When devotion becomes organisation: Amul, Swadhyaya, and the power of people
Human development is often spoken of as programmes, schemes, and budgets. Sometimes the quieter truth is older: people move when something binds them — a shared interest, a shared faith, a shared sense that “we” can act. Two Gujarati experiments of the last century show this with unusual clarity. One organised millions around milk. The other organised millions around swādhyāya — self-study, devotion, and work offered as worship. Different languages of meaning; the same underlying question: how does devotion — in the widest sense — become the energy that organises people for development?
Two ways of gathering people
Dr Verghese Kurien and Tribhuvandas Patel gathered dairy farmers into cooperatives. The bond was economic and democratic: own the procurement, processing, and marketing of milk; remove the middleman; let professional management serve farmer-owners. Dr Kurien believed that shared economic self-interest could cut across caste and class more reliably than sermons. Amul and the Anand pattern became a school for a nation — Operation Flood was, at root, organisation of people around an economic activity, with institutions strong enough to last beyond any one leader.
|Amul Administration Building |
1969-1970
Pandurang Shastri Athavale — Dādā — gathered people around the Bhagavad Gītā: jñāna (understanding), bhakti (devotion), and karma (action). He argued that neither welfare handouts nor abstract socialism alone could bridge the gap between the rich and the needy without wounding dignity. Charity that demeans the receiver was not his path. Instead, Swadhyaya invited people to discover divinity in themselves and in others, then to express that discovery in concrete local experiments — bhāv pherī, Yogeśwar Kṛishi, and, in drought-struck Saurashtra, a people’s movement to put rainwater back into the earth.
The thread that pulled these two stories onto one page for me was a recent LinkedIn note by my friend Tushaar Shah — Life, Logic and Why’giri #11: Gurus, Godmen and Grandees. In that post he recalls that Dr Kurien once sent the two of us to Puttaparthi to learn about Sathya Sai Baba’s experiment in value-based education. (He names me as Shailendra there; here I simply continue in my own voice.) We went together.
It began, as I remember it, in Dr Kurien’s office. After a delayed flight from Kolkata he had spoken with ITC’s Ajit Haksar about commitment in management graduates; Haksar mentioned an institute in the South near Bangalore. Dr Kurien named the “godman… with a distinctive hairdo.” When I said “Sai Baba?” he said yes — and told me to “case the joint.” Days later, when I had not yet gone, he asked why not, and added: take Tushaar.
So we did. Gujarat Mail from Anand to Mumbai, then a flight to Bangalore. I still see the stairs up to the far platform at Anand station that night. Climbing them, Tushaar asked me to look carefully at the ticket examiner. I did. His name was something like Sharma.
On that same journey Tushaar told me how, after standing first in Gujarat in the tenth class, his father had given him thirty rupees to visit Bombay. Youthful geography being what it is, he set off — and somehow progressed steadily toward Viramgam, discovering the error only at Sanand. Back toward Anand on the return train, the same enterprising Sharma (or his spiritual twin) got hold of him, fleeced him of nearly all the money, and left him with just enough for a bus to Thasra. Moral of the story, as we climbed those stairs years later: always check the TT’s name — destiny sometimes travels in uniform.
We reached Bangalore. NDDB’s office buildings were not there then; I doubt they had even taken the land. As Gujaratis from a dry region we ordered beer and began our inquiries. Whitefield, they said — then, when we got there, no: the management institute was in Puttaparthi. Taxi next morning. It may have been Sai Baba’s sixty-fifth or seventieth birthday (23 November, three days before Dr Kurien’s); the town was in a celebratory mood, yet not crowded. We removed our shoes at the institute and were taken to Mr Rao, the Dean — an excellent man and a devotee — who explained curriculum, selection, the two-year programme, and that they did not allow campus recruitment. Tushaar wrote the tour report for Dr Kurien. Something in the atmosphere there had touched me.
Tushaar’s LinkedIn note is frank about what followed in his own mind: I was impressed; he was drawn to the followers’ rehabilitation of the long Telugu Ganga canal for Chennai’s water, yet put off by the guru’s “magic tricks.” From that mixed experience he turns to the figure who changed his view of gurus: Pandurang Shastri Athavale — Dādā — and Swadhyaya.
Tushaar writes with a social scientist’s eye and a seeker’s honesty. He had long been fascinated by gurus and godmen — and wary of temples that soak up resources the poor could use. Athavale struck him differently: interested in building people more than temples. His central idea, as Tushaar puts it, was radical in its simplicity: bhakti can be a social force. In 1989 Tushaar drove to Junagadh to hear Dādā address nearly 300,000 farmers in a devastating Saurashtra drought. The message was practical poetry: quench Mother Earth’s thirst, and she will quench yours; rain on your roof, field, and village should stay there. Devotees experimented with well recharge. Wells stayed fuller. Check dams, tanks, underground dykes followed. Cement companies, diamond merchants, professionals giving Sunday śramdān, NGOs and panchayats joined. A spiritual message had become a people’s movement for groundwater recharge. For Tushaar, the real test of a guru is not the size of the following, but the ability to turn devotion into social energy for change — which is why, in 1995, he proposed Athavale as IRMA’s convocation speaker, and the Board agreed.
After that convocation, Tushaar and I both met Dādā. For some reason he called me “Chaturvedi,” mentioned a village meeting, and asked us to come; we went, and he would not let us leave until we had eaten with him. Pravin Bhatt was our link to the Swadhyaya movement. Those meetings stay beside the Surajkund dialogue in this essay: devotion tested not by following alone, but by how people organise for life.
Dr Kurien and Dādā together
What Amul and Swadhyaya share — and where they differ
Both begin with organisation, not with charity as the first word.
| Amul / Anand pattern | Swadhyaya | |
|---|---|---|
| Organising idea | Shared economic stake in milk | Shared spiritual self-study and bhakti |
| Typical “activity” | Village society → union → brand → market | Yogeśwar Kṛishi, Nirmal Nīr, recharge, bhāv-centred seva |
| Professional role | Managers as servants of farmer-owners | Scripture and prayog as guides; local self-help |
| Dignity | Farmer as owner, not beneficiary | Receiver of “prasād” of impersonal wealth, not alms |
| Risk if hollow | Cooperative becomes bureaucracy | Ritual without bhakti; show without karma |
Dr Kurien’s path is secular in method even when farmers bring their own faith to the door of the society. Athavale’s path is frankly spiritual, yet its fruit in Saurashtra looked like development economics: self-help recharge before waiting for distant schemes. Researchers who studied the Saurashtra groundwater movement have noted how spiritual institutions used non-economic motivators to forge a collective ethic — and how, past a point, the movement gained a logic of its own. Swadhyaya’s own experiments such as Yogeśwar Kṛishi — collective farming in God’s name, produce treated as impersonal wealth for village need — try to keep giver and receiver free of superiority and shame.
The difference matters. Amul scales through markets, contracts, and federations. Swadhyaya scales through parivār, weekly listening, and local prayog. One can learn from the other without collapsing them into one slogan. Dr Kurien’s India needed milk and bargaining power. Athavale’s India needed, in his words, people who do not wait for others to solve the problem — mobilise, take responsibility, make things happen — a note IRMA’s own “can-do” culture recognised.
A personal thread from Anand and Surajkund
On the eve of that 1995 IRMA convocation, I had the unexpected duty of welcoming Dādā at the NDDB guest house on behalf of the Board. Miss Amrita Patel asked me to stay; it was nearly eleven at night. He asked about family, work, NDDB, Amul, IRMA — patient, smiling, refusing rest while Swadhyayee companions urged him to sleep. The next morning he would speak to graduating managers. The conversation was not theology first; it was curiosity about institutions that organise people.
Years later, with my father, I sat in a Surajkund dialogue where Maulana Wahiduddin Khan and Dādā and others wrestled with a hard question: can people who differ in āsthā (faith-philosophy) still join on the practical side of Swadhyaya’s work? The Maulana admired the rural experiments but felt distance from the spiritual idealist frame. Dādā insisted that religion’s social and economic sides cannot be peeled off from lived life; that antarnishṭha prabhu — the Lord within — is a universal ideal, not a sectarian trademark; that when religion becomes only ritual, its prāṇa leaves. Friendship, he said, can be for profit, pleasure, principle, or devotion — and buddhinishṭha devotion is what makes the middle class capable of slow revolution: krānti as gradual expansion, not overnight theatre.
That dialogue stays with me because it names the hinge of this essay. Devotion that cannot organise is sentiment. Organisation without a binding meaning often becomes brittle. Amul bound people with ownership of an economic stream. Swadhyaya bound people with jñāna–bhakti–karma until wells filled and fields were tilled as Yogeśwar’s work. Both are human development — one through the dairy society’s ledger, one through the Gītā’s call to act without the poison of contempt.
Closing
Tushaar’s line is worth keeping on the table: if only the formidable energy of followers were applied to societal problems, gurus could become “super NGOs.” Athavale’s answer was not to become an NGO in the usual sense, but to awaken bhakti as social force — rain returned to the aquifer, labour returned to the common field, dignity returned to the one who receives without being labelled a beggar.
Dr Kurien’s answer was the cooperative: farmer power plus professional management.
India still needs both vocabularies. Economic organisation without meaning can exhaust people. Spiritual uplift without karma and without institutions that last can evaporate after the discourse ends. Where swādhyāya meets the Anand idea is here: people, organised, responsible for their own future — whether the rallying cry is the milk cheque or the verse that says work itself can be worship.
Sources and threads
- Tushaar Shah, LinkedIn: Life, Logic and Why’giri #11: Gurus, Godmen and Grandees (Dr Kurien sent Shailendra & Tushaar to Puttaparthi; Athavale; Saurashtra recharge; IRMA 1995)
- Vrikshamandir: आस्था भेद और व्यावहारिक जीवन दृष्टि; एक संवाद (Surajkund notes; IRMA eve meeting with Dādā).
- Swadhyaya Movement overview (incl. Yogeshwar Krishi): Wikipedia — Swadhyaya Movement; swadhyay.org notes on impersonal wealth.
- Saurashtra recharge / Swadhyaya: India Water Portal on Swadhyayee well recharge; Tushaar Shah’s related academic writing on mobilising social energy for groundwater recharge in western India.
- Dr Kurien / Amul: public accounts of Anand pattern cooperatives and farmer organisation (e.g. standard biographies and Dr Kurien’s I Too Had a Dream on farmer power + professional management).