“A Charismatic Guru, the Deity He Serves, and Mercantile Devotion” Dr. Rufin Jeremy Saul

In the course of research in India, I have frequently had the opportunity to visit religious shrines operated under the auspices of a charismatic guru. These kinds of shrines are effectively unknown to international tourists and researchers, but I have had frequent involvement with them because they are commonly connected to folk deities of Rajasthan, my primary area of study. The significance of the Rajasthan connection is that the main clientele for such shrines consists of Marwari merchants, who claim descent from Rajasthan but nowadays mostly live in cities throughout India. Inasmuch as they are a merchant caste, they typically have financial resources that they can draw from to support the deities that they revere. This has made them highly influential in the proliferation of shrines connected to Rajasthan’s deities in recent decades. During time spent in Kolkata, I had the opportunity to visit such a shrine and even watch its primary annual celebration, which exemplifies the considerations mentioned above, such as the need for a guru to demonstrate supernatural powers to justify his charismatic authority and the patronage of Marwari merchants. In this way, we see the importance of Marwaris in the development of popular devotional practice.

The particular shrine that I will mention is located near Kolkata. I will not disclose the exact location, but will just note that the shrine has been there for several decades. Kolkata, incidentally, is the cultural center of Marwari life, although such merchants are found in cities throughout India. The significance of its location is that it attracts a fair number of Marwari merchants each week. From my observation, few if any from other cultural groups show up here. Although devotees are somewhat cagey about revealing if they have ever financially supported the shrine, it is clearly a focus of devotional interest for many of them, and in that sense they share a sense of community, which is also grounded in Marwari caste awareness. The guru himself was born in Rajasthan in the vicinity of the shrine’s main deity, a folk version of Bhairava. This deity, in pan-Indian scriptural tradition, is understood to be an “angry” or fierce, hence impure, version of the Hindu god Shiva. In past times, Bhairava often received blood sacrifice and alcohol offerings, but because of changing social attitudes, sacrifice is now seldom seen at Bhairava shrines in general, although giving alcohol, an impure substance that the god nonetheless favors, is still often part of ritual protocol.

During an occasion where I observed the deity’s major annual celebration, several typical aspects of his worship were shown. For example, at one point, the guru ceremoniously lifted multiple bottles of wine to the image’s mouth, provided by devotees. And the guru himself demonstrated his supernatural powers in the way that he tended the ritual fire set up on the stage in front of the deity’s image. That is, when repeatedly adding sacred liquified butter (ghee) to keep the fire going, the guru would stick his hand into the fire itself, demonstrating that he was impervious to harm by virtue of his devotion. At times he would lift the pan holding the fire to further show that the heat did not bother him. Later that night, while giving blessings to devotees lined up for this service, he would occasionally let out strange shrieks, showing that the power of the deity had entered him. Since Marwari funding is an important factor in the current development of shrine deity devotion in cities throughout India, the kind of situation described here is a vibrant area deserving further study.