Sw. Chinmayananda and the art of religious bufoonery

The Master jester of Spiritualism

Yoga's Latest Joker of the Pack

What you will see above set side by side are the images of two prominent religious buffoons of India, the first  Sw. Chinmayananda, a ‘shining star’ of yesteryears and the next, Baba Ramdev,  an exponent of contemporary religious buffoonery.

Ardent devotees of the Chinmaya Mission will surely feel revolted by this clubbing of a country bumpkin guru like Baba Ramdev with the so-called towering intellectualism of Chinmayananda. But to a skeptic and critic, these represent but different faces of the same spectacle of cheerleading fervor and insanity that is at the heart of the phenomenon of organized religion. 

Chinmayananda, the founder and organizer of Chinmaya Mission, a growing and sprawling empire of religious and spiritualist cultishness,  goes by the honorifics of Swami (Master) and Gurudev (Divine or Godly teacher) and is a highly revered and deified personage in spite of all clownish antics that are the hallmarks and trademarks of his public behavior and demeanor. 

To a rational and dispassionate observer, the reputation and image of Chinmayananda as an intellectual and leader of high order would be an enigma and puzzle. To me it has always been a wonder that a person so slovenly and clumsy in attire and appearance as Chinmayananda  and  exhibiting oddities and eccentricities in his speech and mannerisms would ever be considered an object of reverence and awe. 

But such are the ways of the world and people that the irony of the magnetic appeal or charisma of a clown or buffoon is not altogether uncommon.

The success and growth of Chinmaya Mission does testify to the business acumen of Sw. Chinmayananda and his understanding and successful application of the sociology and psychology of mass religious fascination and delirium. 

In this article I have tried to reassess a common impression of his commentaries on Hindu treatises, which is about his so-called oratorical skills. That article provided an  analysis of his commentary  to examine whether his style and manner of narration really qualifies for the lofty encomium of oratory that is so easily conferred on him by the religious and intellectual gentry of India.

In most lexicons, oratory is defined as eloquence or skill in making speeches to the public, or as a manner of public speaking marked by the use of overblown or effusive rhetoric. So it can be seen that there are not one but two requirements for a speech or expressive style to be properly denoted or qualified as oratorical; firstly the eloquence of speech or expression and along with that the predominance of rhetoric.

Quoting from Wikipedia “Eloquence (from Latin eloquentia) is fluent, forcible, elegant or persuasive speaking. It is primarily the power of expressing strong emotions in striking and appropriate language, thereby producing conviction or persuasion. The term is also used for writing in a fluent style.”

While a speech or expression needs to be forcible or persuasive, we must not be unmindful of an almost equal emphasis on fluency, elegance and use of appropriate language.

While Chinmayananda’s talks may sound forceful and persuasive to many, they miserably fail the test of fluency, elegance and use of appropriate language. Using appropriate language involves adhering to the rules of a language pertaining to its grammar, idioms, semantics and context, while improvising on style and effect using the freedom that figurative expression allows us.

Chinmayananda’s style of speech and writing are in complete violation of these rules of the English language. He confuses prose and poetic style and mixes literal and figurative elements of expression without any sense of proportion, placement or agreement with context. He repeatedly uses common jargons of spiritual lingo, which is a clear sign of his lack of fluency in his subject matter and language. He is notorious for coining new words, many times by tagging Sanskrit or Indian words with English words.

There is nothing wrong about coining words- neologism, as it is termed in linguistics. Many languages are enriched by the addition of new words. But new words to gain currency in a language need to satisfy certain requirements of semantics, with associative and derivative qualities of coherence, cogency and ablity to blend with other words and groups.

His terms like ‘mud-tattwa’, ‘packet-yoga’ ‘rama-gold’, ‘Krsna-cure’, ‘Arjuna-disease’ etc., exhibit a tendency for playing to the gallery with weird-sounding words, which may yet signify some ethnicity. But, from the perspective of eloquence, they represent an atrocious use of language.

The purpose of rhetoric is to create an effect and persuade an audience to its point of view. But still, rhetoric needs to be phrased in meaningful and appropriate language. Looking at the style of Chinmayananda’s commentaries, one really wonders whether he knows how to construct rhetoric. It will be noticed that he poses questions with exaggerated terms and fancy phrases and then answers them himself, stumbling in the process of doing both of these. A typically well phrased and delivered rhetorical question is one that does not need an answer or has a reply in the question itself. Rhetoric also demands some grandeur and luxuriance of vocabulary and phraseology that does not seem to exist in Chinmayananda’s literary arsenal.

Surely Chinmayananda’s eccentricities and antics in the process of speaking, like the waving of hands, bobbing of the head, conflation and contortion of nostrils, stealthy wiping of the nose (mostly the result of his regular snuff intake), the bird-droppings of uneven and ‘un-parliamentary’ words and phrases, abrupt changes of voice tones etc., may make for entertaining and comic occasions and interludes. But to take these as marks of oratory and eloquence is to grossly misunderstand the meaning and demands of oratory. If Chinmayananda’s verbal acrobatics is to be considered as oratorical flourish, one can only say that oratory is sorely in need of a redefinition.

To conclude, a few specimens from the book-loads of Chinmayananda’s commentaries were looked at. But one can be pretty certain that the bulk of his writings and speeches very nearly mirror these specimens in their sheer desultory nonsense and aimless exposition of theological concepts. While it may not be a wonder for his devotees to marvel at his intellectual prowess and expressiveness, to any thinking and reasonable student of a langauage and subject, Chinmayananda’s speech and writing represent the most cruel mockery of language, and constitute an insult to human intelligence and understanding.