ABSTRACT
This essay juxtaposes two prose texts, each written by a prominent Indian poet – the primary text is Arundhathi Subramaniam’s More than a Life: Sadhguru, and the secondary text is Agyeya’s Shekhar: A Life. The essay seeks to present the case that the “spiritual” is not just what is the object of a belief (a guru, or various types of gods or powers), but may be more meaningfully understood as the rhetorics of an utterance about belief. Subramaniam’s work, despite the detours of a candid and resilient scepticism, might at the end yield a particular faith in a particular guru; in a different key, Agyeya’s work (though it seems to disavow the religious) often seems to be closer in spirit to some version of religious passion than many of the more bleached statements of conventional piety. The study of the narratology of belief cannot be reduced to binaries of affirmation or disaffirmation, faith or doubt. Something of the rhetoric exceeds such reduction, and the affective outcome of the reading of a biography of a spiritual teacher (Subramaniam) or the plumbing of the depths of haecceitas (individuation, in Agyeya) cannot be reduced to a mere propositional statement of fake/true gurus, or whether the self is at bottom one’s own singleness, or an Other (be it nature, or god, or the teacher-guru, or the ‘social’). If there is a teacher/guru that emerges, it is in the space between the guru and the writer-believer-receiver of that guru as in Subramaniam’s work, and in the non-spaces (death, heightened perception, states of bodily injury) that Agyeya’s Shekhar: A Life, a sort of spiritualist autobiography, navigates.
