Deconstructing the Spurious Belief System behind Pilgrimage: Enlightening Youth towards Spirituality

Abstract

This paper is written with an aim to create awareness that pilgrimage is incapable of bringing about permanent transformation in human beings, though sometimes it can be one of the stimulants to inspire humans to adopt righteousness in their lives. But, in most instances, pilgrims experience transient engendering of these benevolent feelings which can be considered to be equivalent to the concepts of “liminality” and “communitas” propounded by Victor Turner in his theory. This research undertakes to prove it by resolving the ambiguity between the concepts of spirituality and religion citing mainly the thoughts of Mirra Alfassa known to her followers as “The Mother”, Aurobindo Ghosh, Karl Marx & Victor Turner and employing them as bases to demonstrate that the “Kumbh Mela” and Hajj, the places of pilgrimage, are mere manifestations of religion, and therefore insignificant in bringing about any perpetual transformation in human beings, a view which was vehemently buttressed by Rene Gothoni in his paper entitled “Pilgrimage=Transformation Journey”. The main purpose of this paper is to enlighten the youth to become spiritual and not religious because the latter has increasingly deviated from its role of emancipation of mankind.