The guru concept spread well beyond India over the twentieth century, particularly following figures such as Swami Vivekananda's 1893 address to the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago and, later, the Transcendental Meditation movement and various other Indian teachers who established substantial Western followings from the 1960s onward, popularizing guru in general English usage as a term for any recognized expert or mentor, a considerably broadened and often secularized sense far removed from the term's specific traditional religious meaning. This global spread also brought Western legal, journalistic and academic scrutiny of specific guru-led organizations, particularly regarding financial transparency, the concentration of authority in a single unaccountable individual, and, in a number of publicized cases from the 1970s onward, allegations of psychological or sexual abuse of disciples, controversies that have prompted broader discussion, both within Hindu communities and among scholars of new religious movements, about the structural vulnerabilities a strongly hierarchical, personally devoted guru-disciple relationship can create when adequate accountability mechanisms are absent.
These controversies have not diminished the guru concept's continuing centrality within mainstream Hindu religious practice, where the great majority of guru-disciple relationships operate without the scale, media attention or alleged abuses associated with the small number of controversial cases that have drawn the most outside scrutiny, a distinction between ordinary traditional practice and its more exceptional, publicly troubled instances worth stating plainly rather than allowing the more sensational cases to stand for the institution as a whole.