The Work of Hagiography in the Age of Social Media Gurus: On the Grammar and Purpose of a Multiplatform Life Story Unfolding in Real Time

Rakesh Jhavery (b. 1966) is styled the “Venerable Blessed Guru Lord” (pūjya gurudevśrī) of the Shrimad Rajchandra Mission, based in Dharampur, Gujarat (SRMD). Founded by Jhavery in 2001, the Mission’s popularity has grown rapidly since 2016, when they launched a comprehensive, multiplatform, English-language social media outreach campaign. Reaching mainly “bandwidth privileged” Jain youth in India and the diaspora, especially those of Gujarati Śvetāmbar background, the SRMD boasts by far the largest social media presence of any Jain organization, with nearly 640,000 Facebook followers, over 300,000 Instagram followers, and approaching 1.5 million YouTube subscribers.

This paper examines the body of social media posts focused on Jhavery himself to understand the self-conscious construction of his persona as the guru of the SRMD. It theorizes a “grammar” of two types of social media posts by thinking through the structure of hagiography as a form of persuasive writing meant to make a case for the canonization of a religious figure. The first are YouTube videos and Jhavery’s Wikipedia page, which portray Jhavery as a “spiritual prodigy.” The second type are image-and-text graphics on Instagram and Facebook aggregated under the hashtag #sadguruwhispers. These posts feature images of Jhavery either alone or with devotees, combined with either short aphorisms of wisdom as if spoken by Jhavery or assertions made about the guru’s divinity from the author of the graphic. These two types of posts form a mutually reinforcing “ecosystem” of information about Jhavery as a guru meant to persuade their audience using a combination of empiricist language and repeated assertions of claims to divinity that will the viewer to accept his divine status as a fact.

The persuasive structure of hagiography calls our attention to several points in both sets of social media posts, forming an ascending structure of the overall argumentative strategy for asserting Jhavery’s sanctity:

1) The choice of content selected to claim Jhavery’s divinity. These give substance to the structure of each post as a hagiography unto itself and as part of an emerging hagiographical corpus being written daily in “real time,” as opposed to an ex post facto document written posthumously, as most traditional hagiographies are. These include interpretations of the “empirical evidence” of Jhavery’s divinity and repeated assertions of his divinity as an assumed truth.

2) The authorial voice. In all posts, it is an unsigned, anonymized voice, but definitively a devotee’s voice, one that knows Jhavery intimately and calls the viewer to understand what they understand about his divinity.

3) Strategies of “legibility” that make Jhavery’s qualities and deeds comprehensible as evidence of meeting the standard of divinity. These include parallels with Śrīmad Rājacandra’s own life story, itself treated as a fixed, known quantity.

Together, these form what I call a “grammar” of hagiography that makes these social media posts “work” as such and into which new content may be endlessly generated.

Beginning with the 2017 video, “The Unmoved Mover,” this presentation shows how Jhavery’s persona as a guru closely parallels the biographical writings about Śrīmad Rājacandra (1867-1901) produced by Rājacandra’s disciples at their ashram in Agas, Gujarat (founded in 1926). As both Rājacandra and Jhavery are laymen, their authority as Jain gurus and religious leaders rests outside of traditional structures of monastic hierarchy. Instead, Rājacandra’s own life story serves as an authorizing discourse that makes Jhavery’s unfolding divine status “legible” to the SRMD’s audience. As perhaps the first “modern” Jain guru, Rājacandra’s biographies include several strategies to demonstrate his divinity that adopt an authorial position of both objectivism and wonder that sees “empirical” evidence of his advanced spiritual being in his engagements with avadhāna, memory performances popular in nineteenth-century India, and in his adolescent writings, which prove the claim that he experienced the memory of his previous births (jātismaraṇa) at a young age. As biographies of Rājacandra have moved online, they constitute a “dynamic archive” for Jhavery and the SRMD, as additional “facts” of Rājacandra’s life have been recently added to the Agas Ashram’s website that conform to claims made about him by the SRMD.

Jhavery’s Wikipedia page is similarly but tacitly structured on the framework of Rājacandra’s life story, with the only references to the nineteenth-century figure being directly related to Jhavery’s devotion to him. As another kind of anonymized authorial voice, this page lends an academic voice to the “fact” of Jhavery’s status as a “spiritual prodigy.”

The second body of posts under the #sadguruwhispers hashtag takes its cues not from Rājacandra but from the techniques of self-branding marketing campaigns that have emerged since the early 2000s, including repetition, reference, and insertion. These posts, collected since 2016, chart several “chapters” in the SRMD’s campaign to assert Rakesh’s “divinity” (a term their social media posts regularly use in reference to him). While not outright declaring that Jhavery is God or even a guru, these posts combine images of Jhavery, either alone or with devotees, with aphorisms that appear to have been spoken by him or which make general statements about the nature of a sadguru or “true teacher.” Many of these posts discuss the divinity of the guru and assert his equivalence with “God.” All of them take the voice of a closely associated devotee, inviting the viewer to experience being in Jhavery’s presence, complete with the proper interpretation of the meaning of the encounter. These posts produce an endlessly replicable structure for maintaining the SRMD’s social media saturation and, through the sheer volume of repetition, makes Jhavery’s charisma and divinity true.

In sum, the SRMD’s social media posts produce an oeuvre on Jhavery’s divinity that builds upon three modern hagiographical writing strategies: structures of legibility outside traditional channels of Jain religious authority, an anonymous authorial voice that bridges for the reader the gap of skepticism between evidentiary need and the claim of divinity, and the choice of which aspects of Jhavery’s life and work to highlight as evidence. These longstanding hagiographical strategies unfold in real time as a grammar of sanctity that allows these texts to be composed daily for drawing in an ever-growing audience.