22. introduction
Actually it is not the charisma ofdarshan that bothers Kakar, but some of what Cha-
ran Singh says as he gives it. When Charan Singh urges spiritual seekers to accept
their social station, whatever it might be, and acquiesce in “the iron law of karma,”
Kakar parts company. Yet it is important to acknowledge that although the Beas dera
over which Charan Singh presided may fall short of egalitarian perfection, as most
if not all religious communities do, it nonetheless remains one of India’s least caste-
conscious religious environments.
That brings us to an aspect of “lived Hinduism” that some Hindus think ought
to be excluded from any treatment of the subject (part 6). At a conference on local
expressions of Hinduism held in New York in 2003, for example, certain partici-
pants were adamant that “sociology” of this sort (as they called it) has no proper
place in the representation of religion—and Hinduism has nothing to do with
caste.^12 Undoubtedly they are right that caste has long been used as a whipping boy
by Western, Christian critics of Hindu India, and of late there has been some im-
portant work confirming that common notions of caste both in India and abroad
owe a great deal to the ways British administrators managed the concept in the
course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.^13 But Hinduism without
caste? That is something many Hindus themselves would reject—some merely to
acknowledge the reality of the connection, others because they feel caste points not
just to actualities but to ideals. Here Gandhi’s view is important to remember. He
saw caste as signifying a religiously based society whose parts cohere in comple-
mentary ways and articulate a sense of shared need, by contrast to individual-
focused, contract-arranged Western notions of what constitutes a healthy society.
Not all of this came out at the New York conference, but a good bit did. One set
of participants insisted that caste was a figment of the Western imagination, or at
least something the British grafted onto Indian society. But some of the people they
were trying to persuade represented religious worldviews that had been deeply
shaped by the reality of social oppression, and by caste in particular. These confer-
ence participants, like millions of other Indians, have long been called Untouch-
ables. Even though many of them have now lived in the United States for decades,
and some of the younger ones were born there, they all report that they have expe-
rienced the reality of caste. No one was about to tell them somebody made it up. In
partial consequence of that fact, these particular New Yorkers have found it makes
more sense to think of their religious group as aligned with Sikhism rather than
Hinduism.
The group of which we are speaking is the Shri Guru Ravidas Sabha of Wood-
side, Queens, and the guru they venerate in their title is one of the most important