Dynamics of Hope: Secular and Religious Apprehensions in the Swaminarayan Hindu Tradition

ABSTRACT

This article produces a theologically engaged anthropology of hope by examining the function of theological precepts in generating and maintaining hope in the everyday secular life of their adherents. It explores a practical theology of hope practised in a transnational Hindu organisation, BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, and examines the tensions and complexities of theistic hope by asking two questions: What sort of meaning-making frameworks of hope does BAPS create from its theological teachings? How do BAPS practitioners employ these frameworks to negotiate their everyday secular concerns and effect ethical subjectivation? Drawing on the ethnographic research conducted during 2015–17, this article attends to ambivalences and apprehensions in the daily lives of BAPS members to show how their experiential narratives substantiate and yet complicate the mainstream anthropological conceptions of hope. It demonstrates how a practical theology of hope and a social anthropology of hope can inform, transform and complement one another.

KEYWORDS:

• Hope
• everyday ethics
• Hindu theology
• BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha
• Pramukh Swami Maharaj

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.

2 Certain sorts of theologies, such as empirical, critical, practical, ecumenical, are natural conversation partners with anthropology, and hence provide more meaningful and fruitful interactions than those with conventional theologies such as systematic and dogmatic. In this article, I engage with what Don Browning considers ‘critical practical theology’ that ‘begins with the intuition of faith but ends, when needed, with reasons and justifications for the practical actions it proposes’ (Browning 1996: 3). I examine theologically negotiated hope from anthropological perspectives by asking the questions raised by Richard Osmer in his work Practical Theology: ‘What is going on’? ‘Why is this going on’? ‘What ought to be going on’? ‘How might we respond’ (2008: 4)?

3 While most 20th-century theorists have presented the relationship between the secular and religious as dichotomous and often antithetical, recent scholarly works have exposed problems in this representation by comparing the normative foundations, ideological commitments, and evolving formations of these two categories (see, for example, Asad 2003; Taylor 2007; 2011; Bender & Taves 2012; Warner et al. 2013; Mahmood 2015; Bilgrami 2016.) While supporting the deconstruction of secular-religious binary and blurring its traditionally demarcated boundaries, I invoke ‘secular apprehensions’ in this article’s title to denote this-worldly concerns of religious people who adhere to, albeit in varying degrees, otherworldly belief systems. In such everyday apprehensions, the conventional sense of the secular and the religious simultaneously collapse and coalesce to overcome anxiety. They arise from, as Charles Taylor argues, various incommensurate projects of value and meaning that take place within what he calls ‘the immanent frame’ of the secular (2007: 542). In such a constructed social space, where both rationality and religiosity are key values, the modern ‘buffered self’ critically analyses and selectively employs religious viewpoints to address her secular and religious apprehensions, both of which mutually inform each other. In this vein, I use the terms ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ in this article, not as contradictory but complementary conceptions.

4 BAPS is one of the largest denominations of the Swaminarayan Hindu religious tradition, named after its founder Swaminarayan (1781–1830), who ‘attracted a large number of followers from many castes and regions … [and] proclaimed a strict moral code that was valued by British and Indian observers as helping bring order to a chaotic region during a troubled time’ (Williams 2016, xviii) For more information on BAPS, visit its website http://www.baps.org.

5 During the summer, winter, and other research breaks from 2015–17, I conducted multisited ethnographic fieldwork in Robbinsville and Edison, two main centres of BAPS in New Jersey, USA, and in London, UK. In order to empirically examine how BAPS members employ their theistic worldviews to negotiate hope in their everyday lives, I attempted to do reflexive (that is, iteratively inductive and deductive) research by staying with them, attending their weekly assemblies (ravisabha) at respective local temples, participating in their family assemblies (gharasabha), and interacting with them through both semi-structured interviews and informal, semi-formal conversations.

I am a native Gujarati speaker and a near native, fluent Hindi speaker, so I was able to easily communicate with all of my interview subjects and closely study the material of BAPS, a primarily Gujarati community. Moreover, I have attended numerous events and assemblies of BAPS as part of my filmmaking and multimedia projects. This experience has given me basic insights into the philosophical and theological beliefs as well as devotional practices of the Swaminarayan Hindu tradition. It helped me jumpstart the textual study the traditional theological texts, and understand perspectives of my informants.

6 Although several theological works of BAPS have been translated in English, most respondents in my fieldwork used key theological terms in Gujarati; for example, karta-harta, shraddha, vishvash, krupa.

7 Most theological texts of the Swaminarayan Hindu tradition, which are in Gujarati, and my Gujarati-speaking respondents use words such as ichchha, asha, apeksha, shraddha, vishvas and nishchay to denote hope. Although these terms literally, respectively mean desire, hope, expectation, faith, trust and conviction (Lexicon 2017), they are used interchangeably to directly or indirectly refer to ‘hope.’ For example, Manish used the term ‘asha’ to denote ‘hope’ when he said that ‘mari asha par pani phari valyu,’ which means that ‘my hope (asha) was washed away.’ However, in the very next line, he used the term ‘shraddha’ to denote hope as he said that ‘mari shraddha dagi gai,’ which means that ‘my hope (shraddha) grounded in faith was shaken.’ Swapan’s expression ‘mane nishchay hato ke Bhagwan maru saru j karashe,’ means ‘I was steadfastly hopeful that God will do best for me.’ Here he uses the term ‘nishchay’ to denote hope in the sense of a firm belief or conviction. Similarly, Hina and others use ‘ichchha’ to denote both desire and hope. Due to the limited scope of this article, I cannot elaborate on the nuanced differences between these Gujarati terms, however, they frequently denote hope and desire, which can be figured out from their contextual and semantical placements.

8 Names and places of all respondents have been changed to protect their confidentiality.

9 Figure 1 also calls attention to relationship of hope and desire with the third axis of spiritual aspiration, which is not delineated here due to the limited scope of this paper.