Gurus and Media: Sound, Image, Machine, Text and the Digital

The first book dedicated to media and mediation in domains of public guruship and devotion.

Illuminating the mediatization of guruship and the guruization of media, this book bridges the gap between scholarship on gurus and the disciplines of media and visual culture studies. It investigates guru iconographies in and across various time periods and also the distinctive ways in which diverse gurus engage with and inhabit different forms of media: statuary, games, print publications, photographs, portraiture, films, machines, social media, bodies, words, graffiti, dolls, sound, verse, tombs, and more.

The book’s interdisciplinary chapters advance, both conceptually and ethnographically, our understanding of the function of media in the dramatic production of guruship and reflect on the corporate branding of gurus and on mediated guruship as a series of aesthetic traps for the captivation of devotees and others. They show how different media can further enliven the complex plurality of guruship, for instance in instantiating notions of “absent-present” guruship and demonstrating the mutual mediation of gurus, caste, and Hindutva.

Gurus and Media foregrounds contested visions of the guru in the development of devotional publics and pluriform guruship across time and space. Thinking through the guru’s many media entanglements in a single place, this book contributes new insights to the study of South Asian religions and to the study of mediation more broadly.
 

Jacob Copeman is research professor, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and distinguished researcher (Oportunius).

Arkotong Longkumer is a senior lecturer in modern Asia at the University of Edinburgh and a senior research fellow at the Kohima Institute, Nagaland.

Koonal Duggal is a research fellow in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.