August 15t, 2023
The research project "Orientalisms in/from Argentina: the case of Ricardo Güiraldes, Adelina del Carril and their relationship with India" is currently being developed at the National University of Southern Chaco (UNCAUS, province of Chaco, Argentina). It intends to analyze the presence of India and its representation in the trips, ideas, practices and writings of both Güiraldes and del Carril, within the framework of the relations of the countries of the South.
This note presents a succinct sample of our finds so far.
Ricardo Güiraldes was an Argentine writer, born in Buenos Aires, on February 13, 1886. Belonging to a wealthy family, he would marry Adelina Tiburcia del Carril in 1913, also from his social circle. He would become the famed author of various literary works and in 1927 he would be awarded the National Literature Award for his last work, the novel Don Segundo Sombra.
In 1910, he traveled to Paris and later visited various places on the Asian and African continents, including India, in the company of his friend Adam Diehl. In addition to this trip, he would initiate readings with Orientalist leanings through his brother-in-law, which would connect him to different publications on yoga by personalities such as Madame Blavatsky, Hugo Steiner, Mabel Collins, René Guenon, Ramakrishna, as well as works by Ramacharaka (pseudonym of the American author, William Walker Atkinson). These readings would translate into a series of practices which Güiraldes developed and commented on in what would be published, sometime after his death, under the title Diario. Cuaderno de disciplinas espirituales [Diary. Notebook of Spiritual Disciplines, which gives an account of a wide range of different activities which the author carried out between 1923 and 1924, and which allow to follow such practices.
His observations were usually written down rather schematically, as in the manner of a checklist. Thus, for example, while he comments on reading texts such as Ramakrishna's, he reports:
Breathing exercises; bath with a sponge and cold water and great psychic Yogi breathing, lying on my bed (March 26, 1923, in the “La Porteña” ranch, his place of residence).
Getting up at nine and doing breathing exercises like before. That is: three or four times-Morning exercise (p. 104), 2 times Nerve vitalizing breathing (p. 92), 1 time Chest expansion (p. 102), 1 time to stimulate circulation (p. 104), 1 time Stimulation of lung cells (p. 99). According to Yogi Ramacharaka's Science of breath text. After each exercise, purifying breathing (part of the note dated April 25, 1923, at the “La Porteña” ranch).
In my room, lying down, fifty mantras: “I am a center of power and influence; I am developing new powers.” Fifty mantras: "I am immortal, and I cannot be harmed." Fifty mantrams: "I am immortal, and I cannot be harmed or pleased in my body"... Read and thought fifty times the six mantrams of the first lesson of Ramacharaka's Raja Yoga. I read them often and supporting in the final ME... The result is excellent... I arrive at a fairly accurate notion of my real self; to at least one conviction, to which is coupled the anticipation of its domination over my passing body. Tranquility and serene joy (part of the note dated May 21, 1923, at the “La Porteña” ranch).
The more attentive experience of corporality also translates into his attention to various pains and discomforts that he had, as well as interest in the consumption of remedies/substances that work in this sense (among them, injections of Curalues, Epecuén salts, injections of bismuth, scrubs from Bengué, etc.). To this he associated the consumption of specific foods, which were sometimes part of a diet given by one of the different doctors he visited, to which he added the application of massages (sometimes with curative pranic images), etc.
To this, the author added reflections on readings related to the religious-philosophical worldview of India, which were reflected in another text published after his death, under the title El Sendero [The Path]. This book gives comprises the observations he wrote between 1926 and 1927, until shortly before his death. In this text, he notes:
I had arrived, I don't know how many years ago, but surely over ten, to the feeling of the human incapacity to fulfill itself in the emotional field. The war was a great moral torture and the collapse of many illusions. Summary: man, before himself and before others, is impotent. Concluded the peace, which contributed nothing as a beneficial result, I looked towards the East. A small manual for the popularization of Yogis theories fell into my hands: Yogi Ramacharaka's Raja Yoga. Other readings followed. I discovered things within myself. I decided to thread on a thread that I would entitle The Path, the scattered beads of a rosary that I had prayed in my poems (Güiraldes, 1977, p. 11).
Shortly before his death, he ends El Sendero [The Path] with the following account: “October 6, 1927. Paris. Have I had the faintest glimpse of what would be called ecstasy? Yes!".
Güiraldes, who died in Paris on October 8, 1927 (with another unfulfilled planned trip to India, this time with his wife), was part of the intellectual circles that after the First World War, within the framework of the Western value crisis, looked towards the East, especially towards India, and took from it various elements considered positive (in marked contrast to previous Argentine visions), giving an account of what Bergel calls "inverted orientalism", in terms of that spatiality that could fuel a human regeneration project.
His experience in approaching India allows us to follow the dynamics of one of the early practitioners of yoga, at the beginning of the 20th century, in Argentina, while considering the transformations and adaptations of the yogic practice upon its arrival at the local level and the very conceptions of yoga. In the same way, it allows to deepen the context of India's international projection (which would stablish, within the framework of the United Nations, an International Day of Yoga —on June 21st— since 2014) and the local scope of the social construction of the South in general and of India in particular.
Lía Rodriguez de la Vega is a professor and researcher, and directs the aforementioned project, of which Emanuel Obregón and Nicolás Vallejos Zacarías are associated researchers.
Alberto Allende
Pedro Urbano
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