Secularization and Cosmopolitan Gurus

Secularization and Cosmopolitan GurusThis article presents a case study centered on religious reforms of Hindu gurus teaching in the West.Discursive traditions of India and liberation therapeutics in America provide the referential basis for discourse processing of emergent concepts widely distributed with spiritual representations of the Upanishads.Confronted with a lack of counterparts in different cultural repertoires, it is argued that traditional categories of Vedanta are significantly decontextualized in neocolonial narratives of Hinduism.The dichotomy of tradition and secular modernity, however, is replaced with transcultural modes of religious contact and transfer.A set of hypotheses is deduced for future research towards distinguishing variant discourses of Indian spirituality based on empirical observation of contemporary forms of Hindu nationalism.