Not quite a sex guru

Eminent writer Khushwant Singh recalls the willingness of a young Italian girl to sleep with him after telling her that his price for meeting Rajneesh (later Osho) “was different”.

This was the early 1970s when Singh was the editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India in Bombay. The girl, Gracia Marciano, was trying to persuade him to meet Rajneesh who, she said, was different from other spiritual teachers.

Gracia would frequently visit him at his office in a saffron-coloured headband, a loose saffron shirt, lungi and a Rajneesh medallion round her neck, and leave behind literature to convince Singh about Rajneesh.

It was during one such visit that the journalist-writer “quite flippantly” told her that his price “was different”, to which Gracia replied a few meetings later: “You like my body? You want to make love to me? My body is nothing, You can have it anytime you want.”

Singh writes in his foreword to Penguin India’s Life’s Mysteries — An introduction to the teachings of Osho that he was stunned by the girl’s candid willingness to have sex (which didn’t happen), but hastened his desire to meet her guru, Rajneesh.

The encounter happened at Peddar Road’s Woodlands apartments where Rajneesh was staying. While waiting for the Acharya, Singh was “baffled” by the sight — not seen in other ashrams — of shelves packed with books on subjects ranging from religion and theology to humour and crime.

The two conversed about overcoming the fear of death and Khushwant Singh was in complete agreement with Rajneesh’s advice “to expose yourself to the dead and the dying” and keep remembering the inevitability and suddenness of death.

“It made perfect sense to me because that was what I was doing for some years…,” he says in the foreword. One of the most traumatic experiences for Rajneesh in his childhood was the death of his grandfather. As an older child and a youth, he would follow dead bodies being taken to the cremation grounds. He would lie motionless as a corpse for hours together in the cremation grounds.

“Watching people die became a hobby,” writes renowned psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar in his essay on Osho’s childhood (read Kakar’s Mad and Divine).

Describing Rajneeshism as “one of the first global brands in the spiritual marketplace”, Kakar attributes Rajneesh’s extreme narcissism, and his dismissive arrogance towards Mother Teresa and political and spiritual leaders, to the trauma he suffered in his childhood and youth.

Brought up with enormous love by his grandparents till the age of 7 at Kuchwada, Madhya Pradesh, Rajneesh (born as Chandra Mohan Jain), shifted to his parents’ home at Gadarwara, MP, where he had bitter experiences at school.

A precocious child who was “never punished till age 7”, Rajneesh was encouraged to be rebellious by his grandmother who influenced him deeply.

“When Rajneesh was in his teens, she provided him money to smoke, drink and visit prostitutes if he wanted to. Experience every experience without fear, seemed to be her message to the child, exhorting him to seek, in Tolstoy’s words, “madder music and stronger wine”, says Kakar (p.25, Mad and Divine).

The psychoanalyst says that Rajneesh suffered a “prolonged period of psychological breakdown” when he was 21. After emerging from it, he declared that he had achieved enlightenment — precisely on March 21, 1953.

Rajneesh had a piercing, hypnotic gaze and a captivating voice. His discourses were profound, thought-provoking and also entertaining — with Mulla Nasruddin and Playboy jokes. Many serious scholars have acknowledged the intensity, depth and insight of his commentaries on spiritualism.

A popular public speaker, the “sex guru” tag stuck to Rajneesh for the first time when he gave the From Sex to Superconsciousness lectures in Mumbai in 1968.

Introducing a series of new meditation techniques, he moved into the Poona Ashram in 1974 where he and his foreign followers experimented in New Age psychotherapy techniques, encounter, primal and Gesalt therapies.

The Poona commune attracted a hostile reaction with accounts of sexual orgies in the name of therapies. He also experimented with psychedelic drugs such as nitrous oxide to see if this assisted his spiritual pursuits.

More controversies erupted after the entire commune shifted to Oregon, USA.  Was Osho a “sex guru”?  It would be wrong to dub him as one for his well-argued views on sex and on the basis of what his followers did.

This tag, used happily by Indian and foreign press to describe him, diminished and clouded his insightful emphasis on meditation, living in the present, celebrating life, being independent in thought and freeing oneself from the dogma of religion.

With the guru no more, it is as though he has been born again through his books, tapes and videos.