Part I

Origins of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement

   Sanskritization and Westernization

   Inquiry into origins of social movements has not been an important concern for all researchers in the field. In many studies, the eventual development and impact of movements have taken precedence over causation, which was thought to be obscured by layers of historical reinterpretation and complex relations between culture and society.¹In lieu of inquiry into how systems of belief begin and acquire followings and how movements may be historically situated, Weberians have emphasized organizational development and bureaucratic transformation. The question of why people join and form collective enterprises is overlooked in favor of an accounting of the structural situation in which participants find themselves at the start. Under this perspective, social movements become synonymous with their organizations, as in the classic studies of Black Muslims (Lincoln),² Women's Christian Temperance Union (Gusfield),³ and Scientology (Wallis).⁴ Each movement has its own logic and distinctive homogeneous cultural pattern, separate from the routine of the rest of society.

   This study follows a Weberian path in the Part II, concerned with detailed description of the impact of the TM movement's distinctive ideas upon organizational development. In this Part, however, the sources of the movement in India are analyzed with reference to socio-historical, symbolic, and individual contexts convergent on events in the 1950s. Using data drawn from interviews with early participants and movement literature, Chapters Two, Three, and Four lay the foundation for comparative study of the movement in India and the West. The central issue of communication of charisma, ideology, and consciousness is complicated by the origin of these elements in a social system and cultural tradition remote from that in which it took root. Transcendental Meditation's return to the land of its birth in Westernized form was accomplished after twenty years of cultural transformation and organizational change. Part I shows the before-and-after evidence and begs the question of what happened in between, which is the topic of Chapters Five through Ten.

    The title of this Part accentuates two terms - one particular to Indian socio-cultural change and the other common to cultural diffusion and social development throughout the modern world. Together they focus the research into two texts for the TM movement - a reading of the movement's specifically Indian caste-cultural origins, and another representation that attends to its syncretism and later modification when removed to a Western cultural context. There are historical precedents for both readings, and it is important to see that religious change in India has meant political transformation more often than it has in the West.

   Studying an Indian social movement involves special concerns regarding the utility of general sociological concepts and methods for analyzing a society as unique as India's. The controversy has classically been framed about the basic question, "Is there an India?"; that is, does India exist as a unified society, culture, or even nation-state in the sense that such terms are applied to societies in the West, which have been the models for sociological study. Louis Dumont, renowned for his ideological characterization of the caste system in Homo Hierarchicus ^,5 initiated early debate on the possibilities "for a sociology of India" in the article of the same title which appeared in the first edition of Contributions to Indian Sociology. He argued that above all, India is one, as demonstrated by "the very existence, and influence, of the traditional higher, sanskritic, civilization . .," which through the ubiquitous caste system pervades Indian society from top to bottom, and culture from Vedic to popular Hinduism.⁶ In response to Dumont's and Pocock's (his co-editor) Indology, Bailey proposed a sociology of India centered on the "sociological reality of the village" instead of the "civilization" of a single India. Rather than an interest confined to ideas and values, he suggested inquiry into political and economic relationships founded on observed interactions and applicable to comparative sociology.⁷

   T. N. Madan joined the discussion at a somewhat later date,⁸ seeking to counter what he considered the outdated positivist points of view of both the particularist Dumont and the comparative anthropologist Bailey as well as notable Parsonians like Y. B. Damle.⁹ He argued for analyses which include the "subject's point of view" and for a sociology which is not merely imitative of Western sociology. Among structural-functionalists, there has been an assumption of evolutionary convergence from disparate folk societies, bearing different traditional origins, towards a common urban industrialized Gesellschaft. (See Barrington Moore's study of revolutions and works on modernization by Inkeles and Smith.¹⁰) Conversely, Reinhard Bendix's Nation-building and Citizenship advocated a "divergence" perspective in emphasizing significantly different lines of development for emerging nations. In place of systemic portrayal, he permitted individual autonomy and emphasized the role of particular cultures for influencing structural outcomes. His chapter on India took account of the specific historical timing of its "push" for development, which created a striking contrast to the European experience and a social result unpredicted by Western political and economic development.¹¹ Like Bendix, Gusfield's 1967 article, "Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social Change,"¹² exposed major fallacies in linear modernization theory as applied to India. Rather than requiring displacement, conflict, or exclusiveness, relations between tradition and modernity are often mutually supportive, forming the bases for ideologies and social movements.

    The TM movement originated in a period of Indian history marked by its most significant confrontation between tradition and modernity, following independence from Great Britain. The pressure for social change and cultural modification increased, as detailed in the works of M. N. Srinivas and Milton Singer. The former's Caste in Modern India¹³ and subsequent Social Change in Modern India¹⁴ carefully follow the transformations of the caste system under the impact of successive Muslim and British occupations, westernization and secularization from the Vedic period to post-Independence. In seeking a particularistic and non-structural functional portrayal of India, Srinivas rejects the notion of a static caste order in favor of a model which has elements of Marxian class struggle, Weberian social order, and evolutionary convergence theories. Although he finds much social change in traditional India, he errs, perhaps, in heaping too much praise on Westernized and reformist elites and in rejecting traditional mentality as weak in comparison with idealized social change found in the West.

   This Part argues for both text and context as necessary data bases in studying Indian civilization and is a polemic against the anti-textual bias in social and cultural anthropology. Following Singer's example, in When a Great Tradition Modernizes,¹⁵ he showed how the history of images of India in the West reflected their changing economic and political relations.¹⁶ Later he indicated how much epic and Puranic mythology and legends survive in contemporary oral traditions and urban lifestyles. One of the principal assumptions of this study is that the circuitous route of the TM movement back to India was conditioned by conventional mass mediated imagery of Indian subjects. However, once returned, the movement sought to profit from its Westernized image of success while reviving Vedic knowledge and lore.

   In his introductory essay for Social Movements in India,¹⁷ M.S.A. Rao emphasized challenge and conflict in characterizing the social movement as opposed to acquiescence and loyalty found in processes of mobility and change which only perpetuate the established order. In contrast to imitative or emulative processes such as sanskritization (whereby ritual features are adopted by jatis, or castes, to improve the status of the whole group) and Westernization, social movements were defined by three important features: ideology, collective mobilization, and orientation to change. Rao suggested that relative deprivation was the most useful theory for explaining the genesis of social movements because it gave greater attention to ideological contradiction and conflict than did theories of structural strain and revitalization.¹⁸

   Taking direction from Rao, this examination of the origins of the Transcendental Meditation movement in India, at first called the Spiritual Regeneration Movement (SRM), adopts an historical perspective, locating the beginnings of Maharishi's following in South India. What were the conditions in that region which made the development more viable than in the North in the first decade following Independence? Relative deprivation among upper caste Hindus at the time of the anti-brahmin movement can account for early interest. Also pertinent are the histories of other social movements which preceded TM, suggesting that revitalization cannot be overlooked as an important factor. Throughout Indian history, caste exclusivity and communalism have been vital determinants of collective activity, and in the case of the TM movement, too, Maharishi's caste and that of his followers were influential features. Every political power and social movement, especially in the brahmin dominated South, has had to take on caste as an issue, either opposing or supporting reform. A number of other historically situated issues are attached to that of caste domination, including those pertinent to the emergence of TM: Vedic orthodoxy and Sanskrit ritual, the entwinement of political and religious heterodoxy, sacramental privilege and economic power, British bureaucracy and English education, indigenous religion and self-government.

   Movement literature documenting Maharishi's first activities in the South has been utilized in conjunction with interviews with early adherents (taken in India, 1982-83). A second section presents a more Indological perspective on those symbolic aspects of Maharishi's role and message as they resonated with prevailing ideals and values, strengthening the theme of revitalization (or "regeneration"). These fundamental concepts fashioned the sanskritized form of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement. Finally the movement in India is documented in its visual context, and in contemporary Westernized form in the ethnographic film which makes up the third section. The sources of its newer popularity are discussed with reference to the importance of charisma as a vitalizing force, though encumbered by the movement's bureaucratic organization. Three parts constitute the filmic message: a de-constructivist survey of the socio-cultural context, a member's perspective on the core charisma of the movement - the Shankaracharya tradition and master-disciple relationship, and the present condition of the Indian TM movement - employing a syncretist message that combines native tradition with Western science and technology.

Notes

Part I - Origins of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement Sanskritization and Westernization

1. Of the theories most often referenced, Smelser's theory of collective behavior is virtually alone in emphasizing the structural situation of movements as functional within a larger social system (see Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, 1963, New York: Free Press). He locates causation through a value-added approach at the point where social change (structural conduciveness) has generated dis-equilibrium (social strain), requiring a social movement to restore social homeostasis. Adding ideology to the equation, the theory is essentially Durkheimian. The Marxian line of analysis has been historical materialism, emphasizing relative deprivation and common interests within a class structure that is historically situated (see Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 1966, Boston: Beacon). Causation implies historicity and its analysis requires recognition of the social base that has become aware of the inherent conflict in its society (although there is less interest in the processes by which movements originate).

   Both Blumer's symbolic interactionist theory of collective behavior (see Herbert Blumer, "Collective Behavior" in Robert Park, Principles of Sociology) 1939, New York, Barnes and Noble) and Turner's concept of emergent norms (see Ralph H. Turner and Lewis M. Killian, Collective Behavior, 1957, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall) neglect to inquire into social structure for origins of social movements.

   Resource mobilization theory diminishes the use of motivation, common to the "hearts and minds" tradition, and dispenses with analysis of sources of discontent in favor of explanation of organizational development (see John McCarthy and Mayer Zald, The Trend of Social Movements in America: Professionalization and Resource Mobilization, 1973, Morristown, NJ, General Learning Corp. and Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution, 1978, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley).

   More recently, Gusfield's fluid concept of social movements has drawn attention to unintended consequences and shifts in meaning as areas of investigation (see "Social Movements and Social Change: Perspectives of Linearity and Fluidity" in Louis Kriesberg, ed., Research in Social Movements: Conflict and Change, vol. 3, Greenwich Conn.: JAI Press (forthcoming)) as opposed to conventional analysis of movement success or failure in terms of programmatic goals (see William Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest, 1975, Homenoop, Ill.: Corsey Press).

2. C. E. Lincoln, Black Muslims in America, 1961, Boston: Beacon Press.

3. Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade, 1963, Urbana, IL.: University of Illinois Press.

4. Roy Wallis, The Road to Total Freedom, 1976, London: Heinemann.

5. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 1980, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

6. Louis Dumont and David F. Pocock, "For a Sociology of India," Contributions to Indian Sociology, I, 1957, pp. 7-22.

7. F.G. Bailey, "For a Sociology of India?," Contributions to Indian Sociology, III, 1959, pp. 88-101.

8. T.N. Madan, "For a Sociology of India," Contributions to Indian Sociology, IX, 1966, pp. 9-16.

9. See Y.B. Damle, "For a Theory of Indian Sociology," Sociology in India, 1965, published by the Institute of Social Sciences, Agra University.

10. See note 1 in Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and Alex Inkeles and David H. Smith, Becoming Modern, 1974, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Also, Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, 1966, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

11. Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship, 1964, New York: John Wiley and Sons.

12. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 72, no. 4, January, 1967.

13. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1962.

14. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966.

15. New York: Praeger, 1972.

16. "Passage to More Than India: A Sketch of Changing European and American Images," pp. 11-39.

17. "Conceptual Problems in the Study of Social Movements," Social Movements in India, vol. 1, 1978, New Delhi: Manohar Publications, pp. 1-17.

18. For an interesting discussion on Indian social movements that indicates the diversity of perspectives employed by Indian sociologists, see Dissent, Protest and Reform in Indian Civilization, edited by S.C. Malik, 1977, Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study.

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Coplin Curriculum Vitae

|Dr Coplin's Home Page||Coplin dissertation.descriptive pages||Introduction||SRM Origins||Socio-Historical Context for SRM's Emergence||SRM's Emergence||Notes for Chapter 2||Chapter 3: Cultural Revitalization|