Guru English is a bold reconceptualization of the scope and meaning of
cosmopolitanism, examining the language of South Asian religiosity as it
has flourished both inside and outside of its original context for the
past two hundred years. The book surveys a specific set of religious
vocabularies from South Asia that, Aravamudan argues, launches a
different kind of cosmopolitanism into global use.
Using "Guru English" as a tagline for the globalizing idiom that has
grown up around these religions, Aravamudan traces the diffusion and
transformation of South Asian religious discourses as they shuttled
between East and West through English-language use. The book
demonstrates that cosmopolitanism is not just a secular Western
"discourse that results from a disenchantment with religion, but
something that can also be refashioned from South Asian religion when
these materials are put into dialogue with contemporary social
move-ments and literary texts. Aravamudan looks at "religious forms of
neoclassicism, nationalism, Romanticism, postmodernism, and nuclear
millenarianism, bringing together figures such as Swami Vivekananda, Sri
Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi, and Deepak Chopra with Rudyard Kipling, James
Joyce, Robert Oppenheimer, and Salman Rushdie.
Guru English analyzes writers and gurus, literary texts and religious
movements, and the political uses of religion alongside the literary
expressions of religious teachers, showing the cosmopolitan
interconnections between the Indian subcontinent, the British Empire,
and the American New Age.
