Vikram Gandhi grew up in an American Hindu household skeptical of the many gurus his own relatives followed, and Kumare began as a pointed experiment in that skepticism: could he invent a guru from nothing, complete with an assumed Indian accent, robes, a fabricated biography and an improvised philosophy borrowed loosely from real yoga and meditation traditions, and gain genuine followers in Phoenix, Arizona, purely on the strength of performance rather than any actual lineage or training. He filmed the attempt himself over roughly a year and a half.
The philosophy Kumare taught his students was, deliberately, an empty vessel: "you don't need any outside guru, the guru is already within you," a message built to dissolve on contact with its own authority once revealed as false. What the film did not anticipate was how far his small group of Phoenix followers would go in using that message for real personal change, several crediting Kumare's sessions with genuine improvements in anxiety, grief and self-confidence they had not found elsewhere, before Gandhi revealed to them, on camera, that their teacher had never existed as presented.
Gandhi has since said the persona took on a life independent of the joke he set out to make, and he continued exploring the same character in later work rather than treating the experiment as closed once the cameras stopped.