SRM's Emergence
Arya Samaj - Vedic Revival
The TM movement's emergence in South India following Independence has many similarities to movements for religious and political freedom in eighteenth and nineteenth century India. It was founded on the interests of educated elite classes, which were constituted principally of high caste brahmins familiar with Western ideas and English education. Maharishi used his own education to encourage alliances with Western science but firmly established his teaching on the Vedic tradition, respecting the fundamental four Vedas and their associated literature. He solicited participation from pandits and Hindu priests and claimed his discipleship with the reknowned Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math, in the Himalayas. His advocacy of cultural syncretism, however, was stronger after returning from the West. In the early years of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, it stood more for Vedic revival, for sanskritization over Westernization. In that respect it is linked more effectively at its start to Dayanand's Arya Samaj.
The Arya Samaj was one group which was to become a stimulus to Indian nationalism, but only after three decades as an organization dedicated to the defence of Vedic purity against conventional Hinduism. The Arya Samaj was founded in 1875 in Bombay by Dayanand Saraswati, a sannyasi of the Saraswati order who had renounced his ties to the wealthy brahmin family into which he was born (1824) in Kathiawar (Gujarat). Dayanand had little contact with Western ideas or education, receiving a traditional Hindu education involving Vedic and Sanskrit study. In 1846 he began his wanderings among North Indian ascetics, learning Vedanta, Yoga, and Sanskrit in the traditional master-disciple relationship. By 1868 he began lecturing in Sanskrit on the proper interpretation of the Vedas and denounced conventional Hinduism as idolatry. After meeting Keshab Chandra Sen in Calcutta in 1872, he relinquished his sannyasi-like appearance in favor of standard clothing and started speaking in Hindi, the vernacular of North India. The foundation of the Arya Samaj in 1875 reflected the influences of both the Brahmo Samaj and the Prarthana Samaj of Bombay.55
Until his death in 1883, Dayanand worked to extend the popularity of the Samaj throughout North India from its headquarters in Lahore. For a time there was an uneasy alliance with the Theosophical Society, which had been founded by Madame Blavatsky and Col. Olcott in New York in 1875. It appears that the Theosophists took issue with Dayanand's truculent opposition to Islam and Christianity. He had written to Madame Blavatsky, "As night and day are opposed to each other, so are all religions opposed to one another."56 Thus he consistently sought to reconvert those who had become Muslims and Christians, a policy known as shuddhi which was strictly opposed by orthodox Hindus. Although members of the Brahmo Samaj admired his views on the caste structure and idol worship, they did not share his adherence to Vedic ordinances regarding daily fire sacrifice and veneration of cows. It has been alleged that his formation of the Gaurakshini Sabha, or Cow-protecting Association, was a political scheme to arouse Hindu feelings against Christians and Muslims. Dayanand was more effective than any of the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj in reaching the masses and restoring Hindu pride, perhaps because he was active in North and West India where antagonism between Hindus and Muslims was historically established. Arya Samajists criticized the Brahmos as too Christianized:
We have held it from the very first that Brahmoism was but a perverted or distorted form of Christianity. . . Christianity constituted, as it were, the vital principle of Brahmoism, it is the source of its life, vigor, and strength.57
Dayanand's protest against Puranic Hinduism and brahmanical authority in traditional temple worship, caste relations, and rules of marriage won him the respect of many a Christian nevertheless. The following is taken from an article by Dr. Griswold as it appeared in the Indian Evangelical Review, January, 1892:
Pandit Dayanand Saraswati became finally emancipated from the authority of Brahmanism in some such way as Luther became emancipated from the authority of the Church of Rome. Luther appealed from the Roman Church and the authority of tradition to the Old and New Testament. Pandit Dayanand Saraswati appealed from the Brahmanical Church and the authority of Smriti to the earliest and most sacred of Indian scriptures. The watchword of Luther was 'Back to the Bible'; the watchword of Pandit Dayanand was 'Back to the Vedas'.
With this religious watchword another watchword was implicitly, if not explicitly, combined, namely 'India for the Indians.' Combining these two, we have the principle, both religious and political, that the religion of India as well as the sovereignty of India ought to belong to the Indian people; in other words, Indian religion for the Indians, and Indian Sovereignty for the Indians. In order to accomplish the first end, Indian religion was to be reformed and purified by a return to the Vedas, and foreign religions as Islam and Christianity were to be extirpated. Thus the program included reform for indigenous religion and extirpation for foreign religion. With regard to the second end, the founder of the Arya Samaj seems to have taught that a return to the pure teachings of the Vedas would gradually fit the people of India for self-rule and that Independence would ultimately come to them.58
Dayanand was certainly among the most chauvinistic and devoted apologists for the truthfulness and validity of the Vedas. He believed in monotheism, transmigration, and modern science and technology, and he interpreted the Vedic hymns to substantiate his assertion that all these things were contained therein. This was repudiated by almost every other translator of the Vedas. Nonetheless he held fast to the conviction that Vedas were utterances of eternal truth, not historically situated or personalized, and infallible guides to human conduct. The Arya Samaj permitted all men and women, regardless of caste, to study the Vedas and condemned contemporary Hindu literature, idolatry, ancestor worship (shraddha), pilgrimage (tirtha), animal sacrifice, food offering, child marriage, and the doctrine of divine incarnation (avataras). Dayanand did not consider even the Upanishads, Aranyakas, Brahmanas, or Vedanta Sutras (to say nothing of the Bhagavad Gita or Puranas) as part of the Vedas - only the mantras contained in the samhitas; he separated the Aryas from sanatani Hinduism, which he considered based on the medieval Puranas.
Following Dayanand's death in 1893, the Arya Samaj continued to grow despite division into two separate organizations. One, known as the College or "cultured" party, was progressive in its advocacy of modern education and freedom in diet, while seeking to teach their religion throughout the world as the one true universal religion. The Vegetarian or "mahatma" party favored traditional Hindu education and vegetarianism in accordance with their belief that the Samaj is pure Hinduism and thus culture-specific. The College party founded the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic College at Lahore to encourage study of Vedic, Sanskrit, and Hindi literature and provide means for technical education through English literature and scientific studies. The Samaj also instituted many primary and secondary schools along the same lines as the D.A.V. College. The Mahatma party was responsible for the establishment of the Gurukula Mahavidyalaya at Hardwar in 1902 and other gurkulas (now numbering nearly a thousand) dedicated to traditional Hindu guru-shishya style of education.
Politics and Religion
Although Maharishi did not share the Samaj's opposition to Christianity and Islam, he has consistently followed Dayanand's adherence to the dictum that the Vedas are all the theology that India needs. He has repeatedly held that the Vedas are utterances of truth applicable to contemporary problems of both an academic and practical sort and has sought to make them available to men and women of all classes not only throughout India but around the world. Because many of the reforms which Dayanand favored had already been adopted by most Hindus, Maharishi has spoken little about such things as ancestor worship, child marriage, and idolatry. He gives much greater attention to the Vedic literature which extends beyond the four Vedas - darshanas, Bhagavad Gita, Upanishds, and Upavedas. Maharishi has advocated both Sanskrit and modern science in education and allowed for freedom in the diet of his followers while extolling the advantages of vegetarianism.
When approaching the TM movement as a social movement, it is important to recognize how the potential for political implications has been embedded in Indian religious movements. The Arya Samaj was founded ten years before the Indian National Congress and set the stage for the appearance of the independence movement through its linking of indigenous religion with self-government. Lala Lajpat Rai, one of the leaders of the Arya Samaj after Dayanand, wrote in 1915:
The foreign rulers of India have never been quite happy about the Arya Samaj. They always disliked its independent attitude and its propaganda of self-confidence, self-help, and self-reliance. The national side of its activity aroused their antagonism. The progress it made, the impressive hold which it acquired on the minds of the people, the popularity which it won in spite of its heterodoxy and iconoclasm among the Hindus, the influence which it possessed, the immense 'go' which characterized it in all its doings, the national spirit which it aroused and developed among the Hindus, the ready self-sacrifice of its members, the independence of their tone, and the rapidity with which the movement was diffused throughout India, and last, but not least, the spirit of criticism which it generated, gained for it the suspicion of the ruling bureaucracy. This suspicion more than once brought the wrath of the authorities on its members which took the shape of deportations, prosecutions, dismissals, etc.59
The first movement of Indian nationalism represented a Western and liberal perspective inspired by association with the British. All of the major leaders had received some English education, and most were high caste Hindus and middle class intellectuals from Bengal, Bombay and Madras. After the Mutiny of 1857, the British withdrew much of their support from reform movements and administered their provinces in a manner more paternalistic and aloof than before. Nevertheless the earliest assertions of Indian rights were loyalist in character, seeking only a larger share for landowners or educational opportunities and positions in the Indian Civil Service. Even provincial political organizations, like the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, which were formed by Chitpavin Brahmins whose families had been stripped of their power and status under the peshwas, patiently sought British favors. Ranade and Gokhale were reformers who saw Hindu modernization as prerequisite to nationalism and formed the Prarthana Samaj as Bombay's version of the Brahmo Samaj.
Lala Lajpat Rai (of the Arya Samaj) and Lokmanya Tilak were considered extremists because they wanted to change the loyalist character of the Indian National Congress. Tilak opposed even moderate social reforms in the name of nationalism and drew substantial mass support among orthodox Hindus, much as Dayanand had done, through his public lectures in the vernacular, in this case Marathi. Tilak revived Maharashtrian festivals in honor of Ganesh and Shivaji, insisting that hero worship was at the root of "nationality, social order and religion," and also alienated Muslims, as had Dayanand. After the partition of Bengal in 1905, Tilak and Rai were the most popular leaders of the nationalist movement, advocating programs which appealed to Indian youth opposed to English education.
In order to popularize the Swadeshi boycott of British goods following the partition of Bengal, Surendranath Banerjee sought to move the masses through ceremonies in honor of Kali and Shakti in Hindu temples. He realized that the most effective appeal to Indians was religious, however divisive that may be to Hindu-Muslim unity. Following World War I, the nationalist movement came under the leadership of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was able to make the Congress a mass political movement due to his reputation for saintliness, his personal charisma, and his appeal to spiritual motives for political action. The Congress under Gandhi not only accepted swarajya (full independence), which had been advocated by Dayanand, but also adopted most of the social reforms initiated by the Arya Samaj. He opposed shuddhi (reconverting Hindus) as antagonistic to Christian and Muslim minorities and against Hinduism.
Spiritual purification was the prelude to political emancipation, according to Gandhi. His non-violent method of non-cooperation and civil disobedience (satyagraha) was derived from yogic non-violence (ahimsa) and bhakti, the Hindu path of devotion that relies on the belief that love and silence can convert opponents. After 1920, the Arya Samaj lost many of its members to the Congress Party due to Gandhi's popularity. Following Independence, however, the more orthodox Jan Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party developed as conservative alternatives to the centrist Congress Party which ruled most of the country.
South Indian Variations
Prior to the 1887 meetings of the Indian National Congress in Madras, political organization was limited to concerns of brahmin elites, promulgated by loyalist groups like the Madras Native Association and the Mahajana Sabha. In Madras Presidency, resistance to British rule was sporadic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the pace of reform was generally slower than elsewhere in part due to the relatively widespread study of English and the ryotwari land tenure system. However, an equally important reason was the larger proportion of "princely states" in the South. During the Mutiny of 1857-58, South India remained relatively calm, as the princely states even sent reinforcements to support the British.60
It has been estimated that 90% of the population of India lived in either princely states or in rural areas of British Presidencies. Those who lived in Native (princely) States had less contact with Westernization than the rural residents of British India, who had less contact with ideas of social reform than people in smaller outposts and towns. The most Europeanized groups were found in major urban centers of Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi, and Madras. The princely states constituted about 40% of Indian territory but a much larger proportion of South India, notably Hyderabad (present-day Andhra Pradesh), Mysore (Karnataka), Cochin and Travancore (Kerala). Especially in Cochin and Travancore, caste rules were enforced under orthodox rulers (Dewans) who were totally opposed to even the slightest change in customs. Respect for purity was strictly maintained towards Nambudiris (brahmins) and Nayars, e.g., the Shanar revolts of 1829 and 1859 occurred when women insisted on wearing upper garments in violation of traditional salutation accorded to men of rank.
The social reform movement of Shri Narayana Guru at the start of this century must be credited with having initiated the spiritual and social regeneration which resulted in modern Kerala. Today caste distinctions are less and intercaste marriages more in Kerala compared to other provinces where the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, and Prarthana Samaj originated, because Shri Narayana Guru had effected a fundamental change in attitudes towards untouchability, unseeability, and other caste customs. Significantly he advocated internal reform within the untouchable and lower caste Ezhava communities before seeking to persuade brahmins and their rulers. He worked for more than forty years in Travancore touching some two million people with his message of education, equality and industry. In less than a decade he had established over one hundred temples for untouchables whom he effectively "brahminized" or sankritized as priests, making them religiously self-reliant. He supported worldly material achievement (artha) as a necessary adjunct to education and spiritual progress and demanded social reform as a prerequisite to political awakening.
The Indian National Congress under Gandhi became a mass movement only when it adopted a program for social reform. Unlike Gandhi, Shri Narayana Guru opposed caste restrictions and varnashrama in general rather than merely supporting the cause of "harijans" (Gandhi's term for untouchables). His efforts and those of his organizations, Paripalana Sabhas, succeeded in achieving educational concessions and employment for lower castes and in 1936 the Temple Entry Proclamation by the Maharaja of Travancore, opening temples to all Hindus. Although Gandhi's satyagraha at Vaikom in 1925 has been credited with achieving the national publicity to pressure that decision, the foundational and continuing work of others was really responsible.61
Home Rule and Anti-Brahminism
The Theosophical Society established its headquarters at Adyar, a suburb of Madras, in 1882, after its founders, Blavatsky and Olcott, had endured a year of association with Dayanand. The Arya Samaj followed by another year in Buddhist Ceylon. The two Westerners were interested in reforming education, promoting Sanskrit learning, and opposing the efforts of Christian missionaries. Although their journal defined itself as "devoted to Oriental Philosophy, Art, Literature, and Occultism; embracing Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and other Secret Societies,"62 the Society became the bulwark of the established order for orthodox Hindus in defense of traditional practices. Theosophists started schools for untouchable boys in 1894 and many others for both boys and girls after the arrival of Annie Besant in the same year.
During the first decade of the twentieth century, a clear division emerged between brahmins, who had profited from the benefits of Western education and secured the greater portion of the new administrative and commercial opportunities, and low caste "non-brahmins," who resented their inferior position but lacked political influence to change it. Annie Besant's advocacy of Home Rule and her defense of the glories of India's past were opposed by non-brahmins as an attempt to perpetuate bramanical indifference and discrimination: "Let all low caste Indians clearly realize that Home Rule now means High Caste rule which spells eternal servitude for the masses of the people in this country."63
Home Rule was supported by the Congress and newspapers like The Hindu and The New India, which stood for the interests of brahmins. When Gandhi insisted upon social reform as a precondition for the attainment of swaraj (self-rule), the Home Rule League under Besant criticized him as being more a social reformer than a politician. Besant converted the Theosophical Society into a political organization advocating swadeshi (boycott of foreign goods) and propagandizing in the vernacular Tamil. In 1917 she was imprisoned for four months by the British and emerged as an enormously popular leader, despite increased rivalry among competing linguistic groups, some of whom opposed her preference for Tamil brahmins.
In November, 1916, members of the non-brahmin majority founded the "Justice" movement to challenge the prevailing elite, including the Congress. The Justice Party was attacked by Besant as "unpatriotic, short-sighted, and narrow-minded"64 To some extent the non-brahmins collaborated with the British and received assistance from them because they both feared the growth of the brahmins as a nationalist power.65 However after Gandhi put removal of untouchability at the top of the Congress agenda, many in the non-brahmin movement joined in the nationalist effort, including the non-cooperation and Khilafat agitations. In 1921 Hindu-Muslim cooperation was shattered by riots between Malabar Hindus and Mappilas in which more than ten thousand were killed; the consequential weakening of Congress influence was partially restored by Gandhi's satyagraha at Vaikom in 1925.
During the 1930s the princely states, Mysore, Cochin, and Travancore joined in the nationalist and reformist movement as agitation for democratic representation grew. After the Justice Party was defeated in the 1934 elections, non-brahmins reorganized with the support of the Communists under E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker's Self-Respect Party, which denounced Congress as "the stronghold of landlordism, capitalism, and private ownership."66 Naicker attacked brahmins as the authors of caste and sought to abolish all caste distinctions, all religions, and to introduce a "Russian form of government".67 In 1939 the Self-Respect Party, supported by the Muslim League, led a massive opposition movement against the Congress Ministry's measure to introduce Hindustani as a compulsory subject in school curriculum. Reasserting South India's Dravidian identity, many non-brahmins accused brahmins of injecting Tamil religion with idols and foreign Vedic doctrines and sought to adopt the Saiva Siddhanta religious system, which claimed to be distinct from the teachings of Shankara.
The Self-Respect Party was popular in its appeal (unlike the Justice Party), but it did not receive the support of the British government which had granted non-brahmins concessions for employment in government service. After 1917 many brahmins had left Madras for Bombay and other urban areas or adapted their skills towards other professions or industry and trade. Justice leadership came mainly from landowning groups and its membership from middle class caste Hindus in both Tamil and Telugu areas; the Self-Respect Party appealed mainly to low caste Tamils and untouchables, as well as to women, young people, and newly urbanized migrants.68 While the "Quit India" agitation was occurring throughout India during the Second World War, Naicker pushed for a separate non-brahmin or Dravidian country (Dravida Nad) and founded the Dravida Khazhagam for that purpose. In 1949, after Independence, some members of D.K. broke away to form Dravida Munetra Kazhagam (D.M.K.), the first political party working solely for a separate Tamil nation. It was the precursor to A.D.M.K., which has ruled in Tamil Nadu since the 1976 "Emergency," when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi removed her most critical opposition (D.M.K.).
Class and Caste in Post-Independence India
The immediate historical context in which the Spiritual Regeneration Movement developed was the first decade after India's independence from Great Britain (1947). It was a period of reallignment of political forces under the Congress Party, and official secularization and social reform throughout the country. This threatened the traditional security and hegemony of brahmins, who reacted by setting up social and cultural barriers wherever possible. Maharishi's message of cultural revitalization fit this climate in the South, where the conflict was most pronounced.
Although disruptive and violent opposition towards British rule occurred during World War II, most Indians remained passively unconcerned or supported the effort to mobilize resources desperately needed by colonial powers. In general the industrial economy advanced dramatically, and many merchants acquired substantial financial and political influence thereby. Especially in the South, a significant number of brahmins joined this new middle class, having relinquished interest in administrative positions due to lower caste reforms. After Independence in 1947, private enterprise remained influential in the Congress Party and increased profits despite official party goals of "the establishment of a socialist pattern of society".
The first seventeen years of independent India were dominated by the personality of Jawaharlal Nehru: his pragmatism, his secular modernism, his Western egalitarian idealism. He was an imperial ruler, who, like his daughter Indira Gandhi, surrounded himself with agreeable men incapable of challenge or succession. He governed as the sole unifying element in a society which had lost its common outlook and traditional moorings. He was an outspoken critic of India's "caste and priest-ridden society". It has been said that his pragmatism and secularism created a spiritual void and skeptical ideology at the top of government and set the tone for nepotism and moral corruption in public administration. Under his leadership Congress had been transformed into a political organization, like other movements for social reform and independence, and this much to Gandhi's chagrin. The Mahatma declared in January, 1948, just before his assassination, that it would be better to "dissolve" Congress than to allow it to continue as a decaying and declining institution for power politics.
Untouchability was abolished by the Constitution and its practice forbidden by specific penalties provided in the 1955 Untouchability (Offences) Act. Special ex-untouchable quotas were established for university grants, government bureaucracies and all legislatures. In the South, where "harijans" (untouchables) outnumbered brahmins, they could exercise their franchise and vote their caste, provoking brahmins to declare themselves "disadvantaged political minorities". Congress subsequently lost support in varying degrees throughout the states south of the Vindhyas during the late 1950s. Hindu Marriage Acts of 1949 and 1955 removed intercaste barriers to marriage and gave women the right of divorce, but traditional obstacles remained rooted to custom, especially in the southern states. Due to military costs of the war in Kashmir, there was little accomplishment in the war on poverty and ignorance. Monsoon failures in 1952 and 1953 added to food deficits. After ten years of independence, more of the population was landless and unemployed (especially college graduates) than under the British.69
Despite continuing problems, social and economic, there was no real national opposition to Congress politically, because Nehru so effectively neutralized attacks of both left wing Communists and Socialists and right wing Jan Sangh and Swatantra parties by agreeing with them all. Gradually, however, the appearances of national consensus faded, as power shifted from the center at Delhi to the states, where local issues stimulated interest. The central government was administered by English speaking, Western educated elites, a fact which served to separate them further from the vernacular-speaking rural majorities.
Caste was not weakened under the impact of industrialization and urbanization, although its outward appearances have all but disappeared in their extreme manifestations (like distance pollution in Kerala). Casteism is still very strong in the Congress Party, determining whom will be nominated, and "caste patriotism" is found everywhere in the form of loyalties to caste associations which provide employment security, housing, health care, and newspapers. Caste still stands as a barrier to the establishment of a monolithic state bureaucracy, further weakening the power of the central government against the states.
Communalism in the South
Nehru had opposed both linguistic separation claims and the movement towards linguistic states, in spite of vigorous statement of support for such regrouping by the Nehru Committee in 1928 (the J.V.P. Committee recognized the danger in 1948, however). Gandhi had favored homogeneous linguistic units, but Nehru resisted until 1952, when the dramatic fast-until-death of Sri Potti Srimalu forced the formation of Andhra Pradesh. Linguistic agitation throughout the South resulted in the redrawing of state boundaries along linguistic lines; similar conflicts developed between Maharashtra and Gujarat and between Bihar and Bengal. When the government attempted to replace English with Hindi as the national language, violent opposition surfaced in all non-Hindi speaking areas but most powerfully in the South. Cultural self-preservation thus proved stronger than nationalist or secular allegiances, and regionalism reappeared charging "U.P. Imperialism" (a reference to the most populous North Indian state, Hindi-speaking Uttar Pradesh).
The Communist Party of India (CPI) fomented agitation whenever possible using local issues like linguistic separation and communalism. The 1957 electoral victory by the Communists in Kerala came as a shock to Congress, but it did not really reflect any trend towards Marxist ideology as such. Kerala was the most densely populated state (over 1100 persons per square mile) with high unemployment and the lowest per-capita income. Although it was mostly agricultural (86% rural), it was a food deficit region, generating mostly cash crops for export. However literacy was the highest in India (46% compared to Indian average 24%).70 Charges of class exploitation by the "Congress bourgeoisie" were well received in Malabar where most land was held by absentee landlords (in contrast to Travancore where eighteenth century reforms by Martanda Varma had placed 80% of the land in state ownership, guaranteed rights of tenants, and eventually created a large owner-cultivator class).
The Communist Party had been formed after the Vaikom protest over untouchability in 1937 by brahmins disenchanted with Gandhi and the Congress; it finally won office by taking advantage of communal competition and lost it due to caste conscious self-preservation. Communists led by E.M.S. Nambudripad (a Nambudiri Brahmin) promised more food and less unemployment but they won only a 35% plurality from scattered Hindu communities, who voted against the new Christian leadership of the Kerala Congress Party.71That the Kerala Communists were led by a member of the highest ranking and traditionally most socially exclusive brahmin caste in India indicates that the leadership of CPI was hardly proletarian but mostly upper class intelligentsia. When Nambudripad's government tried to exercise its mandate by introducing new state laws aimed at land reform and by taking over private schools run by churches and caste associations, the ensuing protest by the Christian churches and the Nayar Service Society led to riots, mass arrests, and deaths, followed by the removal of the Communists under President's Rule in 1959.72
These events in Kerala indicate why attempts by the Communists to create a national following have failed since Independence. The rise of Communism in India is basically inhibited by the inert but formidable presence of atavistic Hinduism. Whenever an ideology which is as essentially foreign, collectivist, and materialistic as Marxism threatens, Hinduism is capable of generating a more powerful right-wing traditionalism. The internationalist and egalitarian tendency may have adherents among the Western educated elites, but most Indians associate foreign power with colonialism and survive in a complex matrix of caste allegiances founded on the principle of hierarchy.
Maharishi in South India
The Spiritual Regeneration Movement was started in South India in the decade following Independence. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a graduate in physics from Allahabad University, was most likely born into a family of Hindu Kayasthas, a well known and high status literary caste of Hindustan - with reference to varna, a kshatriya not a brahmin jati.73 The name "Mahesh" indicates that the family was probably Saiva (worshippers of Shiva), the largest Hindu group in the South, but second to Vaishnavas in North India where Krishna's life unfolded. His father was a government revenue officer in Jabalpur,74 now part of Madhya Pradesh, but at the time of Mahesh's birth (January 12, 1912) a part of British administered Central Provinces; thus it is probable that his father spoke English as well as the vernacular Hindi. At about the age of 28, he met Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, the Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math (Himalayas), became his disciple, and served as one of his foremost aides for some thirteen years until his passing in May, 1953.75 As Shankaracharya, Brahmananda travelled throughout northern India and met with civic and political leaders as well as other religious authorities. Mahesh made good use of his familiarity with English, handling correspondence and accompanying his "Guru Dev" wherever he went. Because he was not a brahmin, Mahesh could not become a member of the dandi sannyasi order and succeed his master as Shankaracharya; the honor passed to Swami Shantanand Saraswati in June, 1953.76
After about one year of ascetic seclusion at Uttarkashi, in a place called "valley of the saints," Maharishi Mahesh Yogi accompanied his ailing aunt from Calcutta to a medical facility at Madanapalle in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. By his own admission, he was responding not only to the request of his relative but more directly to an irrepressible impulse to "go south" and visit the temples of pilgrimage at Kanchi, Rameshwaram, and Kanya Kumari. Sometime in June or July of 1954, he acquired his first students at Madanapalle and initiated them into "transcendental meditation". According to T. Rama Rao, perhaps the very first initiate, the technique of meditation and its instruction was exactly the same as it is taught today by TM teachers throughout the world.77 Mr. Rama Rao was at that time the manager of the local branch of the Bank of Mysore, a position requiring a command of English (enabling him to translate for Maharishi, who could not speak the vernaculars - Tamil and Telugu) and affording contacts with businessmen throughout South India. Sree Narayana Iyer was another businessman who contributed to the construction of the first "permanent meditation hall" at Madanapalle.78 That both men were English speaking businessmen and Tamil brahmins suggests the social base of the movement at this earliest stage in Andhra Pradesh and, through their contacts in other South Indian states, the social base in centers where Maharishi travelled subsequently.
After several months at Madanapalle, Maharishi went on to the temples at Rameshwaram and Kanya Kumari in Madras State (Tamil Nadu). In Kerala he began lecturing (in English but accompanied by translation into Malayalam) on "mind-control and spiritual development" through meditation, affirming that "Everybody already possesses the capacity of enjoying satchitanandam, abiding peace, and permanent unbounded bliss."79 Reciting passages from the Vedas in Sanskrit and giving all glory and gratitude to his master, Guru Dev, Maharishi initiated hundreds in a few months in Quilon, Trivandrum, Kottayam, Trichur, Palghat, Alleppey, Cochin. and Ernakulum. His message was simple and practical, misery could be transformed into happiness through an easy practice (sadhana) available to everyone. His approach was also timely, in that he appealed to a renewed spirit of freedom in post-Independence India:
after the advent of the political freedom of the country, a Spiritual Renaissance throughout the vast continent of India is the need, and now is the time to accelerate the spiritual development, because spiritual development alone will assure abiding peace and lasting happiness in the country.
It was on the basis of this spiritual development that India was once so great and it is the glory of the same spiritual development that can make India great once again, to shine as a rising sun of peace and happiness on the horizon of the world.80
In a newly independent country these ideals could appeal to many, but they were especially resonant with the aspirations of those relatively disenfranchised by the events and social changes of the first decade since 1947. An examination of the list of participants (and their occupations) in the Kerala Maha Sammelan for the Spiritual Development Conference held at Cochin in October, 1955, indicates a high proportion of brahmins and upper caste Nayars and many of them pandits, professors, advocates, barristers at law, MLAs, and government service workers (IAS). The conference featured an inaugural address from the Maharaja of Cochin and was supported by letters of best wishes from two Shankaracharyas, the Vice-President of India Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the Ministers of Defence and Home Affairs, the Governors of the states of Andhra Pradesh, Madras (Tamil Nadu), and Uttar Pradesh, and influential businessmen from Calcutta and Lucknow. Evidently contacts made by Maharishi as an aide to the Shankaracharya proved useful in enlisting support from upper caste Hindus in the South.81
SRM as a Sanskritization Movement
During the conference, in which participants assembled from all the newly organized Adhyatmic Vikas Mandals (Spiritual Development Centers) of Kerala, personal experiences were related, offerings were made by the sacred fire, pandits recited Vedic mantras, ceremonies invoked the blessings of Lord Shiva, Lord Vishnu, and Devi Parashakti, and finally a procession to the sea was conducted amidst music, kirtans (singing), and artis (offerings of light).
The traditional Vedic format of the conference and Maharishi's use of English and Sanskrit suggests an appeal to upper caste Hindus, especially brahmins. This was politically sensitive in a South India which in 1955 was experiencing agitation for linguistic separation and anti-brahmin reform on the part of disadvantaged lower castes and untouchables. Statements by other participants at the Kerala conference confirm a yearning for a simpler India, one which existed before Nehru's secularism and Westernized pragmatism had created a "spiritual void and skeptical ideology" which encouraged corruption in government. Some speakers urged "resuscitation of sanatana dharma" and claimed that "the blinding materialism seems to have completely clouded our vision".82 Others who "cherish varnashrama dharma" stated opposition to "modern education coupled with the national method advocated for the analysis of every subject (as it) tends to cast many a doubt on the traditional beliefs of ages.."83 The Maharaja of Cochin said:
It is being more and more recognized that the great advancement of science has little helped in reducing the miseries and discontent in the world and the wiser men are looking to Mother India for spiritual guidance.84
There were a rather large number of prominent Nayars (Menons, Pillars, Nairs) among the participants at the conference. Although not of as high a jati ranking as brahmins, most Nayars were landowners and well educated: "In respect of English education, the Nayars occupy a prominent position".85 The 1909 Gazeteer of Malabar noted:
The Nayars as a class are the best educated and the most advanced of the communities in Malabar excepting perhaps the Pattar brahmans, who are not strictly a Malayalam class, and are intellectually the equals of the Brahmans of the East Coast. Many of them have risen to the highest posts in Government, and the caste has supplied many of the leading members of the learned profession.86
In Travancore capitalist development was more rapid and far-reaching than in Malabar, spearheaded by middle caste Syrian Christians and low caste Ezhavas. Their prosperity was perceived as a threat by Nayars. When competing groups acquired much of their land, and land reform in the early twentieth century discouraged large holdings, many Nayars abandoned land for occupational security and sought higher education as an avenue to wealth. As a result they came in contact with Western ideas on marriage and private property, weakening their distinctive matrilineal joint family system. The Nayar Service Society, formed in 1914, responded to the near monopoly by Tamil brahmins in government service and secured far greater representation in the bureaucracy than their proportion in the population. After Independence, despite government quotas discriminating in favor of lower castes, Nayars held twice the number of positions as their general proportion would warrant.87 The Nayars were sensitive as an interest group to the reforms and social changes which were taking place in India following Independence and were in a situation to support a movement for traditional reaffirmation.
Certainly another, though not unrelated, attraction to Maharishi's program was the sense that his teaching was one that had previously been available chiefly to brahmins and sannyasis (renunciants). Maharishi spoke and taught in the name of his master, was himself identified as coming from "Uttarkashi, Himalayas," and he named "Adhyatmic Vikas Mandal" (spiritual development centers) after his master, "Shri Shankaracharya Brahmananda Saraswati". More than one speaker at the conference referred to the number of brahmins present, the experience of brahmins learning Maharishi's meditation, and the opportunity to witness Vedic rituals and yagyas. Another mentioned that "Now we are able to reconcile the truth of Upanishadic teachings with our practical life."88 The Maharaja extolled Maharishi's teaching because it "reinforces the material aspect of life rather than combat it and destroy or lead to renunciation".89 Mrs. Thankamma Menon, one of the organizers of the conference, further declared the uniqueness of the opportunity to acquire the benefits of a higher status:
This great spiritual secret hitherto kept concealed in the valleys of the Himalayas are now being revealed through the universal benevolence and the generosity of our revered Maharishi - the beacon Light of the Himalayas, and who in Kerala, functioning, we find as a torch bearer of the divine effulgence. It was out of infinite kindness to the suffering humanity that our revered Maharishi has revealed the secret of peace and Atmanandam which no science or study had so far been able to give us. The ideology of Maharishi is very much suited to our way of life - the busy life of the householder. He at once rejects the idea of renunciation - Thyaga and Vairagya by the householders (Grahasthasramis). Maharishi proclaims that the same Satchitanandam which is enjoyed by the good Sanyasis through the path of detachment and renunciation can very well be enjoyed by the householders through the path of attachment or Raga. We could rise to the same level of Jivanmukthy which a Sanyasi attains.90
Several speakers related experiences of material success and everyday achievement in addition to evidence of progress in the spiritual realm.
From India to the West
It is apparent that it was not Maharishi's original intention to form an organization to propagate his teaching. Several speakers explained how he resisted their requests to give a name and "organize all the Mandals in a manner so that 'gurubhais' of different places may contact each other and be profited by mutual give and take of the spiritual experiences."91 According to A. N. Menon, the chief organizer of the conference, Maharishi said:
I am not at all for forming an institution or society nor, would I advise you to spend your energy in this line. It is enough that you meet amongst yourselves, and be benefited by mutual give and take of the experiences of your sadhana, and if all of you want to make an institution of 'gurubhais' you make it after I leave Kerala, so that I .KS may not be taken to be the promoter of any institution. My approach to the people is individual and not institutional, and let it be like that.92
After receiving entreaties at every place he went, Maharishi was finally convinced that he would merely be giving his blessing to that which had spontaneously come from his devotees and agreed to the foundation of the first center at Alleppey (Kerala) in August, 1955. Once this had been achieved, however, Maharishi did not hesitate to take an active role in not only changing the name of the organization (adding "Adhyatmic Vikas"), but also adding to the constitution a clause "providing for affiliation and cooperation with any provincial or central organization, if and when it should be formed at a later time".93 In this step can be seen the beginnings of an outlook encompassing "spiritual development" within a vision of a movement, soon to become the"Spiritual Regeneration Movement".
With the highest literacy rate in India, Kerala has an exceptionally high number of small newspapers. Nevertheless Maharishi's lectures were only announced by paid advertisements (until years later when he returned with foreign disciples) and never mentioned in feature articles. That is because there are so many gurus travelling throughout India that it is not feasible to freely publicize them all. The arrival of a respected teacher or yogi is communicated mostly by word-of-mouth and therefore often restricted to a particular family, caste community, or class. Thus it is not surprising to find that most of the earliest meditators were upper caste brahmins and Nayars. Although there is no evidence of Maharishi intending to initiate only a select group, his support from the Menons, T. Rama Rao, and other influentials in South India determined the social base of the movement at its start. Wherever he went subsequently, he arrived as an expected guest with letter of introduction and was immediately welcomed into respectable and learned society.
This network of influentials in the South and relatives and well-connected contacts in the North, acquired through his years of service to the Shankaracharya, enabled him to conduct organized "Spiritual Development Camps" at Hardwar, Calcutta, Pahalgam (Kashmir), Ujjain, Ahmedabad, Bombay, and Bangalore from January, 1956 through October, 1957. Hundreds were initiated at each of the camps, which lasted about three months. From November, 1957 till February, 1958, Maharishi was in Madras conducting the camp inaugurated by Shri S.K. Ramaswamy Sastri, a retired district judge, and during February, he conducted camps at Madanapalle and Anantapur (Andhra Pradesh), the former inaugurated by the Honorable Shri M. Anantasayanam Iyengar, Speaker of the Lok Sabha. On November 30, 1957, Maharishi addressed the 15th session of the World Vegetarian Congress at Madras and spoke on the successful living of all "isms" through spiritual "-ism".94
Celebrating the 89th anniversary of his master, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, the former Shankaracharya, the Seminar of Spiritual Luminaries was held at Madras, December 29-31, 1957. The event resembled in format and prestige the Kerala Maha Samelan (conference) held at Cochin more than two years before: it was organized by respected high caste leaders, it involved learned pandits and professors, and it gave opportunity for traditional bhajans and Vedic rituals and recitations. However, the focus of the meeting was far more ambitious:
the main issue was to find a practical formula for the spiritual regeneration of the world and to evolve a spiritual technique of living for everybody to be in the higher values of life and to enjoy mental peace and spiritual joy in all phases of worldly career.95
To an enthusiastic response from those assembled, Maharishi formally inaugurated the Spiritual Regeneration Movement on January 1, 1958. In so doing, he diagnosed spiritual detachment and renunciation as the root cause of human ills and suffering in this age, in which the majority of people are householders. He declared that modern materialism was not responsible for spiritual decadence and that regenerated spiritualism will be used to glorify and strengthen the values of material comfort. To achieve this end of developing latent faculties of men everywhere, he proposed:
The one aim of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement is to provide a simple and easy method of concentration and infuse the system of meditation in the daily life of everybody everywhere on earth. To meet this end, this movement has been started to work for the construction of meditation centres, everywhere in every part of human habitation. These meditation centres will provide all facilities to those desirous of enjoying the benefits of the control of mind, experience peace and spiritual joy in their daily life and increase their energy to be able to work more, quantitatively and qualitatively, in the field of thought and action and to those who want to live and enjoy all the glories of life, earthly and heavenly.96
In addition Maharishi trained certain members to give lessons in meditation and conduct weekly meetings at the centers. Supported by donations, a quarterly journal was published in Madras in July, 1958, under the title, \fITorch Divine\fR,. The first issue featured a cover photo of Guru Dev, portions of lectures by Maharishi and other participants in the Madras seminar, an outline of the aims and objects of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, and notes on Maharishi's speaking tour. The introductory editorial began:
This little bark, Torch Divine, is being floated in raging boiling waters. The world is in the grip of warring ideas. Intolerance is ahead. In politics, we have fighting systems on a global scale, communism, socialism, and capitalism, buttressed by strikes and catch words everywhere. Politics, Economics, and Society are in the weltering pot and there seems to be no way out of this chaos and disintegration. Now is the time for a powerful spirituality to take the field, to give direction to the affairs of man.97
In early March, 1958, Maharishi returned to Kerala for a tour of the major cities. At Trivandrum, the new state capital, he was greeted by the Governor of Kerala, Sri Ramakrishna Rao and thousands of others. Then after stops in Bangalore and Madras, he went to Calcutta to prepare for his first world tour. Relying on business contacts engaged by influential merchants, traders, and industrialists of Madras, Calcutta, and Bangalore and brahmin family ties in Southeast Asia, Maharishi flew from Calcutta to Rangoon, Burma on April 27, 1958, and thence to Bangkok, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Hong Kong. In each city, he taught meditation, trained teachers, and set up meditation centers with the assistance of local religious leaders, businessmen, and government officials. He travelled alone but found wealthy and respected Indian expatriates and Hindu temples waiting for him. As a foreign personality visiting among society's elite, he drew the attention of the press, and the movement snowballed. At each succeeding stop, he stayed longer (three months each at Singapore and Hong Kong). On December 21, 1958, Maharishi left Asia for the United States, stopping in Hawaii (one month) before arriving in San Francisco on January 30, 1959.98
Maharishi had conceived of the world tour after seeing an enthusiastic response from Indian meditators, hearing their call for spreading his teaching from India to the world,99 and realizing that the spiritual regeneration of India (mentioned at the Kerala conference in 1955) could best be effected by spiritual development worldwide (formally expressed at the Madras seminar in 1957). While the Indian response from high caste Hindus and especially their desire to see Vedic knowledge propagated to the West can be identified with post-Independence resurgence of atavistic Hinduism, the notion that India would be attracted more to an internationally accepted program was Maharishi's concession to cultural interdependence and Westernization.100