Hello friends,
I am Nidhi Dave, a student of the Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University. This blog is a response to my thinking Activity given by professor Yesha Ma'am. Here I discuss the Documentary My Daughter Joined a cult.
🌟My Daughter Joined a cult:
My Daughter Joined a Cult', a docu-series about self-proclaimed godman, Swami Nithyananda.
In 2019, Netflix released a documentary feature, Bikram: Yogi, Guru & Predator, detailing the many sexual misconduct allegations against popular yoga guru Bikram Choudhury. A year later came Bad Boy Billionaires, which singled out the shady dealings of Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi and Subrata Roy. A damning portrait emerges of another absconder, Nithyananda, in the three-part documentary series My Daughter Joined a Cult, which streams on discovery+. Using news footage, a lot of it from local media in Karnataka, talking heads of ex-devotees and journalists, and video bytes of the godman’s sermons, the show tracks the quick rise and subsequent fall of Swami Nithyananda.
🌟Title:
My Daughter Joined The Cult’
The title is certainly eye-catching, but closer inspection reveals it's a nod to the kind of obfuscating rhetoric that has allowed the self-professed godman to escape punishment. The documentary starts in 2019 as Janardan Sharma and his wife arrive at Nithyananda's ashram after their two daughters were taken from Bengaluru without their knowledge.
"Please ask them. Ask them where my daughters are!" The mother screamed at the assembled journalists, who had only recently begun piecing together the ashram's evil schemes.
It was the father who took his two daughters to meet the guru in 2014, completely unaware of Nithyananda's intentions. Till today it is a mystery for this family as they are still in search of their daughters that went missing in 2019. Nithyananda was accused of rape and fled the country in 2019 fearing arrest for a rape case.
🌟The process of Brainwashing – (Indian followers – White followers):
“The moment you sit in front of me, enlightenment starts,” says Nithyananda to his audience. It is one of the many declarations the godman makes, which leave us questioning what made people fall for him. His legion of followers includes influential and wealthy people, who are unnamed, and like many Indian spiritual gurus he has his share of foreign devotees. There are accounts from followers-turned- whistleblowers. The most insightful voice here belongs to an anonymous woman whose experience suggests that Nithyananda knew how to target the vulnerable and make people commit to him so much that they’d be ready to sever ties with their families.
Nithyananda’s controversial life—the foremost being the “sex tape” which rubbishes his claims of being a celibate; accusation of rape from erstwhile follower Aarthi Rao, and the sudden death of a young woman at his ashram in Bidadi near Bengaluru. These hardly deter his followers, who instead launch a malicious campaign against his detractors.This process is responsible for brainwashing all the followers.
🌟Concept of ‘Bhakta’ – (Blind followers):
While talking about the Bhakta and followers of saints, it is obvious that it is connected
with religion and its sentiments. Nithyananda dismisses the notion of ‘karma’ as being legitimate: “Karma means that the effect of our actions will come back to us in the future, is a myth. There is no CCTV recording going on in the cosmos… where your actions will be bringing suffering to you in the future. God is not playing the game of judgment.” In the series, we also learn that a summons from the court does not reach the godman, because his security team quite literally does not allow it to pass. When a TV journalist attempts to be a medium for the summons by carrying it with him at a press conference held at the ashram, he is chased out before he can even finish reading it.
This absurdity reaches a crescendo when we learn about how the godman allegedly absconded, leaving the police, the courts and international agencies clueless about his location and methods. Saraiya points to the slow-moving nature of State institutions and processes — for example, the sheer amount of time it took for the rape trial to commence — to explain how the godman may have escaped the authorities. After all, for any godman to succeed in India, they need to make friends in powerful places; it goes without saying that this friendship is reciprocated in turbulent times.
The very nature of the truth is twisted in the ashram: residents and followers receive a limited amount of information from the outside world. They’re repeatedly told that any allegation against their guru is an attack upon their faith, and a conspiracy against their movement. It’s as though they’re living an entirely different, manufactured version of reality. “Lies told many times over can begin to sound like the truth,” Saraiya explains. Assurances don’t have to be issued to them, because a majority of them perceive accusers as being liars and betrayers.
The unwavering support and devotion that Nithyananda enjoyed would not exist if it weren’t for a carefully constructed self-mythology.
🌟What role of the English language in this?
As Nityananda lived in the era of the digitalized world, he knows very well how to use, rather than misuse the technology. He gave certain tasks to his white followers who were masters in technology and he command them to make videos about him, how and where the upcoming event is organized and they were supposed to cheer up him. Nithyananda’s two-faced ways are revealed best by Sarah Landry aka Sudevi, his social media manager, and Jordan Lozada through their recollection of goings-on in the ashram, which include verbal abuse and beating of disciples as well as demands to ramp up the videos propagating his teachings and increase the enrolments for his inner awakening programme. Landry and Lozada do as the boss orders with a video segment called “Keeping up with the Kailashians”, in which they dress up in saffron robes and chronicle their lives in the ashram. That reason Nityananda was most famous in social media and English language was very high way use by This documentry.
🌟Why do people believe him even after the CD incident?
After the victim, Aarthi Rao herself said to the people what Nityananda did with her, people still did not believe that he was a fraud. Probably the lack of awareness that what is right or what is wrong and the lacking knowledge about education also.
Nithyananda is not the only one missing. The series begins with footage of Janardhan Sharma and his wife searching for their two daughters, who they believe are held against their will by the swami at his ashram in Ahmedabad. "I am very happy here. I am not kidnapped,” says Nanditha in a video call with the media, rejecting her parents’ claims. Sharma’s two daughters are yet to be found. While most of his former followers are busy critiquing him, Jansi Rani is one of the few to call out her own follies. Rani’s 24-year-old daughter died of a heart attack in the ashram under mysterious circumstances. “He told us the sun rose because he appeared,” she says. “All of us were crazy.” Many continue to be under his sway watching his videos and supporting him as he hides in Kailaasa, a place few can pinpoint on a map and where the self-proclaimed ‘Paramashivam’ continues to preach.
🌟Connection with The Wretched of the Earth:
Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth in the face of the horror of the Algerian civil war and in the broader context of anti-colonial liberation struggles in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Such experiences had showed that violence is necessary both to impose domination and to break free from it. It comes as no surprise, then, that Fanon puts his faith in revolutionary violence. In dissent from some recent interpretations, this article argues that Fanon considered physical violence a useful tool both to free people from the constraints of colonialism and to build a society free from oppression. The conditions in the ashram mirror the laws and policies in 20th-century dystopian novels — from long hours of work and forced sleep deprivation, to more insidious aspects, such as encouraging devotees to be suspicious of each other and forcing children to hit their peers. Family members were separated and made to do tasks in different departments, prompting them to feel dissociated from each other — to the point where they may not feel the need for family anymore. The constant cycle of sleep deprivation — about four hours of rest to be precise — has been cited by more than one ex-devotee as impairing their judgment and ability to function.
The unwavering support and devotion that Nithyananda enjoyed would not exist if it weren’t for a carefully constructed self-mythology. The godman at the centre of My Daughter Joined a Cult not only commodified faith but also himself. One of the many manifestations of this is his devotees taking selfies with standees of his image. Saraiya remembers another story concerning a devotee who claimed they were healed of an acute health issue because of the godman’s mere touch. The docu-series paints a picture of how Nithyananda changed his appearance over the years; as his hair grew out, he also increasingly presented himself as a pathway to enlightenment, and Shiva himself.
Thank you
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