose (Brown 2012; Dorman 2011; Korom 1991), the emphasisplaced on the “postmodern” values of indeterminacy, change, and contingency tofashion the pluralities of dharma situates her thinking within a milieu characteristicof multiple modernities (Benavides 1998).

Engaging the world of technoscience, Guru Ma’s rhetorical performances bringinto sharp focus an alternative constellation of the modern that is not only based inIndic traditions but also holds value for western societies. In such a signal moment ofIndia’s social history when competing religiopolitical narratives of the “modernIndian nation” frequently employ rhetorical gestures that seem to standardize themeanings of dharma by carving out determinate definitional parameters, it is signif-icant that Guru Ma resists this approach and offers a counterpoint to such discourses.Her practices provide an entrée into Indic views illustrative of the moral sentimentsof a dharmic modernity and underscore that being modern rests, in part, on acceptingthe conceptual indeterminacy of dharma. Let us now turn to the religious stories thatGuru Ma adapts through performance in order to rethink dharma for contemporarytimes.

“You Can’t Carry a Corpse Around for Long”: Reimagining HinduDharma for Today’s Times Through the Story of Shiva and Sati

The concept of change (badlāv) operates as a key theme in Guru Ma’s narrativeperformances. Using kathā contexts to expand ideas about dharma, she frames hertellings with the provocative statement that what people typically think dharmameans represents a minor aspect of what she says dharma “actually” is. She hastoldme that many of her devotees hold onto “stubborn” and “strict” understandings ofthe concept. One example she gives involves parents who complain that their childrenare moving “far away” from the protective “shield” and “shelter” of Hindu dharmain that they no longer want to perform the traditional worship ceremonies (pūjā),attend community gatherings (satsang) dedicated to dharmic instruction, or journeyto temples and shrines in order to receive divine blessings (asirvād). Guru Ma saysthat the parents blame the “modern” influences of cell phones and other digitaltechnologies (especially television), computers, and education for the waning interestof their children in dharma. From the parents’ perspectives, such influences, as GuruMa indicates, appear to affect their children’s views that dharma has no place in amodern world. Other examples she gives concern devotees who refuse to acceptscience on the basis that it conflicts with the teachings of sacred texts, or those who

Rhetoric of Technoscience in North Indian Vernacular Asceticism 9

say that science offers the “real” truth and consider dharma an embarrassment tomodernity. What stands out in these cases is that dharma and the modern representopposing spheres of experience and knowledge.

Complicating these dominant conceptions, Guru Ma emphasizes that “we aremodern Hindus” and defines modernization with respect to the capacity to change“according to the times.” She says that “modernization” [adhunkitā] comes fromthe word “adhi.” It means to run with the present. “Every day is new. Every day ismodern. We are always modern, because the necessities of human life change daily.”Establishing this interpretation of the modern, she constructs the congruence ofdharma and the modern. She says, “Dharma is always new and always changing.It always runs with the present. Change is the rule of nature and the natureof dharma.” She adapts the idea of dharma from ancient Vedic teachings on naturalorder (ṛta), from which Indic conceptions of dharma are derived, and uses it todescribe the dynamic principle of change running throughout the universe (for Vedichymns on order, see O’Flaherty, trans. 1991). What is unique in Guru Ma’s use of theword dharma is her application of it to conceptualize the modern. That is, dharma isseen to embody “the spirit of modernization” (see Chandler 2004, who makes asimilar, and persuasive, argument about the Chinese Foguang tradition of Buddhismand its understanding that the Buddhist dharma embodies “the spirit of modernity”in the global world). Or, to put the matter in a different way, the spirit of modern-ization is thought to materialize the principle of dharma. She considers moderniza-tion to be a manifestation of dharma as the principle of change in the world.

At the same time, “letting go” of the “old ways” (purāne tarīkhe) of thinking thatkeep people perpetually trapped in limiting understandings of themselves and thecomplex worlds they live in exemplifies, in Guru Ma’s view, the modern Hindu. Shesays that “we have to constantly revise our ideas, our thoughts, our ways, and ourtraditions if we want to know dharma.” Being open and flexible to change issynonymous with dharma. She stresses, “Dharma is the opposite of strictness.”People who refuse to change represent what Guru Ma calls the “antimodern”(rūdivāḍhī ; kattarpanthī ). She compares the antimodern, who “think that dharmacan only be this way, but not that way,” to people who go through life carryingaround a corpse (sav) on their shoulders. And, as she says, “you can’t carry a corpsearound for long.”

To illustrate her point, Guru Ma tells a story that is well-known among themembers of her community about the capricious Hindu god Shiva. As a deity whowields the complementary cosmic powers of world creation and world destructionwith a concentrated glance of his three eyes, Shiva refuses to release the body of hiswife (and the goddess) Sati after she has permanently left it, so that only a lifelesscorpse remains. A quarrel between Shiva and Sati’s father, Daksha, precipitatedSati’s decision to exit her body. In his escalating grief, Shiva grasps onto the corpseand, consumed by rage over Sati’s loss – a rage ignited by Shiva’s predilectiontoward cosmic destruction – drags the corpse around the cosmos as the other godswatch in shock. Guru Ma’s telling of this story drives home the idea that the“traditions” which her devotees tend to associate with dharma, such as the stories,symbols, and rituals, support social change and new ways of thinking about dharmain contemporary times. Here is her telling of that story:

10 A. E. DeNapoli

Shiva carried Sati’s (deceased) body on his shoulders because he loved her so much. Listen,this is the greatest love story on earth. There is no other story like it in the entire universe.See, Lord Shiva wasn’t ready to release Mother Sati’s body to the universe. . .So, LordVishnu said to the other gods, “This is a corpse. It’s not Sati. We need to separate Shiva fromthis corpse. If he continues to carry it around with him, he’ll never move forward.” Finally,Vishnu cut the body with his discus into many different parts. Those parts became the fifty-one śakti pīthas [places of power]. Sati is the symbol of dharma. She keeps changingaccording to the situation. . .. Whenever there is the need, dharma also changes.

To give some context to Guru Ma’s telling of this story, as I suggested earlier, thequarrel between Shiva and Daksha (Sati’s father), which signifies their contentiousrelationship, puts Sati in a moral bind (dharm-sankat) that, faced with supportingeither her unorthodox husband (the long-haired and wild Shiva) or her orthodoxfather (the ritual priest), she decides to avoid taking sides altogether and leaves herphysical body. Given that the conversational context in which Guru Ma narratedthis story hinged on distinguishing between the “modern” and the “antimodern,” thecontext performatively cues that the stubbornness illustrated by the mentalities of themen in Sati’s life contributes to her death. But rather than take this telling of the storyto mean that “Shiva and Daksha made Sati kill herself,” the key point that Guru Ma’stelling articulates is that a stubborn mentality is akin to killing oneself, whereas anopen mentality contributes to the flourishing of life. I will have more to say about thisidea later on in this discussion.

By adapting the Shiva-Sati story to address issues of social change, Guru Maopens up the interpretive parameters for what dharma is, how it means, and howit applies to challenging times of today. The symbol of Sati works well for herpurposes. In the Hindu traditions, Sati personifies the vitalizing creative energy offemale divinity known as sakti (or Devi) and, through the power of the femaledivine, symbolizes one of sakti’s many forms (Mookerjee 1988; Mookerjee andKhanna 1989; Sherma 2001). Associating dharma with the goddess Sati, Guru Mastretches the meaning of dharma beyond the standard notion of rituals, rules, andrites and equates it with the supreme female creative power of the universe. Sati’sown dramatic transformation amplifies the principle of change even as it callsattention to the idea that change depicts sakti’s divine nature and comprises a divinefunction of that infinitely expanding female power.

Crafting conceptual equivalence between dharma and Sati helps Guru Ma toreinterpret dharma through the use of the fluid language of change and contingency,because, like sakti, dharma changes whenever the need for change arises in theworld. Guru Ma’s interpretation of dharma in connection with the “rule” or law ofchange in the cosmos draws from religious teachings featured in an authoritativeHindu text, the Devī -Māhātmya, which is part of the Markandeya Purāna anddescribes in 700 verses the changing forms of the goddess (Devi), who repeatedlyincarnates in the world in cases in which dharma is threatened by evil (adharmic)forces (Coburn 1991; Erndl 1993; Erndl and Hiltebeitel 2001; Humes 2001). Thistheme of the reincarnation of a goddess, or a god, in times of chaos occursthroughout the Hindu textual traditions, such as in the Bhagavad Gī tā, a text that

Rhetoric of Technoscience in North Indian Vernacular Asceticism 11

precedes the Devī -Māhātmya by as much as a millennium, and in the collection ofPurānas associated with the ten incarnations of the god Vishnu.

But what Guru Ma accomplishes through means of performance that brings afresh perspective to the dominant understandings of dharma and the divine feminineis that she correlates the creative power by which capacity Sati constantly changesform and reappears in the world for the beneficent (and divinely justified) purpose ofsaving dharma in the cosmos with what dharma is and how it works in existence.Whether she changes forms or saves the world from evil, the goddess can do whatshe does because she is dharma, and dharma is the goddess. Commonly envisionedby the Hindu traditions in the frame of the moral principle of righteousness, throughthe impulse of the transformative life force of the goddess depicted in Guru Ma’sstory, dharma generates the change that makes a righteous world possible.

The goddess-dharma equation performatively crafted through Guru Ma’s kathāssituates both the fact and significance of change within an authoritative religioussymbolic. What is more, just as no single form ever captures sakti’s infinity (as GuruMa says, “new forms of the goddess emerge all the time”), and infinite manifesta-tions, in the same way, no single idea, tradition, or practice ever encompassesthe infinite potentiality characterizing the nature of dharma as “the principle” ofchange. Guru Ma’s story suggests that no person, religious or otherwise, can claimto have a monopoly on what counts as dharma, and, therefore, on what “truth” (sat)is. In this conception, the modern Hindu accepts what she calls “the storms ofchange” to come (i.e., the notion that the world changes and must change becauseits material nature [prakṛti] embodies the quality of change). By contrast, theantimodern refutes change and its possibilities for world renewal. The modernHindu, as Guru Ma says, “is ready to release the old for the new to arrive.” Shesays “good things came out of Sati’s change because the 51 sakti pī thas werecreated.” For her, the story teaches that “people have to see the good in change.”Otherwise, like an obstinate Shiva who clings to Sati’s corpse, people cannot “moveforward.” Guru Ma’s Sati narrative suggests that far from threatening the continuityof creation, change ensures the flourishing of life. Change, then, is not only a fact oflife, but it is also “good” for life. Without it, there would be no creation, no world,and no existence.

The property of change that Guru Ma attributes to dharma heightens that allforms of knowledge are relative and all meaning is contingent (Benavides 1998;Esposito et al. 2015). Postmodern thinking seems to play a role in her narrativeconstructions of dharma and the modern with respect to her views of change,diversity, plurality, and contingency. That a young female guru can lead thousandsof devotees who come from mostly high-caste backgrounds and build. An alternativesocial life to the normative societal expectations that prescribe strict gender roles,while emphasizing and that her life exemplifies what she says is “real” dharma inpractice, calls attention to the rights that “today’s” Indian women, including GuruMa, can claim and benefit from as the result of the long and hard-won struggles ofIndians, men and women, for gender justice, rights which have come to characterizean aspect of the postmodern milieu. It is important to point out that the ritual role ofsādhu, and more specifically, guru, affords Indian women like Guru Ma the freedom

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of movement that is typically uncommon for high-caste (North) Indian women. Bymaking this statement, this chapter does not mean to suggest at all that women do notbend or break such prescriptions (see the work of Gold and Raheja (1994) for anillustration of this notion in North India).

By the same token, Guru Ma’s postmodern thinking also appears to be theproduct of reinterpreting a vast Hindu tradition. As Gustavo Benavides (1998:192) reminds us, it is important for scholars of religion to consider that notions ofpostmodernity, and the virtues that are often suggested by those concepts, may befound within the resources of non-western religions, rather than constitute the soleintellectual capital of the western world. From Guru Ma’s perspective, the constantlyexpanding power of dharma, which, in her teachings, encircles the universe like acontainer and flows through it, presents what she calls the “greatest life experiment”by virtue of the indeterminacy of its imaginative possibilities. This interpretationhelps Guru Ma to emphasize that dharma embodies “the best technology” and “thedeepest science.”

“The Greatest Love Story on Earth”: Reimagining the Dharma-Technoscience Relationship Through Indic Concepts of Divinity

Representing dharma through the use of the Sati symbol suggests an important ideawith respect to the ways in which Guru Ma conceptualizes the relationship betweendharma and the forms of the modern, like science and technology. Her telling ofthe Shiva-Sati story is helpful for making sense of this interface. It is perhaps nocoincidence that many of the stories that Guru Ma performs in public devotionalcontexts to explain the interaction between dharma and science concern those aboutShiva and Shakti. Her teachings on modernization are drawn from her interpretationsof Shakta goddess theology. She talks about science and technology – and theenvironment – in Shakta theological terms (see DeNapoli 2016a). “Shakti” isanother name for the great goddess. When this chapter talks about the goddess asa life force/divinity/personality, the name “Shakti” is used, but when it discusses thepower and potentiality ascribed to the divine feminine, “śakti” is used. In thisexcerpt, Guru Ma uses Shakti to refer to the great goddess (Devi).

Approached from a Shakta perspective, Guru Ma understands science – ortechnoscience more generally – to symbolize the form of Shiva and dharma tosymbolize the form of the goddess Parvati, another manifestation of sakti. Theirrelationship, which Guru Ma envisions in terms of duality and unity, signifies the“marriage” (vivāha) between science and dharma. Speaking about the dharma-science dialectic, she draws on the story of Parvati and Shiva’s celestial marriage.“I like this story a lot,” she says. “It tells us that Shiva and Parvati live togetherin love (prema), and that mutual understanding is essential to their happiness as acouple. Shiva belongs to Parvati, and Parvati belongs to Shiva. But Shiva never triesto be Parvati, and Parvati never tries to be Shiva. This is the difference [betweenthem]. Both remain exactly who they are. In this marriage, both are equal. Both arenecessary for the welfare [kalyāna] of the world. Both must coexist so that the world

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can move forward in a good way.” The correlation that she crafts between dharmaand science foregrounds their compatibility, complementarity, and congruence.Interpreting that relationship through the familiar story of Parvati and Shiva’s divinematrimony puts into perspective her view that the dharma-science relationshiprecalls the “greatest love story on earth.”

But there is more to this love story. In this marriage, Shiva and Parvati are neitheralways “equal,” nor is their relationship necessarily commensurate. Often, in Shaktatheology, and in Guru Ma’s Shakta-based syncretistic teachings, Parvati standssupreme. As a form of the ultimate sakti principle, Parvati holds all the power,while Shiva serves Parvati as a divine feminine force and tries to understand,according to his capacity, her changing nature and forms. Although Guru Ma talksabout the compatibility between Shiva and Parvati, the Shakta theology on whichshe draws to interpret their relationship, and that between science and dharma,comes through in the dichotomous ways she describes their individual personalitiesand characteristics. To give an illustration, she says that Shiva is “wild” and“unkempt” ( junglī ), but Parvati is “civilized” (sabhya). Shiva is “incomplete”(adhūrā), whereas Parvati is “complete” (sampūrna). Along similar lines, Shiva’spower, like time (kāla), is “finite” or “limited” (sīmit), whereas Parvati’s is “infinite”(ananta). Guru Ma describes this difference as follows: “Shiva is the form of thedestroyer. He’s the form of time. You will not have different forms of the destroyer.But Shakti is the world; and the world exists only through her form. She alwayschanges form, because she is the incarnation of the world [duniyā].”

Shiva’s secondary status in relation to Shakti has to do with the prevailing Shaktaview that he, like all creation, including the other male gods, represents Shakti’sprogeny, her “seed,” born of her body (Erndl 1993; McDaniel 1989; Mookerjee1988; Sherma 1998, 2001). Against a Shakta theological backdrop, the cornerstoneof Guru Ma’s thinking about dharma and modernization is built on the symbol of theseed (bī ja) as a metaphor for the “cosmic body” and power of divinity (DeNapoli2017; Nelson 1998). In her words, “The most important thing in existence is theseed. It contains all the information of the universe.”

While seed imagery is found in Shakta theology, it is also featured in some of theearliest Upaniṣads, like the Chandogya Upaniṣad (CU 6.12) (Olivelle 1996). GuruMa’s idea of the seed is, in fact, drawn directly from this late Vedic text. Buther reading of this imagery updates its application and, in the process, its meaningfor Indic contexts. Her pedagogical approach is comparable to the methodsimplemented by the Thai Buddhist monks described in the work of Buddhismscholar Sallie King. According to King, prominent scholar monks in Thailand,who seek to combine traditional Buddhist principles with innovative conservationefforts, “think outside of the box of established Buddhist interpretations” and are“uniquely creative in applying Buddhism to the modern world”; they “. . .provokeothers as a skillful means in order to. . .get others to see things in a fresh way, to thinkdeeply on matters which the established understanding had shut off” (King 2002:291, n. 4, cited in Darlington 2012: 171). Guru Ma’s innovative use of the seedsymbol has similarly allowed her to “think outside of the box” of established Hinduinterpretations and be “uniquely creative” in applying Hindu dharma to contempo-rary problems.

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More specifically, in her teachings on the seed, she says it represents the con-stantly expanding “body” (sarīr) of the divine. Sometimes Guru Ma identifies thedivine with Brahman, but more often with sakti. She also clarifies that the divine“cosmic body” refers to what she imagines to be the always expanding, growing, andmoving universe, namely, the brahmānd. But what is distinctive about Guru Ma’srepresentation of the seed has to do with her understanding that the seed not onlycontains “Shakti’s ‘DNA’” but also that sakti (as both the goddess and life energy)and the seed “are the same.” That is, the property of change, which is evident in theprocesses of cosmic expansion and movement, and which is contained within thedivine principle, is seen to be equivalent to divinity itself (DeNapoli 2017).The implication is that Guru Ma interprets the meaning of the seed in a differentway than is often suggested in the texts from which she borrows that imagery inorder to purport the evolution of divinity (for Hindu perspectives on evolution anddivinity, see Brown 2012; Korom 1991). Unlike the conventional Upanishadic andShakta applications, in which the seed symbolizes the “essence” of a changelessdivinity underlying the manifest world of change, for Guru Ma, the seed signifiesessence with respect to “God’s DNA,” which, according to her, “changes to meet theneeds of the world.” She explains:

Take the example of an ‘amoeba.’ It is a kind of seed. An amoeba is always dividing andmultiplying into many cells, because of its DNA. Each new cell has the DNA of the originalcell. DNA always changes according to the environment [in which it lives]. God and DNAare the same. God’s DNA is to divide, to multiply, and, through that, to become present inexistence. God’s DNA is to change, to create, to expand in all directions. God always takesthe form of the world and God changes according to the environment of that world.

Guru Ma’s view parallels ideas articulated within the emerging field of epigenetics(Francis 2012). When I pointed this out to her, she agreed. She said, “It is necessaryto have science. It is necessary to use science. Whether it is geography, physics,math, or medicine, all science develops from dharma. Like Shiva born of Shakti’sbody, science is born of dharma.” Explaining divinity and its creative processesthrough the use of the rhetoric of technoscience provides a means for Guru Ma andher devotees “to make dharma relevant to contemporary life” (Darlington 2012). Bythe same token, using Shakta theology, she positions science, generally speaking,within the encompassing sacred canopy of dharma, which she imagines in the senseof the infinite wellspring of knowledge concerning life and the ways of knowing theuniverse. Hence, much like Shiva’s lower status in relation to Shakti, science, incomparison to dharma, remains limited and secondary. But because what scienceseeks to comprehend through its (finite) methods and theories is dharma, that is, howlife works and what it is made of, for Guru Ma, science holds great promise forhumanity. Just as Shiva strives to know and understand the infinite power of Shakti,on which his own life depends, and through which he recognizes his own divinenature and power, science aspires to know, understand, and apply the infinitepotentialities and principles of the universe that is dharma in order (ideally) tohelp make life better for all living creatures. In this context, Guru Ma says dharma

Rhetoric of Technoscience in North Indian Vernacular Asceticism 15

“is the best technology,” on the basis that dharma represents a transformative agentof science. But she also says that science “is the deepest dharma,” because it atteststo the infinite powers of human imagination and creativity and its potential to “takehumanity forward toward dharma.”

Experimenting with the traditional meanings of seed imagery, Guru Ma explainsdivinity in the modernist terms of science but, as significantly, interprets sciencethrough ancient Hindu categories. Because science is thought to be the seed ofdharma and contains within its own nomos knowledge about dharma, it represents a“limb” of dharma. Guru Ma says that “dharma means to obtain the universe,” andfor her, science brings humans closer to that goal. It epitomizes “a great invention”in that it affirms Guru Ma’s understanding that dharma is the “greatest life experi-ment,” by which humans develop through trial and error – or in her words,“according to the needs and conditions of the time” – the “best” ideas and methodsfor making sense of themselves and their worlds. The positive valuation accorded toscience is related to her view that human creativity reveals the inspiration of divinecreativity and that humans become divine instruments through their creative capac-ities, whether they make life, ideas, art, or technoscience (DeNapoli 2017). Sheforegrounds that “It is in God’s nature to experiment and humans have the samenature. God’s DNA and humans’ DNA are the same. We are God’s seed; our natureis to be creative.”

“You Can’t Leave the World Without Giving”: Accountability,Responsibility, and Rethinking the Modern in the RenunciantRhetoric of Technoscience

The capacity for creativity demands that humans apply their inventions responsibly.Guru Ma speaks about responsibility in two ways. According to her, the “gift of life”that all the species of creation receive by being born in the universe places a “debt”on them. Guru Ma’s idea of debt reaches beyond that which is typically associated inthe Hindu traditions with the “three debts” to the gods, ancestors, and teachers(Flood 1996; Olivelle 1996). Rather, the debt to which she refers concerns that ofgiving back to the earth (bhumī ). Guru Ma says, “We have taken something from thisworld. We have taken oxygen, water, sunlight, moonlight, food, many things.” Butshe also says, “Nothing leaves this earth without giving something back to it. Wehave come into this world to give to the earth, not just to take from the earth.” Oneway, then, for humanity in particular to pay back its debt and demonstrate account-ability for its existence is through its creative capacities. Inventions like techno-science become the means for humans to apply their creativity and contribute to theprocesses of life, in which all species are engaged.

Another way in which Guru Ma talks about (dharmic) responsibility has to dowith making sure that whatever humans create “moves the world forward in a goodway.” Notions of development (vikās) and progress (unnatī ) are, therefore, oftenintertwined in her understanding of responsibility. Guru Ma deemphasizes theanthropocentric dimensions of development, focusing instead on the impact it has

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for the earth, nature, and life in general. In the rhetoric of technoscience performed aspart of Guru Ma’s dharma-kathās, development does not traverse a teleological pathin the way it does in dominant western discourses (Ram 2013) but rather moves “inall directions” (see also Macy 1991, for a discussion of the notion of development asconceived and enacted by the leaders of the Buddhist Sarvodaya Movement inSri Lanka). Her performances suggest that development proceeds in a multilinearfashion with no singular (or set) endpoint and takes many forms (see also Korom’s1991 analysis of scientific theories of evolution in the writings of Aurobindo Ghose).Not only that development has everything to do with raising human mental (mānsik),emotional (bhavanātmik), and physical (sarīrik) capacities and less to do withincreasing the material (and monetary) dimensions of human existence on the planet.The development fostered by technoscience that meets this criteria embodies GuruMa’s vision of dharma as the greatest life experiment. She says, “Dharma isdevelopment. It is the development of humanity, personality, and existence.Definitely, it will become modern, more modern, and even more modern.”

Seen in this light, Guru Ma’s rhetorical constructions of the concept of develop-ment suggest another salient aspect of her idea of the modern. For sure, to be modernmeans to be accountable to life. Even so, it also entails the ability to develophumans’ always partial understanding of the world – that is, to expand the infinitecapacities of consciousness so that people can move beyond their perceived indi-vidual limitations, recognize the beauty and interconnectedness of existence, andapproach life in an interdependent way. This standpoint amplifies her idea of thesubtle meanings and workings of dharma as the complex principle of changeexplored earlier in the context the Sati story. Guru Ma once again uses the dharmicsymbols of Shiva and Parvati to illustrate what the modern means to her. She says:

Look at Shiva and Parvati. Their symbols tell us a lot about how to live. Both of them sit onthe tiger. Shiva sits on a tiger that he has killed. But Parvati sits on a live tiger. Shiva can onlylive with the tiger by conquering it. He has won the tiger by killing it. That’s how he sits onit. But Parvati also won the tiger, but she didn’t kill it and win. She won the tiger throughlove. She sits on a tiger that she has won with her love. This is the difference between scienceand dharma. When science does something, its method is to break life into small pieces. Butafter that, science just gets pieces in his hand. But dharma is saying something different.Dharma says work on completeness. Dharma tells us to join science and dharma. Whenboth are joined together, we become complete humans.

Guru Ma’s understanding that science by itself breaks “life into small pieces” bringsto mind the views of the Indian environmental activist and physicist Vandana Shiva,who equates the reductionist (and Cartesian) approaches characteristic of westernscience with “violence” toward nature and the earth (Shiva 1988). While Guru Ma’sstory hints at the ecological violence that science is capable of wreaking on the earth,by interpreting the symbols of Shiva and Parvati in the context the dharma andscience dialectic, her performance works to theologize the modern. She draws outthe characteristics that she associates with the modern by locating it withina reconfigured imagining of dharma. Through her representation of Parvati’s benef-icent interaction with the tiger, Guru Ma’s construction of the modern calls attention

Rhetoric of Technoscience in North Indian Vernacular Asceticism 17

to the virtues of love, kindness, empathy, compassion, and reciprocity with respect toliving interdependently with life, the earth, and nature, which the tiger symbolconnotes. Her telling presents a “power with nature”model of dharmic developmentin its theologizing of the modern (Shiva 2015).

By the same token, also woven into this performance is the view that ignorance,fear, insecurity, greed, domination, control, and the destruction of life, earth, andnature, symbolized by competitive Shiva-tiger relation, illustrate a “power overnature” model of development (Shiva 2015). For Guru Ma, this approach givesexpression to those “stubborn” attitudes and behaviors she attributes to her idea ofthe antimodern described earlier. But so do perspectives which reject dharmain favor of science and vice versa. In this respect, while Guru Ma’s narrativeperformance comments on the necessity of engaging the issues of modern globalculture, heightening that empathetic engagement enacts accountability, it also offersa cautionary warning about the dangers of seeing dharma and science in opposi-tional ways. She emphasizes in this specific dharma-kaṭhā that joining dharma andscience together brings about the kind of dharmic human development (and trans-formation) that she describes in terms of “completeness.”

Thus, Guru Ma’s theologizing of the modern attempts to integrate dharma andscience into a comprehensive system, even as it communicates the need to combinerational thinking with emotional intelligence. Rationality alone, which is suggestedby her representation of Shiva, who symbolizes empirical science, is not enough “tomove the world forward.” Emotional understanding is also required. Her represen-tation of Parvati, who is, after all, the symbol of dharma and “love,” implies thisaspect. As Guru Ma says, “Examine all ideas carefully. Don’t accept somethingblindly, or because it’s written in the texts. Truth must always be verified byexperience. The knowledge you can feel in your heart is the truth.”

Conclusions: The Hindu-Inspired Modernity that a Female Guru’sPerforming the Rhetoric of Technoscience Creates

Over two millennia ago, the wise teacher and holy man Gautama Buddha recognizedthat change is a real and unavoidable characteristic of life (Rahula 1974). Thedoctrine that developed from his theory of change, and which was laid out in theframe of the Four Noble Truths, became the premiere philosophical foundation forthe inspiring tenets of the enduring Buddhist traditions. While the question ofwhether or not the historical Buddha created the “new” religion of Buddhism outof the wellspring of Hindu traditions that were also in practice during his time can bedebated (Batchelor 2015; Lopez 2001), the ideas of change and contingency ofwhich he spoke were already salient issues within Indic traditions. In the view of thehagiographies on the Buddha’s life and work (Lopez 2001), a good storyteller, he notonly drew from his deep knowledge of ancient Indic teachings on the nature ofexistence (samsāra) but also modified them to reflect the changing times in which heand his devotees lived and organized their worlds (Darlington 2012). The same maybe said about Guru Ma and her performance of kathā to shape ideas about the “forms

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of the modern,” such as science and technology, illustrative of the contemporarymilieu.

A competent storyteller in her own right, Guru Ma tells tales with the convictionthat their telling heals people’s “broken” hearts and “weary” minds, the all toocommon side effects of the current avatār of globalization (DeNapoli 2016b). Justas the Buddha’s teachings, which his biographers and Buddhist commentatorsalike have classified in the practical terms of “medicine,” helped people comprehendthe fact and significance of change and deal in humane ways with the forms ofsuffering (duhkha) that inevitably arise on account of living in an impermanent andunpredictable world (Rahula 1978), Guru Ma’s kathās similarly take ancient Indicideas of change and transformation and rework them to cast new and meaningfullight on the range, depth, and role of change characterizing the global twenty-firstcentury. Science and technology, the two modern conduits of global transformation,have dramatically altered people’s lives and their expectations for life. Whiletechnoscience can serve the universal common good, it also needs to be placed ina conceptual framework that relates it to other kinds of sociocultural phenomena thatorient Indian lives. The dharma traditions constitutive of Indic civilizations representsuch phenomena and the vital cultural elements of Indian well-being. Guru Ma’sstories provide a scaffolding that works for/in Indian contexts. Her tales translatecomplex technoscience into familiar Indic language and symbols, bringing out itsbenefits for life, by situating it within the authoritative world of dharma.

Stories have been the everlasting cultural lingua franca of Indic traditions andcivilizations, imbuing Indian social (and imaginative) life across the class, gender,and educational spectrum with empathy, vitality, and moral purpose (Alter 2000;Flueckiger 1996; Gold and Raheja 1994; Narayan 1989). Not only have storiestransmitted religious values and ethical imperatives, but they have also inspired theirlisteners to reflect on their shifting meanings and construct worlds that matter. Theanthropologist of Indian vernacular culture Kirin Narayan highlights the centrality ofstorytelling to religious experience. She says:

Narrative provides an ‘incipiently theoretical level of legitimation’ to the propositionsof a religion; things are the way they are because that is what stories say. . .The valueof. . .narrative in religious teaching is that oral transmission unselfconsciously accommo-dates change even as it plays upon cultural themes familiar to listeners from other contexts.The act of performance also brings these themes alive: listeners hear ancient messagescoming from a living source, fleshed out with gestures and shaped around the immediacyof a particular situation . . .In complex societies religious storytelling may emerge as aspecialized profession. Wherever there is a demarcated role of religious teacher, it is likelyto be associated with storytelling. (Narayan 1989: 243–246)

For sādhus and other holy figures in India, the “living sources” of and, I would add,the living links to ancient Indic wisdom traditions, stories are indispensable to theenduring transmission and transformation of religious teachings and, as this chapterhas argued, making sense of the reality and fact of social change in the contemporaryworld. Recall the exemplary teacher Gautama Buddha with whose paradigmaticexample we began this section. His stories not only fueled new approaches to the

Rhetoric of Technoscience in North Indian Vernacular Asceticism 19

age-old problems of change, pain, and suffering, but also transformed people,making their lives better (Batchelor 2015; Macy 1991, 2003). Stories have certainlybeen the preferred, if not the only, spiritual currency of exchange by which spiritualpreceptors and leaders, like Guru Ma, create and, as significantly, perform their“social capital” and their religious knowledge (Bourdieu 1991). Through narrativeperformance, Guru Ma and other sādhus in Indian society earn the respect, love,trust, and devotion of the people whom they teach and transform through the meansof their tales. Their telling of tales fashions new or alternative knowledge of ancient“traditions,” while interpreting the shifting landscapes of change in Indian society.

In sum, drawing on the divine symbolic of Shiva and Shakti in her kathās, theHindu-inspired modernity that Guru Ma performs through the rhetoric of techno-science values the combining of emotion and logic and interrogates notions of themodern in which “relentless rationality” is privileged in the discourses and practicesthat so often shape social development in modern global contexts (Ram 2013).The values of Guru Ma’s dharmic modernity concern empathy, compassion, andlove, which she ascribes to Shakti, who signifies the interdependence of dharma,technology, and nature. These values oppose those which Guru Ma associates with asolitary Shiva, namely, competition, violence, and consumption, values that threatenthe integrity of dharma and nature. To clarify, Guru Ma’s goal is not to affirmthe superiority of Shakti over Shiva but rather to implore that dharma (Shakti) andscience (Shiva) must work together and, through their cooperation, join forces inorder to “move the world forward in a good way.” From her perspective, humanflourishing becomes possible when both types of knowledge systems “meet.” Thatdharma and science can combine to augment the common good is seen in Guru Ma’sunderstanding that Shiva is born of Shakti and, thus, is not and cannot be anathemato the dharmic values that the goddess represents. Interpreting the Shakti symbol inlight of the technological devastation of the earth, Guru Ma widens its traditionalmeanings beyond the creative and sustaining principle of the universe to tease outthe dharmic virtues of change, transformation, and contingency that illustrate heridea of the modern.

To that extent, for Guru Ma, the modern Indian (or the modern human) exem-plifies a person who remains open and flexible in her or his conceptions of the worldand, by implications, perceptions of the “real,” who recognizes the necessity ofchange in the world on account of the principle of change that she says is dharma,and who changes herself or himself to accommodate the change that makes possiblethe flourishing of life. Her vision of the modern challenges predominant nationalistIndian narratives that tend to constrict the definitional parameters for what and howdharma, science, and even modernity mean in the global twenty-first century. Whilethe characteristics of change, flexibility, and emphasis on the diversity of viewsalign with what scholars have identified as the postmodern mentality and suggestthe influence of the transnational discourses of postmodernity on Guru Ma’s ownthinking and work (Taylor 2004), it is also evident that her conceptions of themodern are based in her reconfiguring of foundational notions featured in the Indictraditions. As her kathās show, and as the adaptations she accomplishes by means ofperformance indicate, engaging the challenges of modernity requires reframing

20 A. E. DeNapoli

concepts on both sides of the dharma and modernization dialectic in repurposedways as religions respond to current political, social, economic, and environmentalcircumstances (Chandler 2004: 5; Darlington 2012; Nelson 2013).

The experimental Hinduism that has been described in this chapter suggeststhat emphasis on indeterminacy and contingency in constructions of religion, sci-ence, and the modern helps sādhus like Guru Ma bring dharma to bear on contem-porary problems and rethink of the role of dharma and, by implication sannyāsa, inmodernity. The modernized Hindu dharma she performs by telling familiar tales ofthe gods in fresh ways shows how Indian sādhus shape the currents of modern globalculture and fashion a Hindu-informed modernity within a global milieu of multiplemodernities. Through the creative theologizing of the modern, Guru Ma’s narrativepractices illustrate a provocative (and contemporary) example of what the politicalscientist Sudipta Kaviraj has called the “vast spectacle of variation in the inventionof modern life” (2000: 160). What is more, her rhetoric performs the ways that GuruMa combines the categories of dharma and technoscience into an integrated frame-work to construct a modern dharmic ideology in which “dharma is highest science”and “science is the deepest dharma.”

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