Unfurling Ashram Life: Who Takes the Center Stage?

Ashram communities, today, are largely defined by their guru and mostly always, His, bloated reputation. In this, we miss people’s practices, engagement with rituals, which rarely, if ever, inform ashram life. Visiting an ashram in Vrindavan, Unfurling Ashram Life pays close attention to mango for its ability to unfurl ashram life. So often things that seem inherently religious—Gods, guru, or sacred texts—inform our understandings of religion. A piece of fruit like mango is consumed and thrown away, without much thought about its entanglements constituting ashram-specific rituals, as well as conceptions about guru, bhakti, seva, gender, caste and class dynamics, Islamophobia, climate change, colonialism, and South Asia. This paper is an ethnography about mango, including the mango-inspired paisley design inside a Vrindavan ashram.