Religiously Being, Historically Relating: Distinguishing the Swaminarayan Sampradaya in Gujarat, India

This paper explores the conceptual and practical historiographical system by which the Swaminarayan Sampradaya, a new religious tradition in nineteenth century Gujarat, India, articulated itself and continued to mature into the twenty-first century.  As an emerging Vaishnava devotional community the Sampradaya was faced with the predominance of other, well-established Vaishnava groups and challenged to create a novel personality in western India.  One important way the institution impressed itself on modern Gujarat was by employing lila—the longstanding Vaishnava concept to describe the enchanting playfulness of a divine figure—after reconfiguring it as an apparatus for commemoration. As such, the community exhibited a remarkable sense of historicization and self-awareness as they sought to preserve in exact detail their own existence through the innovation of Swaminarayan lila.

This paper frames Swaminarayan lila’s purposeful and active proliferation in the nineteenth century as the institutionalization of historiography in the non-secular sphere of modern Gujarat. As theoretical and performative aspects of lila rendered the pastime of the divine, its corresponding devotional habits reinforced engagement with the past and required its constant enlivening. The essay ethnographically examines lila’s archival production today through the case of the recently created Shree Swaminarayan Museum in Ahmedabad, Gujarat and its tremendous, multifaceted repository of hagiographical literature, visual renderings and material artifacts.  Such a contemporary project of history and its foundational system of lila underscore how invigorating and claiming the past is central to crafting a distinct identity for the Museum creators among the several popular Swaminarayan communities in Gujarat today.   As such, this project of intellectual and cultural history sits necessarily at the intersections of history, religion and anthropology and challenges neat distinctions in excavating complex patterns of commemorating the past in South Asia.