MSG: New Action Guru, Old Struggle

He preaches, sings, dances, fights, flies, and takes down elephants with a single stroke of his palm. Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Ji Insan, also known as MSG, is both an Indian holy man and a film star. He also produces these movies and is their main and only hero. He also provides script and choreography ideas, writes the lyrics of the movie songs and sings them. Guess who he plays in the films? Yes, he simply plays himself. To date he has made two movies, both released in 2015. Innovatively, the first one is called MSG: The Messenger of God (later renamed as MSG: The Messenger) and the second: MSG 2: The Messenger. These titles are as modest as everything else he does. The MSG acronym serves as the guru’s nickname and means (surprise!) “the Messenger of God.” Despite all the superhuman powers he shows in both of the movies – and these powers include flying, titanic strength, and telepathic communication with buffaloes –  the plot of the second film is described as “based on real events.”

While watching him in interviews or during the flashy film release parties, it is hard to even guess that Gurmeet Ram Rahim is an actual spiritual teacher. His thick, black beard flows onto a stout chest, often adorned with a golden chain and clad in a T-shirt. Interviews are sometimes interrupted by his display of singing or rapping skills. He is happy to point out how fit he is for his age and how many sporting disciplines he has tried. The two MSG films belong to the Bollywood action movie category, rather than the religious genre. A holy man’s action movie: Should we call it Holywood?

The films have been crushed by the critics as ruthlessly as the guru destroys his enemies on the screen. If you really want to try watching them, it is perhaps wise to first try sampling the trailers. Be warned: The Hindustan Times reviewer suggests that you should watch the first MSG movie “only if your survival depends on it” and that the second part is “beyond rating.” The DNA India reviewer felt that the first movie was “three hours of torture so painful that you start laughing at yourself.”

Yet Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh is not a self-styled sadhu (holy man). It is said that he has formally inherited the mantle of leadership of Dera Sacha Sauda, a religious community based in the Indian state of Punjab, from its earlier guru, Shah Satnam Singh, in 1990. The community runs various social programs and holds spiritual meetings. In line with mysticism’s universalism, his three names – Gurmeet, Ram, and Rahim – evoke three different religious traditions: the Sikh, the Hindu, and the Muslim, respectively. Yet to underscore that he is an ordinary person, the guru took the surname Insan (‘human being’). Contrary to the idea of sannyasa – abandoning of family and renunciation of material possessions – Gurmeet Ram Rahim is actually involved in a few businesses and has a family, with one of his daughters married to a former member of an important political party.

Holy Man About Town

It is in fact not uncommon for some of the popular Indian holy men to run companies, appear in the media, or even enter politics. Swami Ramdev has a chain of yoga schools and sells traditional Ayurvedic medicine. However, the difference between Gurmeet Ram Rahim and people like Swami Ramdev is that the latter try to restrict all of their activities, including business, to a broadly understood Indian tradition and do not cross certain lines into self-promotion. While Ramdev and others always wear traditional holy men attire, Gurmeet Ram Rahim does not shy away from fashionable Western clothes. The guru boasts of his fashion design skills and recently announced his plan to start a chain of clothing outlets. Instead of filling his Hindi with pure Sanskrit terminology, he likes to insert English words nearly as often as the West-influenced elites of India do. Before becoming a filmmaker, the Dera Sacha Sauda leader released six musical albums. The form of music is also quite removed from Indian traditions (and is therefore referred to by some as “religious rock”).

Gurmeet Ram Rahim usually explains that his clothes, songs and movies are a necessary repackaging of a spiritual message to attract youth. In another words, he is a guru for the 21st century, the saint of Bollywood, a self-appointed teacher of the Westernized urban middle-class and upper-class. He really does claim that his last movie, MSG 2: The Messenger, is based on real events, but goes on to explain that the dance scenes, stunts and fights, which have him wrecking army jeeps by jumping on them, magically stopping arrows in mid-air, or breaking large ice cubes with his bare hands, have been added because in a movie “there needs to be drama” (film me drama honi chahiye).

Cutting these fantastical scenes, however, would leave very little movie. But what remains, Gurmeet Ram Rahim claims, is the basic story of his social work among the tribesmen of India. In real life he is said to have lived for a time among a tribe in the Kotra area of southern Rajasthan in 2001, trying to convince them to abandon their addictions and their habit of going around naked. In MSG 2: The Messenger, the guru is similarly engaged in a social reform of tribal communities but also faces their immense opposition which leads to public trials and physical confrontations.

Heated Debate

Apart from the devastating reviews, the first picture (MSG: The Messenger of God) had its share of problems prior to release. MSG 2: The Messenger, released on September 18, is in for even greater controversy. The way tribal communities are depicted in it as backward, dangerous and barbarous will not go unnoticed in a country of hundreds of such groups. The trailer is already quite straightforward in its criticism. It says that “these people [the tribesmen] are neither humans nor animals. They are real devils.” (Na toh ye long insaan hai na jaanwar, ye shaitain hain, shaitan.) The guru, however, his heart filled with compassion, claims benevolently that he has “come to turn the devils into humans” (shaitanon ko insan banane ke liye ham aye hain). Following the release of the trailer, the movie has already been banned in two Indian states with sizeable tribal populations, Chattisgarh and Jharkhand.

It is therefore not only the movie’s form, but also part of the message that has caused heated debate. While it might be amusing to note the existence of a holy man who chooses to dress as a rock star and play a Bollywod action hero, a lot of his ideas actually fit in well with the age-old Brahmanic (priestly) traditions of India. Gurmeet Ram Rahim’s aspirations of “social reform” may be perceived as part of a process that some scientists have called “Sanskritization.” The term was popularized by Indian sociologist M.N. Srinivasan and originally denoted the accepting of elements of the dominant, priestly Aryan culture by politically and economically aspiring groups that had hitherto been outside the purview of that culture and needed this acculturation to win social acceptance. Since Srinivasan, this definition has been widely discussed and now may be used to denote more than one process. It was for example pointed out that in given circumstances the culture might have also been imposed on those groups that were not necessarily were willing to accept it. And this is the case with Gurmeet Ram Rahim, at least on a symbolical cinematic level.

Consider the images of both sides created in the movie. In classic Sanskrit epics, the sages representing the priestly Aryan culture usually resided in secluded, wild areas. Their hermitages were often surrounded and threatened by the demons (rakshasas). It is often understood that the sages were in reality the Brahmans (priests) and their hermitages were their endowments of land (granted by the rulers), while the lurking “demons” were the non-Aryanized tribes. The imagery helped to justify the struggle against the latter and their acculturation. In the movie, as well as in his own life, Gurmeet Ram Rahim similarly presents himself as a sage who chose to live among the tribesmen, who not only attack him but are also likened to demons. The same term, rakshasas, is used in the film. Eventually, of course, they begin to worship him. Interestingly, the guru’s real-life followers accept the same surname: Insan (human), which symbolically makes them equal. Therefore, when in the movie Gurmeet Ram Rahim claims that he wants to turn the tribal “devils” into humans (insan), it can also mean that he wants to change them into members of his community.

Criticism

What doesn’t the guru like about the tribal groups? Their lack of clothing, for starters. In a discussion during the release of MSG 2, he compares the sexual nakedness shown in foreign movies to the everyday nakedness of some Indian tribal communities. Both are for him an example of obscenity (ashleelta). It is as if the ways of the tribal communities were not natural and traditional for them. They must be the result of some social degeneration, just like the depravity-spreading foreign movies. For Gurmeet Ram Rahim, it is the culture that he is bringing with him that is natural for any human being. Just as in the Sanskritization model, the priestly Aryan culture is considered higher and the only one worth emulating. Similarly, his Dera Sacha Sauda organization observed that the tribesmen of Kotra were following “superstitious or illogical customs” (those promoted by the guru cannot be superstitious and illogical, of course). Their “[y]outh used to be engaged in sexual relationship before marriage and used to get married only after having children, and then have multiple partners.” Again, how close the tribal ways were to the depraved Western culture! Fortunately, with Gurmeet Ram Rahim’s “intervention, the institution of marriage had been established in the correct form.”

Second, the tribesmen are criticized for meat-eating, and beef-eating in particular. That custom would certainly seem illogical for the guru if he were to look at the tribesmen as part of Hindu culture, in which the majority of the communities do not consume the meat of a cow, an animal considered sacred. This, however, would not be illogical if Gurmeet Ram Rahim would simply not consider these particular communities as Hindus. His view, however, rests on the assumption that all tribal communities are indeed Hindus and it is only their economic deprivation and moral depravation that had made them not Hindu enough (as if the religion was a starting point for all Indian communities, including those that had lived on the subcontinent before the religion even came into being).

Third, the tribal people are attacked for partaking of alcohol and drugs. (In the movie, they are also said to continue human sacrifice; in real life, Dera Sacha Sauda has accused them of criminality.) While Gurmeet Ram Rahim can certainly be lauded if he indeed sought to curb alcoholism, it needs to once again be noted that the purification of drinking and eating habits was also part of Sanskritization.

Gurmeet Ram Rahim’s ambition does not stop here. He wants to make the next movie which, he claims, “will be bigger than Avatar.” Coincidentally, avatara is Sanskrit for the incarnation of God in Hindu tradition.