Spiritual Brands in India: An Insider’s View
By: Venky Ramachandran
Tags: Branding, Marketing, Spirituality

Gods posing for selfie

Picture this. In the nondescript town of Janakpur in Korea district of Chattisgarh, a goat goes about its everyday business, happily chomping grass and vegetables in a bountiful garden it has fortuitously strayed into. The owner of the garden is not too pleased. He is enraged. The goat is put behind the bars.

Goat put behind the bars

The goat and its owner are booked under Indian Penal Code Section 447 (criminal trespass) and 427 (mischief causing damage). It’s obvious. The owner of the garden is Judicial Magistrate (first class). Although the goat -”repeat offender” in the written complaint filed by the Judge- is released after it bleated in protest, the owner is produced before the court. The court duly sends the goat owner on a two-day remand, as he refuses bail.

In case you are wondering, such incidents are commonplace. Earlier last year, a parrot was detained in Maharashtra, after an old, termagant woman filed a complaint against it for swearing at her and making obscene remarks.

You see, you can never make sense of India unless your mind stretches enough to embrace both the sublime and the ridiculous. The sacred and the profane. The traditional and the rational.

Take the burgeoning rise of “Spiritual Brands” in India, for instance, which are giving a run for the money to the traditional FMCG big weights like Unilever, P&G and Nestle.

Your reaction to the term “Spiritual Brands” could vary from amusement to oxymoronic despair, depending on your association with both of these words, and the way your upbringing and cultural context has been yoked with “spirituality”. How can “Spirituality” with its anarchic (or, if you prefer a more contemporary term — counter-culture, hippie, take your pick) tendencies, find its unique expression in emerging capitalist societies like India?

Recently, my dear friend, Sunny Narang wrote a short and insightful post about the leading triumvirate of spiritual brands in India. Having spent a considerable amount of time in my life associating with two of these leading brands, I thought it would be interesting to paint brush strokes of an insider ‘s view to his broad outline.

For the uninitiated, Art of Living, Isha Foundation, Patanjali Ayurved are the three leading spiritual brands, each led by their charismatic founders, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev and Baba Ramdev respectively.

Where do I start? May be, a bit of my background would help you frame my cultural context.

I was born in a deeply religious family in the by-lanes of Mylapore, as TM Krishna had beautifully put it, ‘the Brahmin neighbourhood at the heart of Chennai where music and temple rituals merge like the warp and weft of Kanjeevaram silk’.

When I was seven years old, I underwent the initiation rites of Brahminhood with the sacred upanayanam ceremony. The word sacred, I admit, finds its place here after a long, circuitous journey of introspection which taught me the true meaning of profundity through unconditional embrace of profanity. Back in my childhood, I was taught to respect what’s profound only by abhorring what’s profane. I remember doing my sandyavandanam rituals religiously, until my hormones began to treat callously the rituals I bequeathed from my parents. Like many others in their teens, I began to question them, especially the way it was presented to me, in its ossified form, enforced through parental authoritarianism.

It was at this juncture, I was introduced to “spirituality”, packaged exclusively for the modern mind by the Art of Living Foundation. Spirituality suddenly acquired a new language. It was no longer about boring, somnolent lectures — those ventriloquist renderings of scriptures reverberating since eternity- given by sexagenarians, out of their wits. It was a journey of “Inner Transformation”, to be undertaken in the prime of the youth, for the restless mind, as one Art of Living Teacher had put it, which had become as unhealthy as an effervescent bottle of Coca-Cola.

Today, I cringe at the recall of writing such cheesy lines in my personal blog, several years ago, when I was an influential Evangelist for ‘Youth in Spirituality’ in my college circles, having won the Times of India national debate on the same topic,

‘All those bubbles which effervesce out of the coca cola bottle are our thoughts. Thoughts keep coming up and disappearing. The moment the bubbles settle down, you get to enjoy your drink’

My early lessons of marketing came from active volunteering for the Art of Living foundation. I went about organizing meditation camps in the campus, recruiting my fellow classmates, employing all the guerrilla marketing techniques I had learned in my volunteer training.

Flushed by the maiden success of my efforts, I became aware of my growing marketing-fu skills. If I could sell meditation to a bunch of teenagers peaking on hormones, I can sell any damn thing on Earth. How about soaps? By then, I had already visualized my FMCG marketing career escalator in the image of my successful cousin. It took few years before this decision returned to haunt my work and identity, triggering a deep spiritual crisis in my journey of self-introspection.