From Analogies To Narrative Entanglement: Invoking Scientific Authority In Indian New Age Spirituality

It is late afternoon in the tiny library room, and together with a handful of elderly people I sit quietly by a large table, leafing through spiritual magazines and newspapers. Suddenly a voice interrupts the buzz of the ceiling fan: “Do you have Osho Times?” The voice belongs to a retired medical doctor in his late 50s who just dropped by to borrow the latest issues of the Hindi edition of this magazine. His question astonishes me since he has never mentioned Osho—the controversial guru who amalgamated Eastern religion with Western psychoanalysis and sexual freedom—in any of the conversations we have had about religion and spirituality on earlier occasions. When the old widow who volunteers as a librarian registers his loan, I take the opportunity to ask him what he thinks about Osho. He pauses. With a serene look he ultimately replies, “Osho is very scientific”, collects his magazines and leaves. This minor incident, which occurred in a spiritual centre, Jyoti Ashram,1 in the North-Indian pilgrim town of Haridwar, was one of numerous instances I witnessed during my ethnographic fieldwork in 2003–2005 in which science was invoked to lend authority to spiritual practices, interests and beliefs. In this chapter I discuss some of the ways in which this occurred in a cross-section of middle-class spiritual and self-development settings in New Delhi and Haridwar in the mid2000s. I devote particular attention to the forms of legitimacy construction I encountered most frequently: analogies, references to scientific experiments, terminological loans and the use of doctoral titles, the last bordering on a source of legitimacy that is more academic than scientific. I also look into narrative entanglement, which was a more unusual and idiosyncratic way of seeking scientific authority. By prioritizing