WHY I DISLIKE BEING CALLED A GURU

Yesterday was Guru Purnima. Several of my former students sent me Guru Purnima greetings. While their messages touched my heart, I did not reply to any of them, even at the risk of seeming rude. This, I felt, would discourage them from sending me similar such greetings year after year. Another two months, and we’ll be celebrating Teachers’ Day, and once again my inbox will be full of Happy Teachers’ Day messages. I know of teachers who expect this from their students, and are offended to the point of getting vengeful if the students fail to comply. But not me. Let me explain why.

A guru is one who has acquired perfect knowledge and perfect wisdom and looks for disciples to whom he may bequeath these. I have neither acquired perfect knowledge nor perfect wisdom, so there’s no question of my seeking disciples. I am a professor, yes, has been one for 44 years, and I have students whom I love. But that is not the same thing as being a guru. A professor learns from his students as much as they learn from him. In my case, for example, I can hardly be said to be tech savvy, and I often need help from my students when I have to make a power point presentation or give online lectures on Google or Zoom.

My reservations about being hailed as a guru, however, run deeper. To start with, I’m not sure most students would want to regard me as their guru if they really knew what my politics and my sexuality represent. I am subversive, radically queer, irreligious, and anti-family, for the family according to me is a herteronormative, patriarchal and misogynist institution. Naturally, therefore, I am against all types of marriage, including same-sex marriage. I dislike children, whom I regard as a by-product, no more than brats, and I regard the men and women who produce them as breeders. I love nature in all its glory, including forests, trees, birds, wild animals, hills, seas, rivers, sunshine, moonlight, and every other manifestation of nature. But I hate India’s stray dogs that people love to feed from the bottom of my heart. I have been viciously chased by fang-displaying stray dogs so often that I regard them not as man’s best friend but as predators, pests rather than pets, and I feel they should be on the radar of pest-control companies exactly the way mosquitoes and cockroaches are. I abhor capitalism, even though outwardly my lifestyle might have some of the trappings of capitalism, and I long for a return to the days of socialism and communism, the Fiat and the Ambassador. I can’t stand the spicy oily food that Indians seem to adore. All this is reflected in my writing, in the books and articles I have penned over three decades, but I doubt much of this has ever been read. The upshot is that I am completely alienated from the Indian mainstream. A guru, conversely, cannot afford alienation. He must belong.  

Then, in my experience, India’s guru-shishya tradition encourages passivity, lethargy and intellectual sloth, both in students and teachers. Once students begin to see their teachers as gurus, they stop questioning them, stop engaging in debate and classroom discussion, and take their teacher’s word as gospel. This makes teachers complacent. They cease to be on their toes to fill the gaps in their knowledge, to keep abreast with the latest, as it were, and they get away with mediocrity. Any day, I prefer students who challenge me for what I have said, rather than who sleepily and sheepishly agree with my views. I may want to bring them round to my point of view, but only after tackling their resistance head-on, leading to verbal duels both in class and outside class, say in the college canteen over cups of coffee, and, I daresay, cigarettes.

The guru-shishya tradition is a hierarchical one. The guru is on top and the shishya is at the bottom. How can this appeal to someone like me who detests hierarchies of any kind, and have spent a considerable part of my adult life trying to dismantle them? I have even advised students not to address me as ‘Sir,’ to which they say, “Alright, sir.”

All this of course is not to junk the idea of gurudom itself. People can be gurus, but perhaps not in their lifetime but after their passing, through their teachings. Gurus may be mythical figures, as, say, Krishna was to Arjuna.  But the word guru has religious connotations which itself makes it undesirable to someone like me. The guru is almost elevated to the stature of god, while the disciple is human. The guru, thus, is stripped of his humanity. He is denied the right to have desires and emotions, the way ordinary humanity does. I for one certainly do not want to be stripped of my humanity.

A certain department in my former university called itself a Gurukul. This, I thought, was highly affected. A Gurukul was a place where, firstly, education was religious and not secular. It was to Hindu kids what madrasas were to Muslim kids. Gurukuls were residential schools, where students, in the brahmacharya ashram stage of their lives, stayed in the school and abstained from sex and alcohol. They ate only vegetarian food. They paid their teachers not in cash but in kind, and this was known as guru-dakshina. They led austere lives. Can all this be said to apply to a modern Indian university? Are the professors in the said department of the university receiving their emoluments only in kind and not in cash running into lakhs of rupees paid by the UGC? (Of course they may still be receiving guru-dakshina in the form of gifts, but that’s another story).

Not just on Guru Purnima or Teachers’ Day but even on other days, I have met students who reach straight for my feet to touch them and seek my blessings. This, as far as I am concerned, is revolting. I don’t have feet as beautiful as Meena Kumari’s in Pakeezzah that inspired Raaj Kumar to say that her feet were so nice that she should abstain from putting them on the ground for fear of dirtying them. I often have potato holes in my socks. Do I want students to see all this? I’d rather that they shake my hand, but no, that they won’t do. The gods mustn’t be touched, you see, except on the feet.

So friends, it is for these reasons that I wish that days like Guru Purnima and Teachers’ Day are deleted from the calendar once and for all.