Shakti's New Voice: Guru Devotion in a Woman-Led Spiritual Movement

by Angela Rudert

Overview

Shakti’s New Voice is the first comprehensive study of Anandmurti Gurumaa, a widely popular contemporary female guru from north India known for offering spiritual teachings and music on satellite television and the Internet. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and religious-historical research—as well as unexpected and unprecedented outsider contact with the guru—Angela Rudertoffers an intimate portrait of “Gurumaa” that will be of interest to the guru’s admirers as well as to scholars. To examine Gurumaa’s innovation, Rudert turns to examples drawn from fieldwork research in the guru’s ashram and from other locations in India and in the United States. These examples specifically discuss Gurumaa’s religious pluralism, her gender activism, and her embrace of new media, in order to illuminate elements of continuity and change within the time-honored South Asian tradition of guru-bhakti, devotion to the guru. Raised in a Sikh family, educated in a Catholic convent school and understood to have attained her enlightenment in Vrindavan, the famous Hindu pilgrimage site of Lord Krishna’s divine play, Gurumaa refuses identification with any particular religious tradition, or “ism,” yet her teachings draw from many. She speaks strongly, often harshly, about contemporary issues of gender inequality, while calling for women’s empowerment, and she has established a non-governmental organization called Shakti to promote girls’ education in India. In the case of Anandmurti Gurumaa and those spiritual seekers in her fold, innovations and re-interpretations of tradition come from within the pluralistic setting of Indian religiosity, while they exist and act within a global religious milieu.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498547550
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	10/04/2017
Series:	Explorations in Indic Traditions: Theological, Ethical, and Philosophical
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Angela Rudert is senior lecturer in the Department of Religion at Colgate University.

Table of Contents

Introduction. An “All-In-One Guru”

1. Methods in a “Buddhafield:” Interchanges Between a Scholar and a Sant
2. What’s New about New Age Gurus?
3. Gurus and Disciples: Situating Gurumaa in Tradition
4. Death at Darshan and Other Narratives of Guru-Bhakti
5. A Sufi, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, TV Guru
6. Shakti, in Word, Activism and Hagiography: “Listen to My Voice!”
7. New Media, Same Old Magic: “This is the Siddhi”

Conclusion. Conversations with a “Twenty-First Century Mystic”

Editorial Reviews

This volume is enriched by the author’s reflections upon her own experiences in Gurumaa’s ashram. At the same time, it is grounded in substantial ethnographic research conducted with Gurumaa and her devotees in both India and the United States. This book will therefore appeal to scholars and students of Indian religious traditions, as well as to the general reader with an interest in religion and gender, the globalization of religion, and/or guru-led movements.

Nova Religio: The Journal Of Alternative And Emergent Religions

The book manages to retain the apposite scholarly rigour demanded of a dissertation, while donning the relaxed and casual armchair readability expected by wider audiences. . . . There is much in this book that both a lay audience as well students and scholars of religion would enjoy.

Nidan: International Journal for Indian Studies

Angela Rudert presents readers with an intimate portrait of the “New Age” tech-guru Anandmurti Gurumaa. Her book is analytically nuanced and thoughtfully engages with extant research. For those unfamiliar with the field, Rudert’s research will be a welcome tour through some of the most fascinating aspects of this particular female guru.

The Journal Of Religion

In Shakti’s New Voice, Angela Rudert, a scholar working at the intersection of anthropology and the history of religions, fills a lacuna in the field with her in-depth and empathetic exploration of the transcultural guru movement centered on Anandmurti Gurumaa. Based on more than ten years of research with Gurumaa and her middle-class Indian (and a few non-Indian) devotees in India and the United States, Shakti’s New Voice offers a critical ethno-historical examination of global guru devotion (bhakti) as it is “performed” on stage and through song, gender activism, and new media. This book will appeal to academics and non-academics interested in South Asia, religion, globalization, religious pluralism, and gender and women’s religious leadership. Expertly written, its dialogical style makes the book highly accessible to undergraduates, and its delicate balancing of culturally specific and generalizable insights will be of much interest to scholars and graduate students working in these and related fields.... Rudert’s book pushes against the old school dichotomies of “insider” and “outsider” in religious studies and other Humanistic disciplines. The book charts out a new modality for representing the (female) scholar’s voice and those of the people with whom she works and creates relationships, while casting a sobering glance on the ethics and politics of appropriating others’ worlds in the production and commodification of scholarship.

Reading Religion

The book manages to retain the apposite scholarly rigour demanded of a dissertation, while donning the relaxed and casual armchair readability expected by wider audiences.. .. There is much in this book that both a lay audience as well students and scholars of religion would enjoy.

Nidan: International Journal for Indian Studies

Angela Rudert’s fascinating book introduces the contemporary transnational female guru Anandmurti Gurumaa, ‘a fresh, fiercely independent, feminine manifestation of Master who is poet, sant and activist.’ Central to the study is the theme of conversation across multiple registers. The author’s special access to the guru enabled discussions that animate her ethnography and theorizing. Gurumaa’s emphasis on pluralism rejects labels in favor of listening to historical voices from a multiplicity of religions that are relevant to spirituality today. Through socially-informed activism, she empowers girls by her educational Shakti NGO, and by encouraging global communication through social media the guru engages her devotional community in discussion about her teachings. This fine study demonstrates that Gurumaa and gurus of today transform the received idea of the New Age to bring spirituality into potent contemporary dialogue with self and service.

Karen Pechilis

This nuanced and informative book is recommended for, though not limited to, scholars and students (both graduate and undergraduate) interested in religion, transnationalism, and gender, as well as histories of the present, Indic studies, and the ethical implications of ethnographic scholarship today.

Religious Studies Review

This volume is enriched by the author’s reflections upon her own experiences in Gurumaa’s ashram. At the same time, it is grounded in substantial ethnographic research conducted with Gurumaa and her devotees in both India and the United States. This book will therefore appeal to scholars and students of Indian religious traditions, as well as to the general reader with an interest in religion and gender, the globalization of religion, and/or guru-led movements.

Nova Religio: The Journal Of Alternative And Emergent Religions

Angela Rudert has written a fascinating study of the contemporary Punjabi female spiritual leader Anandmurti Gurumaa, generally simply referred to as ‘Gurumaa’. This is a rich account of an important, but as yet little known Indian-derived spiritual movement.. .. Rudert’s book is highly accessible and yet deals with some important and complex issues. It is relevant to anyone interested in the appeal of contemporary gurus, the globalisation of spirituality, and the increasing significance of new media platforms in spiritual movements.

Journal of Contemporary Religion

Shakti's New Voice is a rich addition to studies on gurus, women’s leadership in religion, and the tension of continuity and change in religious traditions. Rudert nimbly situates the ‘modern’ and 'New Age’ eclecticism and cultural challenge of Gurumaa into broader historical patterns found in longstanding North Indian sant traditions while illuminating the innovations facilitated by twenty-first century technology. Creative, empathetic, and self-aware, Rudert’s book makes a worthy contribution to on-going scholarly analyses of ‘gurudom’ while also offering noteworthy and fascinating insights on method. Written with scholarly expertise along with a personal and approachable style, Shakti's New Voice should appeal both to professional academics and anyone intrigued by the magnetic pull of gurus and wisdom figures.

Thomas A. Forsthoefel

Rudert’s remarkably rich and insightful ethnographic study of the contemporary Indian ‘revolutionary mystic’ Swamiji Anandmurti Gurumaa reveals how the call of the Divine Beloved is played out in the lives of disciples in a globalized and transnational context, whether through her songs, or through digital, electronic or face-to-face encounters. Framed as an interplay between tradition and innovation, the book is essential reading for understanding how Gurumaa’s pluralism and gender activism are embodied within Indic spirituality even as they reformulate traditional understandings of the boundaries between religious faiths and the role of women.

Zayn Kassam