Gurus and Media

Gurus and Media: Sound, Image, Machine, Text and the Digital, a collection of essays substantial in size and premise, explores the multitudinous ways in which guruship and devotion is inscribed, sounded, and discerned in contemporary South Asian media worlds. It features a significant introduction by the editors, Jacob Copeman, Arkotong Longkumer, and Koonal Duggal, followed by a series of thirteen diverse and consecutive essays written by a wide-ranging and global assemblage of junior and senior scholars, especially ones trained as cultural historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and religious studies experts.

In trying to cast the widest net possible, Gurus and Media defines guruship broadly, as well as across and in-between formal and informal arenas of pedagogy and authority. Notably, it recognizes the potency of the term beyond more conspicuous religious domains to include the arts and other performative phenomena. While the introduction recognizes and references a copious and preexistent body of literature on gurus and media, the volume’s interdisciplinary approach—which is particularly rich in its ethnographic content—is also unique in its attempt to put this scholarship in conversation with other conceptual work drawn from visual and material culture studies. As such, the  contributions to this volume examine various ways in which gurus engage with media  through sound, yoga dolls, letter writing, statuary, games, graffiti, tombs, television broadcasts, iconography, and digital empires. 

The main aim of this volume is to explore guruship in contemporary (and occasionally historical) South Asian contexts, and especially by accentuating complexities across space, time, and milieux. In addition, the essays place particular emphasis on the mutual mediations between gurus, industries, and devotional publics. This second theme is especially relevant because of entangled and proximal discussions of caste, religious dissent, Hindu mobilization, and the state in contemporary India. While the collection is intentionally sprawling and de-compartmentalized, the introduction does provide a series of stimulating tropes—“absent-present guruship” (29), “guru readymades” (37) and “spiderweb guruship”—to help navigate the contents as a whole. These suggested modalities allow one to examine the interwoven spheres of gurus and media through an  authority that lingers beyond a corporeal presence, or the circulation of prefabricated objects and templates used to enhance mass publicity and spiritual marketing, or the pervasive spectacle and enchantment of digital ecosystems that aim to foreground guruship.   

Despite its broad conceptual and ethnographic premise, Gurus and Media restricts itself to a discussion of guru-focused mediatizations as they relate to Hindu (and, in one instance, Sikh) traditions. The volume’s wide-ranging examination of media conduits, acolytes, and performance practices are similarly curtailed by a fixation on localized, transglobal, or otherwise virtual Indian communities, and not the more expansive religious parameters of South Asia. While this limitation might be assumed to be intentionally selective, one of the most intriguing and anomalous contributions to the volume situates the iconography of Christ as guru in South Indian churches (349), which profoundly highlights the book’s salient concern with guru-based media dispersion across publics, conventions, and locales—precisely because the object of study is outside of a dharmic tradition. It is with this point in mind that the volume’s  limited coverage of South Asia’s vast and interconnected religious worlds becomes apparent. For instance, what of the role of Tibetan Buddhist devotional media in contemporary practice, the interstices of faith embedded in South Asian Shi’a iconography, or any number of related discussions on religiosity and placemaking emerging from the field of Bangladesh Studies? Notably absent, too, is any of the apposite literature dedicated to sacred space, material culture, and devotional mobility between and across South Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral. Any such related topics would have added tremendous scope and pertinence to the edition’s otherwise commendable study. 

As a whole, Gurus and Media is an engaging and approachable edition for readerships across disciplines, and it is also filled with a broad collection of relevant images and screen shots. Its objects of scrutiny are varied and distinctive, and it will certainly be welcomed by those interested in the topic. In its exploration of the “guru’s methodology of presence” (2), it reifies the guru’s enduring connections with aurality and orality, as well as intimacy, in South Asia, while expanding on the perplexities of guru-ness through issues of digitality, mass mediation, and the quotidian in today’s world. 

Bertie Kibreah is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the University of South Florida.

Bertie Kibreah

Date Of Review:

July 25, 2024