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AMMA's DAUGHTERS: a TRANSMODERN STUDY of PERSONAL, GENDER, CULTURAL, and RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES AMONGST WOMEN in the AMMA COMMUNITY in UNITED STATES Bhavana Upadhyaya

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AMMA's DAUGHTERS: a TRANSMODERN STUDY of PERSONAL, GENDER, CULTURAL, and RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES AMONGST WOMEN in the AMMA COMMUNITY in UNITED STATES Bhavana Upadhyaya University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository Communication ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2-9-2010 AMMA'S DAUGHTERS: A TRANSMODERN STUDY OF PERSONAL, GENDER, CULTURAL, AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES AMONGST WOMEN IN THE AMMA COMMUNITY IN UNITED STATES Bhavana Upadhyaya Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cj_etds Recommended Citation Upadhyaya, Bhavana. "AMMA'S DAUGHTERS: A TRANSMODERN STUDY OF PERSONAL, GENDER, CULTURAL, AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES AMONGST WOMEN IN THE AMMA COMMUNITY IN UNITED STATES." (2010). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cj_etds/9 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. -i- AMMA’S DAUGHTERS: A TRANSMODERN STUDY OF PERSONAL, GENDER, CULTURAL, AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES AMONGST WOMEN IN THE AMMA COMMUNITY IN UNITED STATES BY BHAVANA UPADHYAYA B.Sc., Zoology, University of Calcutta, 1994 B.C.J., Communication, University of Pune, 2001 M.C.J., Communication, University of Pune, 2003 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Communication The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico December, 2009 -ii- © 2009, Bhavana Upadhyaya -iii- DEDICATION To Amma and to the “Amma” in all of us -iv- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation has been written with the support, guidance, grace, and hard work of many people, some of whom I know personally and others I don’t. Of those whom I know, I wish to first and foremost acknowledge my advisor, my guru in academics, Dr. Ilia Rodriguez for her many acts of kindness, deep support, strict and unwavering guidance, and understanding. Without her, this dissertation would have been lost many years ago. I wish to acknowledge committee member Dr. Jan Schuetz for helping me to articulate a different worldview. If not for her, I would have never dived into communication theory or its philosophical underpinnings. I thank Dr. Ruth Trinidad Gálvan for introducing me to Gloria Anzaldúa and other scholars who embraced spirituality in their writings. I thank Dr. Glenda Balas for her no-nonsense honesty, which enabled me to learn the ropes of academic presentations. I also thank my work supervisor Dr. Dan Young for the many insightful and helpful conversations on the subject of this study. In the Albuquerque community, my many thanks and deep gratitude to my dear friend Alexandra Sands for her presence and support. I also thank other friends like Nicole and Chris, Rain and Robert, Tracie, Christine, Vance and Margo, Clair K., Susan, Bonnie and Martina, Sharon, Lisa and Riti, Elaine, Diane, Mohit, Sachin, Lissa, Audrey, Andrew, Olga, my former students Dianna, Cyndi, Laura, Melissa for their kindness, friendship, and support in many ways. The presence of these friends offered me deep consolation in moments of despair and confusion and a place to celebrate in moments of happiness. A big shout-out to my Facebook friends whose words of encouragement and support helped me stay the course. In one sense, this dissertation belongs to Amma’s daughters—it stands as a testimony of their lives and their struggles as they negotiated their spiritual paths. I thank and am deeply grateful to the New Mexico Amma community for welcoming and allowing me to be a part of their spiritual journey. I thank all participants of this research study who were gracious with their answers and my requests for edits and feedback. Without their sincerity and enthusiasm, this study would not have been as rich as it is now. I also thank them for their genuine concern and interest in this study and for their many offers to help me in this process. -v- My gratitude to my son, Harshvardhan, whose presence in my life is my greatest joy and who represents all my success and happiness. Thank you, dear son, for having patience with your mother as she struggled through writing and thinking, and at times, being mentally away from you. My gratitude to my mother for bringing me into this world and giving me an opportunity to exhaust my karmas and vasanas. My many thanks to my dad for having always believed in me. My gratitude to my brother Prasad and his wife Varsha for providing me filial and financial support, even though we lived oceans apart. My many thanks to my ex-husband for his many acts of kindness during this period of study. I acknowledge the Office of Graduate Studies for the Research Project Travel grant that enabled me to travel to Amma’s Indian ashram in Amritapuri. Of those whom I do not know personally, first and foremost, my undying gratitude to the centuries of dalits in my country India on whose broken backs my Bramhin wisdom was able to thrive. I stand here because you suffered without a choice. In every sense, this wisdom belongs to you. My gratitude to decades of feminists around the world who made it possible for me to read, write, voice my opinion, and obtain a doctorate. Specifically, I thank Dr. Leela Fernandes, whose work affirmed my deepest thoughts and converted them into convictions. This dissertation is, in a sense, a continuation of your work, Dr. Fernandes. I thank Dr. Yoshitaka Miike for his brilliant work on Asiacentricity that gave me a foundation to build this study. I thank you, Dr. Miike, for your sincere and dogged efforts to help this study by making copies of hard-to-find articles and journals many times. Those articles introduced me to new ideas, new authors, and I was able to find a sea of scholars with whom I could claim membership. Finally, I humbly submit this work at the feet of Mata Amritanandamayi (Amma). Amma, I know, in my heart, that you brought me to the safety of New Mexico, into the Ph.D. program, to the topic of this study, and to its completion. I know it is by your grace that I have been able to delve deep into complex modern texts and translate between the ancient traditions and modern philosophies. I offer my deepest gratitude for your compassion and your unconditional love, and for helping me discover the purpose of my life. -vi- AMMA’S DAUGHTERS: A TRANSMODERN STUDY OF PERSONAL, GENDER, CULTURAL, AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES AMONGST WOMEN IN THE AMMA COMMUNITY IN UNITED STATES BY BHAVANA UPADHYAYA ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Communication The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico December, 2009 -vii- AMMA’S DAUGHTERS: A TRANSMODERN STUDY OF PERSONAL, GENDER, CULTURAL, AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES AMONGST WOMEN IN THE AMMA COMMUNITY IN UNITED STATES by Bhavana Upadhyaya B.Sc., Zoology, University of Calcutta, 1994 B.C.J., Communication, University of Pune, 2001 M.C.J., Communication, University of Pune, 2003 Ph.D., Communication, University of New Mexico, 2009 ABSTRACT Using a transmodern philosophical approach, this study illustrates the different ways in which women devotees and participants in the Amma Community in United States experience processes of personal and social identification and disidentification as they strive to follow a spiritual path. The study uses the framework of spirituality, which is defined as the journey of disidentification from personal and social identities to the state of connectedness, to highlight how spirituality works in particular and contextual ways amongst Amma’s daughters in the community to enable alternative transmodern articulations of self and difference. The study focuses on four areas—personal, gender, cultural, and religious identities—to make the argument that the particular ways in which identities are negotiated in these areas can provide insights for theoretical reflection and praxis on social change and global peace. In each area of study, modern understandings in that area is used as the foundation on which ancient knowledges and conceptualizations create new dimensions and articulate new readings to result in a transmodern understanding of that subject area. Each dimension of identity studied showed its characteristic movements. In the area of personal identities, devotees and participants struggled with each other for Amma’s attention and for each other’s recognition and acceptance to validate and secure -viii- their personal identities. At the same time, many also disidentified and stepped inwards to a state of deep self-awareness and regulation to find the root of conflict not in external differences but in the very state of difference created by ego (forces of individuation). In the area of gender identity, Amma’s teachings have motivated some devotees and participants to articulate gender by disidentifying the concept from the notion of “who am I” into mutable, voluntary roles that they could play in different social situations. At the same time, they understood their gender identity as a composite of masculine, feminine, and any other aspect in the universe which they bracketed in a very feminine term of “motherhood.” This grounding allowed some of them to transform their interaction with male partners from confrontation to education and mutual respect. In the area of cultural identity, devotees and participants found unique ways to consolidate their Western cultural identities and at times found it difficult to develop a full cultural awareness of the East Indian practices and norms. This, I have argued, could be improved through an intracultural awareness, a process by which we can understand the cultural roots of our assumptions and disengage from it. At other times, devotees and participants did succeed in disidentifying from their cultural structures through either a theoretical postulation or an experiential reality of an underlying unity. Finally, in the area of religious identity, the dialectics of identification and disidentification allowed for a deeper inquiry into religious differences in the form of intrareligious dialogue.
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