Summary: When Hindu believers flocked to temples across India and as far away as the United States in September to witness the "miracle" of religious idols that appeared to be drinking milk, it came as a clarion call to another group of Indians who have assigned themselves the quixotic mission of debunking all gurus, swamis, yogis and others claiming mystical powers. Since 1949, members of the Indian Science and Rationalists Association have been busy exposing fraudulent "godmen" who whisk gold watches out of thin air, levitate, give off electric charges, and even claim to have conducted erudite discourses with tigers in the wild.
When Hindu believers flocked to temples across India and as far away as the United States in September to witness the "miracle" of religious idols that appeared to be drinking milk, it came as a clarion call to another group of Indians who have assigned themselves the quixotic mission of debunking all gurus, swamis, yogis and others claiming mystical powers.
Since 1949, members of the Indian Science and Rationalists' Association have been busy exposing fraudulent "godmen" who whisk gold watches out of thin air, levitate, give off electric charges, and even claim to have conducted erudite discourses with tigers in the wild.
The "guru busters," as they have taken to calling themselves in recent years, include activists raised as Hindus, Muslims and Christians and as members of other religious groups. Most are now atheists and use their attacks on India's more egregious mystics as the spearhead of a broader assault on all religions. In the process, none are spared, not even Mother Teresa, the Roman Catholic nun who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her relief work in the slums that have made Calcutta a byword for urban misery.
"Mother Teresa has a clean image, and there is no doubt that she has helped the poor," said Debasis Bhattachariya, a 28-year-old law clerk who has been a leading protagonist in the rationalists' campaigns. "But in the end, we believe that Mother Teresa is not at all any better than all the other godmen and godwomen, because she helps to place a more kindly mask on the overall exploitation in our society."
Similar arguments have been used against holy men and women in India for generations, in this century most vociferously by the country's Marxist parties. But none of the efforts have made more than minor inroads into Indian mysticism. Although the rationalists say they have 86,000 members in 300 branches across India, nearly as many Indians can be seen at dawn each day dipping themselves along the banks of the muddy, garbage-strewn Hooghly River, a branch of the Ganges that flows through the heart of Calcutta, in the belief that washing in the water cleanses the spirit.
The dippers include businessmen who are working to cut new deals for the foreign investment that many hope will help regenerate this degraded city, as well as lawyers, doctors and destitute mothers with their scrawny children who live in cardboard shelters under the arches of a nearby overpass. Mixed in with them, and tossing marigold petals on the water, are sinewy mud wrestlers from a nearby temple, who greet the rising sun with ancient rituals and bouts that fetch a few rupee notes from the day's contingent of tourists.
Lesser men might be discouraged by this evidence that India, perhaps more than any other nation, remains resistant to the appeal of rationalism. But Prabhir Ghosh, the rationalists' president, believes in tilting his lance at every form of what he calls "religious trickery.
"See what a fraud it is!" Mr. Ghosh exclaimed one recent evening as a large crowd pressed around him in the dimly lit concourse of Calcutta's Howrah railway station. In one hand, he held a statue of Ganesh, the Hindu god with an elephant's head and a rat for an attendant. In the other, he held a spoonful of milk to Ganesh's mouth. As the milk rose toward the idol's mouth, Mr. Ghosh positively shimmered with triumph. "See what it is that the gurus and swamis are up to!" he said.
Mr. Ghosh's purpose was to demonstrate the scientific principle that the rationalists, and many scientists in India and elsewhere, say explains the phenomenon of milk-drinking idols. After the reports about that phenomenon began, millions of Indians stayed away from work on Sept. 21 and on the days that followed to line up at temples to watch. Mr. Ghosh set out to show that any liquid, including milk, can be made to rise from a spoon through the porous ceramics used for the idols through capillary attraction.
At the railway station, Mr. Ghosh and his
assistants attracted friendly laughter, suggesting that milk-drinking
idols strained the credulity of many Hindus. It may have helped that
Indian newspapers had begun to suggest that the milk miracle was a
stunt organized by a New Delhi-based guru, Chandraswamy, whose ties to
the Prime Minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, have been front-page news
following accusations that he has wide influence over the Government as
well contacts with Indian criminal gangs.
Mr. Rao's contacts with swamis have brought him embarrassment more than
once. In 1993, he seemed moved during a visit to his native state of
Andhra Pradesh when a well-known guru, Sai Baba, appeared to produce a
gold watch out of thin air. But Indian newspapers had considerable fun
at Mr. Rao's expense when film of the event that had been taped by an
Indian state television team was played back in slow motion and
revealed the Mr. Baba had employed sleight-of-hand techniques commonly
used by magicians.
Matters have not always been so easy for the
rationalists. Last year, Mr. Ghosh and several companions ended up with
cuts, bruises and fractures -- and a Calcutta hotel with broken tables,
chairs and lamps -- after a fracas at the annual meeting in Calcutta of
India's main astrological society. Mr. Ghosh's gambit on that occasion
was to challenge the astrologers to forecast, on a slip of paper to be
placed in a sealed envelope, the date of death of Prime Minister Rao,
Ravi Shankar, the sitarist, and other prominent Indians. "
They say,
'It's possible to forecast anything,' " Mr. Ghosh recalled. "So I said,
'Fine, let's forecast something that will interest every Indian.' " But
the astrologers decided that something more terrestrial was called for,
and summoned bouncers. Mr. Ghosh ended up in hospital, but he counts
the occasion as a victory. "We had very good coverage in the local
media," he said. "Front page in several papers -- a big loss of face
for the star-gazers!" For Mr. Ghosh, 50, battling the belief in the
supernatural has been a lifelong battle. His skepticism began when he
was a teen-ager living in a town outside Calcutta. Cutting classes at
school, he went about bearding holy men who demonstrated their mystical
powers on the street by walking on hot coals and by other tricks Mr.
Ghosh says were taken from the repertory of country-fair magicians.
"I
saw how people were being fooled," he said. "And I saw how this
fradulent spiritualism was being used to exploit the poor."
Later on,
he traveled around India, unmasking bigger fry. By his personal
account, he says he has exposed 150 gurus and swamis as frauds,
effectively putting them out of business. In 1993, the rationalists in
Calcutta held a weeks-long vigil outside the home where the body of a
prominent guru, Balak Brahmachari, was laid out. The guru's disciples
contended that he had not died, but had instead gone into a deep
trance. After 55 days, and no sign that Mr. Brahmachari would revive,
police carried the badly decomposed body away for cremation, setting
off street battles in which scores were hurt.
Before Mr. Rao, several
Indian Prime Ministers had close links with gurus. Jawaharlal Nehru had
a guru, as did his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Mrs. Gandhi's favorite,
Dhirendra Brahmachari, fell from favor after his habit of having holy
messages appear on blank sheets of paper was exposed as a new
application of an old high school science experiment involving the use
of invisible ink. When the guru, attempting a comeback, greeted
devotees with electric shocks, the rationalists stormed his ashram and
exposed a car battery with wires beneath the guru's throne.
The
rationalists have challenged not only practitioners of Eastern faiths,
but also Christian evangelists, including an American who claimed to
have made a child presumed unable to hear or talk since birth to speak
during a rally in Calcutta. Mr. Ghosh stormed the platform and
persuaded the 10-year-old boy to confess to the crowd that he had grown
up speaking Bengali, the common langage in West Bengal.
"We created a
counter-mass-hysteria that night," Mr. Ghosh said. "Now, the trick is
repeat that everywhere in India, wherever these tricksters appear."
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