Foreign Swamis at home in India: Transmigration to the birthplace of spirituality

Abstract

This essay examines the lives of non-Indians who live as monastics in Rishikesh, India. As transmigrants, they cross national borders and occupy transnational social fields. However, they neither maintain a home outside of India nor use the language of displacement to describe their experience. They speak instead of feeling "at home" in India and of finally finding their place, thus unsettling the emphasis on displacement in models of transmigrant identities. I explore how Foreign Swamis experience India as home and point to certain characteristics that make India eligible to become "home" to non-Indians: discursive constructions of spiritual India, low cost of living, institutional support for the monastic life, and the Hindu doctrine of transmigration of the soul. Foreign Swamis are unusual, even radical, transmigrants in that most move from rich to poor country, with ascetic rather than worldly aspirations, and after renouncing family, employment, and country. Yet their narratives may prompt us to ask new questions about other kinds of transmigrants: What other kinds of people might find home through migration? What makes a place eligible to become home to what kinds of people, and, finally, what other kinds of homes might be possible?