Roughly the same way popular preachers like Billy Graham establish themselves in America. Here's my lean-Swami startup formula. And yes, you do have to be Indian and Hindu, and start out IN India to work this particular script. The marketing is weak otherwise.

Step 1: Master enough scripture early on to quote from tradition with confidence. You don't have to be good enough to win theological debates with scholars (you will be dismissing them as narrowly scholastic later, and not engage them at all). Just be good enough that you know your stuff better than the laity do. As with the Bible, the Hindu scriptures lend themselves very well to three kinds of preaching: narrating and interpreting old stories with current references (easy, good for beginners... telling a story from the Mahabharata with a reference to the Internet and the latest Bollywood hit will do the trick), interpreting important verses (somewhat harder, good for intermediate disciples) and discoursing on metaphysics (hard, reserved for an inner circle of acolytes usually). Some sources are friendlier to Swamihood than others. The Mahabharata, Ramayana and Bhagavad Purana are particularly popular. The Vedas (oddly enough) are not. Optional step that will be useful later: learn Yoga and/or semi-classical singing (the styles known as bhajan and kirtan, roughly equivalent to American gospel music).

Step 2: Lose your way and have (or pretend to have) an enlightenment experience of some sort, and find your way back. Try and have it in some sort of visibly extreme and public way with dramatic before/after differences (like going from being a debauched drunk to absolute celibate abstinence and a week-long fast where people are begging you to eat). Or run away from your family and cause a panic/filing of missing persons reports. Come back utterly changed in 3 months. Claim you were meditating in the Himalayas (actually doing it helps, though you could just hide out at a bar in a distant city). If male, grow a beard. The best kind of change is one that provokes someone to give you a new Swami name. If nobody does, invent an origin myth and give yourself one that you can later have your acolytes spread ("All the priests at the temple threw him out, but this one one old priest caught up with him in the back alley and whispered, "You shall henceforth be called Swami Agniputra Mahadev and you are the reincarnation of Sage Vasishta from the Vedas. You will suffer for 3 years and then the world will recognize your greatness. Have patience."")

Step 3: Create an innovative heterodox reading of scripture. It helps if you can create a new kind of meditative practice/chant or other unique practice to distinguish yourself. This is probably the major difference between Swamihood and Christian popular preaching. Creating your own school of Yoga is also a popular move, as is a unique variety of satsang (group singing/praying). Popular innovations usually rely on making traditionalists a little uneasy. By borrowing from Islam or Buddhism or Christianity for instance.Two swamis du jour, Shri Shri Ravishankar (not the sitar player) and Mata Amritanandamayi rely on a unique chant (so-hum, so-hum instead of the commodity "om") and hugging devotees, respectively. These two are reputed as being the real thing/not corrupt. The rest of my script is optimized for corrupt Swamihood.

Step 4: Start living as a swami. Low capital needed: just live in (or pretend ot live in) poverty and celibacy. All you need is enough money for a rosary and an orange robe.

Step 5: Start offering discourses/advice to anyone who comes to you. Often the initial audience is slightly older women with family/relationship problems to deal with. You must develop a very popular discourse style (I use "discourse" instead of "preaching" because the format is less structured, more relaxed, and more like a conversation). Humor is very important. Fiery demagoguery does not work as well with Swamihood as it does with popular preaching in Christianity because the heaven/hell sin/good distinctions are not very important in Hinduism. Charm and humor work much better.

Step 6: As your discourses get more popular, the chances of finding true acolytes increase. These are highly energetic and talented types who will quit their regular lives to organize an ashram for you, and devote themselves to building an organization around your teachings, building institutions etc. You need these. Without these, you cannot scale. They will be able to say/do/as for things you cannot.

Step 7: Start geting venture capital, err... I mean, donations to scale. Build an ashram where you can offer some retreats etc. A good early move here is to get a TV show or radio show at this point. But this is a double-edged sword, since it can lead to over-exposure and too much of a document trail that you don't control. There is also a lot of PR value in growing stealthily, so disciples feel special. CDs are better.

Step 8: You now have to decide whether to position your offerings in the Indian mass market, or the global premium market. If the former, start moving towards huge public discourses in cricket stadiums with big audio systems. Or set up in some remote provincial town, offer free food and very cheap/free lodging to the poor. Learn a couple of magic tricks like making holy ash appear magically in your palm. At this point, the middle class will dismiss you as a dhongi (a fraud), but the non English-speaking masses will typically lap it up. If you decide to go upmarket instead, switch to discoursing in English, sharply cut down on your use of Sanskrit quotes, start drawing on international new-age sources (Native American for example) and start cultivating an audience in colleges/big cities.

Step 9: If you are on the mass-market route, start cultivating high-profile devotees and political influence. You must have at least two Chief Ministers on your roll call at public events to count as a true mass-market Swami. If you are on the premium route, the sign of having arrived is a regular sprinkling of foreign devotees (usually Eat, Pray, Love type white women) at your events and ashram retreats. This means being based in a big city so you can be part of good package tours and near 5-star hotels (if Delhi, you can be part of the Taj Mahal package for example).

Step 10: On the mass-market route, once you are at the top, you should have enough clout to swing major local elections one way or another. Even candidates who don't believe your stuff should be kissing up to you. You should also have achieved significant control over civil service appointments, with the ability to get district collectors and senior police officers transferred or appointed. You should be able to block licenses and permits for major business undertakings. On the upmarket route, at this point you should have multiple international branches of your ashram, and regularly tour globally. A major variant is to simply move abroad at the first sign of international traction.

Step 11: Grow in Step 10 mode for 3 years. Now it is time for Rolls Royces, sex scandals, corruption and mutinies. By this point, you must accumulate hidden wealth and indulged in a couple of scandalous sexcapades. These must be suppressed through a mix of denial, spin, questioning the credibility of the accusers etc. In the mass-market route, you may want to employ a cadre of gangsters to beat up journalists who poke too much (especially because on this route you are exercising a lot of political influence in Indian domestic politics and the media gets a lot more interested than they do in the upmarket swamis).

Step 12: At this point, the cycle is complete. Almost certainly 1-2 of your top acolytes will mutiny and start on his/her own spin-out path to Swamihood. Spin-out Swamis can skip Step 1 and Step 2. They can merely proclaim a return to the "pure" values of the beginning, accuse the older Swami of having lost his way, and fork off with a good fraction of disenchanted devotees. If the ashram by this point has many branches, there may be a branch-by-branch war.


Step 13: If you survive the scandals, you will come back stronger and grow even more: schools, colleges, hospitals, take over an entire town... At this point mass-market and up-market paths reconverge and you'll have your cake and eat it too.

Step 14: Predict your own death, die peacefully (and preferably somewhat mysteriously in a medical sense), and arrange to have your body not decompose as fast as a normal body would. Or some other miracle. This is needed if you want the brand to last beyond your death.

Step 15: Reincarnate, repeat. Okay, bad joke.

This may seem cynical, but this IS the path that is taken by 80% of swamis who manage to scale. The non-corrupt ones are the 20% minority at the large scale. Of course, it is possible to stay non-corrupt and small, and there's a lot more of those.

Examples of well-known Swamis who are widely regarded as having been corrupted are Rajneesh (international/upmarket) and Satya Sai Baba (mass market, he died recently).

Ravishankar is a good example of a non-corrupt upmarket Swami. His org, the Art of Living foundation is now a global behemoth, but as far as I know, it has stayed uncorrupted and turned into an admirable social service organization that does work in prisons etc. I don't take their beliefs and practices seriously, but their social impact has been good.

Several of his now top acolytes went to school with me in 93-97 and were active proselytizers. A small minority in my school became serious devotees. The rest of us used to call them "dadiyal" (beardies, after their lushly hirsute leader, though most of them remained clean-shaven).