Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City 9781789206104

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Names, Language and Transliteration
Introduction: A Tale of Two Countercultures
1 Land of the Golden Avatar
2 Changing the Subject
3 Practices of Knowledge
4 Learning to Love Krishna
5 Simple Living, High Thinking
Conclusion: Failing Well
References
Index

Citation preview

Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

Wyse Series in Social Anthropology Editors: James Laidlaw, William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge Maryon McDonald, Fellow and Director of Studies, Robinson College, University of Cambridge Joel Robbins, Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge Social Anthropology is a vibrant discipline of relevance to many areas – economics, politics, business, humanities, health and public policy. This series, published in association with the Cambridge William Wyse Chair in Social Anthropology, focuses on key interventions in Social Anthropology, based on innovative theory and research of relevance to contemporary social issues and debates. Volume 9 Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City John Fahy Volume 8 It Happens Among People: Resonances and Extensions of the Work of Fredrik Barth Edited by Keping Wu and Robert P. Weller Volume 7 Indeterminacy: Waste, Value, and the Imagination Edited by Catherine Alexander and Andrew Sanchez Volume 6 After Difference: Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological Theory Paolo Heywood Volume 5 Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life Edited by Cheryl Mattingly, Rasmus Dyring, Maria Louw, Thomas Schwarz Wentzer

Volume 4 The Patient Multiple: An Ethnography of Healthcare and Decision-Making in Bhutan Jonathan Taee Volume 3 The State We’re In: Reflecting on Democracy’s Troubles Edited by Joanna Cook, Nicholas J. Long and Henrietta L. Moore Volume 2 The Social Life of Achievement Edited by Nicholas J. Long and Henrietta L. Moore Volume 1 Sociality: New Directions Edited by Nicholas J. Long and Henrietta L. Moore

Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City John Fahy

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2020 John Fahy All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2019039580 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78920-609-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-610-4 ebook

Contents

List of Illustrations

vi

Acknowledgements vii Notes on Names, Language and Transliteration

ix

Introduction. A Tale of Two Countercultures 1 1. Land of the Golden Avatar 27 2. Changing the Subject 52 3. Practices of Knowledge 80 4. Learning to Love Krishna 103 5. Simple Living, High Thinking 130 Conclusion. Failing Well 158 Glossary 175 References 177 Index 191

Illustrations

1.1 Local farmers take a break against the backdrop of the rising TOVP (2014)

32

1.2 International devotees in Mayapur lead local Bengalis on sankirtan 32 1.3 Grihastha family in Mayapur

33

1.4 Devotees gather to listen to katha during parikrama in Mayapur 42 1.5 International devotees on parikrama 43 1.6 The ISKCON complex (foreground) and the Gauranagar residential development to the north (background) 46 1.7 The Samhadi Temple (foreground) and the ‘grihastha area’ (in the top left corner) 47 2.1 Radha-Madhava deities 60 2.2 Pancha-Tattva deities 62 2.3 A young Eastern European devotee chants in the temple during the morning programme 69 3.1 Srimad Bhagavatam morning class 4.1 Vallabhi’s home altar

88 108

5.1 Open-air kitchen area in the gurukul 141 5.2 Gurukulis perform a yagna (fire sacrifice) 142 5.3 Gurukulis performing ritual duties in the main ISKCON complex 145 5.4 Local pilgrims take photographs near the rising TOVP (2018) 149

Acknowledgements

I want to thank both the faculty and staff at the University of Cambridge for the stimulating intellectual environment within which this research developed. I am grateful to the anthropology department, through which my research was supported by the Henry Ling Roth Fund. I am also indebted to Presidency College Kolkata, and in particular Sukanya Sarbadhikary, for the affiliation that allowed me to conduct my research in West Bengal. I want to thank Soumhya Venkatesan and Perveez Mody, who made the viva a surprisingly enjoyable occasion and provided rich feedback that I hope I have done justice to here. While this research found a home in Cambridge, its roots can be traced back to Queen’s University, Belfast, from where I began conducting fieldwork at the Hare Krishna temple in San Diego. Many of the ideas that informed the development of this research can be traced back to my early encounters with devotees in San Diego. I also want to thank Ashley Clements in Trinity College, Dublin, without whom I may never have discovered anthropology. Some of the chapters in this book have appeared as articles in Ethnos, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory and the Journal of Hindu Studies. In the process, these chapters, and the book as a whole, have benefitted hugely from the thoughtful and thought-provoking feedback from anonymous reviewers. I thank the editors for permission to publish revised versions of these articles here. I owe a great deal to my PhD cohort, with whom I was lucky enough to spend countless hours sharing ideas and frustrations, breakthroughs and setbacks. I am indebted in particular to my close friends and most generous critics, Jonas Tinius and Ben Belek, who never failed to provide invaluable, if at times, colourful feedback on early chapter drafts. Without their advice, support and muchneeded ridicule, I have no doubt this book would have taken a very different shape and its writing would have been a much less enjoyable process. I want to thank Amaretto Chanthong, Katie Reinhart, Ryan Rafaty and Mike Golan at King’s College, who have been a constant source of support throughout and beyond the PhD. In Cambridge, I also thank Jan-Jonathan Bock, Darja Irdam and Patrick McKearney. Special mention is also due to Tobias Häusermann, who is convinced that I owe the completion of this book to his pestering (he is probably right).

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Acknowledgements

Much of the writing of this book was undertaken during my research between the Woolf Institute, Cambridge and Georgetown University, Qatar. I want to thank my colleagues and friends at both institutions. I am grateful to Marion Berghahn, Harry Eagles, Caroline Kuhtz and Tom Bonnington at Berghahn, and the Wyse Series in Social Anthropology editors, James Laidlaw, Joel Robbins and Maryon McDonald for the support they have given me throughout the publication process. To James I owe a further debt. From our first meeting before my acceptance to Cambridge, I could not have asked for a more generous mentor. James has had a profound influence on this research, providing insightful comments and invaluable guidance at every stage of the process. Without him, this book simply would not have come to fruition. I cannot hope to express in words my gratitude to my parents, whose love and encouragement made the otherwise difficult decision to pursue a PhD the easiest I have ever made. For giving me a love of learning, I owe my parents and aunt Joan more than I could ever hope to repay. To my wife, Sukhpreet, who endlessly tolerated my neurosis (and my book beard), your support means everything. Finally, I want to thank the devotees of Mayapur, many of whom I am honoured to call friends. Although there are too many people to mention, I owe special thanks to Bhumika, Shankar, Kadamba Kanana Swami, Jayadvaita Swami, Gauranga Simha, Adidevi, Madhavi, Isvari, Rasatma, Bhakti, Guntis, Harikirtana, Nila, Ganga Das, Gopal, Madhu, Aradhika, Vanessa, Ter Kadamba, Dimana, Ojasvini and Jagannath Kirtan. It is because of their patience and hospitality that this karmi could learn about Krishna consciousness. I thank Marje Ermel and Teruko Vida Mitsuhara, fellow anthropologists in the field. Thanks are also due to the devotees and scholars on the Vaishnava Advanced Studies online forum, who never failed to provide quotations, references and thoughtful feedback on ISKCON-related questions and publications. While this research has benefitted from the insight and friendship of ISKCON devotees in Mayapur and beyond, all inaccuracies and misunderstandings are my own.

Notes on Names, Language and Transliteration

For purposes of readability, when referring to Gaudiya Vaishnava and Indic terminology (see Glossary), I have used the most common Anglicised spellings and avoided diacritical markers (‘Krishna’ rather than ‘Kr.s.n. a’, for example). Indic terminology is italicised throughout, with the exception of more recognisable words such as ‘guru’. I have employed pseudonyms to preserve the anonymity of my informants, unless referring to well-known figures of authority.

Introduction A Tale of Two Countercultures

STAY HIGH FOREVER. No More Coming Down. Practice Krishna Consciousness. Expand your consciousness by practising the TRANSCENDENTAL SOUND VIBRATION. TURN ON… TUNE IN… DROP OUT —ISKCON poster (1966)1

Since the early 1970s, the small town of Mayapur in West Bengal has been home to a multi-national Gaudiya Vaishnava community of International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) devotees.2 While this community comprises a wide variety of religious, national and ethnic backgrounds, including local Bengalis, devotees here share the common goal of following ISKCON’s spiritual programme of self-realisation, as was presented by founder Srila Prabhupada (henceforth Prabhupad) in the context of an ambitious preaching mission to the West in the 1960s and 1970s. Following the path of Krishna consciousness requires commitment to a set of spiritual practices that includes meditation, deity worship and adhering to a set of ‘regulative principles’, all of which are designed to facilitate detachment from the material world and attachment to Krishna. Alongside these core ascetic practices, devotees understand the chanting of the Hare Krishna mahamantra to be the most effective means of attaining salvation. One cannot get far in Mayapur without hearing the sound of the holy name: Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare. While Prabhupad’s pedagogy was developed in the 1960s and 1970s in the context of a ‘world-rejecting’ (Wallis 1984) monastic movement that was for the most part shaped around young American celibate monks, ISKCON has changed dramatically in the last fifty years, evolving into a ‘world-accommodating’ congregational movement of lay practitioners.3 Whereas renunciation was the defining ethic of the early institution, the goal for today’s lay devotees is not so much to renounce the world as it is to engage in it, albeit in a strictly prescribed way. This shift is a direct consequence of an economic downturn in the late 1970s, since when the institution has not been able to financially sustain its communalist social structure (Rochford 2007). With no other

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Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

choice, devotees were forced to move outside of the walls of the short-lived temple communes and find employment in the outside world. The socio-historical context of Prabhupad’s mission to the West and ISKCON’s institutional trajectory in the decades after his death have had profound consequences for the ideals of self-cultivation and social transformation by which devotees understand and practise Krishna consciousness. Outside of the setting of the ashram, devotees have had to develop new ways of becoming Vaishnava. With respect to wider Gaudiya Vaishnavism, to which ISKCON traces its roots, Mayapur is a particularly interesting community to examine. An important place of pilgrimage, it was in Mayapur that the ascetic saint Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was born in 1486 ad, and it was from here that he began his mission of spreading Krishna consciousness. Almost five hundred years later, and after returning from his mission to the West, Prabhupad brought his message back to India, making Mayapur ISKCON’s global headquarters in the early 1970s. During these years, he also made plans here for the development of what some devotees are today calling an ‘ideal Vedic city’, a spiritual city inspired by Krishna consciousness. Prabhupad’s vision has been the catalyst for dramatic social, economic and infrastructural development, which has accelerated markedly in the last decade with the beginning of construction work in 2009 on what will be one of the largest Hindu temples in the world, the Temple of Vedic Planetarium (TOVP). Previously no more than a handful of small temples amidst expansive agricultural lands, the town of Mayapur is today dominated by the ISKCON complex, within which can be found several temples, schools, restaurants and guesthouses. In addition to the growing community, hundreds of thousands of devotees, both local and international, visit Mayapur every year as Prabhupad’s dream of a spiritual city is widely felt to be an imminent reality. The Mayapur project, however, is not without problems. While on one hand the growing population and new high-rise buildings are being welcomed as signs of the success of Prabhupad’s divine mission, on the other, Mayapur is undergoing unprecedented, and at times, unplanned and unregulated urbanisation. As international devotees continue to arrive from all over the world, large residential developments are springing up in the land surrounding the ISKCON complex. Around the TOVP site, the centre of this imagined spiritual city, and in the place of a viable economic model for international devotees living in rural India, land speculation and property development have become popular but precarious entrepreneurial ventures, and have resulted in corruption, crime, and on occasion, violence. The commoditisation of the sacred land itself has become a significant obstacle to the realisation of Prabhupad’s ambitious utopian ideal. Against the backdrop of Mayapur’s dramatic development, this book centres on how international devotees, in the context of social change and ethical indeterminacy, and often in the face of failure, strive to subscribe to Gaudiya Vaishnava ideals and practices of moral self-cultivation. Strictly following ISKCON’s path to self-realisation, as we will see, is extremely difficult,



Introduction

3

if not at times essentially impossible. And while the land of Mayapur is understood to be sacred, and therefore conducive to spiritual life, devotees often struggle with the practices and prohibitions that are deemed indispensable for their salvation. Living as lay practitioners by a philosophy that was shaped around monastic roots, they are faced with new obstacles as well as opportunities. Alongside understandings of and commitments to a prescribed set of Vaishnava virtues, devotees must also contend with the inevitability of failure along the way. However, they are also both prone to and adept at articulating their inability to consistently live up to the ideals of Krishna consciousness. So much so, I suggest, that narrating moral failure itself becomes a privileged mode of self-cultivation. Devotees do not inhabit the moral system by simply conforming to its dictates, but at times by failing to do so within shared moral narratives that subsume the inevitability of failure. In other words, they become Vaishnava by failing well. Before returning to Mayapur and the central theme of moral failure, it is important to firstly understand ISKCON’s roots in two countercultures: 1960s America and late nineteenth-century Kolkata.

The History of ISKCON In September 1965, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami (Prabhupad), a sixty-nineyear-old renunciant monk from Kolkata, undertook the arduous thirty-fiveday boat journey from India to the east coast of America. Penniless and in a foreign land, he began his preaching mission simply sitting under a tree in New York, chanting the Hare Krishna mahamantra. From these humble beginnings Prabhupad soon found an unexpected following amongst the counterculture youth of America (Daner 1976, Rochford 1985, Knott 1986, Bromley and Shinn 1989). He began giving classes on Vaishnava philosophy, and within a year was initiating young Western disciples. In May 1966, he opened a small storefront temple on New York’s Lower East Side and in that same year founded the ‘International Society for Krishna Consciousness’. Over the next twelve years, until his death in 1977, ISKCON would become a global religious movement, with temples and centres in major cities all over the world. In his lifetime, Prabhupad authored, edited and translated over eighty books (which have since been translated into dozens of languages) and built an institution to oversee the worldwide preaching activities of his dedicated disciples. Today, with a following of over one million, ISKCON boasts more than 550 centres worldwide, including temples, educational centres, restaurants and farming communities.4 Prabhupad had fulfilled a sixteenth-century prophecy that the chanting of the holy name would spread to ‘every town and village’ in the world. This, in any case, is the hagiographical narrative by which devotees locate the divinely inspired beginnings of ISKCON. Although this account of the ‘quasi-mythic golden days’ (Bryant and Ekstrand 2004, 438) is certainly an incredible success story, the emergence of Vaishnavism in the West requires a little more unpacking. In what follows, I

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Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

will briefly describe ISKCON’s history in the West, with the main aim of outlining the profound transformation it has undergone in the years since Prabhupad’s death, from ‘cult to congregation’ (Rochford 2007). I then turn to nineteenth-century India to outline how Kolkata’s own ‘counterculture’ has profoundly informed ISKCON’s development a century later. ISKCON, I suggest, is the product not of one, but two countercultures, and belongs to a rich history of East-West syncretism, of which 1960s America is one chapter.

The Early Years It was by a stroke of luck that Prabhupad was able to travel to America in 1965, as it was in this year that President Lyndon Johnson abolished the Oriental Exclusion Act, allowing Asians once more to migrate to America (Melton 1989). Ironically, Prabhupad had had limited success with his preaching activities in India, where he had become a sannyasi (renunciant monk) in 1959. Although advanced in age, while in Vrindavan in India, Prabhupad had a dream where he was reminded of his guru’s instruction to preach Krishna consciousness in the West. The rest, as described above, is history. Arriving in America, Prabhupad was frustrated by the failure of his early attempts to appeal to what he called the ‘intelligent class of men’ that he had targeted in his preaching mission. He quickly found support, however, amongst the counterculture ‘hippies’ of New York. The 1960s was a period of upheaval, as young Americans, disillusioned by America’s role in the Vietnam war abroad and disorientated by political scandals and the civil rights movement on home soil, sought out alternatives: alternative social systems, alternative communities, alternative religions, and as intimated in one of ISKCON’s early slogans (cited at the top of this chapter), alternative consciousness. Prabhupad became an unwitting icon in the counterculture years (Deadwyler 2004, 153).5 Although he was strictly opposed to a lot of what the counterculture represented, in terms of hedonism, intoxication and liberal sexuality, Prabhupad’s spiritually inspired critique of Western modernity resonated with the disenfranchised youth on some important points, including the rejection of consumer capitalism and traditional forms of authority. I will return throughout this book to the development of Prabhupad’s theology, but for now an overview will suffice. ISKCON identifies with the rich Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition that traces its beginnings back to the sixteenth-century Bengal and the ascetic saint Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. Having grown up in the Mayapur area, Chaitanya dedicated his life to travelling through India and spreading the philosophy of Krishna consciousness. He preached that the most effective way of attaining salvation was to chant the holy name and participate in sankirtan (public dancing and congregational singing). Through cycles of demise and revitalisation, Gaudiya Vaishnavism re-emerged in the late nineteenth century under the leadership of Bhaktivinod Thakur, amongst others (see below). It was Bhaktivinod’s son, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati



Introduction

5

(Prabhupad’s guru) in the early twentieth century, who founded the Gaudiya Math, from which Prabhupad emerged as one of Gaudiya Vaishnavism’s most successful proponents. Prabhupad came to America, armed with an extensive philosophical canon, but in the early years, he kept his message simple. ‘You are not this body’, he would repeat time and time again. From this axiomatic principle, he would explain how we are all ‘spirit souls’, trapped in the material world of illusion. Having forgotten our eternal identity as loving servants of Krishna, we have become entangled in the material world, and in cycles of death and rebirth. Only by taking up Krishna consciousness, following the ‘four regulative principles’ (no meat eating, no gambling, no illicit sex, no intoxication) and chanting the Hare Krishna mahamantra, can we hope to escape the cycle, and be reunited with Krishna in the next life. While these four regulative principles were to become the foundation of any serious devotee’s spiritual practice, in the early years it was not uncommon for Prabhupad to give classes to a room half-filled with intoxicated youths. Many devotees found the regulative principles difficult, if not impossible, to follow, and as Prabhupad became stricter, many left the movement. For those who remained, ISKCON became what anthropologist Francine Daner (1976) described, in Erving Goffman’s terms, as a ‘total institution’. Prabhupad’s audience soon evolved from a scattered group of curious ‘hippies’ to a strict and committed group of disciples, the core of who were brahmacharis (male celibate monks). Joining ISKCON involved taking spiritual initiation, changing one’s name, living communally in temples and submitting totally to the authority of the institution. It often implied cutting ties with friends and family members, and giving up one’s possessions and savings. These were the markers of what in the early years was a world-rejecting monastic movement. The ISKCON these early devotees joined was very much a work in progress, as Prabhupad was the sole conduit between America’s countercultural youth and Vaishnava philosophy. Prabhupad’s preaching mission, however, was not confined to the propagation of philosophy. Along with the basic tenets of Krishna consciousness, Prabhupad introduced his young disciples early on to what was referred to somewhat interchangeably as ‘Indian’, ‘Vaishnava’ or sometimes ‘Vedic’ culture. Many of those more committed to Prabhupad proudly wore tilak (forehead marking) and Vaishnava dress (dhotis for men and saris for women). Men also ‘shaved up’ (shaved their heads, leaving a tuft of hair at the back, called a sikha), making themselves immediately recognisable on the streets of America. Devotees learned Bengali vegetarian cooking, sang bhajans (devotional songs) and learned Indian instruments such as the mrdunga and harmonium.6 Prabhupad’s early disciples did not simply ‘convert’, or become ‘believers’, but enthusiastically submitted themselves as subjects of an experiment in cultural transformation. Although conversion to Krishna consciousness today manifests in divergent ways, in the 1960s almost all of Prabhupad’s committed disciples felt they were making not just a philosophical, but also a deeply cultural shift. On one hand they were rejecting

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mainstream ‘American culture’ (along with the counterculture), while on the other embracing what was considered superior ‘Indian culture’ (as was the rough conception at the time). Adopting a Vaishnava aesthetic and engaging in a wide array of Vaishnava cultural practices was considered fundamental to one’s spiritual journey. Cultural competence was itself a virtuous pursuit that any committed devotee would have to have taken as seriously as adhering to, or demonstrating faith in, the philosophical tenets presented by Prabhupad.

Public Image After opening the storefront temple in New York and founding his international society, Prabhupad was quick to seek out opportunities for expansion. In 1967, he opened temples in San Francisco and Montreal, and soon he would bring ISKCON to Germany, England and further afield. Within a few years, ISKCON had opened centres around the world, as Prabhupad worked tirelessly on both his preaching and translating work, while travelling the world initiating new devotees. The Hare Krishnas were becoming a familiar spectacle on the streets of North America. From 1968, devotees began attracting attention with their sankirtan parties, singing and dancing, while engaging the public with a range of preaching strategies. By far the most successful of these was book distribution, which was the financial lifeblood of Prabhupad’s mission. The capital raised from book distribution funded further preaching initiatives, temple building projects and printing expenses and allowed ISKCON to flourish, sustaining temple communities and small communes around the country, which in turn facilitated its world-rejecting ideology. This economic prosperity however was not to last. With success came notoriety. In 1974, at the same time as ISKCON was gaining momentum in America, it was listed alongside several other ‘new religious movements’ (NRMs) as a dangerous cult (see Glock 1976, Barker 1982, Beckford 1985).7 They were accused, along with The Way, The Family and The Moonies, for example, of ‘brainwashing’ and psychological coercion (Gelberg 1983, Shinn 1987, Melton 1989). In the face of such accusations and counterconversion strategies such as ‘deprogramming’ (where devotees were kidnapped and subjected to a range of psychological methods to reverse their ‘personality change’), ISKCON struggled to assert itself as a legitimate religious movement. It also suffered major financial setbacks as legal fees and costly settlements added up, and as families of ex-devotees sued. The situation only worsened for ISKCON in 1978 as the anti-cult rhetoric was amplified in the wake of the Jonestown mass suicide. It was not just in America that ISKCON struggled to fit in. In Argentina, ISKCON was banned in 1976, while in 1973 ISKCON’s Mumbai temple was demolished by mercenaries. This would foreshadow the religious persecution that devotees would face in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. As the tide began to turn against ISKCON in the mid-1970s, and in an attempt to distance itself from the ‘great American cult scare’ (Shinn 1987), ISKCON turned



Introduction

7

to an unlikely ally: American Hindus. In a series of court cases in the late 1970s (based on charges of brainwashing), ISKCON benefited from the support of tens of thousands of Indian Hindus (Melton 1989, 95). This would not be the last time that the expatriate Hindu community vouched for ISKCON’s legitimacy as an authentic Hindu tradition (Nye 2001).

The Postcharismatic Years 1977 was a bad year. Amidst disastrous publicity surrounding several court cases, along with mounting legal bills and settlements, Prabhupad passed away in Vrindavan, India. By this time, he had already put in place the ‘Governing Body Commission’ (GBC) to manage ISKCON in his absence.8 The devotees who comprised this management board however were mostly in their twenties and many had only been in the movement for a few years. On their shoulders now rested the responsibility to guide Prabhupad’s global institution out of the difficult 1970s and into an uncertain future. Immediate concerns included leadership, succession and financial insecurity. There was confusion, and to this day heated controversy, over the role that had been assigned to these young sannyasis.9 They became ‘proxy-acharyas’ (spiritual leaders), and in a system that became known as the ‘zonal acharya system’, each guru was allocated a geographical region over which he (always he) exercised unquestioned authority. In the years that followed, this created a splintered ISKCON, as different regions would compete for money, resources and manpower. The zonal acharya system lasted until 1987 when the ‘guru reform movement’ successfully pressured the GBC into addressing what had become a ‘crisis of authority’ (Deadwyler 2004). This crisis was not just a matter of organisational structure, but increasingly in the years following Prabhupad’s death became an issue of individual integrity. What was becoming clear was that the devotees that Prabhupad had chosen to lead his movement, just recently countercultural ‘hippies’, were far from qualified for a life of renunciation. The guru ‘fall-down’ (dropout) rate was around ninety per cent (Deadwyler 2004). Every year more of Prabhupad’s chosen disciples proved themselves incapable of upholding not only the rigorous standards expected of a guru, but also the basic spiritual standards demanded of a neophyte. Scandals included drug abuse, affairs, embezzlement and abuse of children in the movement’s schools. On top of this, ISKCON was to face fresh socioeconomic challenges in the coming years that would profoundly alter the development of the institution. After the initial success of the 1960s and 1970s under Prabhupad’s charismatic leadership, the ‘postcharismatic years’ (Bryant and Ekstrand 2004) were to prove disastrous for ISKCON (Rochford 2007, Dwyer and Cole 2007). As the countercultural sentiments of the 1960s were waning, ISKCON found it increasingly difficult to appeal to the American youth. With a severely damaged public reputation and ever-dwindling revenues from book distribution, it seemed that

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ISKCON might not survive the death of its founder. Aside from ISKCON’s difficulties in the public arena, new obstacles emerged during the 1980s that highlighted how fragile the ISKCON experiment had been from the start. In the earlier years, and thanks to the financial success of book distribution, ISKCON devotees typically lived in temples or communes, where the institution was able to pay for their maintenance in exchange for seva (‘devotional service’ or work). As an economic model, this worked well. Prabhupad had set up several gurukuls (‘traditional’ schools) to both educate and accommodate boys as young as five years old. Here they would be given a Krishna conscious education, and, it was hoped, the next generation of ‘pure devotees’ would emerge, untainted by mainstream society.10 Centralising childcare and education in this way meant that even when devotees started a family, they would still be available to contribute to ISKCON’s expansionist goals. While the gurukul was a fundamental aspect of Prabhupad’s cultural mission, things were to go horribly wrong. In the late 1990s it emerged that in gurukuls all over the world, devotee children had been systematically abused, both physically and sexually. So bad was the problem that twenty per cent of children who attended a gurukul were abused in some form, with that number rising to seventy-five per cent of those who attended the Vrindavan gurukul in India (Rochford 2007, 75). The scandals in the gurukul system culminated in 2000 in a federal lawsuit filed in Dallas against ISKCON, involving forty-four devotees who had suffered abuse as children in the gurukul. Though this case was dismissed, other suits followed, with a total of 535 claimants resulting in a $9.5m settlement against ISKCON (ibid.). This led to ISKCON filing for bankruptcy. What had initially been conceived of as a central feature of Prabhupad’s spiritual culture had become degraded and abused as a means to economic prosperity. The tension between ISKCON’s missionary goals on the one hand and its social goals on the other would be a key theme in its transformation throughout the decades following Prabhupad’s death. The 1980s and 1990s are today remembered for the countless scandals in which ISKCON found itself embroiled. Membership decreased dramatically during these years, with every guru ‘fall-down’ and new child abuse scandal. ISKCON would almost certainly not have survived these postcharismatic years if it were not for what has been termed the ‘Hinduisation’ of the movement (see Rochford 2007). Despite Prabhupad’s priority of missionising to non-Indian American youths, as the counterculture faded, Americans seemed to lose interest in ISKCON’s ‘worldrejecting’ agenda. At the same time, however, the expatriate Hindu community began to fill temples around the country. Although not all necessarily committed to Prabhupad’s mission, and in some cases not even particularly devoted to Krishna, the Hare Krishna temple emerged as a space in which expatriate Indians could practise Hinduism, performing puja, taking darshan and gathering for major festivals. In sharp contrast to the early years, when ISKCON temples were filled by young Caucasian hippies (turned brahmacharis), today’s ISKCON congregation for the most part reflects this ‘Hinduisation’, comprising mostly of ethnically Indian lay practitioners.



Introduction

9

ISKCON Today ISKCON then has changed profoundly in the decades since Prabhupad’s death. While in the early years ISKCON, as a world-rejecting movement, comprised for the most part young Western brahmacharis, and prioritised proselytisation over all else, today’s ISKCON can be characterised as world-accommodating and is overwhelmingly made up of a lay congregation, the majority of whom are ethnically Indian. The particular presentation of Vaishnava philosophy ISKCON espouses is very much a product of the movement’s monastic roots, but how today’s devotees go about pursuing Krishna consciousness in a changing world does not always conform to the ideals presented by Prabhupad. Rather, the spaces that have emerged between the ideal and the real have proven generative of novel ways of becoming Vaishnava. Having exchanged ‘world-rejecting asceticism’ for ‘inner worldly asceticism’, today’s devotees could be described, to borrow James Bielo’s phrase, as ‘new monastics’ (2011, 75). While ISKCON might be deemed a success by the very fact of its survival, it has, by devotees’ own understanding, thus far failed to achieve many of the lofty ideals set out by Prabhupad. In terms of its individual-orientated goals (Gelberg 2004), and evidenced by the epidemic of guru ‘fall-downs’, ISKCON has failed to produce ‘pure devotees’.11 Of course, and as this book will show, I am certainly not suggesting that ISKCON has not produced moral exemplars. It does seem however that in its short history ISKCON has produced more exemplars of moral failure than it has of moral success. In terms of its social aspirations, ISKCON has fallen short in its attempts at instituting Prabhupad’s ‘Vedic culture’ (see Chapter 5). If ISKCON has then, as devotees often suggested to me, thus far failed in terms of both its individual-orientated and social ideals, how have these ideals been shaped by this failure? Where the early monastic ISKCON developed around ‘coordinated, centralised and physically and socially bounded communities’ (Rochford 2007, 67), today’s congregations are typically decentralised, gathering once a week (on a Sunday) for temple worship and kirtan (congregational singing). Over the course of a couple of decades the demise of communalism, concomitant with the rise of congregationalism, saw devotees becoming less dependent on the institution. This is what Burke Rochford (2007, 54) describes as a process of ‘internal secularisation’. Along with financial independence, another important consequence has been that the cultural change that ISKCON has undergone has largely taken place outside the temple, and outside the control of the GBC. Today there is a wide spectrum of commitment to the philosophy, practices and the institution itself. Some stoically stick to the regulative principles and adhere to a Vaishnava aesthetic, wearing tilak or a sikha, for example, while others are happy to drink coffee, wear ‘karmi’ (non-devotee) clothes, or engage in ‘illicit’ sexual relations (see Chapter 2). Some pursue formal initiation, chant (the mahamantra) every day and work for ISKCON, while others are content attending the temple programme every now and again, dedicating most of their time to their otherwise secular professional and personal lives.

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Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

Where the celibate monk was once held up as the virtuous ideal, ISKCON today has not only made room for grihasthas (householders), but as lay practitioners account for the vast majority of its worldwide membership, ISKCON today looks to them as the future of the movement. No longer perceived as a ‘cult’, ISKCON today self-identifies as a spiritual, cultural and educational movement. After decades of decline, ISKCON has in recent years again found the missionary zeal that was so pivotal to its early success (Berg and Kniss 2008). Alongside sankirtan and book distribution, it has embraced new preaching initiatives such as self-help style seminars, retreats and ‘bridge preaching’, whereby Prabhupad’s philosophy is packaged in almost exclusively secular terms such as ‘self-improvement’. Having just about survived, ISKCON has found a place in the pluralistic religious landscape (Rochford 2007, 7). On ISKCON’s official website (www.iskcon.org), one can find short biographies of devotees from around the world (nine out of ten are grihasthas). These include Krishna Lila Dasi, ‘mother and film producer’, Nanda Kishor Das, ‘husband and IT executive’ and Radha Dasi, ‘grandmother and lawyer’. This is indicative of ISKCON’s orientation as a world-accommodating movement. This conception, however, could be somewhat misleading. While some have certainly ‘accommodated’ the world, in a lot of cases, more accurately, devotees today tend to accommodate Krishna consciousness in their busy secular lives. Pursuing Krishna consciousness alongside a successful career, almost unthinkable in the early days of ISKCON, is today the very core of what it means to be a good devotee. Of course, as this book will elaborate, attempting to live by a philosophy that was shaped by the context of its monastic roots leads to a difficult set of ethical dilemmas. ISKCON’s history has typically been portrayed in terms of an Indian sannyasi ‘transplanting’ Vaishnavism to the West. In focusing on Mayapur, however, this book tells the story of how this same sannyasi brought Krishna consciousness back to India (see also Brooks 1989). While not denying the importance of the American counterculture in ISKCON’s history, in order to understand Mayapur today we must turn to a deeper history in India. Looking at the movement ‘back home’, this book considers Mayapur in the context of the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition of revitalisation to which it traces its lineage. With this in mind, it is to one such period of revitalisation in the late nineteenth century that I now turn: Kolkata’s own ‘counterculture’.

Kolkata’s Counterculture Despite the particularly strong impulse to turn East during the 1960s, by the mid-twentieth century America had a long history of interest in India (see Tweed and Prothero 1999, de Michelis 2004). The nineteenth-century Transcendentalists, for example, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, were heavily influenced by Eastern spirituality, as was Madame Blavatsky, founding the American Theosophical Society in the 1930s



Introduction

11

(see Judah 1974). It was not only Indian literature and philosophy that had made it to America, however. Prabhupad’s voyage, although often presented by ISKCON devotees as unprecedented, followed in the steps of several influential Indian gurus who had come to America with similar missionary goals in mind. Protap Chunder Mozoomdar was one of the first to make the journey, delivering an address in Boston in 1883 (Melton 1989, 79). Ten years later Swami Vivekananda made his famous address in Chicago at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, after which he toured the country for several years. Founder of Transcendental Meditation and Prabhupad’s contemporary, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi arrived in America on a preaching tour in 1959, as did many others in subsequent years. Prabhupad then was not alone in his goal of spreading Indian philosophy to the West, nor were the hippies of the 1960s the first to be receptive to Eastern spirituality. Rather, Prabhupad was one of a long line of gurus that belong to a complex history of cross-cultural fertilisation. To be sure, the 1960s were undoubtedly a serendipitous time to arrive on American shores. In Robert Ellwood’s words, the 1960s was the culmination of ‘a more deeply mystical current of spirituality quietly rising like water behind a dam, until the floodgates suddenly open and it streams out in torrents’ (1989, 103). Although the history of this cross-cultural encounter is often recounted in terms of the West’s curiosity and receptivity, however, it is to India that we must turn to properly understand the channels through which this ‘deeply mystical current of spirituality’ could flow in the first place. The period between 1850 and 1950 has been referred to as the century of Christian-Hindu syncretism (Michaels 2004). It was, in Shukavak Dasa’s words (2002, 48), ‘a time of global awakening and secularisation’ where ‘Indian hearts and minds were torn between Christian missionaries and the bhadraloka’.12 By the late nineteenth century, Indians were used to what Peter Van der Veer (2013) calls ‘Western imperial modernity’ (see also Kopf 1979, Jones 1989, Clarke 1997, Copley 1997, Pandian 2009). As the second city of the British Empire, and the administrative centre in India, it was from Kolkata that the British exercised power. The colonial mission in India was one of many arenas of nineteenth-century globalisation, characterised by Van der Veer as ‘a thoroughgoing political, economic, and cultural integration of the world’ (2013, 41). Initially spurred on by an economic agenda, in time Britain’s colonial mission came to subsume all aspects of Indian society and culture, from religion and law to governance and morality (see Bayly 2004). Education in particular was seen by the British as an indispensable tool in their mission of modernisation. British education was introduced in 1817, the purpose of which was to create, in Thomas Macaulay’s words, ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and intellect’.13 ‘The pressures applied by missionary educators’, Tamal Krishna Goswami writes, ‘were only part of a larger challenge quite unlike any India had faced before. Modernity seeped into all human institutions through a network of channels too numerous to be thwarted. As the principal seat of the British, Bengal was a laboratory for testing modernisation alternatives’ (2012, 57).

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Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

Although Indians were considered subjects (not citizens) of the Empire, they were not, as history often renders narratives of colonial domination, passive actors in the unfolding story of their own subjection. Amidst a complex history of complicity and submission, as well as antagonism and revolt, Indians’ relationship with the British was not a simple tale of repressor and repressed. Just as Britain was embarking on its mission of ‘modernising’ India, Indians themselves were recasting themselves and their traditions in multifarious ways. The very educational institutions that the British had built to extend their control of the colony became prototypes for Indian institutions, like the Hindu College, for example, which was founded in 1818 with the aim of counteracting missionary influence (Sardella 2013, 42). In 1830 the Scottish Church College (that both Vivekananda and Prabhupad would attend) was founded. Here, the Socratic method was taught to stimulate ‘rational enquiry’ (Sardella 2013, 13). Over the course of the nineteenth century, Ferdinando Sardella notes, ‘the [British] schools … succeeded in transmitting the missionaries’ sensibilities to generations of students, who began viewing their own literatures, beliefs, and customs through this newly acquired cultural lens’ (2013, 40). Such educational institutions were to produce an intellectual elite that would appropriate in their own various ‘neo-Hindu’ agendas a ‘puritanism cloaked in Christian institutional dress’ (ibid.). In an effort to tighten its grip on India, the British, in large part through Christian missionaries on the ground, singled out particular aspects of Indian culture for purging. Sati, a custom where a widow is obliged to sacrifice herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, was seen as a particularly barbaric practice that had to be abolished. The caste system and idolatry were similarly targeted, ill fitted as they were with the individualist and rational Protestant ethic. While the British went to much effort to stamp out these elements of Indian culture, it was maybe ironically Indians themselves who, through a long engagement with the ruling power, led the charge towards modernisation, though not always on the colonisers’ terms. The Western-educated intellectuals, predominantly based in Kolkata, did not simply reproduce a British disdain for certain Indian customs, but appropriated Western narratives of superiority in their own revisionist critiques of Indian traditions. With reference to the modern period, Willhelm Halbfass writes: [Indians] tried to disengage themselves from the status of mere objects or instruments of Western curiosity, and they took more distinctive initiatives to interpret their identity for the Europeans, and to defend and affirm it against them. They began to demarcate themselves against the foreign and to recognise the other, but in a new sense they also tried to comprehend and assimilate the Western ideas within the framework of their own tradition. (1988, 173)

If one response to domination was complicity, another was what has become known as the ‘Bengal Renaissance’ in the early nineteenth century. One of the main protagonists in this effort was Rammohan Roy (1772–1833). Often referred to as the ‘father of modern India’, Roy had immersed himself in



Introduction

13

European philosophy, becoming involved for a time with Unitarianism and Freemasonary. In 1828, Roy founded the Brahmo Samaj (as it would later be called). In line with British ideas of modernisation, the Brahmo Samaj called for the abolition of what were considered superstitious aspects of Hinduism (such as idolatry and sati).14 Against colonial narratives, however, it offered an apologetic account of India’s traditions, and sought to highlight the ‘rational’ aspects of Hinduism. The Brahmo Samaj borrowed liberally from the moral sensibilities of the ruling colonial powers. Many areas of Indian social and religious life were debated in light of the influence of Western moral discourse, such as caste politics, the role of women, and idol worship. While the Brahmo Samaj sought to recast Indian traditions, both social and religious, in what were perceived as more rational, moral and intellectual frameworks, they certainly did not wholesale adopt the culture of the West, but rather sought a synthesis, embracing the ‘rationality’ of the West and the ‘spirituality’ of the East. Like others around him (and after him), Roy espoused the idea that India’s sacred texts were indeed rational. Such a blending of rationality and mysticism was a prevalent theme in India’s response to the colonial demands of modernisation, and would be foundational to the success of later spiritual leaders, such as Vivekananda, who sought to bridge the cultural gap between the East and the West. Western and Indian notions of mysticism and rationality did not just come together, but in the process they created something new. While debates emerged around social customs, as noted above, at the heart of the clash between tradition(s) and modernity, unsurprisingly for the Christian missionaries, were the themes of religion and morality. One of the controversial focal points of such debates was Krishna. A murderer and a thief, famous for his amorous affairs with Radha and adulterous orgies with the gopis (cowherd girls), Krishna’s apparently questionable character was an easy target for the demonstration of Christian moral superiority. As Max Weber wrote in his Religion of India, ‘What strikes the occidental about the redeemer Krishna, and what separates him from later redeemers who are presented as free of sin is the theology of the sects in Krishna’s indubitable nonvirtuousness’ (1958, 189). The theme of Krishna’s moral transgressions has been an interpretive battleground for centuries in India, but in the nineteenth century in particular, Krishna’s character emerged as a focal point of cross-cultural (mis)understanding between the British and the bhadralok. How was it that on one hand Krishna was the purveyor of dharma, the omniscient and benevolent God that bestows mercy on his devotees, outlining for them in the Bhagavad Gita how to live a good life, while on the other he was stealing men’s wives and engaging in Dionysian orgies on the outskirts of Vrindavan? He was at worst, it seemed, simply a delinquent, and at best surely ill-suited for the divine role attributed to him. As Shukavak Dasa (2002, 87) writes, ‘the critics charged that the thieving and erotic pastimes of Krishna made a mockery of God and so justified the Europeans’ opinion that the Indians lacked moral character. Christian missionaries used stories about Krishna as a weapon against Hinduism, challenging its ethical basis’.

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Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

It was not only the British who felt that Krishna was a dubious candidate for divinity. There were several strategies employed by the Brahmo Samaj to accommodate Krishna, one of which involved rewriting his history without the moral ambivalence.15 Gone were the days of violent kisses, torn hair and adulterous flings, so vividly depicted in the twelfth-century devotional poem, the Gita-Govinda. For Bankim Chandra Chaterjee, another pioneer of neoHinduism, ‘the Krishna of the Bhagavad Gita was rational and moral, whereas the Krishna of the Puranas was irrational, immoral, and a source of embarrassment’ (Dasa 2002, 124). Chaterjee sought to present a new and sanitised version of Krishna that emphasised the sage Krishna of the Bhagavad Gita and did away with hedonistic Krishna of the Puranas. While this represented a progressive step for Indian culture for some, for others it was a betrayal and misinterpretation of Indian tradition. Alongside the leading Hindu thinkers of the time, the lesser-known Bhaktivinod contributed an important and nuanced counter-critique to the revisionist discourse that emerged from the Bengal Renaissance. Like the majority of the bhadralok, Bhaktivinod was educated in the British system and had strong interest in Western philosophy, as well as Christianity. In his work The Bhagavat, Its Philosophy, Ethics and Theology (based on a lecture given in 1869), he confessed: When we were in college, reading the philosophical works of the West and exchanging thoughts with the thinkers of the day, we had a real hatred towards the Bhagavat [the Srimad Bhagavatam]. That great work looked like a repository of wicked and stupid ideas, scarcely adapted to the nineteenth century, and we hated to hear any argument in its favour. With us a volume of Channing, Parker, Emerson or Newman had more weight than the whole lot of the Vaishnava works. (Cited in Dasa 2002, 119)

Although he had been attracted to Western ideas, Bhaktivinod came to reject the philosophies of the West in favour of Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Like Prabhupad almost one hundred years later in the West, Bhaktivinod found himself in the middle of Kolkata’s own counterculture, and made it his mission to promote the philosophical and moral superiority of India’s ancient traditions. Bhaktivinod’s agenda was to insist that there was nothing wrong with Krishna’s adulterous affairs, but that rather the cause of misunderstanding and controversy was the lack of spiritual qualification of the ignorant Western interpreter. Krishna did not need to change, but the ontological assumptions with which his stories were approached did. Bhaktivinod argued that one cannot hope to understand esoteric spiritual topics with unqualified mundane eyes: this was to become a central tenet of Prabhupad’s theology. As will be touched upon throughout this book, Bhaktivinod was an important figure in the late nineteenth-century Vaishnava revival, to which ISKCON can be traced. Alongside a successful governmental career as a magistrate, he was a prolific writer (in both English and Bengali), preacher and spiritual leader. Bhaktivinod was bold enough to challenge the colonial (and Hindu)



Introduction

15

critiques of Vaishnavism on the very ‘rational’ grounds so often assumed to be lacking in Hinduism. As nationalist movements were beginning to emerge in India, Bhaktivinod dedicated his life to re-establishing Chaitanya’s mission of spreading Krishna consciousness, synthesising Vaishnava tradition and Western narratives of modernity and rationality in the process. It was his son, and Prabhupad’s guru, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, in the early twentieth century, who carried on his mission with a focus on institutionalisation, founding the Gaudiya Math, which grew to sixty-four centres around India (with small outposts in England, Germany and Burma). It was from Bhaktisiddhanta that Prabhupad inherited the missionary zeal that would bring him to the West in the 1960s and it was to Bhaktisiddhanta that Prabhupad remained fiercely loyal in terms of both his theological and institutional commitments. In his book A Living Theology, Tamal Krishna Goswami notes that Prabhupad was heir to a revitalised Gaudiya Vaishnavism, a century of effort by his immediate predecessors to relate their tradition to the modern world. [His predecessors] … had to work through many of the same questions Prabhupada confronted upon reaching the West … How Vaishnava teachings can be presented to the widest possible audience, how they can be explained to the Western mentality, how new devotees can be brought into the Chaitanya movement?’(2012, 103)

Like the Vaishnava tradition that was to make it to the West in the 1960s, Prabhupad himself was a product of colonial Kolkata. He attended the Scottish Church College, where he was exposed to a liberal arts education that included Christian theology, Western science and, of course, Victorian moral tastes. According to Tamal Krishna Goswami, Prabhupad ‘distilled from the hundreds of hours of classes and sermons a sense of what was and was not theologically acceptable to the religious sensibility of the West … then shaped his theology accordingly’ (2012, 51). I will elaborate on Prabhupad’s past throughout this book, but suffice it to say for the moment that he was well versed in cross-cultural politics long before he stumbled into the American counterculture. Prabhupad did not simply transplant an Eastern philosophy into the West, as narratives of ISKCON’s emergence in America often suggest. Shaped in the crucible of the colonial encounter, the tradition that Prabhupad inherited from Bhaktisiddhanta and Bhaktivinod before him had already subsumed sophisticated discourses of syncretism based around a set of oppositional narratives (‘East’ vs. ‘West’, tradition vs. modernity, sacred vs. mundane) that prepared him well for the cross-cultural preaching mission he was to undertake. The institution that he built was in a very real sense a product of not one, but two countercultures. Without dismissing the importance of the American chapter in ISKCON’s history, as this book will argue, the Mayapur case can only be understood through meaningful engagement with Gaudiya Vaishnava

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Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

and indeed wider Indian history. As will become clear, this is not an anthropological conjecture, but an ethnographic observation. Before moving on to outline the book’s structure, I firstly want to turn to its central theme: moral failure. While anthropologists working on ethics have begun to pay close attention to moral failure in recent years, this is quite a new development, and so some theoretical ground needs to be cleared before we proceed.

The Anthropology of Ethics and Moral Failure This book seeks to contribute to several debates within the anthropology of ethics. Since what has been termed the ‘ethical turn’, ethics and/or morality have garnered a lot of anthropological attention (Laidlaw 2002, 2014a; Zigon 2007, Lambek 2010, Faubion 2011), and a comprehensive review of this now sprawling body of literature is beyond the scope of this book. Rather, I focus here on the theme of moral failure. My overall argument speaks to a particular debate between two anthropological perspectives on the twin problems of identifying and locating ethics; I argue that beyond a focus on virtue and ‘the good’, the anthropology of ethics must also account for how people relate to vices, and how moral systems accommodate the inevitability of moral failure. While there are a range of approaches and splintered debates emerging within the anthropology of ethics, the ethnographic accounts that this book engages with mostly agree on a basic distinction between ethics and morality, as put forward by Bernard Williams and Michel Foucault (Laidlaw 1995, Mahmood 2005, Robbins 2004, Cook 2010, Pandian and Ali 2010, cf Zigon 2008). Ethics, for Williams (1985, 6), is what falls under the broad question of ‘how one ought to live?’ or in Foucauldian terms, one’s ‘relation to oneself ’ (1994, 266). In this formulation, ethics subsumes morality, which more narrowly refers to the following (or disregarding) of rules and regulations. A common point of departure for anthropologists interested in ethics is Foucault’s ‘ethical system’ (1994, 263–65), which comprises four basic questions or ‘components’. Firstly, there is the ‘ethical substance’ or the part of the self or one’s behaviour that is concerned with moral conduct. Does one work on the body? Or on one’s mind or feelings, for example? Secondly, there is the ‘mode of subjectification’ or ‘the way in which people are invited or incited to recognise their moral obligations’. How do people relate to rules and regulations? Thirdly, there are ‘self-forming activities’, or ‘the means by which we can change ourselves in order to become ethical subjects’ (what Foucault also calls ‘technologies of the self ’). How, then, Foucault asks, with particular attention paid to ascetic discipline, broadly conceived, do we work on the ‘ethical substance’? Fourthly, is the telos or ‘the kind of being to which we aspire’. I follow here Joel Robbins’ (2004) use of the term ‘moral system’ to refer to the combination of a moral code (the rules and regulations) with Foucault’s ‘ethical system’ (how one relates to the moral code).



Introduction

17

Within a broadly speaking Foucauldian framework, the anthropology of ethics has produced several influential ethnographies, which focus, maybe unsurprisingly, for the most part on ethical experience in religious contexts (for example, Robbins 2004, Mahmood 2005, Marsden 2005, Lester 2005, Hirschkind 2006, Cook 2010). As part of what has been identified as a wider shift in anthropology from the ‘suffering subject’ to ‘the good’ (Robbins 2013) – which encompasses, morality, value, well-being, empathy, care and hope, for example – these ethnographies engage with ethical life by describing processes and narratives of self-cultivation in the particular socio-historical contexts, traditions, institutions and discourses within which they are pursued. In the process, they outline a variety of ‘modes of subjectification’ and ‘technologies of the self ’ that animate the ethical lives of religious subjects. While these ethnographies have proven generative of new ways of thinking anthropologically about ethics, and will be engaged with in more detail throughout this book, the anthropology of ethics has, however, been criticised for privileging ‘the pursuit of ethical perfection’ at the expense of the myriad ways that people often fail to live up to ethical ideals (see Mayblin 2017, 506; Kloos and Beekers 2017, 5). That is to say, anthropologists have tended to emphasise how religious subjects strive to cultivate religious virtues, while paying less attention to how they struggle, and often fail, in the process. Ethnographies that take as their subject ethics tend to cohere around what Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic describes as ‘positive agency’, which privileges achievement, efficacy and selfdetermination. Positive agency, Oustinova-Stjepanovic notes, ‘constitutes a default assumption that discounts failure or ineptitude as an ‘aberration’’ (2017, 339). Although, as James Laidlaw (2014a, 138–78) notes, anthropologists such as Saba Mahmood do describe moments of failure and frustration, they often present what amounts to a misleadingly coherent picture of ethical life, one in which religious subjects are presented with a ‘grand scheme’ (Schielke and Debevec 2012) that they then simply strive to inhabit (see also Van der Veer 2008, Schielke 2015, Kloos and Beekers 2017). There are, however, several notable exceptions to the tendency to privilege coherence over contradiction, and virtues over vices. Before turning to these, there are two noteworthy theoretical contributions that have proven particularly instructive in laying the groundwork for an anthropological treatment of moral failure: Laidlaw’s Riches and Renunciation (1995) and Joel Robbins’ Becoming Sinners (2004). In Riches and Renunciation, Laidlaw looks at how affluent lay Jains in Jaipur aspire to the strict, and essentially unrealisable, religious values of renunciation. As most of these Jains are wealthy gem traders, such values are strikingly discordant with the lives they actually live. Based on the ethnographic puzzle of how people pursue antagonistic ethical imperatives, Laidlaw sets out to describe ‘how people can live by, without in an obvious sense conforming to, ethical and religious values; and how they can live by contradictory and conflicting values’ (1995, 12). Laidlaw points to the tendency of explaining away ethical life by recourse to categories such as culture or doctrine, which he

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Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

argues, are misleadingly well-packaged ‘ontological fictions’. In its place, he gives an account of what he calls ethical complexity (see also Faubion 2011), within which ideals, however unrealisable, nevertheless retain motivational force. Conformity is then just one of many relationships one can have with a moral code. Laidlaw concludes that while this is a particularly interesting case, such ethical complexity is not confined to Jainism. Where Riches and Renunciation gives an account of one ethical tradition, Robbins’ Becoming Sinners describes how the Urapmin in Papua New Guinea live with two ‘contradictory cultural logics’ at the same time. Framed as a process of ‘cultural adoption’, Robbins demonstrates how in abandoning one moral system and striving to live by another, the Urapmin are caught between two sets of moral imperatives that often come into conflict. He details how in the context of rapid cultural change the Urapmin enthusiastically adopted millennial Christianity (curiously, despite a lack of direct missionary contact). Although they still live what he terms ‘largely traditional lives in material terms’ they have almost completely abandoned previously held conceptions of personhood and virtue in the pursuit of conversion to Christianity. Such a dramatic shift however has not been as smooth as it has been quick. Robbins underlines the antagonism between these two moral systems: ‘How does one live as a good person while existing in the midst of a social world that routinely draws one into sin?’ (2004, 254). Focusing on the Christian notion of the will, Robbins explains that while the suppression of the will is understood to be a fundamental Christian virtue, imposing the will remains central to the creation and maintenance of traditional Urapmin social relations (as in when a woman must choose a man to be her husband, to take his example). In order to live within the traditional Urapmin social structure it is understood (and at times celebrated) that one must be a wilful agent. However, in order to be a good Christian one must renounce the will entirely. In Christian ethics, then, the individual alone is the moral unit of salvation, an ‘essentially non-social moral being’, Robbins notes (2004, 293): an essentially non-social moral being nevertheless that is embedded in social relations. In so far as the Christian life is impossible to live for the Urapmin, Robbins argues, one way or another they must contend with what he describes as the ‘inevitability of moral failure’ (2004, 208).16 This results in what Robbins calls moral torment. Although the very notion of moral torment might seem to suggest dysfunction, as is the case with Riches and Renunciation, Robbins’ ethnography is not an account of how a moral system has failed. It is a description rather of how people fail within a moral system (and between moral systems). Even though Urapmin efforts are indeed destined to fail, they remain determinedly committed to Christian moral precepts. And despite the apparent contradictions at the heart of their endeavours, they can still inhabit the moral system. In part, this is because moral weakness itself is integral to what it means to be a Christian. As Robbins notes, it is one of the ‘ingenious design features’ of Christianity ‘that they make the ever-renewed conviction of



Introduction

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sinfulness an important condition of salvational success’ (2004, 252; see also Robbins and Williams Green 2017). The Urapmin then do not inhabit the moral system by being ‘good Christians’ but by failing to be good Christians within particular Christian moral narratives of sinfulness. In other words, it is not through virtue or moral success that the Urapmin inhabit the moral system, but through sinfulness and moral weakness. Both Becoming Sinners and Riches and Renunciation draw our attention to the fact that beyond normative accounts of ethics that cohere around ideals, virtues and exemplars, moral systems also comprise conflict, contradiction and failure. From both a systematic as well as a subjective perspective, such features are not to be understood as deviations from an otherwise coherent moral system – indeed, as Laidlaw (1995) argues, logical coherence is not always there to be found (see Simon 2009). In both of these accounts, the apparent ethical indeterminacy is not where moral systems necessarily fail. Rather, this indeterminacy is itself the fertile terrain of ethics. Inconsistencies are not aberrations. As Laidlaw notes elsewhere, ‘life … is not a puzzle to which there can be a solution. The essential perplexity will always have to be lived with’ (2014a, 127). How, both Laidlaw and Robbins ask the following question: do people inhabit a moral system when they are not always able to live up to the moral dictates they are presented with? It is a central concern of this book to address that very question. I have already briefly pointed to the fact that despite going as far as to relocate to rural West Bengal, devotees in Mayapur often struggle with the basic prescriptions and prohibitions of Krishna consciousness. There are those who struggle with meditative chanting on a daily basis, for example. There are a smaller number who seem incapable of following the most basic prohibitions, as I found out when a devotee joined me for a coffee and a cigarette across the road from the ISKCON complex. My conversations with devotees in Mayapur seemed overwhelmingly to cohere around their struggles with Krishna consciousness. A sense of personal failing was pervasive, to the point that devotees were often reluctant to even refer to themselves as ‘devotees’. As Robbins describes in the case of the Urapmin, in Mayapur moral failure ‘hung in the air’ (2004, xix). Despite this, however, devotees have a range of resources to help them both navigate and narrate their inability to live up to the ideals of Krishna consciousness. Over the course of my fieldwork I came to understand that failing to adhere consistently to the ascetic practices and prohibitions of Krishna consciousness does not constitute an aberration of an otherwise coherent moral system.17 Rather, given the extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of spiritual life, failure is, maybe counterintuitively, at the very heart of what it means to be a devotee. It is an important aspect of the spiritual journey, and an integral feature of the moral system. So while devotees often struggle with their spiritual life, they are also well practiced at articulating their failure to live up to the expectations of Krishna consciousness. They are, in other words, well equipped, both practically and theologically, to deal with the fact that in this material world the

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Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

spiritual journey back to Krishna is not easy, and many of the ideals of Krishna consciousness are essentially unrealisable (in this lifetime, in this physical body). They still, however, find ways to inhabit the moral system. And they do so not simply by conforming to a set of Vaishnava prescriptions and prohibitions, but by articulating their failure to do so within Vaishnava moral narratives that account for the aperture between precept and practice. In other words, they inhabit the moral system by failing well. All this talk of ambivalence, contradiction and moral failure might well lead the reader to assume that devotees in Mayapur are not very committed, that the community I describe throughout this book are simply not ‘good’ devotees. This is not the case and points to an important distinction that should be made clear from the outset. In describing the various struggles that devotees face in striving to live a Krishna conscious life, I am not imparting a judgement, nor am I offering an evaluation of their efforts. Rather, I am describing the centrality of unforgiving self-assessments in their ethical lives. Selfperceived senses of failure are pervasive in Mayapur, but as will become clear, this is not in spite of, but rather because of devotees’ deep commitment to Krishna consciousness. Of course, an anthropology of ethics that emphasises virtue (at the expense of vice) and ‘the good’ (at the expense of the ambivalent) is not very well disposed to account for the centrality of experiences and articulations of moral failure. Given anthropologists’ penchant for virtue ethics generally, and the frequent reliance on Aristotelian ethics in particular (often read through Foucault or MacIntyre 1981), it should not come as a surprise that anthropology has smuggled a tacit preference for virtue into its engagement with ethics. Aristotle (unlike Kant) was famously optimistic, and while his ethical treatises do include some discussions on vices (kakia) and moral weakness (akrasia), he tends for the most part to privilege virtue (aretê) in his account of a good life. His famous ‘doctrine of the mean’ defined virtues as lying somewhere between vices of deficiency and excess; so modesty, to take one example, is flanked on either side by the vices of shyness and shamelessness. Vices, then, appear as framing devices for Aristotle’s extensive musings on the virtues. As Karen Nielson notes, Aristotle’s account of vices ‘emerges mainly as a long shadow cast by his analysis of virtue of character in the first books of the Nicomachean Ethics’ (2017, 3–4). The little direct attention he does pay to the vices, furthermore, is scattered and less than coherent, if not at times quite inconsistent (see Brickhouse 2003, Roochnik 2007, Müller 2015). But of course, vices are not ethical epiphenomena. Just like virtues, they are constitutive aspects of any given moral system. As Cheryl Mattingly has observed, ‘hope and despair, moral aspiration and moral failure … are close travel companions’ (2014, 62). In the case of Mayapur, I suggest, it is impossible to describe the moral system without properly accounting for the role(s) that vices play in devotees’ everyday ethical lives. This idea that moral failure is itself a constitutive aspect of a moral system has been reflected in entrenched philosophical debates on ‘moral dilemmas’



Introduction

21

(Gowans 1987, Sinnott-Armstrong 1988) that typically respond to the longstanding Kantian maxim ‘ought implies can’ (see Stern 2004). The philosophical debate presents a particular understanding of ‘moral dilemmas’ as (typically hypothetical) situations in which people are met with two (or more) conflicting obligations, and where choosing to satisfy one means that they cannot satisfy the other(s), and are therefore doomed to fail one way or another. Rooted in these same debates, more recent philosophical treatments that seek to both acknowledge the importance of moral failing and challenge the validity of the ‘ought implies can’ principle have focused more specifically on ‘inescapable moral wrongdoing’ (Gowans 1994) and ‘the inevitability of moral failure’ (Tessman 2014). Against the tendency to privilege virtue as the lens through which we might understand ethical life, there has been an analogous turn in anthropology of ethics. Growing unease with the tendency within the anthropology of ethics to privilege the ‘pursuit of ethical perfection’ has brought increased attention to the seemingly pervasive, but all too often overlooked, problem of failure. Where anthropologists were once finding moral coherence, it seems, they are now finding moral ambivalence. This trend can be considered a concerted response to the earlier ‘earnest turn’ (Mayblin 2017) in the anthropology of ethics that tended to present conspicuously consistent and coherent religious lives. Accounts of inconsistency, imperfection, frustration, failure and moral uncertainty have emerged from both the anthropology of Islam (for example, Marsden 2005, Schielke 2009, 2015, Simon 2014, Kloos 2017a) and the anthropology of Christianity (for example, Engelke and Tomlinson 2006, Pype 2011, Robbins and Williams Green 2017) in particular. In a recent volume, Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion (2017), Daan Beekers and David Kloos set out to document how everyday experiences and self-perceived senses of failure animate religious life for Christians and Muslims. Against earlier accounts that tended to gloss over moral uncertainty, rather than engage meaningfully with it, Beekers and Kloos’ volume centres on the question of ‘how senses of failure constitute productive grounds for believers to reflect and work on their moral selves’ (2017, 11). Moral failure, it is argued throughout the volume, is ‘part and parcel’ of ethical formation for Christians and Muslims alike. In his chapter on Dutch Salafi Muslims, for example, Martiin de Koning suggests that ‘the idea of weakness is an intrinsic part of [Muslims’] self-fashioning as pious Muslims’ (2017, 48). ‘The state of weakness’, de Koning continues, ‘gains a virtuous moral value; realising one is weak is an important step in becoming a pious Muslim’ (2017, 49). Recognising and responding to one’s lack of capacity to realise certain ideals, in other words, itself becomes a mode of self-cultivation. Articulating one’s propensity for moral failure is constitutive of the moral system Muslims are striving to inhabit. Kloos similarly argues in his own chapter on the negligence of prayer amongst Muslims in Aceh, Indonesia, that his informants’ negotiating such moral incapacity reflected ‘an ethical mode that built on and incorporated, rather than excluded, senses of failure’

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(2017a, 93). In Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority and Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia, Kloos elaborates on the implications for the broader anthropology of ethics: ‘a comprehensive approach toward the religious subject should … include both questions about religious commitment and related notions of piety, success, social mobility, transformation, and progress, and questions about its drawbacks, including feelings of shortcoming and stagnation, doubt, religious negligence and sinfulness, and concomitant experiences of stress and disillusion’ (2017b, 13). Samuli Schielke makes a similar point, arguing that ‘[anthropologists] need to be sensitive not only for the successful ordering of a social experience but also for ambivalence, contradictions, and experiences of failure’ (2015, 19). While the majority of anthropological arguments put forward for the importance of ambivalence in ethical life have emerged from the anthropology of both Christianity and Islam (cf Parish 1994, Pandian 2009, Pandian and Ali 2010), this book contributes to this development by offering a Hindu perspective on moral failure. Furthermore, while I embrace the increased focus on failure, I want to take the argument a step further. A central claim of this book is that not only is moral failure constitutive of ethical experience, but in certain cases, if responded to appropriately, it becomes a privileged mode of self-cultivation. In other words, in situations where moral ideals are essentially unrealisable, failing to uphold them in prescribed ways becomes a rather expedient means of being ‘good’. In the case of Mayapur, I describe how devotees’ inability to adhere consistently to the precepts of Krishna consciousness does not lead them to abandon the spiritual path. On the contrary, in so far as Vaishnava ethics subsumes the likelihood, if not inevitability, of failure, narratives of becoming and articulations of weakness are integral features of ethical life, without which it becomes difficult to imagine a viable moral system. Devotees then must learn not only to aspire to the lofty virtues, but also identify with the lowly vices that Krishna consciousness presents them with. Paolo Heywood has recently noted that it has become somewhat of a truism within the anthropology of ethics to suggest that ‘people are not always faithful to the moral codes they espouse’ (2015, 204). It then becomes the task of the anthropology of ethics to describe the various ways in which people can otherwise inhabit a moral system. Looking past the case study at hand, this book argues that in order to present a more fully developed account of ethical life, the anthropology of ethics must go beyond virtue and describe the ways in which moral systems articulate and accommodate the problem of moral failure, and how people manage its inevitability.

Fieldwork This book is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork amongst international devotees in Mayapur between 2013 and 2014, before which I spent three months in Kolkata learning Bangla. I have been in close contact



Introduction

23

with quite a few devotees since, and visited Mayapur to catch up with informants in 2018. Over the course of my fieldwork, I also undertook several trips to other important Vaishnava centres in India, including Puri (Odisha) and Vrindavan (Uttar Pradesh). The decision to focus on the international rather than the local Bengali community was a natural one, as it was with the former that I found myself spending the vast majority of my time. While the two communities are not wholly distinct, there is a widely recognised, if at times tacit, distinction between the two that has both socio-cultural and practical dimensions. Depending on their country of origin, international devotees are typically more affluent and live in air-conditioned apartment buildings. They tend to employ locals as domestic workers, and in many cases socialise predominantly with devotees of similar linguistic or national backgrounds. Only in very rare cases would international devotees speak Bangla, as English is the de facto lingua franca in Mayapur. During my fieldwork, I lived both inside the ISKCON complex in what is called the ‘grihastha area’ (where families live) and later in a newly-built residential area, a short cycle ride to the north of the complex. I spent a lot of my time in classroom settings, from the morning class in the temple (see Chapter 3) to the seasonal courses run by the Mayapur Institute, including cooking classes, deity dressing and short courses on meditation and kirtan. I tried to attend the temple for mangala arati (at 4.30am) as often as possible, but there were days when I would not make it there until 7am for the ‘morning programme’. As it turned out, this was also the case with the vast majority of devotees, who for various reasons only rarely attend mangala arati. Alongside devotees in the temple, I would spend somewhere between one to two hours every day chanting the mahamantra. Although I often struggled to concentrate, as I was soon to learn, so did almost everyone else. My very inability to keep up with the spiritual practices, or in my mind, to play the part of a devotee, turned out to be what in my informants’ eyes made me a devotee, whether or not I knew it at the time (see Chapter 2). Outside the temple and the classroom, there was no shortage of activities. Every Thursday, for example, I helped out with the ‘Food for Life’ programme, which involved visiting nearby villages and distributing prasadam (food offered to Krishna) to the locals. I also went on a parikrama (pilgrimage) around the Mayapur area (see Chapter 1) and spent a lot of my time doing seva (service) for the community. I offered free photography services and so was invited to weddings, conferences, festival celebrations and initiation ceremonies, and was given access to a wide variety of events that were otherwise private affairs. Over the course of my fieldwork, I conducted forty interviews and two focus groups, for the most part with international, but also with some Indian devotees. I spent hours every day in conversation with devotees, mostly discussing the trials and tribulations of Krishna consciousness. I was extremely fortunate to have been able to sit down with some of the most influential leaders in the movement today to discuss the history, development and future

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Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

of ISKCON generally, and Mayapur in particular. While I scheduled my days around the temple worship programme and the various classes I attended, I also, to borrow Paul Rabinow’s words (1977, 125), ‘spent a great many hours merely wandering around … engaging in casual talk while sitting around the stores, setting up interviews, waiting for informants’. If I was not to be found in the temple, in a classroom or with a camera in my hand, I was sure to be found sitting in Madhu’s Bakery, a small Russian restaurant where I regularly met with friends. This book is then, again to borrow Rabinow’s phrase, ‘a studied condensation of a swirl of people, places and feelings. It could have been half as long, or twice as long’ (1977, 6).

Outline of Chapters Based on a history of ‘two countercultures’, and in light of ISKCON’s profound transformation, Mayapur has emerged as an important site for the contestation between tradition and modernity, East and West, the sacred and the mundane. How international devotees in Mayapur strive, and at times struggle, to cultivate themselves as subjects of particular institutional discourses, themselves emergent products of individual attempts to pursue Krishna consciousness in a changing world, comprises the core of this book (Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5). Rather than conceiving of ethics as a sub-discipline, I bring familiar anthropological categories into dialogue with emergent debates in the anthropology of ethics. Individual chapters then advance an ethnographic argument, in each case speaking to a particular anthropological theme, namely place (Chapter 1), the self (Chapter 2), knowledge (Chapter 3), emotion (Chapter 4) and culture (Chapter 5). In the Conclusion, I bring together these strands to speak to the theme of moral failure. Chapter 1 (‘Land of the Golden Avatar’) locates Mayapur in ISKCON’s broader history, outlining both its historical and spiritual significance in the wider Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. It presents an overview of the history of Mayapur, from the sacralisation of the land in the nineteenth century to its sporadic, but nonetheless dramatic, development since the arrival of ISKCON in the 1970s. Ethnographically, this chapter explores how devotees themselves learn to engage with and inhabit the sacred land today, which despite its special place in Gaudiya Vaishnavism, is being commodified and fought over in the pursuit of material prosperity. Beginning with an introduction to the Gaudiya Vaishnava philosophy to which ISKCON traces its roots, Chapter 2 (‘Changing the Subject’) examines the basic tenets and practices of Krishna consciousness. With particular emphasis on conceptualisations of the self, the world and Krishna, this chapter centres on how devotees narrate and evaluate their own spiritual journeys. I describe how a rich and sophisticated theology is distilled into mundane idioms of detachment, dependence and purification, and outline how devotees



Introduction

25

understand and struggle with the soteriological strategies by which they understand one can live a good life. This chapter also sets up an ethico-aesthetic trajectory from knowledge to emotion that will be unpacked over the course of the book. Based on ethnographic accounts of various pedagogical settings in Mayapur, and situated in wider Indian epistemological traditions, Chapter 3 (‘Practices of Knowledge’) examines how devotees strive to ‘realise’, rather than simply acquire, knowledge. Moving from a central distinction in Indian epistemology that differentiates between the accumulation and the assimilation of knowledge, this chapter describes how knowledge can only be defined as such in so far as it facilitates a profound transformation of the knowing subject. While the case presented is an ethnographic one, this chapter speaks to broader anthropological debates that have been informed by what I suggest are inherited Western philosophical assumptions that frame knowledge as ‘justified true belief ’. Chapter 4 (‘Learning to Love Krishna’) revolves around the following basic ethnographic puzzle: what did devotees mean when they said they were ‘learning to love Krishna’? In response to this, and focusing on the ultimate telos of spiritual life, Krishna prema (or ‘pure love for Krishna’), this chapter investigates how emotions become sites of moral self-cultivation. While prema is unambiguously understood as the goal towards which spiritual practices are geared, in my time in Mayapur I never met anyone who claimed to have attained it. With reference to the systematic Gaudiya Vaishnava theology of moral emotions that prescribes ascending modes of relationality with Krishna, this chapter describes how owing to the pragmatics of Prabhupad’s preaching mission, devotees have inherited the goal of prema, but not necessarily the traditional means of attaining it. In light of ISKCON’s apparent failure to implement Prabhupad’s ambitious socio-cultural ideals in the decades since his death, Chapter 5 (‘Simple Living, High Thinking’) describes devotees’ divergent understandings of and commitments to the concept of ‘Vedic culture’. This chapter examines how institutional narratives that cohere around the concept of culture are appropriated by devotees to both frame their own spiritual practices and conceptualise the idea of an ‘ideal Vedic city’. I outline how culture becomes an object of both knowledge and practice, with which devotees fashion themselves as ethical subjects, and Mayapur itself as an ethical object. As is the case with the persistence of the anthropological concept of culture, I suggest that the ambiguity at the heart of ‘Vedic culture’ is a precondition for its enduring appeal. The Conclusion (‘Failing Well’) brings the various thematic strands together to elaborate on the book’s central argument about moral failure. I situate the core theoretical contributions within emergent debates by suggesting that beyond a focus on virtue, the anthropology of ethics must also account for how people relate to vices, and how both they and the moral systems they strive to inhabit accommodate the problem of moral failure.

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Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

Notes   1. Cited by Ellwood 1989, 106.   2. Vaishnavism is one of the four major Hindu traditions, and although it generally centres on Vishnu, in the case of Gaudiya Vaishnavism (derived from the locative ‘Gauda’, which refers to pre-partition Bengal) Krishna is held to be the Supreme Lord. It is also referred to as ‘Chaitanya’ or ‘Bengal’ Vaishnavism.   3. Early ISKCON was a monastic movement in so far as the majority of devotees were celibate monks. In line with Prabhupad’s proselytising agenda, however, devotees were not cloistered within an ashram but spent much of their time preaching to the wider public.   4. These are ISKCON’s own estimates. While these figures are often presented with pride, they are quite modest compared to other transnational Hindu movements. The Sathya Sai movement, for example, boasts around 8,000 centres in over 167 countries (Srinivas 2010, 12).   5. For more on 1960s America, see Roszak 1969, Tipton 1982.  6. A mrdunga is a two-headed drum, while a harmonium is a small portable reed organ. Along with kartals (hand-cymbals), these are the staple instruments for kirtan in ISKCON.   7. Although in a broader sense not ‘new’ at all, the particular institutional form of Gaudiya Vaishnavism that Prabhupad founded in the West was also not simply an extrapolation of an Indian tradition. As Tamal Krishna Goswami writes, ‘If ISKCON [was] not a new religion … it certainly [was] a new religious movement’ (2012, 21).   8. Like his guru in the early twentieth century, Prabhupad decided not to name a successor, but instead felt the institution would be best managed by a board of senior representatives.  9. Despite the elevated spiritual position of the renouncer in Vaishnava theology, Prabhupad gave first sannyas initiation to Western disciples in 1967, just one year after founding ISKCON. 10. Although the term ‘pure devotee’ is used in various ways, it is most often used to refer to a devotee who has rid themselves of all material desires and serves Krishna without selfish motivation (in other words, one who has truly become Krishna conscious). 11. There is a widespread sentiment amongst other Vaishnava sects (particularly the Gaudiya Math) that ISKCON has failed to give adherents access to the highest Vaishnava teachings (see Chapter 4). 12. Bhadralok literally means ‘gentle or respectable people’ (Sardella 2013, 17) but refers particularly to the cultural and intellectual elite of Bengal society who tended to sympathise with the British. 13. Cited from Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Indian Education’ of 1835 (see Hall 2008). 14. This was one of many such reform movements founded in the nineteenth century. Another prominent example is the Arya Samaj, notable for its veneration of all things Vedic (see Chapter 5). 15. In the early nineteenth century, for example, Sahajanand Swami of the Swaminarayan sect rejected the more licentious aspects of Krishna’s character. 16. Speaking to the particular philosophical debate about ‘moral dilemmas’, Lisa Tessman (2014, 3) describes the inevitability of moral failure as ‘moral requirements that remain binding even when they become impossible to satisfy’. 17. Asceticism should be understood here in the broad Foucauldian sense of ‘self-forming activity’ (see Laidlaw 1995, Cook 2010).

1 Land of the Golden Avatar

I have given you the kingdom of God. Now develop it. —Prabhupad (1971)1

After a four-hour car journey from Kolkata through predominantly agricultural plains, small villages and the occasional larger town, we were finally nearing Mayapur. With little regard for oncoming traffic, the driver barrelled dangerously down the narrow road towards the ISKCON complex, scattering stray cattle and barely dodging overloaded lorries along the way. The ISKCON complex was impossible to miss, the Temple of Vedic Planetarium (TOVP) emerging on the horizon beyond the trees and crumbling stalls that line the street, rising towards the sky and dwarfing everything for miles around it. Bright red Vodafone advertisements depicting Krishna and Radha (Krishna’s consort) were strapped to telephone poles that dotted the roadside (in India, the sacred and the profane are never far apart). On the advertisements was printed the Bangla words:

I did not need to call on the months I had just spent studying Bangla in Kolkata to understand what this read: Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare. The main road that led to the ISKCON complex was lined with small restaurants, rickshaws and stalls selling Krishna paraphernalia, from devotional clothing and worship items to children’s plastic toys. Outside the gate to the complex, some local pilgrims sat around chai (tea) stalls, eating biscuits and smoking beedies (locally rolled cigarettes), while others gathered around a DVD stand that was playing a serialised adaptation of the Mahabharata on a small television. From an adjacent stall selling CDs, bhajans (devotional songs) bellowed, although they seemed not to faze those already gripped by the drama of the epic playing next door. A couple of locals navigated a small herd of buffalo against the flow of pilgrims, as yet another bus beeping an obnoxious melody just about

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Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

squeezed past our car. Amidst the cacophony, I could hear the ringing of bells. What I assumed to be a puja of some sort turned out to be a local Bengali pressing sugar cane into a sweet drink on the side of the road. The smell was piercing: cattle and cardamom, incense and cigarettes. Several international devotees passed us, some walking on the street, comfortable in the crowd, while others were chauffeured above the commotion on cycle-rickshaws. The car took a left turn as a uniformed security guard opened the gate of the complex. The serenity of the walled complex made for a stark contrast from the bewildering bustle of the chaotic street we left behind. Over the last forty years, the small pilgrimage town of Mayapur in West Bengal has undergone a dramatic transformation. Inspired by Prabhupad’s utopian vision of a spiritual city, the sometimes sporadic but nonetheless significant development of the ISKCON Mayapur project since the early 1970s is embedded in a complex set of circumstances arising from local, global and indeed internal politics and economics. Although Mayapur presents devotees with its own set of unique challenges, it is not immune to the wider transformations that ISKCON has undergone worldwide. While on one hand, Mayapur is a sacred landscape understood to be inherently morally pure, and therefore conducive to the pursuit of Krishna consciousness, on the other, and within a wider project of urbanisation, the sacred land itself has turned into a valuable economic commodity. International devotees who have moved here to pursue Prabhupad’s ideals of self-realisation must learn not only how to inhabit the sacred space of Mayapur, but also how to live in an underdeveloped town in rural India, where piety and politics are not easily disentangled. In the first half of this chapter, I trace ISKCON Mayapur’s history from its modest beginnings to grand ambitions, and describe recent attempts to guide its development. In the second half, and through two strikingly dissonant field experiences, I discuss how devotees experience the land itself as a resource for both spiritual transcendence and material prosperity, pointing to profound obstacles that threaten the future of this ‘ideal Vedic city’.

Mayapur Today Located in the Nadia district of West Bengal, 130km north of Kolkata, Mayapur is a small but bustling pilgrimage town, home to various Gaudiya Vaishnava sects, including, most visibly, ISKCON. Not far from the Bangladeshi border and situated at the confluence of the Ganges and Jalangi rivers, it is 25km from the district capital city of Krishnanagar and within a short ferry ride to the urban centre of Nabadwip across the river, which also lends its name to the wider area of which Mayapur is a part. Affectionately referred to by ISKCON devotees as the Land of the Golden Avatar, the Nabadwip area is of particular significance in the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition.2 Although not so much the case today, for centuries Nabadwip was renowned as a traditional centre of learning. The population of the larger



Land of the Golden Avatar

29

Nabadwip area is 175,000, of which approximately 11,000 live on the Mayapur side of the river.3 Although this is a predominantly Vaishnava area, approximately 25 per cent of the population are Muslims. International residents make up a small percentage of the overall population, estimated by management to be 4,000 (approximately 1,211 of whom are international residents). However, numbers fluctuate quite dramatically throughout the year. Around the month of March, when the major Gaura-Purnima festival (Chaitanya’s birthday) takes place, thousands of devotees visit Mayapur from all over the world, some for weeks or months at a time, while during the hot summer months, a lot of international devotees return to their home countries. In the international community, Russia is by far the most represented country, followed by the United States, Australia and Ukraine.4 Other nationalities include Chinese, Nigerian, Irish and Norwegian. ISKCON management’s database lists over seventy-five nationalities in total, all of whom (with rare exception) live either within the walls of or within a short distance of the ISKCON complex.5 While there are 400 brahmacharis, almost all of whom are Indian, the vast majority of the ISKCON community are grihasthas (householders), reflecting the wider demographic trend in the movement. Typically, although there are devotees who have been here since the early 1970s, most international devotees tend only to stay for less than five years. Reasons for this include lingering commitments back home, visa restraints, or, in relatively rare cases, disillusionment. A constant turnover, of course, is not an ideal basis for a stable and cohesive community. Along with several other factors, this has led some devotees to characterise Mayapur as ‘a community of communities’. While devotees do speak of an ‘international community’, in most cases to distinguish it from the wider local population, the international community at Mayapur is often divided along lines of language and nationality, for example, for the purposes of discussion groups or classes.6 The ISKCON complex, which dominates the otherwise small and unremarkable town of Mayapur, is surrounded mostly by agricultural plains for miles in every direction, though on one side it is bordered by Bhaktisiddhanta Road (the main thoroughfare just described). Beyond this road, it is a short walk to the Ganges that runs parallel. Bhaktisiddhanta Road is lined with a number of guesthouses and restaurants for local pilgrims, typically from the state of West Bengal. There are several Gaudiya Math temples, varying in size and popularity, none of which however can compete with the ISKCON complex in terms of size, facilities and popularity (and for the local pilgrims, novelty). The ISKCON complex is located roughly halfway between a small Muslim area to the north and a ghat (dock) that connects Mayapur to Nabadwip by boat, to the south. While there has been much development in the area, it is in and around the ISKCON complex itself that there have been the most dramatic changes. In recent years, as part of ISKCON’s wider project of urbanisation, development has sprawled into the surrounding area, mostly concentrated to the north of the complex where new residential apartment blocks have sprung up, occupied for the most part by international devotees.

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What was forty years ago a typical rural Bengal village is today a busy pilgrimage town that is home to a cosmopolitan community of devotees. As well as the international devotees who live here permanently, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, both Indian (mostly from West Bengal) and international, travel to the sacred dham every year, particularly during major festivals such as Gaura-Purnima (Chaitanya’s birthday) or Janmashtami (Krishna’s birthday).7 Inside the complex, there are two temples, several large guesthouses and a private residential area, predominantly for international devotees. The administrative buildings, most of which are painted saffron (the colour of renunciation), are surrounded by quiet and well-maintained parks where devotees can escape the intensity of the street outside. There are four schools in or around the complex, and several restaurants that cater for both international and local pilgrims. These include ‘Madhu’s Bakery’, the Russian restaurant, ‘Gauranga Pizzeria’, a seasonal rooftop Italian pizzeria, and ‘Food Paradise’, a locally run restaurant that serves Chinese noodles. There is an internet café (minus the coffee), a hardware shop and ATM facilities on site. Devotees have almost everything they need within the walls of the complex. For more specialised goods, such as electronics, they make the short trip by boat to the larger town of Nabadwip across the river. While most now live a short cycle (or even shorter motorcycle ride) from the main development, devotees’ lives revolve around the ISKCON complex. Their daily activities are punctuated by programmes in the temple, and some, but not all, do seva (service) for ISKCON, in an administrative office, in one of the schools, or in the temple, for example. After years of sporadic and at times stinted development, Mayapur today is felt to be well on the way to becoming what is being called by some an ‘ideal Vedic city’. Although debates continue as to what this city should look like, it is predicted, indeed it is prophesied, that it will accommodate 50,000 devotees from all over the world, an airport, universities, gardens and sprawling agricultural land. The heart of this city, both symbolically and literally, is the TOVP. Now a huge construction site in the middle of the complex, it is forecast to be the tallest Hindu temple in the world. No expenses are being spared in terms of materials. Marble is being imported from Colombia and Vietnam and the domes will be finished with the best acoustic materials available. A chandelier-like structure representing Vedic cosmology will hang from one of the domes, which, devotees boast, will demonstrate the folly of modern scientific ideas about the universe. Surrounding the temple will be acres of landscaped gardens leading to the Jalangi River nearby. According to management the project is being planned along sustainable lines, utilising the best of modern technology to reduce the impact on the local environment. Although the cornerstone for the TOVP was laid in 1977, construction did not get underway until 2009. When construction started, it was hoped that the TOVP building would be completed by 2016 (ISKCON’s fiftieth anniversary), but as ISKCON continues to struggle to finance the project, 2023 has recently been proposed as the most optimistic completion date.



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History and Development of Mayapur According to Gaudiya Vaishnava understanding, the Nabadwip area was created in sacred time by Radha, Krishna’s eternal consort, to entice Krishna away from another lover. Of equal significance for ISKCON devotees, and framed by historical time, Mayapur is the birthplace of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486–1534). It is to Chaitanya that ISKCON traces its spiritual lineage and it is for this reason that Prabhupad designated Mayapur as the international headquarters of the global movement in the 1970s. While the greater Nabadwip area has been a Vaishnava centre of education and spiritual practice for hundreds of years, Mayapur on the other side of the river was until relatively recently not considered a centre of pilgrimage at all. As is often the case in India, the demarcation of sacred space in the Nabadwip area was as much a political as it was a spiritual undertaking (Eck 2012).8 The history of the sacralisation of Mayapur begins with Bhaktivinod Thakur in the nineteenth century. In the 1880s, Bhaktivinod was coming to the end of his career in civil service, working as a magistrate in the district capital Krishnanagar, not far from Nabadwip. As often as possible, Bhaktivinod would spend his free time travelling to Nabadwip and in particular Mayapur, to research the exact location of important events in the life of Chaitanya. Bhaktivinod is credited for, in ISKCON parlance, ‘revealing’ Mayapur dham, and most importantly, locating Chaitanya’s birthplace here. In addition to reconstructing an enchanted past, Bhaktivinod also paved the way for a prophesied future. From across the Jalangi River, he had a vision of an adbhutamandira (commonly translated from Bengali as ‘extraordinary’ or ‘wonderful’ temple), from which Krishna consciousness would spread to ‘every town and village’ in the world. Bhaktivinod’s vision for Mayapur echoed a sixteenthcentury prediction by Nityananda, Chaitanya’s closest disciple. In the hands of Prabhupad and his Western devotees, Bhaktivinoda’s vision would become a prophecy. Bhaktivinod’s revelations mark an important shift in Mayapur’s history. Until this point, it was widely assumed that Chaitanya was born on the other side of the river, in what is today Nabadwip. Indeed, there are still a couple of sites here that are claimed to be his birthplace, and this remains a contentious issue. While a few small temples were built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by both Bhaktivinod and his son (and Prabhupad’s guru) Bhaktisiddhanta, respectively, by the time Prabhupad sent his Western disciples here in 1971, Mayapur was, as one of the said disciples told me in an interview, ‘just some palm trees and a handful of temples’. Today, ISKCON’s understanding of its own deeper past and imaginings of its prophesied future are bound up in an affective relationship with the sacred landscape of Mayapur that can be traced back to Bhaktivinod. While the land is understood by devotees to be transcendental, the history of ISKCON in Mayapur is one of measured attempts at the construction and constitution of sacred space.

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Illustration 1.1  Local farmers take a break against the backdrop of the rising TOVP (2014). Photograph by the author.

Illustration 1.2  International devotees in Mayapur lead local Bengalis on sankirtan. Photograph by the author.



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Buoyed by his unprecedented success in the West, Prabhupad brought his ‘white elephants’ (as he referred to his Western devotees) back to India in 1970, leaving behind forty centres and a few thousand disciples in major cities all over the world. Having spent the previous five years travelling and preaching, he now set his sights on bringing Krishna consciousness back home to India. Among his priorities were several important Indian cities like Mumbai and Hyderabad, and also the traditional Vaishnava centres of Vrindavan and Mayapur. Both the Mughal and colonial periods were a time of widespread demise for Gaudiya Vaishnavism throughout India, but in these centres the tradition not only survived, but flourished. As a ‘new’ Vaishnava sect, it was somewhat inevitable that it would be in these two places that a fledgling ISKCON would make its boldest claims to legitimacy. While Vrindavan, being the place of many of Krishna’s earthly deeds, is unambiguously the most important town in other Vaishnava sampradayas (traditions), as the site of Chaitanya’s birth, the Nabadwip area is held to be equally if not more important for Gaudiya Vaishnavas. There are both theological and practical differences between Vrindavan and Mayapur. Vrindavan is an important town in India’s ‘sacred geography’ (Eck 2012) and is home to thousands of temples, representing a variety of Vaishnava sects dating back hundreds of years. Although Vrindavan represents the pinnacle of Vaishnava spiritual advancement, this is not easily attained (see Chapter 4), and so it is only by the mercy of figures such as Chaitanya, who are felt to be more accessible in Mayapur, that the profound mysteries of Krishna consciousness can be understood.9 Devotees often told me that they came to Mayapur because Chaitanya is, in their words, ‘more merciful’ than Krishna. Even they, lowly as

Illustration 1.3  Grihastha family in Mayapur. Photograph by the author.

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they understand themselves to be, can make spiritual advancement in Mayapur. On a more practical note, however, in terms of Prabhupad’s wider ambitions, while Vrindavan was already a ‘spiritual city’ full of competing Vaishnava ideologies, the relatively undeveloped and traditionally Gaudiya Vaishnava Mayapur represented a blank slate where Prabhupad could envision the development of his own spiritual city in line with the prophetic visions of the previous acharyas. Despite being a comparatively recent ‘discovery’, and little known outside of West Bengal, Mayapur was not only to play a significant role in Prabhupad’s vision for ISKCON in India, but was to be central to his global plans. Prabhupad did not come to Mayapur until 1972 but sent a handful of disciples here from Kolkata to buy land on which to construct a temple in 1971. Although ISKCON faced unique obstacles in different towns and cities across India, Prabhupad was faced with the familiar issues of legitimacy across the country. The idea of Westerners (who are considered ‘untouchable’ in ritualistic terms within India’s caste system) performing puja and preaching devotion to Krishna in India was a strange one and difficult for the Brahmanical orthodoxy to accept. Even today, a lot of the most important temples and places of pilgrimage in India (such as the Jagannath Temple in Puri) are not open to non-Indians. Hostility from his god brothers (devotees who share the same guru) in the Gaudiya Math was not surprising, but was nonetheless deeply disappointing for Prabhupad. As was the case in the United States, but for different reasons, ISKCON was treated as a potentially subversive cult. In Vrindavan and Mayapur, rumours spread that the ‘Western sadhus’ were in fact CIA agents in disguise (Brooks 1989). In this atmosphere of distrust and antagonism, it was ultimately two Muslim brothers who sold ISKCON five acres of land less than a mile away from Chaitanya’s birthplace. As the Pakistan-Bangladesh war was heating up, Westerners were not allowed to stay near border areas, and so the land was initially occupied by a handful of Bengali devotees. This is the site of today’s much larger complex. In 1972, Mayapur consisted of several small Gaudiya Math temples, surrounded by sparsely populated agricultural land. These temples had sprung up in the wake of Bhaktivinod’s revelation that Mayapur was Chaitanya’s birthplace, but since the subsequent rise and disintegration of the Gaudiya Math, Mayapur had failed to develop as had been hoped. The area attracted very few pilgrims and aside from its proximity to the historically significant Vaishnava centre of Nabadwip, there was nothing to distinguish Mayapur from other similar rural settings in India. Prabhupad’s competitive spirit was evident from early on, as reflected in a private letter he wrote in 1972: ‘I want that we shall excel the Chaitanya Math. They have been struggling for the last fifty years, and we shall surpass them in two years’.10 The early years of the Mayapur project were modest, but with Prabhupad’s vision and his devotees’ energy, ambitions would not be frustrated for long. Prabhupad’s first visit was the Gaura-Purnima festival of 1972, during which he stayed in a small thatched hut on the property ISKCON had



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purchased. He visited annually for the festival, until his death in 1977, and it was on such visits, brief as they were, that he communicated his vision for a spiritual city to his disciples on the ground. Within a year, the ISKCON complex began taking shape. Prabhupad laid the cornerstone for the original temple in 1972, and by 1973 the Lotus building (a four-storey administrative building and guesthouse) was almost complete. That year’s Gaura-Purnima festival welcomed over 200 devotees and numbers doubled in 1974 to over 400 (Swami 1987, 51). By 1975 more administrative buildings were springing up and international devotees were being accommodated in purpose-built guesthouses and fed in large mess halls. Many of these buildings are still being used today to serve the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who come to Mayapur annually. A boundary wall was completed in 1975, ostensibly for reasons of security, as there were several incidents of theft, and in some cases violence, early on in the development of the complex.11 Indeed, as I was to learn, ISKCON’s acquisition of land for the Mayapur project in 1971 is shrouded in murky tales of burnt crops and poisoned wells. Despite early antagonism with locals that sometimes resulted in violent conflicts, ISKCON, in these few years, had acquired 350 acres of land. For Prabhupad this was just the start of what he saw as the inevitable fulfilment of Bhaktivinoda’s prophecy of a spiritual city. As Prabhupad’s vision began to materialise however, more obstacles arose on the ground. In 1976 the Urban Land Ceiling Act was passed in India, legally complicating the acquisition and development of large tracts of land. While this certainly restricted Prabhupad’s immediate ambitions, devotees often ascribe Mayapur’s stinted development to the rule of the communist party in West Bengal, from 1977 until 2011 (indeed this is a wider sentiment shared by Bengalis lamenting West Bengal’s slow development when compared with that of India’s more prosperous states). 1977 also marked the year of Prabhupad’s death, after which ISKCON on a global scale, as we have seen, spiralled out of control. Mayapur continued to develop as ISKCON’s international headquarters, though at a more modest pace than had been predicted before Prabhupad’s death. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s accommodation was built for international residents, and Prabhupad’s Samadhi Temple, started in 1978, was finally completed in 1995.12 The famous Radha-Madhava (Radha-Krishna) deities, at over seven feet tall, were installed in 1980, and in 2002 the even larger PanchaTattva deities (Chaitanya and his four closest disciples) were introduced (see Illustrations 2.1 and 2.2).13

From Management to Government The Mayapur project was inspired by Prabhupad’s pedagogy of spiritual realisation and conceptualisations of ‘Vedic culture’, but this fledgling spiritual city faces serious obstacles in terms of the more mundane matters, such as management and the economy. While Prabhupad left no shortage of statements behind, from which residents today piece together what they believe was his vision, he

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was somewhat ambiguous and at times contradictory when outlining his practical plans for the Mayapur project. In the years since his passing, Mayapur has struggled to find stability and there is still no coherent economic or managerial blueprint for such a large-scale project. It is to Mayapur’s various management bodies that devotees look for leadership, though this same management is often perceived as highly political (in terms of its internal dynamics), heavily bureaucratised and at times unresponsive to the needs of the community. Devotees are often frustrated by what they consider a lack of strong leadership. Management in Mayapur is spread over a number of councils, departments and positions. In terms of the organisational structure, a natural point of departure would be the movement’s global management body, the Governing Body Commission (GBC). Created by Prabhupad in 1970, the GBC started as a small committee of his most trusted disciples from around the world, who were tasked with managing ISKCON’s affairs worldwide to allow Prabhupad to concentrate on preaching and translation work. Today the GBC consists of thirty-six members, most of whom are Prabhupad disciples, and a significant number of whom are older Caucasian males (there are only two female members). They have two annual meetings, in Mayapur and Mumbai, at which they discuss, debate and vote on pressing ISKCON management issues from around the globe. In Mayapur, as elsewhere, devotees have mixed feelings about the GBC. For some, it is far too conservative and out of touch with the movement ISKCON has become. For others, it is too liberal and has betrayed Prabhupad’s faith, for example, by allowing women a more prominent role in the movement since the late 1980s. It is also sometimes portrayed as an ineffective body whose decisions do not matter very much in the actual lives of practising devotees. The GBC represents the highest authority and it is to this body that major decisions about the Mayapur project are presented and voted upon. Not all decisions, however, reach this level. Under the GBC, there is what is called GBCoM (Governing Body Commission of Mayapur, also referred to as the ‘local GBC’). While temples around the world are typically managed by a single ‘temple president’, the Mayapur project is so big that it requires a board (since 1987), consisting of eight senior devotees, only some of whom are permanent residents of Mayapur. This is the level at which most major decisions are taken with respect to day-to-day management. It is to the local GBC that other management authorities must present proposals for approval and it is up to the local GBC to provide the vision for the managers on the ground to follow. Until 1997, Mayapur’s management was dominated by Western devotees but between 1997 and 2009 or so, in the wake of the departure of an influential Western guru (and many of his disciples), Mayapur was for the most part in the hands of local Bengali disciples. The management dynamic has balanced out over recent years, and both international and local devotees are well represented. There are six ‘deputy directors’, for example, three of whom are Western and three Bengali.14 However, there have been, and still are, tensions between local and international devotees at the management level.



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As is the case with the GBC, those in positions of authority in Mayapur are appointed by those in more senior positions. The GBC, then, is more oligarchic than it is democratic. In terms of the management structure on the ground, there are the following positions (all of which are under the guidance of the GBC and GBCoM): six co-directors (in charge of implementing the local GBC’s vision), six deputy directors (in charge of day-to-day administration), twenty-three divisional heads (in charge of particular areas, such as ‘preaching’) and thirty-eight department heads. Departments include the Mayapur Development Authority (MDA), Food for Life Mayapur, and ISKCON Congregational Development Ministry Office, for example. The most prominent body that devotees deal with on a daily basis is the Mayapur Sevaks Committee (MCS). They are the first point of contact for devotees on the ground in terms of settling in, obtaining visas, finding seva, and, as we will see, property development. The MCS however, as is the case with management generally, has no legal power. One of the few areas they have control over is visa administration, as devotees living in Mayapur often need ISKCON’s help with obtaining or renewing their visa. There is much excitement about what the future holds for Mayapur but there are also serious causes for concern. Grand as Prabhupad’s utopian ambitions were, ISKCON has never overseen such a large-scale project, and historically has no experience in laying the economic or political foundations of such a large community. ISKCON’s early expansion in the 1960s and 1970s manifested in a network of small monastic temple communities, which in the decades since have transformed into centres of looser congregational membership. ISKCON has had limited success (and some significant failures) with communes and farming projects in the West, but as one of the deputy directors emphasised to me during an interview, there is no precedent to turn to in terms of managing a town, let alone a ‘city’ of devotees. Without a workable blueprint for development (infrastructural, economic or social), ISKCON management is not entirely sure how best to guide the Mayapur project through this crucial phase, and for the most part, as I will describe, the city is growing in spite of, rather than because of, its best efforts. While residents feel that there is too much bureaucracy, leading to breakdowns of communication and inefficiency, there are plans to add more management bodies in the coming years, as the GBC is trying to move towards what it calls a ‘city administration model’ (based on ‘councils’ rather than ‘departments’). In anticipation of this evolution towards a city-model, ISKCON management has started to replace ‘membership’, ‘management’ and ‘guidelines’ with the language of ‘governance’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘law’. Recently, for example, there have been debates about proposed ‘by-laws’ pertaining to a range of issues such as divorce, tax and property development. Divorce, to take one example, has become quite a serious problem in ISKCON, and management in Mayapur has taken an official stance on the matter. To ‘preserve the sanctity of the dham’, management decided that should a couple seek divorce, ‘one or both parties will be requested to leave Mayapur for a minimum

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period of 2 years’ (as is written in the proposed by-law). I know of one case where a female devotee from South Africa had to leave Mayapur (as it was felt that she rather than her husband had instigated the divorce) for a period of two years, while her young daughter stayed with her husband. In this case, her leaving was agreed upon without recourse to threats or visa restrictions. By-laws such as these are still very much a work in progress, and despite numerous attempts, I could never get my hands on the complete ‘Mayapur By-laws’ as I was told they were under revision. There are several other initiatives that management is pursuing in order to move towards a city-model, such as the proposed ‘annual community membership fees’, a small tax payable by every member of the community. Management will use this to renovate buildings and update infrastructure and drainage, essentially playing the role of a government. While management then has begun taking steps towards what looks increasingly like governance, they have no legal authority, limited power and are yet to decide on exactly what this ‘city-model’ will look like. ISKCON’s management is struggling to keep up with the pace of, let alone govern the development of, this fledgling city. While devotees understand their commitment to Prabhupad’s ideals in almost exclusively spiritual terms, in conceiving of Mayapur’s development, there has historically been a lack of attention given to mundane matters such as the economy and employment. Other priorities such as preaching and deity worship always took precedence. Prabhupad, after all, was a spiritual rather than a political leader. Possibly the biggest obstacle in Mayapur’s development is the lack of viable economic opportunities for international residents. The low salaries that ISKCON offers make it difficult to support a family. While rent and other expenses are very low relative to a Western income, they are quite high if one was to live within the local economy, as Westerners typically prefer not to. This has resulted in most families being separated for up to six months of the year, as the father (in most cases) returns to the West to work to support his wife and children in Mayapur. Devotees often cite this as a major contributing factor to the worryingly high divorce rates (hence the apparent need for a by-law). On another front, this economic model has also led to a problematic and ever-widening gap between international and Indian devotees. While the latter for the most part live in small homes, quite typical of rural West Bengal, international devotees tend to live in simple but, relatively speaking, luxurious apartments. They often have air-conditioning and, despite Prabhupad’s unambiguous condemnation, employ cheap local labour, in the form of maids, nannies and cooks. Unsurprisingly, this has led to envy and resentment amongst the locals (who are nevertheless keen to avail themselves of the economic opportunity). The Mayapur project then is developing around a precarious economic model that serves to undermine the pursuit of a cohesive community. Moving forward, ISKCON lacks a blueprint for managing or ‘governing’ the spiritual city it is hoped Mayapur will become. In a maybe cruelly ironic twist, however, the biggest obstacle to this ‘ideal Vedic city’ is the sacred landscape itself. In



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recent years, the sacred land has become a valuable commodity, particularly with the commencement of construction on the TOVP. Although Mayapur is understood to be transcendental and therefore a space of moral purity, it is of course at the same time a rural town in West Bengal. So while devotees pursue a virtuous life in the Land of the Golden Avatar, they must come to terms with the fact that this very same land is itself a major source of conflict. The sacred landscape that devotees understand to be so central to their own moral purification has been commoditised, catalysing greed, corruption and, as we will see, violence. Between these two realities, devotees of course do not simply perceive the landscape, but they practise it. They learn about the history of the area, and the significance of the dham in Gaudiya Vaishnava theology. Importantly, they constitute their own understandings of the land through engaging with it, both physically and discursively. The rest of this chapter revolves around two markedly dissonant field experiences that shed light on devotees’ experiences of the sacred land. As noted above, and as will become clear, the sacred and the profane are not so easily disentangled in Mayapur.

Living on the Land At 5am on a dark and chilly November morning, devotees gathered in a small park in the ISKCON complex. It was the first of a six-day parikrama (pilgrimage) that would take us on a journey around the sacred sites of the Nabadwip area.15 I shuffled to keep warm, exchanging muted greetings with devotees I had not met before. Some, with their right hand in their bead-bag, began chanting.16 The sound of the sacred syllables broke the otherwise dead silence, as numbers grew: Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare. Suddenly the sound of kartals (hand-held cymbals) began to ring. Two devotees started a small kirtan, as everyone slowly gathered around. Playing the mrdunga, Guntis, a Latvian devotee I had recently met, began singing: ‘Nama om vishnupadaya Krishna preshthaya bhutale, srimate bhaktivedantasvamin iti namine’.17After each line, everyone would sing the same line back in a call-response fashion. While devotees continued to gather, singing quietly, most with eyes closed, the kirtan was brought to an end with several verses of the mahamantra. After briefly outlining some practical matters for the day ahead, the organisers ushered everyone onto the buses. As it was the early morning, an auspicious time for devotees, there was little conversation on the journey and almost everyone was chanting. We arrived at our first destination just before 6am. In front of me as I got off the bus, Jaganmitra, a senior Prabhupad disciple and one of two ‘twin pujaris’ (priests) from London who have been in Mayapur since the early 1970s, was prostrating himself on the side of the road. Lying face down with arms outstretched, Jaganmitra then began rolling, slowly to the side and back again. Some other devotees soon followed, although it seemed that at least a few of

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them had to pay close attention as this was not something they were familiar with. Although devotees often prostrated themselves on the marble floor in front of the deities in the temple, I was surprised to see them outstretched on the side of a dirty road, still damp from the morning dew. Prostrating oneself was one thing, but rolling quite another. I asked Guntis what was going on. ‘Even the dust of the sacred land of Nabadwip is auspicious’, he told me. ‘It is a benediction to get the mercy of the dham … to attain the dust of the lotus feet of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’. The tropes of rolling on the ground, and in particular gathering dust, are common in Vaishnava iconography, from Radha, rolling on the ground in painful separation from Krishna, to Chaitanya’s ecstatic fits of love for God. Devotees often make reference to ‘attaining the dust of Krishna’s lotus feet’ for example but in this particular case, it was to highlight that the land of Nabadwip is so spiritually potent that even the dirt itself is to be worshipped. This was the first time I saw devotees actually enact what I had until that point understood to be a discursive idiom of humility. Abstaining from such a performance of reverence on this occasion (and proudly sporting my spotless white kurta), I quickly joined the rest of the group who had already set out on the short walk to our first stop. The parikrama has been an annual ISKCON event, at least in some form, since 1972. Over the course of a week, devotees are led on a pilgrimage through dozens of sacred sites in the wider Nabadwip area, each of which is associated with a significant episode or personality from the five-hundredyear history of Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Devotees walk to Chaitanya’s birthplace at Yogapitha, about a mile from the ISKCON complex, and visit the ghats where he bathed. They are taken to the place where soldiers sent by the Muslim leader Chand Kazi symbolically destroyed a mrdunga in an attempt to stop Chaitanya’s sankirtan parties. They visit the places where Chaitanya’s close associates lived in the sixteenth century and see Am-ghata, where Chaitanya planted a mango seed that immediately sprung into a tree bearing ripe fruit. By boat, devotees cross the Ganges to Swarup Ganj, to the house where Bhaktivinod Thakur lived in the late nineteenth century. At each of these sites, everyone gathers to sing kirtan and on some days younger devotees perform dramas, staging well-known episodes from the life of Chaitanya. Most importantly, however, devotees gather at these sites to listen to senior devotees, usually a Prabhupad disciple or a prominent guru, recount the ‘pastimes’ (stories) of Chaitanya and his contemporaries. The recounting of these pastimes, not to be thought of as fictional in any sense, is part of the wider Vaishnava, and indeed Hindu tradition, of katha (storytelling). Though this need not necessarily take place in a particular locality, it is all the more spiritually potent when one hears about the pastime in the location where it took place. In Mayapur, episodes from Chaitanya’s life, his ecstatic devotion, his encounters with renowned philosophers and early stories of sankirtan in the streets of Nabadwip constitute what Sukanya Sarbadhikary (2013, 2015) calls a ‘storied landscape’. Not only is the landscape itself ‘storied’, but it is moral (see Narayan 1989, Srinivas 2010, 81). Pastimes comprise a tapestry of morally



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imbued tales that animate the landscape and locate devotees at the intersection of convergent temporalities, sewn together in both historical and sacred time. One particularly popular story is that of Jagai and Madhai.18 This story is said to have taken place in early sixteenth-century Nabadwip, and is probably most faithfully rendered in Prabhupad’s own words:19 Jagai and Madhai were two brothers born in Navadvipa [Nabadwip] in a respectable brahmana family who later became addicted to all kinds of sinful activities. By the order of Lord Chaitanya, both Nityananda Prabhu and Haridasa Thakura used to preach the cult of Krishna consciousness door to door. In the course of such preaching they found Jagai and Madhai, two maddened drunken brothers, who, upon seeing them, began to chase them. On the next day, Madhai struck Nityananda Prabhu on the head with a piece of earthen pot, thus drawing blood. When Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu heard of this, He immediately came to the spot, ready to punish both brothers, but when the all-merciful Lord Gauranga [Chaitanya] saw Jagai’s repentant behaviour, He immediately embraced him. By seeing the Supreme Personality of Godhead face-to-face and embracing Him, both the sinful brothers were at once cleansed. Thus they received initiation into the chanting of the Hare Krishna mahamantra from the Lord and were delivered.

This is a popular story that serves to exemplify a range of Vaishnava virtues, from the all-encompassing ideal of mercy to the radical self-transformation that underpins ISKCON’s philosophy and practices (Chapter 2). Stories like that of Jagai and Madhai are sources not only of moral ideals and devotional aesthetics, but are also considered historical facts. With parikrama, however, devotees do not simply visit these sites or learn about the past. It is not, as I had expected, an act of penance or austerity (though such concepts are not entirely absent), but one of devotion. Through drama, kirtan and particularly katha, devotees learn, through an embodied engagement with place, to participate in a past that becomes deeply meaningful in the present, and pervades imaginations of an ideal future. Landscape, according to Diana Eck, is ‘relational and … evokes emotion and attachment’ (2012, 11). The nature of such relationality, emotion or attachment however, particularly for international devotees, must be learned. Katha can encompass stories from different places in different times, both sacred and mundane. Referring to a popular pilgrimage in the forests of the Braj area around Vrindavan, Diana Eck notes, ‘the process of pilgrimage brings devotees into the world of Krishna as participants. They enter through the narratives linked to place and through plays called lilas [pastimes] … And they participate in the story through the various pilgrimages … This experience of pilgrimage is both in and out of time, connecting devotees to a transcendental reality’ (2012, 349).20 While I had visited many of these sites in the Mayapur area on my own, I had yet to fully experience devotees engaging with the landscape itself in such an affective way. Outside such ritualised displays of reverence, devotees learn to engage with the landscape every day. They often go to the Ganges, where they bathe, offer prayers or simply get respite from the summer heat. It is

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within the pedagogic settings of classrooms and parikrama, however, that devotees explicitly learn the significance of residing in the sacred dham. Devotees then constitute and construct an affective experience of the transcendental land of Mayapur through particular practices, such as parikrama and katha. While they understand themselves to be pursuing a good life (and a good death) in living in Mayapur, they must also come to terms with the everyday reality of living in rural West Bengal in a cosmopolitan community where not everyone gets along, and where economic instability and mundane political disagreements are constant sources of anxiety. Although unambiguously sacred, in Mayapur, it is the very landscape itself that is proving to be the source of this fledgling spiritual city’s most divisive and disturbing conflicts.

Dying for the Land In September 2013, a couple of months into my fieldwork, I bumped into a friend of mine, Sabuj Das, after the temple morning programme. Forgoing the usual ‘Hare Krishna’ greeting, and with a sense of urgency that struck me as out of place for Mayapur, he asked, ‘Did you hear about the attack?’ ‘No’, I responded, not knowing what he was referring to. The kirtan was still booming from the temple, as we stepped to the side so we could hear each other. ‘There was an attempted murder in Gouranagar last night’, he continued. ‘Five men attacked Sadhu Prabhu with knives! He is in hospital now and will probably be alright … but they tried to kill him!’ The full details, I was told, had been

Illustration 1.4  Devotees gather to listen to katha during parikrama in Mayapur. Photograph by the author.



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posted on the online Mayapur forum. Not sure exactly who the victim was, and worried that it was someone I knew, I went home to read the online post. Along with a few paragraphs outlining the incident, a Mayapur resident who had just returned from the hospital had posted a disturbing photograph of the victim in the wake of the attack. He appeared barely conscious, lying on a rickety trolley in a bleak hospital ward. His right hand, left arm and face were covered in bandages, his blood-stained feet protruding from underneath a blue sheet that covered his legs, as curious Bengalis gathered around to see what was going on. If not for the drip he was hooked up to, one would be forgiven for mistaking him for a corpse. What, though had happened? Why, in the sacred dham of Mayapur, was a devotee so savagely attacked in his home? The victim was Sadhu Prabhu, a sixty-year old Argentinian Prabhupad disciple, who had lived in Mayapur for ten years. At around 9pm, while he was in his fifth-floor apartment with his ninety-year old mother, there was a knock on the door. As he answered, five local Bengalis burst into the apartment and attacked him with knives. They slashed randomly and viciously at his face, his arms, chest, and also tried to dismember his genitals, as he struggled to raise the alarm by shouting and screaming. One neighbour, who lives in the same building two floors below, reported hearing loud screams (that apparently caused the assailants to run away). A crowd had gathered outside the apartment and two of the attackers had been caught by some passers-by, themselves ISKCON devotees. Another neighbour described the scene inside the building; ‘there was blood everywhere – on the walls, landings, and steps’. Sadhu Prabhu was rushed to the local hospital at Krishnanagar and after emergency

Illustration 1.5  International devotees on parikrama. Photograph by the author.

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treatment was moved during the night to a better facility in Kolkata. Though he had lost a lot of blood, he was in a stable condition in the hospital, where he stayed for several weeks while recovering. In the immediate aftermath of the attempted murder, devotees were understandably shocked. Possible reasons behind the attack were put forward, both in local news and amongst residents in Mayapur. According to police interviewed for local news (reported under the headline MISCREANTS HACKED ARGENTINE NATIONAL AT ISKCON MAYAPUR), ‘the Argentine National had developed contention with a local person over purchase of a land in Mayapur, who is also a Iskcon devotee’.21 This seemed to have been based on Sadhu Prabhu’s own account, and reflected the consensus that emerged amongst international devotees in the days after the attack. Sadhu Prabhu, according to those close to him, had entered into a business deal with a Bengali devotee, Madhab, who had become well-off living in America before returning to India. They each owned 50 per cent of the apartment building. This is quite common as foreign nationals need a local co-signatory to purchase property in West Bengal. Over the course of a deal gone sour, and amidst accusations of corruption (from the international community), Madhab ended up owing Sadhu Prabhu a significant sum of money. Rather than paying this back, Madhab allegedly decided it would be easier to have Sadhu Prabhu murdered, and so hired several locals to undertake the task. Chillingly, I was told, he called him hours before the attack to warn him to expect visitors that evening. This, in any case, is how the international community came to understand the incident, although amidst all of the hearsay, it was difficult to piece together the key elements of the story.22 Devotees in Mayapur were quick to offer condolences and prayers for Sadhu. They were equally quick to demand swift justice for Madhab (and his wife, who is alleged to have been complicit). He was quickly arrested, as were the attackers, and all were to be charged in due course. I heard reports that he was released on bail and it is unclear what, if any, sentence he will serve. Amidst disparate rumours, it was widely speculated by Western devotees that due to the (perceived) inefficient and corrupt nature of the Indian judicial system, he would be able to escape a prison sentence through bribery, though I heard several different stories. In Mayapur the conversation turned to issues of security, corruption and property development.23 How, devotees asked, were they to get rid of the ‘cancer’ of greed that was poisoning their spiritual city? To what or to whom could devotees turn to reverse what was perceived as indicative of a recent trend in Mayapur towards materialism? One devotee, in a particularly bleak post on the online forum, wrote: It’s not as if we are living in a society of perfectly renounced, fully self-realised sadhus… What we are having now is a copy of the external society, unfettered capitalism, which we brought with us. To live in the dham, all you need is a sufficiently full bank account. Land in the dham, which from a spiritual point of view is



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priceless, is being used as investment by unscrupulous so-called devotees, up to the point of murdering other devotees for financial gain... We want the same opulent livings that we had previously left behind. The reason why I came to live in India was not to aspire for opulent accommodations which I would if I was in the West. It pains my heart to see our ISKCON organisation in India promoting this… The result is what we are seeing today … even to the point of murder attempt, which we just unfortunately witnessed.

Another devotee asked if the four regulative principles and spiritual practices given by Prabhupad were enough, and suggested that maybe Mayapur needs more rules if it is going to succeed. He turned to an unlikely source (but familiar for a lot of devotees from the West), citing the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s good, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill’. During a specially convened istagosthi (in this case translatable as a ‘community meeting’), devotees expressed security concerns and wanted to know what management was doing to make Mayapur safer. Management, represented by a couple of deputy directors, stressed the importance of working with and through them when buying land, developing properties, or resolving disputes with locals. They assured everyone that they were working closely with local police on the issues raised. With regards to this case, however, it was now a legal issue and outside their control. Beyond this, the discussions, both on the ground and on the online forum, quickly turned to the underlying causes of the problem. Concerns revolved around on one hand, the dangers of doing business in Mayapur, as discussed above, and on the other, the state of the Prabhupad’s spiritual city of Mayapur. ‘Sadhu Prabhu’s regrettable situation is just the peak of the iceberg’, one devotee commented, before pointing to what he felt were the roots of the problem, namely greed, corruption and managerial incompetence. Ten years ago, without the GBC’s knowledge, the ISKCON Mayapur Land Department sold off dozens of plots of land in an effort to raise money (with which they intended to purchase more desirable land).24 The result of this has been that the land to the north of the complex, previously owned by ISKCON and part of the proposed master plan of this spiritual city, is now privately owned and out of management’s control. Locals and foreigners alike have invested a lot of money in land speculation and property development, building residential apartment blocks that then become a source of income. Land and property prices have soared, meaning that the decision to move to Mayapur, a place conceived as a spiritual sanctuary from the degraded capitalist West, now depends significantly on one’s financial means. Furthermore, the majority of buildings that are springing up on these small plots of land around the complex are the products of ad hoc and often unregulated urban development that shows little regard for the idea of an ‘ideal Vedic city’. There is no local waste collection system (aside from a handful of overflowing public bins), nor is there adequate infrastructure, in terms of drainage or roads (most of which are laid around the developments, as opposed to the other

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way around). The local electricity grid struggles to support the growing population of Western devotees, particularly in the summer months, when air-conditioning units trip the buildings’ circuit breakers several times a day. Devotees today refer to Gouranagar, the small residential neighbourhood to the north of the complex, as ‘the slum’. In this slum, there is one infamous example of bad regulation and even worse building practices, derisively referred to as ‘the leaning tower of Gouranagar’. Although separated from the neighbouring building by a narrow alley at ground level, at the top this six-storey building leans to one side. If it were not for some makeshift wooden planks that act as a buffer, it would be touching the building next to it. Fresh concerns have been aired in the wake of the recent earthquakes in Nepal, which were felt in Mayapur. While accusations of corruption, greed and incompetence are widespread, the severity of the attempted murder, along with the perceived underlying causes, was most apparent in its striking dissonance with Prabhupad’s ideal for a spiritual city in the sacred land of Mayapur. As the Mayapur project develops around the TOVP construction site, ISKCON is facing new challenges that bring commitments to tradition and modernity into conflict. From the big questions such as ‘what does an ideal Vedic city look like?’ to the less pressing ‘should we have motorbikes?’, devotees often turn to Prabhupad to qualify their commitments to particular aesthetics, rules and understandings of what constitutes a spiritual city (see Chapter 5). Although there is excitement in Mayapur as the TOVP rises, there is also a tangible pessimism, maybe unsurprising considering recent events. One particular post on the online forum by Sasanka Das, a devotee who has

Illustration 1.6  The ISKCON complex (foreground) and the Gauranagar residential development to the north (background). Photograph by the author.



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lived in Mayapur for over twenty years and has been a key member on various committees that have overseen its development since the early 1990s, was telling. He put forward his concerns for Mayapur in a scathing, but what he hoped to be a constructively jolting, hypothetical obituary of the Mayapur project. Framed by the question ‘What will the historians say?’, Sasanka Das’ post is worth quoting at length: In the late 1900’s a prescient individual known as His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada began a movement to reverse the materialistic trend that society was heading in. He recognised that the whole world was under the sway of materialistic atheistic leaders who were bent on channelling the population into a covered form of slavery: wage slavery. He knew that they could all be saved by simply recognising and serving the Personality of Godhead Sri Krishna, using the things He created in His service. Simple Living and High Thinking was his motto. Along with the chanting of Krishna’s holy names, people’s mentalities could be brought to a higher plane, that of goodness, to eventually become totally spiritualised. By creating a sattvik [pure] atmosphere of service and simple life, people could reverse the brainwashing of the materialists and see just how Krishna could actually provide all of their needs in the most sublime and simple way. Most of Swami Prabhupada’s early followers accepted their guru’s advice and began the process of consciousness purification by chanting Lord Krishna’s holy names, creating rural communities along with traditional gurukula schools, and embracing the simple living–high thinking precept.  After Swamis Prabhupada’s departure however, things began to change. Some of the movement’s leaders, now free to develop the society without their guru’s oversight, began to covet name and

Illustration 1.7  The Samadhi Temple (foreground) and the ‘grihastha area’ (in the top left corner). Photograph by the author.

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fame and tried to emulate their guru by copying him instead of following in his footsteps. Instead of distributing his books, they resorted to business or ‘charitable’ methods to make money. They aspired to be seen as great leaders who could open impressive centres. They often neglected those who actually collected the funds, thus alienating them from the movement. Worse, some followers began to take advantage of the neglect to inflict their own abuse on innocent followers. The leadership needed a regular supply of new members to keep the income coming. The movement’s population therefore was in a state of continuous turnover with the result being members whose understanding of the philosophy was superficial at best, the Founder acharya’s vision was being obscured. The movement was gradually veering far away from Swami Prabhupada’s vision of simple living. When the followers began to see that the leaders coveted materialistic comforts, that profit was more important than simple life, they also began to seek profit in whatever ways they could. The movement’s own new followers were potential profit sources, especially when they wanted to secure a place in the Holy Dhams for their residence. Thus the movement’s core principles were forgotten, and it became a shadow of its original potential. The devotees began to cheat each other, and none of the society’s members felt any security or shelter. In this way, due to neglecting the core principles of their Founder Acharya, the movement became just another religious corporation, issuing more and more laws as its members became more and more materialistic…

Sasanka Das’ post offers an important insight into devotees’ own self-perception. In the first paragraph, Sasanka Das points to several pervasive motifs that characterise ISKCON’s critique of the West, namely materialism, atheism and systematic economic repression, while offering a somewhat idealised account of the mythical early years. He turns his attention in the second paragraph, however, to a caustic review of ISKCON’s own failings, touching upon the themes of alienation, child abuse, the high turnover of membership and the failure to live by the standards set out by Prabhupad. The third paragraph, continuing in this tone, presents ISKCON as having become the very evil against which it once defined itself: the materialistic, cheating and degraded West. Sasanka Das, like many residents, is deeply worried about the direction in which Mayapur, now just ‘a shadow of its original potential’, is heading. He concluded his post, however, on a didactic and noticeably more hopeful note: ‘It doesn’t have to end this way. We can still follow Srila Prabhupad’s instructions to base our lives on Vedic culture’ [sic]. Until this point, which was relatively early in my fieldwork, I was not aware of the profound obstacles the Mayapur project faced. I was often struck by the grandiose concept of an ideal Vedic city, but I had been led to believe that despite a difficult past, Mayapur had emerged as a flagship ISKCON community, an emergent success story from a global mission that had lost its way. I did not have to strain to believe this narrative, especially when passing the TOVP site several times every day. As often as I was to come across cynical appraisals of Mayapur’s future, as was the case with Sasanka Das’ post cited above, devotees, I was to learn, are incredibly resilient to episodes of failure.



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As disturbing as the murder attempt was at the time, after a couple of weeks the incident seemed to almost disappear completely from the collective consciousness. Unless I asked about it, during the course of my fieldwork I never heard anybody discuss it again. When I did ask, devotees would often tell me, ‘this is Kali Yuga, what else should we expect?’25 That there are some in their ranks who care more about material profit than spiritual advancement, even in the sacred land of Mayapur, is to be expected in the material world. In a very real sense, that corruption, greed and violence were ever-present dangers was simply taken as evidence of the truth of Krishna consciousness. Prophecy persists, it seems, in the face of failure.

Conclusion After decades of development, it is widely felt that Prabhupad’s vision of an ‘ideal Vedic city’ is finally becoming a reality, particularly as the TOVP rises in the heart of the complex. While there is certainly optimism about what the future holds, there is also much anxiety. ‘If Mayapur is healthy’, one of the senior managers told me, ‘ISKCON worldwide is healthy’. He went on, after pausing, ‘but right now Mayapur is the sick man’. Inspired for the most part by Prabhupad’s lofty spiritual ideals of self-realisation, the Mayapur project faces many serious obstacles that recourse to Prabhupad’s spiritual teachings can only partially inform. With no experience of managing let alone governing a project on this scale, ISKCON management lacks both a viable economic model and a coherent vision upon which this spiritual city might be built. Devotees continue to arrive in Mayapur from all over the world with the idea of living by what they call ‘Vedic culture’ (see Chapter 5), but Mayapur is far from realising the utopian ideals upon which it was conceived. While devotees understand Mayapur to be, and indeed practice Mayapur as, the ‘Land of the Golden Avatar’, a sacred landscape that transcends the mundane world, they must learn at the same time to live on plots of land in rural West Bengal that are commodified in terms of, and fought over in the pursuit of, material prosperity. The landscape of Mayapur is not simply a stage upon which devotees enact what they conceive as ‘Vedic culture’. It is what Tim Ingold calls a ‘taskscape’, a ‘work in progress’ that is ‘perpetually under construction’ (1993, 162). It is constructed and constituted through practice, including ritualised activities such as katha and parikrama, but also mundane encounters and everyday routine. Somewhere between an enchanted past and a prophesied future, Mayapur is widely felt to be in the process of becoming a spiritual city. The issues presented in this chapter will inform questions that pervade this book. How do devotees negotiate the antagonistic ethical imperatives of detachment from, and engagement with, the material world? How do they pursue Prabhupad’s ideal of self-realisation in a setting that, despite its

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promise, continually draws them away from, rather than towards, transcendence? How do devotees deal with failure, in terms of both the spiritual and social goals that Prabhupad prescribed? In the context of wider Gaudiya Vaishnava theology, the next chapter looks at the theological framework within which international devotees in Mayapur understand their pursuit of Krishna consciousness.

Notes  1. Source: http://www.jayapatakaswami.com/biography/, last accessed on 19 July 2019. It should be noted that this quote is based on devotees’ recollection and is ascribed to Prabhupad with slight variations in different accounts.  2. The ‘Golden Avatar’ refers to Chaitanya, who is also known as ‘Gauranga’, which connotes ‘golden’.  3. As of 2011 population census. Source: http://www.census2011.co.in/, last accessed on 19 July 2019.  4. The reasons usually attributed to such a high number of Russian devotees are not just related to ISKCON’s popularity there, but reflect the lack of educational or temple facilities available in centres such as Moscow. Mayapur represents an attractive alternative for devotees seeking to raise a family in a Vaishnava community.  5. ISKCON management estimates the population and compiles lists of nationalities based on records it keeps for devotees’ visa applications. It is only during major festivals that so many nationalities would be represented, if at all, at any one time. Some devotees do not seek ISKCON’s help with visas, while others may have left Mayapur without notifying management, so these figures represent rough estimates.  6. While there are several languages spoken in Mayapur, including Bengali, Spanish and Russian, for example, English is the lingua franca.  7. The term dham is similar to tirtha (literally a ‘crossover’ between the material and spiritual world), but in Diana Eck’s words, dham ‘suggests not so much that we “cross over” to the divine, but that the divine dwells among us now’ (2012, 12).  8. See, for example, Srinivas 2010 on the establishment of the Sathya Sai movement in Puttaparthi.  9. Although a particularly important narrative in ISKCON, this also reflects a common understanding in wider Gaudiya Vaishnavism. 10. Letter to Jayapataka, written from Amsterdam. Source: https://vanisource.org/, last accessed on 19 July 2019. 11. It is very common in India, for reasons pertaining to land law, to build a boundary wall around newly acquired property. 12. The term samadhi, elsewhere referring to a deep meditative state, in this context refers to a commemorative shrine for the deceased. Prabhupad’s body, however, is buried in a different Samadhi Temple in Vrindavan. 13. Pancha-Tattva refers to ‘the five truths’ in several Indian traditions, but in the particular Gaudiya Vaishnava context, this term refers to Chaitanya and his four closest disciples. 14. Considering the population of Mayapur, however, it should be pointed out that there are a disproportionate number of Western devotees in positions of power. 15. At the significantly bigger ‘Sri Navadvipa Mandala Parikrama’ in March, attended by up to 7,000, devotees camp out and walk the whole distance between sites. This particular parikrama was a smaller-scale version, and devotees were picked up and dropped off by bus between sites, and returned to the ISKCON complex every evening.



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16. A bead-bag is a small cloth bag within which devotees keep their personal chanting beads. Similar to rosary beads, these are 108 tulasi beads which devotees use to keep count of the number of mantras and ‘rounds’ (108 mantras) they have chanted. 17. This is the first line of the Srila Prabhupada Pranati, translated as ‘I offer my respectful obeisances unto His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who is very dear to Lord Krishna, having taken shelter at His lotus feet’. 18. Though presented here in a brief passage, when recounted by senior devotees it is often embellished over the course of an hour and framed within what could be described as a sermon (see Chapter 3). 19. Extract from Sri Caitanya-caritamrta, Adi-lila, Chapter 17, Text 17 (Prabhupada 1974). 20. See also Morinis 1984, Entwistle 1987 and Haberman 1994. 21. Source: http://newsfromnadia.com/index.php/news-reader/items/miscreants-hackedargentine-national-at-iskcon-mayapur.html, last accessed on 19 July 2019. 22. What I recount here is the reaction of the international community in particular, as the Bengalis I spoke to about the attack did not know the accused, and were not as forthcoming with their opinions, at least when talking to me. 23. Srinivas notes that there have been similar accusations of abuse of power, corruption and mismanagement in the context of the Sathya Sai movement (2010, chapter 5). 24. There are widespread accusations amongst the community that the ISKCON Land Department has for a long time engaged in corruption. 25. Kali Yuga is the last of the four stages of the cosmic cycle, (after Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga and Dvapara Yuga). This concept often arises in ethical discourse in South Asia as this yuga is characterised by moral depravity and a lack of piety (Parish 1994) and thus potentially serves as an explanatory framework for all that is wrong with the world.

2 Changing the Subject

You can be, in theory, the happiest, the richest, the most intelligent, the most attractive, the strongest, the wisest person on this planet, but you still have to die, you still have to leave this body… We’re eternal, this [world] is temporary, the two don’t mix… Fundamental problem! In that sense that’s the ultimate beginning stage of understanding Vedic knowledge, and then you can start developing a relationship with the Supreme Person that ultimately can end in an incredibly intimate and loving relationship. —Prahlad Das1

In most conversations I had with devotees about ISKCON’s philosophy, the point of departure was rarely the creation of the universe, divine intervention or the character of God, although these are not unimportant themes.2 Rather, the basic puzzle at the heart of ISKCON’s philosophy is most commonly presented in relation to ‘you’. Whatever successes come your way or however well equipped you are to navigate this material world, ‘you still have to die, you still have to leave this body’, as Prahlad Das outlined for me during an interview. Framed as a response to this existential problem, ISKCON’s philosophy can be described in relation to the central themes of the nature of the self, God, the world and salvation. In other words, it provides answers to the familiar questions: Who are we? Why are we here? What ought one to do? Against the backdrop of Gaudiya Vaishnava theology, this chapter elaborates ISKCON’s responses to these questions. In his book The Ascetic Self, Gavin Flood notes that ‘highly reflexive traditions within which asceticism develops have sophisticated accounts of the human subject and highly developed discourses about the self, ways of knowing the self and ways of acting’ (2004, 15). The Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition to which ISKCON traces its roots is no exception. ISKCON’s conception of the self emerges from, and for the most part, moves within, a recognisably Hindu constellation of concepts, and is inextricably bound in comprehensive pedagogies of self-transformation. While this self-transformation can be described broadly in terms familiar to other ascetic traditions, in order to



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grasp what is particular about ISKCON’s soteriological strategy, it is important to first of all understand the underlying theological assumptions that inform devotees’ projects of self-fashioning. As David Shulman and Guy Stroumsa (2002, 4) observe, ‘The kind of transformation(s) a culture puts forward as a goal or possibility for human life always expresses the primary axioms, conflicts, and intuitions that make up its particular world’ (see Venkatesan 2014). With this in mind, I describe here how devotees learn to experience, cultivate and evaluate themselves as subjects within a particular ‘alternative economy of the self ’ (Shulman and Stroumsa 2002). I have chosen the self as a point of departure not because of its rootedness in Western philosophy and social anthropology, but for the fact that in Gaudiya Vaishnava theology the self is the moral unit of salvation. As will become clear, the philosophy that I outline below only becomes meaningful as it is mobilised by devotees, as it does things in the world that leads sometimes to success, and sometimes to failure; as it becomes, in Tamal Krishna Goswami’s words, a ‘living theology’ (2012). In privileging ‘lived religion’ (Hall 1997), I am interested here in how theological categories become tools with which devotees learn to evaluate their spiritual striving. This is not so much a question of theology, as it is a concern of ethics.

The Anthropological Self The self, in all its many guises (including the ‘individual’, the ‘dividual’, the ‘subject’, the ‘person’, the ‘moi’, the ‘I’, etc.). has long been a focus of the anthropological gaze (Geertz 1973, Strathern 1988, Taylor 1989, Wikan 1990, Daniel 1992, Mines 1994, Luhrmann 2006, Biehl, Good and Kleinman 2007, Josephides 2010). While the self today still claims a privileged place in the anthropological imagination, it has often been pointed out that it is far from clear what we are talking about when we distinguish between selfhood, personhood and individuality, for example. Maurice Bloch has offered one quite unique response to the problem. Advocating for the indispensability of engagement with insights emerging from cognitive anthropology, Bloch outlines his frustrations with the ‘galaxy’ of concepts that surround the self: The problem … comes when we try to put together this massive literature; when, for example, we try to relate Geertz’s discussion of the Balinese ‘person’ (1973), with Dumont’s ‘individual’ (1983), Mauss’s ‘moi’ (1938) and Rosaldo’s ‘self ’ (1984). When I attempt such combination I have to admit that I am completely lost and so I will refer to this entire indistinct galaxy, some part of which, or all of which, these terms seem to refer to, simply as the ‘blob’. (2012, 120)

This ambivalence over the self in anthropology reflects a deeper unease in the discipline around the lines we draw, the ethnocentric intuitions we impose, and the use and abuse of Western categories in attempting to understand or theorise possibilities of alterity. On the puzzle of subjectivity, Henrietta Moore

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(2007, 25) asks, ‘If these categories are not really separate in Western philosophical and cultural understandings, then how can we assume that they are consistently differentiated – or indeed even exist – in other cultures?’ In other words, that lines are not always neatly (if at all) drawn is not a theoretical deficiency, but an ethnographic fact. In this chapter, I will focus on what appeared to me to be an important ethnographic distinction in terms of the conceptualisation of the self. While Michael Carrithers’ (1985) elaboration on Mauss’s distinction between the personne and moi theories of the self comes close to what I describe here, for ISKCON devotees, the self can be broken down into what I will call the ‘essential self ’ (or metaphysical self ) and the ‘mundane self ’ (or embodied self ). By essential self, I am referring to the theological conception of the soul (see below). By mundane self, I am simply referring to the everyday ‘I’ – what we might call à la Tyler that ‘complex whole’ that devotees unreflectively mobilise in everyday situations – or what Naomi Quinn (2006, 362) describes as ‘the totality of what an organism is physically, biologically, psychologically, socially, and culturally’. While devotees aspire to ‘realise’ the essential self, they also understand that such realisation is only possible by working on the mundane self (through the body, mind and emotions, for example). In other words, although devotees understand their essential self to be a spirit soul, this essential self is not in Foucauldian terms the ‘ethical substance’ to be worked on, but its uncovering or ‘realisation’ rather is the telos of ascetic practice. It is only by contending with and transforming the mundane self (here, the ‘ethical substance’) that one can fully realise one’s true essential self. In this regard David Shulman’s observation of Tamil Saivism (2002, 131) also holds true in Mayapur: that ‘the metaphysical self … is almost by definition not the personal self [what I call mundane self ] that might be subject to transformation’. Flood similarly observes that ‘asceticism … is performed by a self; not a disembodied self, but a historical, language-bearing, gendered person with their own name and story’ (2004, 2). The uncovering of the essential self requires a lifetime of spiritual practice that implicitly assumes the profound elusiveness of the essential self in the material world, in this physical body. One must pursue ascetic practices that work on, and are worked on by, the mundane self. At times, and relying on Vaishnava theological discourse, devotees certainly problematise and reflect on the various levels of the self but this is not to say they did not also mobilise the more mundane self whose referent in everyday practice is unproblematically ambiguous as an ethnographic category. In what follows, I firstly introduce ISKCON’s philosophy in the context of the wider Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition from which it springs. I then describe some core practices through which this philosophy informs ethical striving. After touching upon some central virtues that are deemed conducive to the pursuit of Krishna consciousness, I describe how this rich and complex philosophy has been distilled into idioms of detachment, dependence and purification, by which devotees learn to evaluate themselves as ethical subjects.



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ISKCON’s Philosophy In 1925, Christian missionary and scholar of Bengal Vaishnavism Melville Kennedy lamented the ‘considerable theological confusion’ (1925, 94) that he identified in Gaudiya Vaishnava philosophy.3 He disparagingly criticised what he called the ‘potpourri method’ by which he asserted Chaitanya, in constructing his own theology, embraced a broad range of contradictory philosophical concepts. The philosophy Prabhupad presented to the West was based on over five hundred years of rich theological scholarship and spiritual practice that has evolved from this ‘considerable theological confusion’. From Chaitanya and the Six Goswamis of Vrindavan in the sixteenth century, to Bhaktivinod Thakur in the nineteenth century, Bhaktisiddhanta in the twentieth century, and later, Prabhupad and his followers in the West, a rich exegetical tradition has emerged that has given rise to divergent Gaudiya Vaishnava sects, of which ISKCON is arguably the most successful.4 Centred on the Bhagavad Gita (Prabhupad’s translation is called Bhagavad Gita As It Is), the twelve-volume Srimad Bhagavatam and the seventeen-volume Chaitanya Charitamrta (a biography of Chaitanya), devotees’ engagement with wider Vaishnava theological discourse is mediated by a profoundly affective relationship with Prabhupad, through his books, lectures, and recorded statements, and in some cases, encounters. From Prabhupad’s preaching mission alone, fifty volumes of translation and commentary, sixty volumes of lectures, thirty-seven volumes of conversation, and five volumes of correspondence have to date been published (T.K. Goswami 2012), along with several database websites. When I refer to ISKCON’s philosophy, I am not referring to one thing, but rather to a firmament of insights, interpretations, commitments and guidelines, itself a dynamic set of resources that devotees relate to and mobilise in divergent ways. While there are particular spiritual practices that are deemed foundational, such as attending temple or chanting, grihasthas are responsible for their own spiritual advancement and often adhere strictly to some practices, while paying little attention to others. Any overview then is of course going to be necessarily selective. With this caveat in mind, I present here an introductory sketch of the fundamental principles from which devotees develop their understandings and practices of their spiritual journey. Subsequent chapters will elaborate on a number of the central themes introduced here. ISKCON’s philosophy starts with the basic axiom ‘you are not this body’. Rather, we are eternal spirit souls (jivas).5 Although we, as jiva, may have been fortunate enough to have been born in a human body in this life, our essential being is that of the spirit soul, the infinitesimally small spark of life that animates every living being. Through reincarnation, this jiva is said to have transmigrated through hundreds of thousands if not millions of bodies, most of which are non-human, to arrive at this particular form. Where we go from here depends on our actions in this lifetime. That we are in the material world in the first place, as opposed to the spiritual world, is a result of our forgetting our loving relationship with Krishna. We are what Prabhupad called

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‘conditioned souls’, eternal beings conditioned by forgetfulness and illusion (maya). We are trapped in material existence, and in this physical body. Out of ignorance, we identify with the body (as a mundane self ), and strive for base sensual gratification and material comforts. Our only way out of this ‘prison’, as the material world is often referred to, is to uncover our essential self (jiva), and develop a loving relationship with Krishna. This can be achieved by following the path of bhakti, commonly translated as ‘devotion’ (see Prentiss 1999) but rendered idiosyncratically by Prabhupad as ‘devotional service’. This, and only this, will ensure that we will escape the cycle of death and rebirth (samsara) and ultimately ‘go back to Godhead’ (attain salvation). The problem, in short, is simple. In Prabhupad’s words, ‘the cause of the distress of a living entity is forgetfulness of his relationship with God. And the cause of happiness is knowing Krishna to be the supreme enjoyer of all the activities of the human being, the proprietor of all lands and planets, and the sincerest friend of all living entities’ (Bhagavad Gita 6.32, purport). From the ignorant and forgetful living entity, the slave to sense gratification entangled in this material world, one must come to know oneself and know Krishna through prescribed practices that result in purification and spiritual advancement, ultimately bringing us back to the spiritual world. Although informed by a range of Hindu exegetical traditions that centre on the self (atman), or in the case of Buddhism the ‘non-self ’ (anatman), Gaudiya Vaishnavism has a particular conception of the soul (as jiva) that can only be understood in the context of its relationship with God.6 Indeed the nature of this relationship is often where conflicting Indic conceptions of the soul diverge. In Shankara’s Advaita Vedantic (non-dualist) philosophy, for example, the soul and Brahman (the impersonal Absolute Truth) are the same, and the goal of life is in this realisation. The thirteenth-century Vaishnava (dualist) philosopher Madhvacharya, however, posited that the soul and the supreme are qualitatively different, the former being a reflection of the latter. Although the dualist and non-dualist perspectives are seemingly diametrically opposed, Chaitanya embraced both, teaching that the soul and the supreme are simultaneously the same and different (acintya bhedabheda).7 Souls are qualitatively the same, but quantitatively different from the Absolute Truth, in this case, Krishna. Being qualitatively the same, the jiva is full of sat (existence), cit (consciousness) and ananda (bliss), derived from the paramatman (supersoul), but being qualitatively different, the jiva have only a limited store of these qualities. While the paramatman pervades material nature and animates the jivas, it is just one aspect of the divine, within which Chaitanya embraced a theology that posited multiple aspects of the Absolute Truth. God is at once Brahman (the impersonal Absolute Truth familiar to non-dualist traditions), paramatman (the supersoul that pervades the whole universe) and Bhagavan (the personal deity more common in dualist traditions). While monistic (or non-dualist) traditions such as Advaita Vedanta posit the Absolute Truth to be without qualities (nirguna), for Vaishnavas (and dualists generally), the highest truth is Bhagavan who has personal qualities (saguna). The monistic conception of Brahman then is not



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rejected by Chaitanya, but is folded into a theology that maintains the supremacy of a personal God, Krishna. How though have we, as jivas, found ourselves in this situation? Why do we mistakenly identify the self with the body? Although we are in one sense part of Krishna’s ‘marginal energy’, we also have free will.8 Originally the jivas resided in Goloka Vrindavana, Krishna’s eternal heavenly abode (made up by his ‘internal energy’). However, we got envious of Krishna, the ‘supreme creator, controller and enjoyer’. We felt that we could be the controller and enjoyer, and in trying to emulate Krishna, fell from the spiritual world.9 Krishna then created (out of his ‘external energy’) material nature (prakriti), where the jiva could rediscover its true identity and surrender to the supreme, at which point, it would be on the path back to Godhead. The jiva, in Prabhupad’s words, has ‘fallen into the ocean of nescience, which is the ocean of material existence involving the repetition of birth, death, old age and disease, all arising out of the acceptance of the material body’.10 This is in some sense similar to the Christian doctrine of original sin (Judah 1974, 72). As the root of all human misery, this transgression must be atoned for before we attain salvation and can go back to the spiritual world. As one speaker in a morning class I regularly attended noted, ‘the whole cosmic manifestation is a facility for us to reform ourselves’. The world itself, this prison, is a place where we might reform and learn to recognise our essential nature as spirit souls. The material world, then, like the human body we have in this lifetime, is both an obstacle to, and our only opportunity for, salvation. If we want to go back to Godhead we must reconfigure our relationship to the world, from one of indulgence to one of tolerance. One senior devotee told me one afternoon as I complained about the intense heat and humidity of the Bengal summer months, ‘the material world is there to be tolerated, not enjoyed’. We must endure the suffering as necessary penance before escaping the material world for good, as we work through our accumulated karma from previous lives. In order to go back to Godhead, we must overcome obstacles, such as our material and sexual desires, that bind us to identifying with the body. The material world is not meant to be an easy place to live, nor is it meant to be easy to transcend, even, as the last chapter made clear, in the sacred land of Mayapur. To be entangled in this world, as we all are to a greater or lesser extent, to identify the ‘self ’ as this body, is to be trapped in the grip of maya.11 The concept of maya is pervasive and designates anything in or of this world that is illusory, which is to say essentially everything that is not conducive to Krishna consciousness. To engage in any pursuit that does not lead one back to Krishna is to ‘be in maya’. One must learn to recognise maya in one’s daily life and focus one’s energies on remembering Krishna. Prahlad Das explained this to me: ‘It is a reality of the spiritual journey... We are in the material world and the material world is a very powerful energy and you’re effectively trying to resist all of that material energy and transcend it … and we are … on an individual basis very vulnerable and weak people … our strength comes from protection from Krishna … we can’t do it on our own’.

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While Gaudiya Vaishnavism mobilises the same broad constellation of concepts as do other Hindu traditions, the theological novelty is in their configuration. As we have already seen, in Gaudiya Vaishnavism this often involves embracing rather than rejecting competing perspectives. This is also evident in the soteriological strategy that Chaitanya espoused, as theologised by the Six Goswamis of Vrindavan in the generation after his death. Although essentially jivas, or spirit souls, in the context of prakriti, or the material world, we are encased in a physical body. We are then a composite of both spiritual and material elements. It is our duty to learn through ascetic practice to identify with the spiritual and develop apathy toward the material aspects of our nature so we can return to Krishna in the spiritual world. We must cultivate detachment from all things material (thus overcoming maya) and attachment to all things spiritual (in particular, Krishna). It is only by doing so that we can identify with our true ‘self ’. As is the case with bhakti sects generally, Gaudiya Vaishnavism departs profoundly from wider Hindu traditions in terms of its soteriological strategy. The classical Hindu goals of life (purusarthas), namely dharma (virtue), artha (wealth), kama (sensuous enjoyment) and moksha (liberation) are replaced with the one overarching goal of bhakti, which becomes both the means and the end of spiritual life. This turns on a fundamental difference in the conception of the Absolute Truth, and the Vedantic and Vaishnava conceptions of salvation could not be more opposed. For Vedantists, salvation is imagined as moksha (liberation), a merging of the soul into the impersonal Brahman at the point of death. For Vaishnavas, salvation is conceived as a reunion of the jiva with Krishna in the spiritual world. The Vedantic effacement of the self, then, undermines both the premise and the telos of a life of bhakti. Kennedy summarises thus: ‘to the Vaishnava thinker the Vedantic doctrine destroyed the possibility of that which gave meaning to salvation, namely, the enjoyment of God. To him the very idea of salvation involves personal consciousness, and a real relationship between lover and beloved’ (1925, 98). In place of moksha then is bhakti, or devotion to God.12 In Gaudiya Vaishnavism, such devotion leads to prema, or ‘pure love of God’. Prema is the topmost level of spiritual realisation and is only attainable for the most exalted devotees (see Chapter 4). A wide variety of philosophical schools sprung up around the central question of how one can attain salvation. While there are many areas on which these schools both agree and disagree, the various philosophical traditions can be approximately grouped according to which paths (marga) they espouse (or reject). The three traditional paths are karma-yoga (the path of action), jnanayoga (the path of knowledge, pronounced ‘gyana’) and bhakti-yoga (the path of devotion). Different traditions follow different paths, or in some cases, particular hierarchical formulations that combine two or more. In Jainism, for example, jnana-yoga is the highest path. In the Vaishnava Pushti Marg sect, karma-yoga is completely rejected as they understand salvation to depend not on action or self-effort at all but on Krishna’s saving grace (Bennett 1993). For



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Gaudiya Vaishnavas bhakti-yoga is the highest path. Outlining ISKCON’s soteriological strategy, Prabhupad writes (Bhagavad Gita 6.46): When we speak of yoga we refer to linking our consciousness with the Supreme Absolute Truth. Such a process is named differently by various practitioners in terms of the particular method adopted. When the linking process is predominantly in fruitive activities it is called karma-yoga, when it is predominantly empirical it is called jnana-yoga, and when it is predominantly in a devotional relationship with the Supreme Lord it is called bhakti-yoga. Bhakti-yoga, or Krishna consciousness, is the ultimate perfection of all yogas.

It should be highlighted here that Gaudiya Vaishnavism does not reject, but rather subsumes the alternative paths of karma-yoga and jnana-yoga, both of which must be embraced but also reconfigured in relation to the highest path of bhakti-yoga. Jnana-yoga on its own may lead one to Brahman (via moksha), but not to Bhagavan (Krishna). This does not mean one should reject knowledge (ignorance or avidya is after all the very reason why we have found ourselves in the material world), but rather one should understand that knowledge alone cannot result in pure love for God, prema. Knowledge, as is also the case with action, is only virtuous when conducive to the pursuit of bhakti. One acquires knowledge of Krishna only so one can learn to love him (see Chapter 4). Karma-yoga, while again not sufficient in this degraded age of Kali Yuga, is still required by the Vaishnava to go back to Godhead. This is one of the central points of the Bhagavad Gita, which records a conversation between the hero Arjuna and his charioteer, Krishna, on the battlefield at Kurukshetra. The famous scene from the epic Mahabharata revolves around Arjuna’s moral dilemma. While he must follow his dharma as a warrior (he is of the kshatriya, or warrior, caste) and fight in the war, he will inevitably cause grief and suffering for thousands, many of whom are his own family members on the other side. His solution then is not to fight, or in other words, to renounce the path of action so as to avoid any karmic reaction. The narrative revolves around Krishna’s response to this dilemma. Rather than choosing the path of nonaction, which as Krishna explains is not an option (as everyone must act in the world), Krishna tells Arjuna that he must learn to renounce the fruits of his action: ‘All men are forced to act helplessly according to the impulses born of the modes of material nature; therefore no one can refrain from doing something, not even for a moment’ (Bhagavad Gita 3.5). Arjuna must detach himself from the consequences of his action, and in doing so he will not incur any karmic reaction: ‘Therefore, without being attached to the fruits of activities, one should act as a matter of duty; for by working without attachment, one attains the Supreme’ (Bhagavad Gita 3.19).13 Krishna’s advice to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita is elaborated upon in ISKCON’s philosophy. Devotees must learn not to renounce the world, but to renounce the fruits of their action. They must learn that they are not the ‘doer, the enjoyer or the controller’, but must learn to depend on ‘Krishna’s

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arrangement’. They must learn to detect Krishna’s agency in their everyday lives and come to understand that they are only partially agents of their own destiny. Of course, agency is not a zero-sum game.14 That devotees acknowledge Krishna’s hand in their lives makes them no less responsible for their various failings. It is still very much up to them as free moral agents to strive towards salvation, and their failure to do so will have karmic consequences. What is important is not that one simply renounces the world, but that one reconceives everything one does in terms of serving Krishna. Jnana-yoga and karma-yoga then are not rejected but are ‘the very channels through which bhakti functions’ (Kapoor 1976, 182). In ISKCON, the ethical aesthetic encompasses all three of these paths. The hierarchy presented here is reflected in a spiritual trajectory from knowledge to emotion (or devotion), as will be elaborated throughout Chapters 3 and 4. So what then do devotees do with these theological concepts? How do they mobilise these understandings in their own pursuits of Krishna consciousness? I now turn back to Mayapur and to the spiritual practices that devotees understand to pave the path back to Godhead.

Mangala Arati Mayapur is eerily quiet at 4.15am. Still pitch-black outside, the only sounds are distant footsteps and murmurings of the mahamantra. I have to use my torch to navigate the ditches and reeds that line the barely marked dirt path as I follow a handful of devotees towards the temple for mangala arati.15 Emerging from the fields that separate my apartment from the main route to the ISKCON complex, I join a splintered procession, women dressed in colourful saris and men in dhotis. After ten minutes or so, I reach the temple. Ringing the bell in the doorway, I pay obeisances, lying face down,

Illustration 2.1  Radha-Madhava deities. Photograph by the author.



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outstretched on the floor. At this point the curtains on the altar are still closed. Devotees trickle in over the next few minutes, some shuffling contemplatively about, trying to chant a couple of rounds before the arati begins, while others wait in anticipation, facing the Radha-Madhava altar.16 Although the majority are brahmacharis, identifiable by their saffron dhotis, a few dozen grihasthas arrive as some Bengali pilgrims are ushered towards the respective genderappropriate spaces of the temple. Facing the altar, men remain on the left while women, outnumbered, are on the right. The temple is quiet, apart from the drone of japa meditation (chanting), as everyone now assembles in front of the altar. At 4.30am, one of the pujaris emerges from behind the curtain. Blowing a conch three times amidst a throng of ululation (a high pitched trill sound made by the women), he signals the start of the arati. As the curtains are being drawn, one devotee, playing the kartals and accompanied by the mrdunga, begins quietly singing Sri Sri Gurva-asthaka, the first song of the arati, which is dedicated to the spiritual master. I struggle to find space around me as everyone pays obeisances, some prostrating outstretched on the floor, others, for lack of space, kneeling with their forehead touching the floor (and others like me stranded awkwardly with nowhere to move). The deities are beautiful. Each of the ten figures on the Radha-Madhava altar is over six feet tall and elaborately decorated every day in stunningly colourful outfits, sparkling jewellery and fresh flower garlands.17 This altar is home to the divine couple, Radha and Krishna, both of whom face the congregation. Krishna, as he is often depicted in Vaishnava iconography, leaning slightly towards Radha, plays the flute with his right leg crossing playfully over his left. Radha and Krishna are flanked on either side by four gopis (cowherd girls), all of whom look lovingly at the divine couple. As devotees get to their feet, with hands folded, they take darshan of the deities.18 The first song, sung as Krishna is being woken up and offered arati, begins slowly, and the congregation sings the verse back in a call-response pattern. Devotees, tightly packed into the temple, restrict their movement to gentle swaying, all the while keeping their gaze firmly locked on the deities. Some raise their hands sporadically and close their eyes while singing. As the kirtan continues, it picks up a little pace and the beat of the mrdunga thickens. The pujaris in the meantime continue to offer arati. Offerings include a ghee lamp, incense and a flower, which are then offered to the congregation as prasadam.19 The music continues to pick up pace, as devotees begin to sway uniformly. Some devotees, often in small groups, begin to dance with more energy, shuffling back and forth, raising their hands, palms turned upwards towards the ceiling, mirroring Chaitanya’s somewhat effeminate devotional aesthetic (see Illustration 2.2). At the end of each phrase the mrdunga picks up, only to come to a crescendo, and abruptly slips back into a half tempo. As more devotees begin clapping, the short song reaches a natural climax in the transition to the mahamantra. By this stage, Krishna has awoken and the tone moves from reverence to revelry. The mrdunga is played with force, and with the kartals, has doubled in tempo. The singing is noticeably louder. Devotees move from a shuffle to more

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animated steps, and incorporate a hop at the end of each phrase. Women in rows, clinging onto their saris with one hand, dance in unison, taking a couple of steps forward and then back, raising the other hand as they twirl together at the end of each phrase. The music continues to build. As the mahamantra gets louder, the mrdunga stronger, devotees sing at the top of their voices, still fixing their affectionate gaze on the deities. Devotees begin jumping up and down on the spot while the congregation uniformly moves a couple of steps forward and a couple of steps back within each phrase. The mahamantra goes on as long as the pujari is offering arati (typically for half an hour). As the pujari blows the conch to signal the end of mangala arati, and begins to close the curtains, devotees again prostrate themselves, as the singer brings the kirtan to an end. The mangala arati is the first part of the ‘morning programme’, which runs from 4.30am until 9am. Immediately afterwards, devotees turn their attention from the Radha-Madhava altar and to Nrsimhadeva for Nrsimhadeva arati, where the kirtan starts again.20 This is followed by tulasi puja, which is again set to kirtan and dancing.21 From 5.30am to 7am most devotees stay in the temple to chant. Some who have missed the arati arrive around this time to join in chanting. Mats are laid on the ground where up to twelve devotees sit with their right hand in their bead-bag, chanting their rounds. A ‘round’ comprises of 108 mahamantras, and devotees are expected to chant a minimum of sixteen rounds per day.22 This typically takes up to two hours for experienced devotees, but for neophyte anthropologists, chanting sixteen rounds can take significantly longer. Some devotees prefer to circle the temple while others will walk outside to chant as the sun comes up. At 7am, when devotees have

Illustration 2.2  Pancha-Tattva deities. Photograph by the author.



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completed most, if not all, of their sixteen rounds, the morning programme continues with deity greetings. Devotees circumambulate the temple, singing particular songs as puja is offered to the various deities, including the PanchaTattva. The Pancha-Tattva deities represent Chaitanya and his four closest associates. Even larger than the Radha-Madhava deities on the altar to the right of the temple, the Pancha-Tattva deities are equally stunning. With arms outstretched towards the ceiling, Chaitanya is depicted in a traditional pose that embodies the central virtues of surrender, humility and devotion. Throughout the morning programme, devotees move around the temple between the various altars, offering puja, prayers and kirtan (including gurupuja,  where Prabhupad’s life-size murti (idol) is worshipped). The morning programme ends with the Srimad Bhagavatam class at 8am (see Chapter 3).

Sadhana Although not attended by all on a regular basis, the morning programme is widely understood to be the foundation of a healthy spiritual life. It is, in other words, central to one’s sadhana (spiritual practice).23 While the ultimate aim of Krishna consciousness is to develop a loving relationship with God through cultivating a detachment from the material world (and thereby realising one’s essential self ), there are many stages along the way in what is a lifelong (or, more likely, lives-long) journey. This journey has been mapped out, interpreted and elaborated by generations of spiritual leaders from Chaitanya through to Prabhupad. Through the books, lectures and classes, there are rich pedagogical formulae available to help devotees navigate the intellectual, emotional and practical opportunities and obstacles of spiritual life. This is the lifeblood of the relationship between the individual and the institution. Considering the complex theological tapestry espoused by Chaitanya, his soteriological strategy turns out to be remarkably simple. The foundational statement in this regard, often quoted to me by devotees, is recorded in the Chaitanya Charitamrta (Madhya-lila, 6.242): ‘In this age of quarrel and hypocrisy, the only means of deliverance is the chanting of the holy names of the Lord. There is no other way. There is no other way. There is no other way’. In this degraded age of Kali Yuga, marked by moral and spiritual degradation, the paths of jnana-yoga and karma-yoga are no longer going to lead to salvation. Instead, Chaitanya preached, one should simply spend one’s time absorbed in the chanting of the holy name. Over the course of five hundred years, and particularly in the hands of the Six Goswamis of Vrindavan, Chaitanya’s devotional aesthetic and personal example were systematised into an elaborate theological framework that centres on, but also goes well beyond, meditation. Within this framework, devotees learn to assess their own spiritual progress, in terms of some key concepts that are taught to be the stages of spiritual advancement. These stages are outlined in the Chaitanya Charitamrta (Madhya-lila, 23.14–15):

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In the beginning there must be faith. Then one becomes interested in associating with pure devotees. Thereafter one is initiated by the spiritual master and executes the regulative principles under his orders. Thus one is freed from all unwanted habits and becomes firmly fixed in devotional service. Thereafter, one develops taste and attachment. This is the way of sadhana-bhakti, the execution of devotional service according to the regulative principles. Gradually emotions intensify, and finally there is an awakening of love. This is the gradual development of love of Godhead for the devotee interested in Krishna consciousness.

This verse is one of many, spanning several generations of Vaishnava theologians, referring to the ‘nine stages of bhakti-yoga’. This verse encapsulates the ideal of Vaishnava self-cultivation, outlining the key stages of spiritual advancement, from neophyte to exalted or ‘pure’ devotee. The key terms introduced here are sraddha (faith), sadhu-sanga (association), bhajana-kriya (devotional service), anartha-nivrtti (ridding oneself of unwanted habits or vices), nistha (steadiness), ruci (taste), asakti (attachment), bhava (love) and prema (pure love for Krishna). While this does represent an archetypal spiritual trajectory, in practice the nine stages do not delineate a clear progression as much as they offer devotees a vocabulary with which to evaluate the trials and tribulations of their own spiritual journey. Devotees, in classes and in private conversations, are encouraged to constantly scrutinise their efforts, always finding fault in their practices and learning to see themselves as ‘fallen’. One cannot be a devotee, as we will see, without first understanding oneself to be in need of Krishna’s mercy. The spiritual journey of a devotee is referred to as sadhana-bhakti, or simply one’s sadhana, defined by Prabhupad as ‘the practice of devotional service’. In his preaching mission to the West Prabhupad prioritised five core devotional activities. One should worship the deities (either attending arati at the temple or worshipping deities in one’s home), one should ‘hear’ the Srimad Bhagavatam (which typically refers to attending classes), one should associate with devotees (sadhu sanga), one should chant the holy name (both japa meditation or congregational kirtan) and one should reside in the holy dham (either Vrindavan or Mayapur). Of course, by attending the full morning programme in Mayapur daily, one has already fulfilled all of the above. Devotees are also expected to do some seva (service). Depending on where one is in the world, this could involve preaching in universities, cooking for festivals or cleaning the temple. The goal of seva is to engage oneself in serving Krishna, and in doing so, keep maya at bay. Sadhana then is the means by which the living entity can go back to Godhead. In common parlance, ‘I’m working to improve my sadhana’, for example, refers to a devotee’s attempts to focus on their spiritual practices while ‘I’m struggling with my sadhana’ indicates that a devotee is having trouble with their spiritual life. This could refer to any number of things, from failing to chant sixteen rounds consistently, to not being able to get up early in the morning to go to the temple. ISKCON offers devotees a series of very systematic guidelines, from which devotees typically assemble their own sadhana,



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according to their ‘conditioning’. Conditioning refers to the extent to which the materially contaminated living entity is entangled in the world (or ‘in maya’). In order to embark on the spiritual journey, and before committing to various practices of self-transformation, one must, in Bhaktivinod Thakur’s terminology, know one’s adhikara (capacity or level of spiritual qualification). Devotees are responsible for their own spiritual journey, and based on their conditioning, it is ultimately up to them how they will assess their own capacity to perform certain ‘austerities’.24 Krishna consciousness is not the same thing for everyone, and being realistic about your capacity is a crucial aspect of spiritual practice. While devotees can commit to Krishna consciousness, or contribute to the movement in various ways, the basic foundation of any devotee’s sadhana, at least in theory, is the ‘four regulative principles’.

Little Compromises with Maya The ‘Four Regulative Principles’ are as follows: (1) no meat eating, (2) no gambling, (3) no intoxication and (4) no illicit sex. There are many ways of being a devotee but the four regulative principles represent the common ground from which one begins to disentangle from the material world. Although widely adhered to, the regulative principles are malleable at times. Devotees come to Mayapur to work on their sadhana, to cultivate Vaishnava virtues and to rid themselves of anarthas (vices). This process of confronting your demons is bound to be painful, and slip ups are to be expected. Prabhupad, after all, often referred to ISKCON as a ‘spiritual hospital’, where conditioned souls come to get better. Devotees often find the first two rules quite easy to follow, some having been vegetarian or vegan before becoming involved with ISKCON, for example. Of the four, ‘no meat eating’ is the one rule that would be absolutely inconceivable for devotees to break. The idea of meat eating is so repugnant that any mention of it is likely to elicit revulsion and certainly condemnation. ‘Meat-eaters’, sometimes referred to as ‘demons’, are often the subject of classes and casual conversations. There is a wide range of ethical arguments, religious and scientific, personal and environmental, that are enlisted in support of devotees’ commitment to vegetarianism. While the other principles tend to have consequences only for devotees’ own spiritual advancement, consuming meat has repercussions for the karma of another soul, that of the slaughtered cow. I never came across an example of a devotee breaking this rule, and even when devotees leave the movement, they tend to remain vegetarian. Not gambling is the least challenging for devotees, as they typically did not gamble in the first place. Although this rule can be interpreted more broadly than just sitting at a blackjack table, it tends to be uncontroversial and was rarely the subject of conversation among devotees. The other two rules tend to be treated a little more idiosyncratically. ‘No illicit sex’ refers to any sexual activity that is not within marriage and for

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procreative purposes. While I did not speak to many devotees about such a personal matter (to do so, I was warned, would be to unfairly make devotees think of the very material conceptions that they have come to Mayapur to escape), I was given the impression that there are a variety of ways to interpret this rule and some are more liberal than others. Not everyone manages to live up to the high standards expected of this particular rule, and abstinence is, at least for single male devotees, a mark of distinction. One male devotee boasted to me, ‘I haven’t passed semen in over ten years’. He was divorced, in his sixties and had lived in Mayapur for those ten years. For him, as for others, not passing semen was a demonstration that he had not only remained abstinent, but had conquered his sexual desires. The rule most often broken (that people could admit to at least) is the prohibition of intoxicants of any kind. While devotees are happy to turn their back on hard drugs or alcohol, should either have been a problem, there are some who struggle with less potent substances such as caffeine. At a Muslim wedding down the road from the ISKCON complex, I accidentally came across a friend of mine, Adideva, enjoying a quick coffee from a Nescafe machine for guests. Somewhat startled and shaking off his embarrassment, he winked and assured me with a cheeky smile that this was his ‘little compromise with maya’. This idea of making concessions, of course, is not restricted to ISKCON devotees. Srinivas Tulasi came across similar indiscretions amongst international Sai devotees in Puttaparthi (2010, 224–25): Despite the best efforts of the Seva Dal volunteers to keep the devotees on the straight and narrow path, I found that some devotees failed at the task of self control. Devotees broke the rules, either by sneaking away to eat or meeting their boyfriends and girlfriends after hours in a cafe outside the ashram premises … a Singaporean Chinese youth who was given a severe warning for buying a pack of cigarettes and smoking them in his ashram room, smiled and said: ‘I cheated’.

In Mayapur, to drink tea or coffee was not common but certainly not shocking, and behind closed doors such a minor infraction would be considered a personal choice. Though most devotees in Mayapur followed the rule against intoxicants quite strictly, there were some, however, whose ‘compromises with maya’ might be a little harder to justify. One devotee in particular, Balrama, who was fond of an occasional cigarette, and had difficulty containing his sexual desires, used to tell me how he and other friends, when back in Australia, would make sure to toast to Krishna before every round of tequila shots. ‘Krishna is my best friend … he wants me to be happy’, he would tell me, while regaling me with tales of sexual conquest. This was certainly an exceptional case, and some of his close friends did comment to me that they did not understand how Balrama could dovetail his spiritual and hedonistic pursuits in this way.25 Although Mayapur is known for being quite conservative when compared with other centres around the world, I was certainly surprised on occasion by



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how these basic rules were interpreted, negotiated or at times simply disregarded. Rumours of adultery, drug abuse and other breaches of the four regulative principles are not uncommon, particularly amongst the youth. How devotees interpret their spiritual life, starting with the four regulative principles, is very idiosyncratic, and is based on their own assessment of their ‘conditioning’ and capacity for spiritual commitment. As I suggested in the introduction, how one pursues the path of Krishna consciousness does not necessarily depend on strict adherence to a central moral code, as was more so the case in the early days of the movement. Devotees do not simply conform to Prabhupad’s ideals and in some cases, they depart from them quite strikingly. Today, as noted, Krishna consciousness appears as an ethics by which devotees, in a bricoleur fashion (Bielo 2012), assemble their own sadhana, and cultivate themselves in multifarious ways as ethical subjects.

Chanting This selective approach to sadhana does not just pertain to the four regulative principles. Chanting, although foundational to Prabhupad’s programme of self-realisation, is practised in various ways in the context of a lay community. In an ashram setting, as I experienced during fieldwork in a temple in San Diego (in 2010), chanting and attending the morning programme are mandatory. Devotees have comparatively little choice as to what activities fill their day. They must rise at 3.30am, eat at a scheduled time and contribute to mundane chores. If a devotee could not keep up, they would soon be asked to leave. For a lot of lay devotees, although they may not always attend mangala arati, for example, chanting is often described as the highlight of their day, and something they cannot do without. Chanting is designed to help the devotee transcend the material world by focusing only on the sacred sound of the holy name. Chanting before the sun rises, devotees often told me, grounds their day in Krishna consciousness. If they do not manage to complete all sixteen rounds in a day, they will make sure to compensate on the following day. While central to one’s sadhana, however, chanting is also acknowledged to be extremely difficult and devotees commit to and struggle with it in various ways. At times, sitting in the temple during the morning programme, devotees looked like they were completely absorbed, with eyes closed, smiling, and head tilted toward the sky. At other times, devotees appeared to be distracted, and seemed to be going through the motions. This was reflected in conversations I had with devotees about the process of chanting. I had naively expected to hear stories of profound transcendental experiences, but for the most part I came across sentiments of frustration, and on occasion, failure. Chanting what are referred to as ‘good’ or ‘attentive’ rounds (where one focuses the mind on the proper articulation of the sacred syllables, themselves considered to be Krishna incarnate in the form of sound vibration) is often spoken of as a constant struggle.26 For some, it is impossible.

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Vaibhava, an otherwise deeply committed devotee in his fifties, active in the community and busy with devotional service, told me about his experiences with chanting. He began by telling me about an amazing experience he had on a ‘japa retreat’ where he had managed to chant for over eight hours: The chanting was extremely easy, it had a life of its own … and on the eighth day I had a vision, and … a taste, a definite taste in chanting. I had a vision of curtains in the temple … so I thought that Krishna is behind this curtain, though even though I have this vision I cannot see him … but I was delighted I had a vision at all … I had you know a cloth over my head for eight hours, I was not able to be distracted by anything and so the chanting was really racing without me doing any effort, it was running on its own and then I felt that my God, this is ecstatic, this is wonderful!!!… Now for the first time I could experience that nectar [sweet experience] … I’ve gotta make this curtain open, so I tried to intensify this chanting to make this curtain open, but the curtain disappeared, and the chanting got pretty heavy…

This spiritual experience happened precisely at the end of the thirty-second round where Vaibhava had told himself he was going to stop that day. He had chanted very slowly so as to pronounce and ‘hear’ the mantra properly, hoping his ‘good rounds’ would lead to a deep experience. While he felt he achieved something, he was also sceptical of his experience and was quick to point out that it was probably not Krishna at all, but more likely his imagination (as he joked would be expected if one ‘sits with a cloth on one’s head for eight hours’). Since this experience years ago, however, Vaibhava has found chanting increasingly difficult. Failing to come close to this experience again, he has today all but given up: I refuse to chant sixteen rounds … because I find myself incapable of doing it to the standard that is expected. To chant sixteen rounds means to hear a fair number of them, ok not sixteen, maybe you hear let’s say half … even ISKCON devotees will admit not near that … and the truth is that they will hear one round maybe … so if I hear one round out of the sixteen, then the rest of the time is mental exercise … then I have no part in this nonsense … I don’t have two hours to waste every day … not enough is actually meditation … I have failed in the performance of meditation … Instead of lamenting and being depressed about it, I find out of the nine processes of devotional life one that really suits me. That is serving! I really can put my teeth into this … so I do it eight hours a day!

Devotees often reflect on both the quality and the quantity of their rounds. While it is quite rare to consider oneself, at least this damningly, to have ‘failed in the performance of meditation’ (this was one of the only cases I came across of someone actually giving up), Vaibhava was confident that reading the books, performing devotional service and worshipping the deities would more than compensate for his failure in this regard. Unlike the Urapmin, for whom failure to live up to Christian ideals often resulted in ‘torment’ (Robbins 2004), Vaibhava was relatively untroubled by this apparent defeat. That he has routinely failed to the point where he has now given up did not seem to me a



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cause for despair, as much as it was an opportunity for Vaibhava to demonstrate for me the truth of the maxim, ‘Prabhupad built a house the whole world could live in’ (in other words, there is more than one way of being a devotee). He had assessed his own capacity and concluded that chanting was not working for him, but this did not mean he was not or could not be a devotee. This just meant he had to do it his way. He had to assess his strengths and weaknesses, and busy himself in devotional service that was suitable for his ‘conditioning’. For Vaibhava, this was in creative seva such as producing and editing short documentaries on devotional topics. So what then are these various practices geared towards? While Krishna prema is the explicit telos, a range of virtues are understood to be both necessary for, and conducive to, the path of Krishna consciousness. Before turning to the discursive idiom of purification, I want to first of all touch upon the foundational virtue of humility.

More Humble Than a Blade of Grass Despite my struggles over the course of fourteen months in Mayapur to follow ISKCON’s philosophy, devotees regularly insisted that I was a devotee. I had certainly never felt that I was a devotee, nor had I claimed to be, although based as it was on my regular attendance at the temple, my fieldwork could certainly have given that impression. While I considered attending the temple to be simply part of my job as an anthropologist (and at times explained as

Illustration 2.3  A young Eastern European devotee chants in the temple during the morning programme. Photograph by the author.

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much), devotees seemed to see things differently. Vallabhi, a middle-aged woman from New Zealand who had lived in Mayapur for around eight years, complimented me during an interview: ‘You are a devotee. You have an ideal temperament, you’re genuine, you’re authentic, you have very sattvic [pure] qualities … there’s something there between you and Krishna … we can see it, we can all see it because we’ve all been through it’. Of course, according to ISKCON’s philosophy we are all devotees, aspects and emanations of Krishna’s divine energy. As Vallabhi attested, there was no question that I indeed was a devotee; my realising it was another matter. While the basic idea that underpinned devotees’ insistence that I was a devotee was the fact that we are all eternal spirit souls, part and parcel of Krishna, there was more to these assertions than I had understood in my first few months in the field. On almost all occasions where my being a devotee was discussed, the tables would at some point be turned. While I was unambiguously a devotee, my interlocutor was ‘trying to be a devotee’ or sometimes would insist they were an ‘aspiring devotee’. On occasion, they were, in their own words, ‘definitely not a devotee’. During an interview with a Dutch guru, Kadamba Kanana Swami, I asked the somewhat loaded question (for reasons that will become clear), ‘are you an advanced devotee?’ He smiled and responded, ‘I’m a neophyte’. Though acknowledging here my clumsy attempt to lead him away from the standard narrative of humility, his response deliberately played on the understanding that in order to be a good devotee, one must identify as ‘fallen’, as conditioned souls unworthy of Krishna’s mercy. As with the Catholic nuns in Mexico that Rebecca Lester worked with, ‘the first stage in the process of religious formation for future postulants is acknowledging a broken self and articulating that sense of brokenness within a religious framework’ (2005, 95). For ISKCON devotees, however, humility is not a stage they pass through, but an affective disposition that they must cultivate over the course of a lifetime. One must be constantly vigilant, and always monitoring one’s own actions, thoughts and desires, lest vices such as pride or envy creep in, detrimental as they are to spiritual life. The insistence that one is an ‘aspiring devotee’ is therefore at the same time a precondition for, and a product of, the cultivation of humility. Always careful to avoid positive selfassessments, devotees in Mayapur prefer to couch their commitment to Krishna consciousness in self-effacing narratives of becoming. When asking residents in Mayapur what a devotee is, or in other words, what one should aspire to, the most common point of reference is what are referred to as the ‘twenty-six qualities of a devotee’. Not only is this list regularly referred to explicitly, but it contains the virtues to which all devotees in one way or another understand to be conducive to developing a detachment from the material world and cultivating a relationship with Krishna. Attending the ‘Brahminical Ethics and Etiquette’ class at the Mayapur Academy, I came to understand that most devotees know these twenty-six virtues as well as I know the alphabet. Although listed elsewhere by others with slight variance,



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Prabhupad enumerates the twenty-six qualities of a devotee in the following passage (Srimad Bhagavatam 5.18.12):27 (1)  [A devotee] is very kind to everyone.  (2)  He does not make anyone his enemy. (3) He is truthful. (4) He is equal to everyone. (5) No one can find any fault in him.  (6)  He is magnanimous.  (7) He is mild. (8)  He is always clean.  (9)  He is without possessions.  (10)  He works for everyone’s benefit. (11)  He is very peaceful. (12) He is always surrendered to Krishna. (13) He has no material desires. (14) He is very meek.  (15)  He is steady. (16)  He controls his senses.  (17)  He does not eat more than required. (18) He is not influenced by the Lord’s illusory energy [maya]. (19)  He offers respect to everyone.  (20)  He does not desire any respect for himself.  (21)  He is very grave.  (22)  He is merciful.  (23)  He is friendly. (24)  He is poetic. (25) He is expert. (26) He is silent.

Of course, the fact that devotees understood these to be ideals to strive for did not always translate into their striving for these ideals. I knew devotees in Mayapur who had large flat-screen TV’s (9). I knew many who prided themselves on their gluttonous appetite for prasadam (17) and others who were anything but silent (26). These virtues pertain for the most part to a very exalted devotee, in most cases a sannyasi. They also, however, often arise in conversation, as devotees would often be praised for their simplicity (13), their temperament (7) or their honesty (3), for example. While each of these qualities is important, the one quality that is most valued above all others is humility. Humility is sometimes included in this list and is implicit throughout, but in common usage it is treated as an umbrella category that encompasses all of these ideals. The third verse (of eight) of Chaitanya’s only recorded writings (known as the Shiksastakam) is dedicated to this virtue: One should chant the holy name of the Lord in a humble state of mind, thinking oneself lower than the straw in the street; one should be more tolerant than a tree, devoid of all sense of false prestige, and should be ready to offer all respect to others. In such a state of mind one can chant the holy name of the Lord constantly.

Not only should one chant in a humble state of mind, but one should be humble in everything one does, or as devotees often told me, referring to the above verse, one should be ‘more humble than a blade of grass’. To be ‘puffed up’, as devotees put it, or proud, is the mark of a neophyte. Like all vices, any traces of pride are to be effaced as a devotee matures, realising himself to be fallen. The central virtue of humility is not only embedded (and embodied) in social interactions, such as offering pranam (kneeling on and touching the floor with one’s forehead and hands) when greeting sannyasis, for example, but it is also to be actively cultivated through mundane interactions. As will be elaborated throughout subsequent chapters, humility is the foundational meta-virtue upon which all other ideals of piety are pursued. One cannot properly pursue the path of Krishna consciousness without cultivating

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humility, and one cannot truly cultivate humility without pursuing the path of Krishna consciousness. As Flood (2004, 139) has suggested is the case in Buddhism (and later Christianity), ascetic practice in ISKCON is necessarily linked to ethics, and ethics to asceticism. ‘Rather than a mechanical method for eradicating impurity’, as Flood describes, ‘asceticism becomes a moral endeavour that leads the ascetic self, after long struggle, to see “things as they are”’ (2004, 120). In ISKCON’s terminology, both ascetic practice and everyday interactions are fundamentally moral pursuits in so far as they are conducive to spiritual advancement. Saba Mahmood has also argued persuasively in the case of the women’s mosque movement in Cairo that ‘ritualised behaviour is one among a continuum of practices that serve as the necessary means to the realisation of a pious self, and that are regarded as the critical instruments in a teleological programme of self-formation’ (2005, 190). While the ascetic practices I described above are certainly deemed central spaces for the cultivation of Vaishnava virtues, my conversations with devotees most typically revolved around their attempts to pursue Krishna consciousness in their everyday lives, outside the temple. As I will elaborate, Krishna consciousness is geared towards a complete transformation of the subject, whereby opportunities for spiritual advancement are to be constantly sought in the mundane routines of the everyday. In this way, devotees must always be attuned to opportunities for what they call ‘purification’.

Purification The idea of purification, as is the case with humility, is pervasive in ISKCON. Although purification is used in many different contexts, the most basic sentiment is that when bad things happen, it is ‘Krishna’s arrangement’. It is his way of ‘purifying’ the hearts of his devotees, and thus bringing them one step closer to going back to Godhead. Purification inheres in meditative practices, attending classes, and worshipping in the temple but also in the mundane: in eating the right food and interacting with others. It provides an explanatory framework that accommodates the trials and tribulations of life. If one loses one’s job and goes bankrupt, for example, this is Krishna’s way of ‘removing obstacles’, leaving the devotee with a clear spiritual path, free of material distraction. Devotees aspire to be able to see Krishna’s arrangement in their daily lives. They aspire, in other words, to be able to detect Krishna’s agency in everything they do, and for better or worse, interpret whatever comes as evidence of his mercy. This could be described in terms of what John Hare calls ‘moral faith’: that ‘[God] orders the world in such a way that we are often enough successful in our attempts to do good to make it worthwhile persevering in our attempts’ (1996, 69). Devotees then must undergo what Tanya Luhrmann (1989) has termed ‘interpretive drift’. Or in Joanna Cook’s assessment (following Luhrmann), referring to the mae chee (lay nuns) she worked



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with in a Northern Thai monastery, devotees must ‘learn to reinterpret subjective experiences and responses in ways that are consonant with religious principles’ (2010, 7). They learn not only to intellectually interpret, but also to affectively experience themselves and the world around them as evidence of the truth of Krishna consciousness. Through such experiences and acts of interpretation, they change their intellectual (and epistemological) habits (see Chapter 3). In doing so, Prabhupad’s teachings are made to resonate with personal experience (and vice versa), and Krishna consciousness is made all the more meaningful in the process. During a focus group interview with some teenagers who live in Mayapur, the story of Jayapataka Swami came up. Jayapataka was sent to Mayapur in 1972 by Prabhupad and has been here since. He has thousands of disciples all over the world, and is widely considered the most senior guru in the movement today. A few years ago Jayapataka had a stroke and is now wheelchairbound and has difficulty communicating, amongst other serious health problems. In response to my inquiries about this idea of purification, one young devotee told me: His Holiness Jayapataka Swami … he got a stroke, and people probably would see it as ‘oh my God, God cursed me’, but he said it’s purification … like, maybe I committed Vaishnava aparadh [an offence against a Vaishnava] but he’s so humble, it doesn’t stop him from devotional service, so it’s just your mentality … Some people I suppose see distress and happiness the same … not that we’re on that level, but that’s what purification is.

Everyone nodded in agreement, as Jayapataka, through his tireless preaching and determination to carry out Prabhupad’s orders despite his poor physical condition, is often held up as an example of an exalted Vaishnava. These young devotees, while highlighting humbly that ‘we’re not on that level’, nevertheless aspired one day to ‘see distress and happiness the same’. They were aware of their inability to see Krishna’s arrangement in their circumstances, but this was something that they were working on. Another girl immediately added: It’s kind of like a test, ‘cause if we want to go back to Godhead, we have to be pure, we have to be pure so Krishna kind of gives us purification to test our faith, to test our love, that’s why maya keeps kicking us in the butt all the time, ‘cause she doesn’t want us to turn around and stab Krishna in the back again…28 but it’s good ‘cause like when you are put into a situation, you’re stung by 35 wasps, you break your leg or something, that’s when you turn to Krishna, that’s when you surrender, and we need to come to a point where we must be always thinking of Krishna, always surrendered to Krishna, not just when we need help … [turning to the others] … Purification and mercy are the same right?

While not all devotees see this as a test, they do see maya ‘kicking them in the butt’ as a necessary aspect of the spiritual journey. Disentangling from the material world, realising your weaknesses and working to purify yourself are going to be painful processes but processes that are nevertheless to be

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interpreted as positive steps towards Krishna. The concept of purification was often the topic of conversations I had with a close informant, Sabuj Das. Sabuj Das is a twenty-five-year old devotee of South Asian descent from London. By profession he is an IT specialist, but when I met him in Mayapur, he had taken five months out of his career to come to explore his spiritual life and, in his words, ‘improve his sadhana’. Like many temporary residents who come to Mayapur, he undertook the Bhakti Sastri course at the Mayapur Institute, which I also attended. This is a highly systematic course that presents ISKCON’s philosophy through both shastra (scripture) and Prabhupad’s books. Four years after joining ISKCON, Sabuj now considers himself a strict devotee. Although he is yet to be initiated, he already refers to Radhanath Swami (a prominent American guru based in Mumbai) as his guru, and has in a short time developed a deep affection for him. Sabuj tells me proudly that he has not passed semen for the past four years, and is now looking to find a suitable female devotee for marriage. His main criterion is that she should be serious about Krishna consciousness. In London Sabuj rises at 5.15am, showers, dresses and chants his rounds until 8am, at which point he goes to work. He spends his weekends with devotees, attending kirtans or going to the Bhaktivedanta Manor in Watford for lectures or classes. While in Mayapur, he follows a stricter schedule, rising for mangala arati almost every day at 3.30am. He studies hard, learning slokas (verses) from the Bhagavad Gita by heart, and worships the deities at the temple every morning. Over the course of my fieldwork, I became very close friends with Sabuj, not least because we seemed to facilitate our mutual ‘little compromise with maya’, in discussing football related matters on a daily basis. Apart from these brief digressions, however, we spent most of our time discussing Krishna consciousness. Sabuj was always keen to discuss how his sadhana was going, and would be interested to see how my attempts at chanting, for example, were working out. We often spent hours discussing aspects of Prabhupad’s books, normally topics that had been covered in class, and particularly their practical application. Sabuj would be ecstatic on a day where he had risen early, chanted his rounds and enjoyed the classes. He would excitedly share his ‘realisations’ with me, when an aspect of the philosophy had suddenly made sense in the context of his daily practice (see Chapter 3). On the other hand, on a day where he may have slept in, or fallen behind with his rounds, he would be visibly stressed. Our conversations about sadhana typically revolved around the central concept of purification, and typically centred on mundane experiences. One evening, I accompanied Sabuj and Acintya, an American devotee from the Bhakti Sastri course, to Gauranga Pizzeria (a rooftop brick-oven pizzeria that opens for three months every year around Gaura-Purnima). After ordering, Acintya had a brief but a friendly exchange with the waitress, who was also from America. ‘How are you?’ she asked. With a big smile, Acintya replied, ‘Much better now that you’re here!’ He continued, ‘You’re my favourite waitress’. As she turned and left after some more pleasantries, Sabuj immediately whispered loudly to Acintya, ‘Prabhu! You can’t say that! You can’t flirt with a



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devotee like that! Maybe she really likes you and you have disturbed her [from her Krishna consciousness]!’29 Unsure of his tone, Acintya laughed it off and insisted that he was not flirting, but just being friendly. However, Sabuj was quite serious and continued to point out how Acintya had just acted in a way that was ‘not very Vaishnava’. Though Sabuj and Acintya were close friends, this incident led to several days of estrangement, leaving me somewhere awkwardly in the middle. It was not until a few days later that we met up again at the pizzeria, at which point Sabuj had changed his mind. The tone had shifted from condemnation to self-abnegation. After some reflection, Sabuj had had what he called ‘realisations’. Firstly, he explained, even if Acintya had had ulterior motives, it was not Sabuj’s role to judge him. Acintya had been in the movement for a couple of years more than Sabuj, and so was to be offered respect as a senior, even though they were close friends and more like equals. Sabuj conceded that maybe he had failed to grasp the cultural difference (perceived between American and British ISKCON) and assumed Acintya was flirting, whereas he was probably just being friendly. He had therefore failed to see the Vaishnava in Acintya, and interpreted the situation from a material perspective, assuming the worst of his friend and fellow devotee. Sabuj insisted now that it was his ‘conditioning’ and his own pride and ignorance that had led to his condemnation of Acintya. The problem was now not whether or not Acintya had indeed acted in a ‘not very Vaishnava’ way but how Sabuj responded. In his own behaviour, Sabuj identified the vices of someone who was proud and judgemental, not the virtues of someone who was humble and tolerant. He had been in breach of ‘Vaishnava etiquette’ and committed Vaishnava aparadh (an offence against a Vaishnava). Sabuj’s apology and analysis of this event lasted for the hour or so we were at the restaurant, and was the topic of many conversations we would have afterwards. These conversations always came back to the idea of purification, or in ISKCON parlance, ‘getting rid of anarthas’. Everybody has anarthas (vices).30 Everybody is imperfect, as I was often told. If nothing else, this is the degraded age of Kali Yuga and we should not expect to find ‘pure devotees’ on this ‘hellish’ planet. The question then is not so much whether or not you have vices, but how you go about identifying and ridding yourself of them. (Remember stage 4 of bhakti-yoga is anartha-nivrtti, or overcoming vices.) What seemed to me to be an innocuous incident served as a powerful lesson for Sabuj, and helped him to confront aspects of his character that he was not aware were holding him back from progressing in his Krishna consciousness. Such incidents were what devotees routinely referred to as purification. When confronted with their own anarthas, devotees would often critically assess their weaknesses. In doing so they were of course also enacting the virtuous ideal of humility, insisting that they were in need of purification. This very articulation and overt explication of one’s experience and understanding of the practical applicability of Vaishnava philosophy in one’s life, as we will see in Chapter 3, is itself an act of piety.

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The process of purification, or getting rid of anarthas, necessitates ‘relentless introspection’ (Lester 2005). One must not only constantly be attuned to the need of purification, one must be able to identify it when it happens and interpret (and articulate it) as Krishna’s arrangement. The disagreement between Sabuj and Acintya was one such incident. Although distressed that his anarthas surfaced, Sabuj talked of this and many other incidents as purification, a chance to confront and rid himself of his vices. It was by Krishna’s arrangement that he was faced with his weaknesses, which he could now remedy. In the process, he could take further steps towards self-realisation. Learning from this incident, Sabuj hoped he could become more humble in his dealings with others. And in cultivating humility through the process of purification he was therefore disentangling himself from his misguided identification with the mundane self that was obscuring his realisation of his essential self.

Conclusion I have focused in this chapter on how a complex theology has been distilled, alongside particular practices, into idioms of detachment, dependence and purification. After introducing the particular conceptions of the self, the world and God by which devotees understand their spiritual journey, this chapter began with an overview of Gaudiya Vaishnava theology. I described how this theology informs the core practices and narratives by which devotees narrate and evaluate their own spiritual progress. While ISKCON’s doctrinal concept of the essential self can be described very much in terms familiar to wider Gaudiya Vaishnava theology, its reception, interpretation and at times negotiation by international devotees cannot be simply cast in theological terms, but must be grounded in everyday striving, as carried out through the agency of the mundane self. With this in mind I outlined how these theological categories become descriptors with which devotees understand their spiritual journey, and come to constitute an ethical vocabulary within which devotees learn to evaluate their spiritual progress and identify their spiritual failings. This chapter has laid out some central concerns pertaining to the theme of moral failure. I have outlined how although most take the four regulative principles and chanting, for example, as foundational to the pursuit of spiritual life, they often commit to and reject some practices in favour of others, depending on ongoing assessments of their own conditioning. In other words, devotees assemble their own sadhana from an extensive repertoire of Vaishnava soteriological strategies, some of which they deem more practical than others in the context of a lay setting. For the most part, however, devotees never seemed to actually ‘realise’ the essential self in the sense of completely transcending the mundane self. Rather, they subsume the mundane self into an oppositional narrative whereby they are always fighting off this misidentification with the body. They are constantly striving to abandon their misguided intuitions about the self while struggling to imbibe ISKCON’s philosophical framework.



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The process of becoming Vaishnava involves not only learning certain metaphysical conceptions of the nature of the self, the nature of God and the world, but committing to a set of practices by which these concepts become meaningful. Devotees must cultivate virtues that are conducive to spiritual progress and self-realisation, and rid themselves of anarthas that can only further entangle them in the material world. However, the spiritual path is incredibly difficult and devotees often struggle with adhering consistently to the path of Krishna consciousness. So while devotees are likely to generously ascribe Vaishnava virtues to others, they are just as likely to ascribe Vaishnava vices to themselves. In addition to aspiring towards a prescribed set of virtues, then, devotees must almost learn how to relate to, and articulate their relationship with, their own vices. They must learn, in other words, how to fail well. While ascetic practices such as chanting are deemed essential to cultivating an affective relationship with Krishna, it is also in mundane encounters and the rhythm of the everyday that devotees must learn to detect his arrangement. Anthropology has often privileged ritual as, in Shulman and Stroumsa’s words (2002, 6), ‘the creative mode of religious life par excellence –the arena in which the person is created along with his or her universe’. In Mayapur, however, it is not just in ritualised spaces, such as the temple, or just through spiritual practices, such as chanting, that devotees are ‘purified’. The ‘empirical laboratory in which one works upon self and world’ (ibid.) is most often situated in the everyday, mundane interactions, the sacralisation, and indeed the moralisation of which, is what it means to be Krishna conscious in a lay setting. I will elaborate on this further in the next chapter with respect to what I call ‘practices of knowledge’ in Mayapur.

Notes   1. Personal interview, Mayapur 2014.   2. Chapter 2 and the Conclusion are derived in part from an article published in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (Fahy 2017a).   3. In ISKCON the terms ‘philosophy’ and the less commonly used ‘theology’ are essentially interchangeable.   4. The Six Goswamis were a group of Chaitanya’s disciples based in Vrindavan in the decades after his death. As Chaitanya wrote very little down, they were charged with the task of systematising his theology.   5. Both jiva and atman connote the ‘soul’ in English, but are distinguished in Hindu philosophy. In ISKCON, though the terms are interchangeable in all but technical descriptions, jiva is more widely used to denote the metaphysical self. This conflation can be traced to Bhaktisiddhanta in the early twentieth century (Sardella 2013, 210).   6. Although there is broad consensus across Vaishnava cosmological schemes, disagreement arises in terms of the hierarchy of heavenly abodes, or the highest form of divinity, for example (see, for example, Williams 2001 on Swaminarayan Hinduism).  7. Achintya bhedabheda (translated generally as ‘inconceivably one and different simultaneously’ or by Melville [1925, 93] as ‘incomprehensible dualistic monism’) is a defining

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 8.  9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

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feature of Chaitanya’s theology that sets Gaudiya Vaishnavism apart from other traditions. It brings together conflicting dualistic and monistic perspectives in an attempt to resolve apparent theological contradictions. Krishna has three ‘energies’. His internal energy makes up the spiritual world, his external energy makes up the material world, and his marginal energy makes up the jivas. The question of whether jivas can ‘fall’ from the spiritual world has been at the centre of a longstanding controversy in ISKCON over Prabhupad’s statements on the subject. Chaitanya Charitamrita, Madhya-lila 2:11:151, purport. Maya is Krishna’s ‘illusory energy’, more commonly translated simply as ‘illusion’. Lawrence Babb (1986, 37) defines it as ‘delusion personified’. Whereas for Shankara, maya is illusion and the world is therefore unreal (as is the case for Buddhists), for Chaitanya, as both the world and maya are part of Krishna’s energy, they are both real (Kapoor 1976, 142) but to be transcended. See Prentiss 1999, 17–24 on definitions of bhakti. This is an important point in wider Brahmanical philosophical discourse that traces a shift from Vedic sacrifice and ritualism to inner renunciation (Flood 2004, 66). Amira Mittermaier has noted that recent ethnographies to emerge from the anthropology of ethics (on Islam) have tended to privilege the individual subject as the locus of agency (2011, 242). While she offers an insightful corrective by looking at the ethical import and agentive complexity of dream experiences in Cairo, my argument here is that while there is indeed a complex reframing of notions of agency (between the devotee and Krishna), this does not serve ultimately to decentre the individual subject as moral agent. This is the first arati of the daily temple programme. Madhava (‘slayer of Madhu’) is another name for Krishna. At 4.30am the deities are not yet dressed in their new outfits, as they have not yet woken up. At 7.15am, there is another darshan where their outfits for that day will be revealed. There are over forty handmade outfits that are rotated in Mayapur for the RadhaMadhava deities alone, and a whole department that works continuously on new garments. As Dian Eck notes, darshan is arguably the ‘single most common and significant element of Hindu worship’ (2007, 1). In one sense it refers to simply looking at, but it also connotes being in the presence of the deities. Prasadam, though usually referring to offered food, refers more generally to anything ritually offered to Krishna. Nrsimhadeva is a half-man-half-lion avatar of Krishna (or Vishnu in other traditions). Comparable to Ganesh in wider Hinduism, he is most often petitioned for protection and is considered a remover of obstacles. In terms of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, ISKCON’s emphasis on Nrsimhadeva is notable, and he is particularly prominent in Mayapur. Tulasi puja involves placing the sacred tulasi plant in the centre of the temple room. As puja is being offered, devotees sing kirtan, while circling the plant clockwise. There are two tulasi plants – one for men on one side of the temple, and the other for women. The number sixteen is somewhat arbitrary. Gaudiya Math devotees are supposed to chant sixty-four rounds per day, but Prabhupad compromised on this number early in his mission to America, so as to avoid deterring interested Westerners. This also allowed devotees to fulfil Prabhupad’s priority of proselytisation. Sadhana comes from the root sadh, ‘to succeed’ (Flood 2004, 99). Sadhana-bhakti itself can be divided into two parts, namely vaidhi and raganuga. While vaidhi-bhakti is characterised by scriptural injunctions and rules, raganuga-bhakti denotes an advanced spiritual state of spontaneous love of God. The difference between these two aspects is at once subtle and profound and will be described in more detail in Chapter 4. The term ‘austerity’ (tapas) in wider Hindu orthopraxy often refers to quite extreme acts of self-degradation, as Van der Veer’s description of the prototypical tyaga (ascetic) of the Ramanandi order illustrates: the ‘wild man with matted hair, smeared with ashes,



25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

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unconstrained by social conventions’ (1987, 690). It should be noted that for the most part, in ISKCON, austerity implies less severe feats of renunciation. Sleeping on a hard bed, living a simple life, and indeed living in India generally are all considered to be ‘performing austerity’ in a mundane sense. Extreme forms of renunciation, beyond periodic fasting or celibacy, for example, are not part of the ISKCON devotional aesthetic. Hirschkind (2006, 69) describes similar incidents when Egyptian friends would light a cigarette while listening to Islamic cassette sermons. Although they would acknowledge that it was wrong to do so, they were just as quick to qualify their actions, adding, these are ‘the kind of times we’re living in’. Gregory Simon (2009) describes a similar situation in the context of Islamic prayer practices in West Sumatra. Khusyak (‘total, sincere concentration on God’), necessary for prayer to be effective, is desired but often felt to be lacking (see also Kloos 2017a, Beekers 2017). Prabhupad takes these qualities from the Chaitanya Charitamrita, Adi-lila 8. Maya is personified as a devi (goddess) and often referred to using female pronouns. Male devotees are referred to as prabhu (master), while females are referred to as mataji (mother). Prabhupad often glossed anarthas as ‘unwanted things’. There are a range of specific anarthas that devotees are particularly weary of, such as avidya (ignorance) or asmita (false ego). The set of anarthas in Gaudiya Vaishnavism reflects but also elaborates on the more common Hindu vices, known as the shadripus (meaning ‘six enemies’), which are kama (lust), krodha (anger), lobh (greed), moha (attachment), mada (pride) and matsarya (jealousy).

3 Practices of Knowledge

To show them special mercy, I, dwelling in their hearts, destroy with the shining lamp of knowledge the darkness born of ignorance. —Krishna (Bhagavad Gita 10.11)

Over the course of my fieldwork, I spent a lot of time in classroom settings. In the mornings I usually attended either the community classes at the gurukul (7–9am) or the Srimad Bhagavatam class at the temple (8–9am), both of which run throughout the year and are mainly geared towards Mayapur’s international residents. Later in the day, depending on the time of the year, I would go to seasonal courses at the Mayapur Institute, such as the philosophically orientated Bhakti Sastri or the more practical Deity Worship class (10.30am– 1.30pm). Both of these are annual, four-month long intensive courses, typically attended by non-residents who stay in Mayapur for the duration of the course. Distinct from the daily classes for residents, these are both highly systematic courses that deal with particular aspects of spiritual life, the former focusing on reading key texts and memorising Sanskrit slokas (verses), while the latter is geared towards training devotees (mostly aspiring pujaris) how to dress, cook for and worship the deities. I also attended workshops, seminars and shorter courses on a range of topics such as ‘Vaishnava etiquette’, ‘empathetic listening’ and japa meditation. Whether sitting on the marble floor in the temple, outdoors on the redbrick floor at the gurukul, or sometimes on plastic lawn chairs in the Mayapur Institute, much of my fieldwork was spent with devotees in pedagogic settings of some description. In attending these classes and courses, I was of course learning about ISKCON’s philosophy and practices. I was also, however, learning about how devotees learn about ISKCON’s philosophy and practices. As we saw in the last chapter, to reorientate oneself in relation to the world, the self and Krishna is a central goal of bhakti and one that informs a sophisticated pedagogy by which ISKCON devotees understand themselves to be advancing in spiritual life. To be able to identify, and respond appropriately to,



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Krishna’s arrangement in the mundane flow of everyday life is the marker of a good lay devotee. Understanding the philosophical principles of Krishna consciousness with reference to one’s own spiritual journey, as opposed to (but not in place of ) abstract theological disputation, informs a particular aesthetic by which devotees strive not only to accumulate knowledge, but to assimilate it. In ISKCON, knowledge can only be defined as such in so far as it facilitates a transformation of the subject. In this sense, it is foundational to, but also just one aspect of, the wider project of self-cultivation.1 I pick up here on ISKCON’s soteriological strategy that I outlined in the previous chapter. While Gaudiya Vaishnava philosophy is unambiguously founded on the pursuit of bhakti, it subsumes rather than rejects the paths of karma-yoga (action) and jnana-yoga (knowledge). In what follows, I outline how ‘practices of knowledge’ animate the ethical lives of devotees in Mayapur. Against a backdrop of both Indian and Western epistemological traditions, I describe the Srimad Bhagavatam class, a particularly popular morning class in Mayapur. While pedagogic spaces such as this certainly facilitate the acquisition of knowledge, the real ethical import, I was to learn, inheres in its assimilation and mobilisation in everyday life. In this chapter, I describe devotees’ understandings and practices of the Vaishnava category of ‘knowledge’ by outlining the ethical significance of vijnana (the practical realisation of spiritual knowledge, pronounced ‘vigyana’,), or what devotees simply refer to as ‘realisation’.

The Anthropology of Knowledge ‘The study of knowledge’, Trevor Marchand writes, ‘is the sine qua non of social and cultural anthropology’ (2010, 1). Knowledge is frequently embedded in anthropological definitions of culture (Crick 1982), and for some it is ‘best conceived and studied as culture’ (McCarthy 1996, 2, my emphasis). However central this concept may be to the anthropological enterprise, anthropologists of religion have often skirted meaningful engagement with knowledge, taking shelter in related categories such as belief. While anthropology might ask ‘what do we know?’, it has been slower to ask ‘how we come to know?’ (Marchand 2010, 3). According to McCarthy (1996), this can be traced back to the Durkheimian assertion that knowledge is a social fact, as echoed by Geertz, for example, amongst others. Advocating what he called a ‘practical epistemology’, Geertz writes, ‘It is a matter of conceiving of cognition, emotion, motivation, perception, imagination, memory … whatever, as themselves, and directly, social affairs’ (1983, 153). Laudable as Geertz’s attempt may be to render epistemology practical, the idea that ‘making knowledge … is an ongoing process shared between people and with the world’ (Marchand 2010, 1) no longer constitutes an interesting anthropological response, but rather, I suggest, should inform a range of important anthropological questions.

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As is the case with anthropology’s historical lack of explicit engagement with morality (Zigon 2007, Laidlaw 2002, 2014a), Durkheim’s rather simple equation of knowledge with the social had the effect of explaining away, rather than explaining anything about, the production, politics or practices of knowledge across cultures. As a result, in the shadow of Durkheim’s observation, twentieth-century social science often talked around, rather than talked about, the most interesting questions about knowledge. One can certainly point to notable exceptions, particularly from the late twentieth century, both within sociology (Mannheim 2013, Berger and Luckmann 1966) and anthropology (Evans-Pritchard 1937, Levi-Strauss 1966, Horton 1997, Barth 1975, Geertz 1983, Strathern 2005, Kresse 2007, Ingold 2000, High, Kelly and Mair 2012). More recently, cognitive anthropology has represented a significant development (Boyer 2001, Sperber 1994, Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2007, Bloch 2012, Cohen 2010), however, one that has for the most part evolved alongside, rather than in productive dialogue with, broader social anthropology. What we might tentatively call then an ‘anthropology of knowledge’ has emerged piecemeal in recent decades, and now informs several fields of enquiry. The ghost of Durkheim, however, is not the only demon that needs exorcising. While twentieth-century anthropology (of religion, in particular) shied away from the concept of knowledge, it often inadvertently engaged with it by treating the related category of belief. As is the case with many of our cherished categories such as culture, religion or kinship, belief has been what Matthew Engelke (2002) refers to as a ‘thorny concept’. Many of the difficulties that have proliferated (of definition, ascription or function) have been traced back to the philosophical assumptions that underpinned anthropology’s sometimes uncritical projection of its own conception of ‘belief ’ onto the ‘other’. Religion was often defined in terms of beliefs and ideas rather than its attendant practices, betraying an entrenched bias for the ideational. As many have since pointed out, the term belief has a very particular history, and cannot be disentangled from the Western philosophical and Christian traditions (Pouillon 1982, Ruel 1982, Southwold 1983) within which it evolved. This is what Fenella Cannell (2005) has characterised as the ‘Christianity of Anthropology’. Spurred on by the epistemological ‘crisis’ of the mid-1980s, anthropologists began asking questions such as ‘Why do we know and they believe?’ (see Fabian 2012, 444). Not only had anthropologists unwittingly endowed the concept of belief with universal importance over other aspects of religious life, but the basic assumption that belief could be treated as a common category that translates across cultures turned out to be deeply problematic. The most influential critique came from Rodney Needham. In his widely cited work Belief, Language and Experience (1972), he advocated the abandonment of the word altogether, writing of belief that ‘The tacit assumption … is that this common psychological category in the English language denotes a common human capacity which can be ascribed to all men’ (1972, 3). Of course, all men aside, the problem is made all the more difficult by the fact that even within



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Western philosophical discourse, the term has consistently evaded definition. For Hume, belief was ‘something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgement from the fictions of the imagination’ (cited in Needham 1972, 53) while for Kant, who placed belief ambiguously between opinion and knowledge, ‘the word belief refers only to the guidance which an idea gives me, and to its subjective influence on the conduct of my reason’ (1998, 464). The following question then arises: if we cannot agree on what belief is, how can we ascribe it to anyone at all? I suggest here that in a similar sense the category of knowledge that we often unreflectively bring with us into the field is a product of a Western philosophical tradition, the mobilisation of which often has had the effect of obscuring how people do, or what people do with, knowledge across cultures. Dwarfed by the rich philosophical tradition of enquiry into knowledge, when approaching this concept, anthropologists have often, understandably, looked to philosophy for guidance. Consequently, anthropological engagement with knowledge often mobilises a particular Western philosophical conception of knowledge as ‘justified true belief ’. This conception can be traced back to Plato, through Descartes and Kant, and up to the late twentieth century. While a range of responses to problems of definition has emerged (most notably, Edmund Gettier’s influential 1963 paper, ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’), Western philosophy has traditionally treated knowledge as broadly speaking representational. That is to say knowledge describes mental representations of the world. Thus conceived, knowledge is mental, disembodied, and is a fundamentally different phenomenon altogether from action. Knowledge is something we call upon so we can act, but ‘knowing’ itself does not constitute action in the world. Within philosophy the representationalist perspective has recently been challenged (Frisina 2002) but the Cartesian commitments that the tradition has so long espoused have not dissipated overnight. That there are different ‘ways of knowing’ (Harris 2007) is taken as axiomatic in anthropology today. The Rylian distinction between ‘knowing-how’ and ‘knowing-that’,2 as an example, has been picked up more or less explicitly by anthropologists (Luhrmann 1989, Ingold 2000). I suggest here, however, that in smuggling certain philosophical assumptions into definitions of ‘knowledge’ or ‘knowing’, anthropologists are yet to engage with some important questions about how people practise knowledge across cultures. Anthropologists have attempted to move away from the assumption that knowledge and action are essentially different phenomena. They have gone about this principally by treating knowledge as constitutive of, rather than itself a kind of, action (or in anthropological terms, practice). Our knowledge of the world, then, anthropologists have tried to demonstrate, cannot be understood as separate from, but is foundational to and generative of, our actions in the world. Bringing knowledge and practice into dialogue, however, anthropologists have tended to reproduce the distinction that they are trying to transcend: that knowledge and practice are fundamentally different phenomena.

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In Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte (1993), Michael Lambek looks at knowledge, in his words, ‘in the context of ’ practice. While he does bring knowledge into dialogue with a range of categories such as personhood and morality, as I intend to do here, Lambek characterises knowledge essentially as ‘a thing with which we do things’ in the world, rather than as a thing we do in the world. In an article in which he attempts to sketch a blueprint for an anthropology of knowledge, Fredrik Barth similarly frames knowledge as ‘what a person employs to interpret and act on the world’ (2002, 1). But of course the idea that knowledge is simply an accumulated resource that informs people’s judgement and actions in the world is quite a particular conception. While I am not suggesting that knowledge does not inform action (it does), I argue here that we cannot afford to cling to an a priori definition of knowledge that rests on a particularly Western dichotomy that privileges the ideational over the practical. In this chapter, I proceed from Johannes Fabian’s assertion (2012, 444) that ‘matters appear in a different light when we think of knowledge as an activity or practice’. Speaking to a range of ethnographic examples that have focused on knowledge in Eastern religious contexts (Cook 2010, Jordt 2007, Parry 1985), this chapter describes what I call practices of knowledge. By this, I want to suggest that knowledge itself is an important category that devotees strive to understand and practise as part of wider ethical projects of self-cultivation. The Gaudiya Vaishnava category of knowledge cannot be reduced to mental representations (though that is not to say it cannot also appear as such), but only becomes ‘knowledge’ when it is embodied, practised and ‘realised’ in the world. While I bring Western and Indian philosophical traditions into dialogue in what follows, my argument in this chapter is epistemological only in so far as epistemology itself is an important ethical category for devotees in Mayapur.

What Is Knowledge? At the International Leadership Sanga (ILS) conference in Mayapur in March 2014 which gathered devotees from all over the world, ISKCON’s Minister for Education took to the stage to ask two simple questions.3 ‘Have you learned anything new?’ he excitedly asked the audience, to which they responded with a resounding ‘Yes!’ He followed this up with, ‘has it changed you?’ ‘Yes’, they again responded, this time with slightly more hesitation. The latent understanding he was invoking was that unless knowledge is transformative, it is not knowledge at all. Such a conception of knowledge speaks to a wider Indian epistemological tradition from which Gaudiya Vaishnavism emerged, and to which ISKCON traces its roots. To shed light on this idea, I will outline a set of epistemological concepts that animate ISKCON’s discourse on knowledge. In describing the Indian (and the Gaudiya Vaishnava) tradition that informs understandings and practices of knowledge in ISKCON, I am not suggesting that international devotees in Mayapur perfectly embody these ideals any



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more than I would suggest that, as a European anthropologist, I embody the Western philosophical tradition. As has already been touched upon, it is often by their very failure to imbibe Vaishnava virtues, epistemic as well as moral, that residents in Mayapur define themselves as devotees. Rather, I describe these epistemological categories as they are understood by devotees to frame a particular cultural conception of knowledge as both a tool and telos of their own projects of self-cultivation. Western epistemology (like most areas of philosophical enquiry) can be traced back to fourth-century BC Athens, and specifically to Plato’s dialogues. The questions posed by Socrates about knowledge (epistêmê) in Plato’s Theaetetus and other dialogues have catalysed a rich tradition that has enticed prominent philosophers, from Kant to Hume, and more recently Wittgenstein and Ryle. Knowledge, as we saw, traditionally defined as ‘justified true belief ’, is at the centre of a range of concepts – including belief, justification and truth – that have informed this tradition of enquiry. From the dichotomous schools of empiricism and rationalism, for example, to the more nuanced pragmatism or foundationalism, the questions that frame Western epistemology concern the nature and definition of knowledge, and correct processes of its acquisition. What is knowledge? By what means do we acquire knowledge? Western philosophy is not alone in asking these questions. Knowledge is a pervasive and multi-faceted concept in both Gaudiya Vaishnava and wider Indian philosophy. However ostensibly similar to (or however often translated as) the Western concept of ‘knowledge’, jnana is a particular cultural construct that, along with its attendant connotations, must be learned by devotees.4 Although, as outlined in the previous chapter, jnana is pursued only in so far as it is conducive to bhakti, it is nevertheless an important concept in the pursuit of Krishna consciousness.5 Of the eighteen chapters of the Bhagavad Gita, three are devoted to the exposition of the concept of knowledge. It is a weapon to combat ignorance (Bhagavad Gita 4.42), a boat to cross over the ‘ocean of miseries’ (Bhagavad Gita 4.36), and, as Krishna tells Arjuna (at the beginning of this chapter), knowledge is a lamp in the darkness (Bhagavad Gita 10.11). Throughout both the slokas (verses) and the purports (commentaries) in this and other important texts such as the Srimad Bhagavatam, ISKCON devotees learn not only what one should know, but how one should go about knowing. They learn what it means to be a knowing subject through a range of practices of knowledge that require, and are also conducive to, particular virtues, both epistemic and moral. What then is knowledge? Knowledge is fundamentally, as was often quoted to me, ‘anything connected with Krishna’. As an often-cited and illuminating example of what is not knowledge, devotees, following Prabhupad, would refer to Indologists (or scholars, generally). Prabhupad writes of Indologists that ‘such unauthorised persons may be very learned by academic qualifications, but because they do not follow the principles of devotional service, hearing from them becomes a sheer waste of time’ (Srimad Bhagavatam 1.8.36, purport). Scholars, along with scientists of all stripes, are often referred to as

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‘foolish’. How could one ‘know’ so much about Vedic culture, and yet not follow the then obvious path back to Godhead? How could one be able to recite so many slokas but not be able to live one’s life around Vedic injunctions? The guru at the helm of the gurukul, widely regarded as the most authoritative expert on all things ‘Vedic’ in Mayapur, told me, ‘academics today do not cultivate knowledge, because they don’t cultivate character with intelligence. Real knowledge is both character development and intelligence’. In other words, knowledge is defined by its capacity to facilitate the cultivation of virtue and ultimately a transformation in the knowing subject. That knowledge must be framed in relation to the ultimate goal of going back to Krishna is an important parameter when thinking about what knowledge is worth pursuing and what knowledge should be discarded. This also points to an important distinction that underpins this chapter, between knowledge (jnana) and the practical realisation of knowledge (vijnana).6 The term vijnana resonates with Aristotle’s phronesis (often glossed as ‘practical wisdom’ or ‘reason’ but translated by Lambek (2000, 309) as ‘moral practice or judgment’). As was very much the case for Aristotle, vijnana is a meta-virtue in the sense that it informs all aspects of one’s life and is at the heart of how devotees understand the pursuit of Krishna consciousness. To learn from scholars or scientists would be ill advised, as while they may have had jnana, they most certainly do not have vijnana. If one is not performing devotional service and following the scriptural injunctions, then one can maybe accumulate but cannot practically ‘realise’ knowledge. Although devotees sometimes conflate these two terms, jnana is a central concept and an ethical imperative only in so far as it is conducive to vijnana. When devotees speak of knowledge (in English), they often conflate the two, eliding the distinction outlined here, but implied in their usage of the general category of ‘knowledge’ is an understanding that privileges vijnana. The term knowledge then is a problematic reduction of a complex category in Vaishnava thought. It is one however that my informants use every day. In many ways, vijnana is a more apt translation for what I will be referring to in this chapter, particularly in the context of the ethical import of knowledge. Although this distinction between vijnana and jnana was initially obscured by my own assumptions about what constituted knowledge (as something to be accumulated or acquired), it points to a rich Indian philosophical tradition within which devotees understand their pursuit of knowledge. Indian epistemology, as is the case in the Western tradition, is founded on enquiries into what Stephen Philips (2011) translates as ‘knowledge-generating processes’ (pramana). This refers explicitly to the processes by which one can acquire knowledge and includes perception, experience and reason, amongst others. Different schools propose various theories of knowledge (pramanashastra), or hierarchies of reliability. The Nyaya school for example, lists four pramanas, or knowledge-generating processes, including pratyaksa (perception), anumana (inference), upamana (analogy) and shabda (revelation) whereas the Carvaka school relies solely on pratyaksa. ISKCON traces itself back to Madhavacharya for whom perception, inference and testimony are the



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only knowledge-generating processes.7 In other words, perception, inference and testimony are the only reliable means to knowledge. While Indian and Western epistemology deal with similar concepts, these distinct traditions of enquiry have yielded some rather dissonant conclusions. Although both might agree (to some extent) on the ‘knowledge-generating processes’, the hierarchy of reliability by which they are presented in ISKCON might raise some eyebrows amongst a Western secular audience. This points to another key distinction implied in the relative conceptions of knowledge in the two traditions, as outlined by Jonathan Parry (1985). Knowledge in Mayapur, as Parry notes of the Brahmanical tradition (in Benares), is not something that is out there in the world to be discovered, but is something to be recovered (from particular sources of authority, such as shastra). So while ‘knowledge’ may be the goal in both cases, discovery and recovery require fundamentally different approaches. This of course reflects a more general distinction between scientific and religious conceptions of the search for knowledge. Taking inference (anumana), perception (pratyaksa) and revelation (shabda, or shastra when talking about scriptural authority), for example, ISKCON advocates what devotees refer to as a descending process (avarohapantha). Shastra, as the word of God, is taken to be infallible and should be accepted without qualification, while both logic and perception are fallible knowledge-generating processes and should be understood as being relative to shastra. The ascending process (aroha-pantha), on the other hand, which for devotees describes how modern science constructs knowledge, relies on logic and perception while treating testimony as highly dubious. These are epistemological axioms that frame any conversation on knowledge in ISKCON. Of course, while modern science might look askance at the ‘descending’ epistemological construct (based on recovery) presented by ISKCON, the centrality of scriptural authority is not at all unfamiliar in Western religious traditions. To conceive, as we often unconsciously do, of modern science as the glorious culmination of enlightened reason (based on discovery), and the pinnacle of Western epistemic virtue, would be erroneous. Rather, as is the case with ISKCON’s epistemology, it is one of many iterations of a complex and disparate field of discourse and practice that can only be understood in the context of both its axioms and its aims. ISKCON, however, tends towards dichotomisation, whereby Prabhupad’s teachings represent the cream of the Vedic wisdom and the West represents the ‘foolish’ other, epitomised by the naïve and credulous assumptions of materialist science. Knowledge, however conceived, does not exist in the world without knowers. Devotees do not simply reproduce but interpret and negotiate nuanced understandings of this philosophical tradition in their own individual pursuit of Krishna consciousness. Indeed, that ‘knowledge’ in the Vaishnava sense of vijnana necessitates an embodiment of, rather than simply an encounter with truth, is inherent in ISKCON’s understanding and practices of knowledge. Accepting the epistemological framework of the descending process, devotees must imbibe a distinct set of epistemic virtues in order to cultivate

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themselves as knowing subjects. Scepticism, doubt or open-mindedness, highly regarded as they may be in the context of the secular Enlightenment tradition, constitute epistemic vices for devotees, as they are obstacles to the path of bhakti. While scepticism or doubt, for example, are of course to be mobilised when engaging with non-spiritual subjects, when it comes to the spiritual path, one should be ‘surrendered’. One must accept the infallibility of the sacred texts, rid oneself of the propensity to doubt and follow the guidance of a guru. In line with the virtue of humility, devotees must surrender their intellectual obstinacy and accept the divine authority of ‘guru, sadhu and shastra’ (in ISKCON parlance) in order to advance in spiritual life and become capable of realisation. To elaborate on the concepts outlined above, I turn now to describe the pedagogical setting of the Srimad Bhagavatam morning class. While communal (and ritualised) spaces such as those which I describe below are foundational to a range of practices by which devotees accumulate knowledge, I will suggest that the ethical significance of knowledge resides for the most part not in its acquisition but its ‘realisation’, which is by no means confined to the classroom itself.

Srimad Bhagavatam Morning Class 8am approaches and the international devotees begin moving from the temple downstairs to a large room on the first floor, where the daily Srimad Bhagavatam class is being set up. This is the last event of the morning

Illustration 3.1  Srimad Bhagavatam morning class. Photograph by the author.



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programme, which begins for some (mostly brahmacharis) with mangala arati at 4.30am. Entering the room, I follow others in prostrating myself before the empty asana (guru’s seat), and find a space to sit. Some younger devotees enthusiastically scramble to make sure everything is in order. The day’s sloka must be written on a blackboard,8 the asana needs to be prepared and a flower garland is set aside for offering to the speaker. One devotee starts playing the mrdunga, as others join in a small kirtan, singing the mahamantra. The devotees working for Mayapur TV set up a small camera in front of the asana, so the class can be taped and broadcasted around the world. Some cushions are laid out on the floor for senior members of the community, typically Prabhupad disciples, while most simply sit on straw mats that cover the cold marble. Facing the speaker, women sit on the right and men on the left. The walls are painted white, with the exception of a map of Nabadwip painted in the far left corner, and a large painting of Prabhupad watching over the congregation. There are several open windows at the back of the room that look out onto beautiful landscaped gardens that surround the temple. Some devotees chat and exchange greetings while most use these few minutes before the class to catch up on their rounds. All around me sporadic syllables of ‘Hare’, ‘Krishna’ and ‘Rama’ penetrate the thickening murmur of chanting, as the room soon fills up to about fifty people.9 As the ecstatic kirtan downstairs echoes its last crescendo, the speaker on this particular day, Jaganmitra (introduced in Chapter 1), arrives and prostrates himself before the asana, as everybody else prostrates themselves before him. Signalling the beginning of the class, he quietly starts singing Jaya Radha-Madhava to the chime of kartals. Jaganmitra then leads the congregation in reciting a series of mantras to invoke auspiciousness. Although these may vary minimally depending on the occasion, they always include the Srimad Bhagavatam supplicatory mantra Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya. With the scene set, the class follows a strict formula. Jaganmitra takes the congregation through a reading of Prabhupad’s translation of the Bhagavatam verse, translation and purport. This particular class was based on a verse from the sixth canto or book (Srimad Bhagavatam 6.1.64), as it appears in Prabhupad’s translation. The Sanskrit verse (complete with diacritics) and word for word translation are written on a blackboard before the class:10 tām eva tos.ayām āsa pitryen.ārthena yāvatā grāmyair manoramaih. kāmaih. prasīdeta yathā tathā

Word for word tām – her (the prostitute); eva – indeed; tos.ayām āsa – he tried to please; pitryen.a – he got from his father’s hard labour; arthena – by the money; yāvatā – as long as possible; grāmyaih. – material; manah.-ramaih. – pleasing to her mind; kāmaih. – by

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presentations for sense enjoyment; prasīdeta – she would be satisfied; yathā – so that; tathā – in that way.

The class then follows a close reading and recitation of Prabhupad’s translation and purport (neither of which are written on the board): Translation

Thus Ajāmila began spending whatever money he had inherited from his father to satisfy the prostitute with various material presentations so that she would remain pleased with him. He gave up all his brahminical activities to satisfy the prostitute.

Purport

There are many instances throughout the world in which even a purified person, being attracted by a prostitute, spends all the money he has inherited. Prostitute hunting is so abominable that the desire for sex with a prostitute can ruin one’s character, destroy one’s exalted position and plunder all one’s money. Therefore illicit sex is strictly prohibited. One should be satisfied with his married wife, for even a slight deviation will create havoc. A Krishna conscious grihastha should always remember this. He should always be satisfied with one wife and be peaceful simply by chanting the Hare Krishna mantra. Otherwise at any moment he may fall down from his good position, as exemplified in the case of Ajāmila.

Once the mantras are recited, Jaganmitra begins by reading out the Sanskrit words individually, which are then echoed by the congregation. Following this, with a subtle but standardised melodic inflection, he chants the Sanskrit sloka one line at a time (in this case, the first four lines above). Again, after each line the congregation repeats it back in turn. Jaganmitra then asks the congregation if anyone would like to lead the recitation. Two men do so in turn, as the congregation again echoes the verse, line by line. Women are then offered the same opportunity, and again two volunteer. Next, Jaganmitra moves onto the direct translation, firstly calling out the individual Sanskrit words followed by the English translation (which as in this case, may be a word or a phrase). After the congregation once again repeats this back, Jaganmitra reads the whole translation without a response. He then reads the English translation once more, now one phrase at a time, as the congregation repeats the lines back (in this case each sentence is broken into short phrases as it should fit roughly into a particular metre). Finally, he reads Prabhupad’s purport without interruption, before moving on to discuss the content. By now, ten minutes have passed. Throughout this first part of the class, which is essentially a communal reading of Prabhupad’s translation, the congregation is expected to participate, and most do so enthusiastically. This reading is ritualised in that it adheres to a standard formula within which both speaker and congregation have invariant roles. The remainder of the class revolves around an exposition of both the sloka and Prabhupad’s purport, after which there is some time for questions. Although there is a degree of freedom



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in how different speakers approach this, classes typically adhere to a particular Vaishnava preference for narrative over argumentation. The speaker’s exegesis of the text takes around forty minutes and is modelled on Prabhupad’s written purports (and his classes). Very much in keeping with a long Indian tradition of textual commentary, the aim of the written purport, or the discussion, is to extract key themes from the verse, rendering the philosophy meaningful to a modern congregation. After finishing the reading, Jaganmitra begins with what was to be the theme of his discussion: ‘This is the danger of associating with maya’. Invoking here the popular idiom in ISKCON that alludes to the pursuit of sensual enjoyment or material comfort (and implies the rejection of spiritual life), Jaganmitra paused for a moment before recapping the popular story of the fall of Ajamila (which is recounted in full over the course of this and several other verses of the Bhagavatam). Ajamila was a respectable Brahmin who, walking in the fields one day, came across a shudra (member of a lower caste) and a prostitute ‘embracing’ (a common euphemism for sex). Despite having a beautiful and chaste wife, Ajamila became enamoured and against his better judgement hired the prostitute to be his maidservant. Soon they began an affair and Ajamila ‘fell down’ (a common euphemism for moral indiscretion). He lost all of his brahminical qualities and became a drunkard and a murderer, amongst other things. Despite coming to embody debauchery and vice, Ajamila still attained salvation by a fortuitous twist of fate. As he was dying, Jaganmitra explains, Ajamila happened to be calling out for his pet Narayana (another name for Krishna). Because he was ‘remembering Krishna’ at the time of death, however unintentionally, Ajamila was purified of his sins and attained salvation. While Jaganmitra spent some time explaining the mechanics of karma and salvation (and justifying what, even in Vaishnava discourse, seems a morally dubious outcome), his discussion of the text revolved for the most part around ‘the danger of associating with maya’. As I had come to expect of his style (and that of speakers in general), Jaganmitra filled forty minutes or so with anecdotes, calling on Vaishnavism’s rich canon and extensive cast to demonstrate the dangers of associating with maya. While philosophical disputation is an important aspect of ISKCON’s epistemological tradition, in keeping with the narrative emphasis of the Bhagavatam itself, ISKCON has a strong preference for expounding its philosophy through colourful stories and exemplars rather than (but importantly, not instead of ) abstract theological discourse. Jaganmitra referred in his discussion to his own relationship with Prabhupad, to Sanskrit slokas pertaining to the theme, and at times to technical theological terminology that illuminated the verse discussed here. While he somewhat spontaneously told stories of previous acharyas, or episodes from his own or others’ spiritual path, he always tied them in both with ‘the fall of Ajamila’ and the broader theme of the dangers of maya. There was some time left at the end for questions, which, as is typical, were asked with a

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respectful tone of subordination. Questions tend to be of one of two types: either clarificatory or practical. The most common questions pertain to the practical application of the content of the class. In this case, one quite broad question was asked: ‘What  can someone do in order not to  fall down when facing maya? We are very weak but maya, she is very strong’. Jaganmitra’s response was quite simple: ‘We should go to our shelter, Krishna, when faced with maya’. He continued to emphasise the importance of chanting, following the four regulative principles, and reading Prabhupad’s books. The point he stressed throughout was that the only way to defeat maya was to take shelter with Krishna. ‘Who are you going to remember at the time of death, when you are leaving your body?’ he asked, before finishing the class, addressing the congregation directly. ‘You should know … who is your shelter in this life’.

The Piety of Pedagogy The Srimad Bhagavatam (also called the Bhagavata Purana) is considered, along with the Bhagavad Gita, the most important text in ISKCON’S canon. As it summarises many difficult themes from the much older Vedic tradition, it is affectionately referred to by devotees as ‘the ripened fruit of the Vedas’. It is one of eighteen Puranas and is commonly ascribed to the sage Vyasadeva, who is also said to have written the Mahabharata, the Vedas and the other Puranas.11 It comprises twelve cantos (books), and has 400,000 verses, covering a wide range of topics from the creation and geography of the universe to the nature and pastimes (deeds) of Krishna. In the context of wider Hindu literature, it is notable, but not exceptional, for its emphasis on bhakti as a path to salvation, as opposed to the alternative paths of jnana or karma. The Srimad Bhagavatam recounts popular stories from the life of Krishna, particularly in the tenth canto (referred to by devotees as ‘the Krishna book’). In contrast to the philosophical Upanishads, for example, the Bhagavatam is distinct for its emphasis on stories, from King Kamsa’s several vain attempts to kill the infant Krishna, to Krishna’s slaying of various demons. This is an important distinction, as noted above, as it is reflected in ISKCON’s pedagogical emphasis on narrative, in favour of, but not in place of, theological disputation. From Krishna’s lifting Govardhan Hill and the swallowing of a forest fire, to episodes like that of Ajamila, the Bhagavatam is replete with stories that rival (and in interesting ways, parallel) those of the Homeric epics. The Bhagavatam class presents devotees with, and guides them through, a rich theological tapestry of tales that informs devotees’ understanding of their own pursuit of Krishna consciousness. In coming to these classes, devotees are certainly learning (in the sense of acquiring knowledge). They are learning Sanskrit terms. They are learning about the deeds of previous acharyas and they are learning how to engage with the text in a prescribed and ritualised manner. They are also learning how to defend ISKCON’s philosophy, in particular against competing ideologies



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such as mayavadism (impersonalism), atheism and modern science. One speaker summed up the basic importance of knowledge thus: ‘It is important to understand the material manifestation [the world] in order to transcend it’. Based on my assumptions about what constituted a class, or indeed knowledge, I had expected that the ethical imperative would inhere in the act of dissemination (on the part of the speaker) and acquisition (on the part of the congregation). I had expected, in other words, that the value of knowledge, representational and disembodied as I had assumed it to be, was to be found on either side of the process of transmission. Knowledge, I had naïvely assumed, was a cognitive commodity and its moral import resided in its transaction. This is certainly the case and knowledge is valued as something to acquire, but this only explains one aspect of what is going on in the classroom. While the daily Bhagavatam class makes possible this transmission of knowledge, it also facilitates several other ethical imperatives, for both the speaker and the congregation. Participation in, or attendance of, the class is itself an act of piety. ‘Hearing the Bhagavatam’, as attending the classes is colloquially rendered, finds its precedent, like most ISKCON practices, in both Gaudiya Vaishnava and wider Indian tradition. Gathering with other devotees (sanga) to listen or discuss the glories of Krishna or Chaitanya (katha), for example, is at the heart of the Vaishnava aesthetic and was instituted by Prabhupad and his neophyte devotees from the early days of his Western mission. Similar to what Charles Hirschkind (2006) describes for Muslims in Egypt, learning to hear (in the sense of attuning one’s attention) in a certain way is bound up in a wider set of practices of self-cultivation. This involves not only the cultivation of particular epistemic virtues, such as surrender, but also necessitates the physical embodiment of such virtues. Devotees are expected to comport themselves in certain ways during class. As described above, they must participate at certain points, echoing invocation mantras and word for word translations, for example. They must sit upright with their legs crossed, and they tend to keep their gaze fixed on the speaker (or the text) throughout. To ‘listen attentively’ requires them to not just passively attend the class or simply hear the speaker.12 In the Aristotelian sense, surrender, as it is understood by devotees to be a precondition for the proper reception of knowledge, is framed as an epistemic virtue that is cultivated through embodied disposition. While what I describe above was nominally a ‘class’, the Vaishnava tradition of ‘hearing the Bhagavatam’ only fits this category in some ways. While not rejecting Prabhupad’s appropriation of secular categories (which is itself significant), it might be more appropriate to describe the Bhagavatam class as a sermon. These ‘classes’ are didactic exegetical discussions that bring a range of morally imbued stories and exemplars (of both vice and virtue) into the everyday lives of devotees, through a somewhat ritualised performance of an ideal of Vaishnava pedagogy. Within this pedagogical space however, more is taking place than just the transmission of knowledge. The practices of knowledge that animated this class reflect the distinction already outlined between the

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Gaudiya Vaishnava and the Western category of knowledge. The knowledge that was presented in both the Bhagavatam class and other classes I attended was geared towards practical realisation. In coming to these classes, devotees do not just learn what to know, but they also learn how to know. In other words, they learn how to implement knowledge in their everyday lives, how to put the philosophy of Krishna consciousness into practice. In this case, devotees are learning about maya, but more importantly they are learning how to recognise and deal with the dangers of maya in their everyday lives. When faced with maya, as they are constantly in this material world, devotees must learn what it means to ‘take shelter in Krishna’. Devotees are not just accumulating jnana, then, but are participating in a wider set of practices of knowledge, both cognitive and embodied, the telos of which is the assimilation of vijnana. In attending the class, devotees then are fulfilling a range of ethical imperatives related to the reception, accumulation and assimilation of knowledge. While the class provides a ritualised space within which piety is performed, it is not the only space where epistemology underpins ethical self-cultivation. Indeed, these classes are only meaningful in so far as they can guide devotees through the mundane flow of everyday life. Furthermore, they are scenes of ethical striving only in so far as they are generative of vijnana, or what devotees often simply refer to as realisation.

Realisation In their everyday interactions, conducting seva, attending the temple and meeting with friends, as described in Chapter 2, devotees must relearn the world they live in. They must learn to inhabit this world of maya as a place where around every corner the material energy is waiting to distract the devotee from the path back to Godhead. The classroom, however central it may be to devotees’ sadhana, is not the only place that one can, or indeed should, learn. It is rather a ritualised performance of Vaishnava pedagogy where devotees learn how one should go about mobilising Krishna consciousness in one’s own ongoing transformation. Devotees not only learn how to inhabit the world afresh, they must also cultivate a humble disposition whereby they can come to understand that in everything they do there is a latent pedagogical potential. Everything they do then becomes an opportunity for advancing in spiritual life, punctuated by what are referred to as ‘realisations’ (as was the case in the previous chapter with respect to ‘purification’). In Mayapur, as Lambek writes of Mayotte (1993, 164), ‘the whole community views itself as being in a state of learning’. Again, this is not simply about acquisition, but about the assimilation or practical realisation of knowledge (vijnana). This informs, and is informed by, a range of concepts at the intersection of ethics and epistemology. To be able to see obstacles as opportunities for spiritual advancement, to find the meaningful in



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the mundane, is an important virtue for devotees in Mayapur. Krishna consciousness, in this sense, is both an ontological perspective and a moral disposition, similar to what the Jains refer to as samyak darshan, or the ‘Right View’ (see Laidlaw 2010), or what Tibetan Buddhists call dag-snang or ‘pure vision’ (Gyatso 2002). Krishna consciousness denotes what Theravada Buddhists call satisampajanna, a ‘mindfulness and awareness of the way things are’.13 It is a way of being in and perceiving the world. To perceive the latent pedagogical import in everything from temple worship and chanting to relationships with others and daily chores is a virtue that is both moral and epistemic, and is central to the pursuit of spiritual advancement. Although the Bhagavatam class is an important site for the transmission of knowledge, it is only a foundation for its assimilation, and one of many aspects of the practice of knowledge in Mayapur. As devotees accumulate knowledge, they undergo transformation, through which they become increasingly ‘qualified’ to know. You cannot be a Vaishnava without ‘knowing’, and you cannot ‘know’ unless you are a practising Vaishnava. For devotees, knowledge implies subjective experience (anubhava). Jnana coupled with anubhava leads to vijnana, which is itself the defining ethical imperative of the knowing subject. It is this idea of transformation that I want to pick up on here, with particular reference to the concept of realisation. Once I understood the basic importance of knowledge as inherently transformational, a range of previously obscured concepts seemed to make sense. I realised that my eagerness to learn about ISKCON philosophy (in the sense of simply acquiring knowledge) was a poor foundation from which to understand what was going on in the classes I was attending. Without a sincere desire to cultivate a humble disposition towards a set of principles by which I could transform my very self and relearn the world around me, I was almost entirely missing the point. My assumptions about what I took for ‘knowledge’ informed my intuition as to what sort of questions would be revealing. To borrow Lambek’s phrase, I was locked in ‘a hesitant grappling of epistemological horns’ (1993, 27).

Rama and Mohini Mohini, from Chile, and Rama, from the USA, had been in Mayapur for three years. They live in the grihastha area inside the ISKCON complex with their young daughter who had just started school in Sri Mayapur International School (SMIS). Mohini, of Jewish descent, met devotees in 1992 and has been involved with ISKCON ever since. Rama, coming from a strict Pentecostal background, had been a devotee for ten years, after having met Mohini. They are both initiated disciples of Jayapataka Swami. Mohini and Rama had a very comfortable life in America. They had a five-bedroom house, steady jobs and large flatscreen TVs. They were, in Mohini’s words, ‘living the American dream’. Tiring of the pursuit of material wealth and struggling to live by the principles of Krishna

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consciousness in the West, they started thinking about the idea of moving to Mayapur. Their main reasons, as was typical of families in Mayapur, were to protect their daughter from exposure to the depravity of Western culture, to concentrate on their spiritual life and to be close to their guru, Jayapataka Swami. They were unsure about the move and decided to leave it, in their words, ‘up to Krishna’. After making some initial enquiries, they told me, ‘things started to happen’ that convinced them that this was the right move. Rama was offered a job at SMIS and they had little trouble finding a place to stay. This was, in their words, ‘Krishna’s arrangement’. Three years later, Rama was a teacher at SMIS, while Mohini was working with the Mayapur Community Sevaks (MCS) office. They had recently invested in a plot of land to the north of the complex where they were building their own house. Over the course of my research, I became close with both Rama and Mohini. I was invited to their house for lunch and dinner on several occasions. We would often bump into each other around the complex, where inevitably, they would patiently explain for me a theological concept I was having difficulty understanding. They were down-to-earth devotees who liked to present themselves as such. In their words, they ‘did Krishna consciousness their own way’. While committed to the regulative principles and a life in Krishna consciousness, they would often confess their various ‘little compromises with maya’. Alongside working for ISKCON, attending the temple and chanting daily, they were happy to watch Hollywood movies once a week or so. On one occasion, having invited me over for dinner, they added some mushrooms to a vegetarian pasta dish; mushrooms, like onions, are forbidden in ISKCON). Although Mohini was proud of having renounced the material fruits of capitalist America, she had kept one of her Louis Vuitton bags that she ‘just couldn’t give up’. A recurring theme that emerged in our conversations was the difficulty of balancing Krishna consciousness with family life. They, like most grihasthas I knew, found it hard to chant sixteen rounds every day, and could count on one hand how many times they had attended mangala arati in recent months. While they understood that reading Prabhupad’s books, chanting and attending temple programmes, for example, was foundational to a good spiritual life, they had a young daughter and had to constantly juggle priorities. This was not so much a source of anxiety as it was of regret, as while they understood that they had important obligations as parents, they lamented that at times their spiritual life suffered. They were confident however that later in life they would be able to concentrate more on their sadhana. I sat down with Rama and Mohini after lunch one afternoon for an interview. After talking for a while about bringing together both spiritual and family life (of course, not wholly antithetical pursuits), we came to discuss knowledge. I asked them why I had not often seen them at the morning Srimad Bhagavatam class in the temple, as devotees had often emphasised for me how important attending such classes was in Krishna consciousness. They explained that as they had a young daughter, they could rarely make it but usually watched it online on Mayapur TV. ‘When you have kids’, Rama told



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me, ‘they become your deities’ (referring here to the small deities that grihastha families often worship in their own home).14 This quickly led us into a general discussion on the importance of knowledge for devotees. I wanted to know why there were so many classes. In particular, I was interested in the fact that the classes often seemed to cohere around the most basic philosophical principles that I had assumed everyone around me knew. Despite covering a range of philosophical texts and narrating a variety of colourful stories from Vaishnavism’s rich five hundred-year history (and beyond), every class I attended ultimately reiterated familiar axiomatic principles: ‘you are not this body’ or ‘we are all spirit souls’, for example. Mohini insisted, as had others, that she did not have a great grasp of the philosophy, that she could not recite many slokas. After a brief pause, she told me, ‘some people like to hear the stories and things like that … for me … it’s like … read the verse, the translation, explain a little about the philosophy … but then tell me how to apply it in my life … I think we need to be more practical in life’. I asked what she meant by ‘being more practical in life’. ‘Everything you want to learn about life is there [in the Srimad Bhagavatam]’, Mohini insisted. ‘It’s up to you whether or not you apply it’. I pressed her for an example. Although he was settled and happy in Mayapur, Rama was recently going through what Mohini called a ‘dip in his sadhana’. He was finding it hard to wake up early, struggling to chant his rounds and had started reading nondevotional books (he had a weak spot for Tom Clancy’s espionage thrillers). Rama was also spending more and more time watching American TV shows on his laptop. Although, as noted, such ‘compromises with maya’ were usually deemed fine in moderation, Mohini felt that recently Rama was losing his way. She attributed this to maya: ‘Once you let maya take control of you, [your sadhana] can drop very quickly so you’ve gotta be careful to observe your surroundings and recognise maya when it’s there … to turn yourself back around’. ‘If you just focus your mind on Krishna’, Mohini explained, ‘have faith that everything is happening for a reason and you start controlling your mind, things are going to be better’. Maya was creeping up on Rama in the form of Western pop culture. However, Rama had had what he called a ‘realisation’ (or in this case, it seemed Mohini had a realisation on his behalf ). Trying to identify why he was finding spiritual life so difficult, Rama told me he was ‘taking shelter in maya’, by which he meant he was indulging in non-devotional pursuits. Mohini. who was mutually thought of as spiritually stronger, felt that in order to improve his sadhana, Rama should ‘take shelter in Krishna’, in this case, by taking care of his own deities. It is very common for grihasthas in ISKCON today to have their own deities, which they worship in their homes, sometimes instead of having to go to the temple every day. Rama and Mohini chose the deities of Jagannath, Subadra and Baladev, all of which are popular among devotees in Mayapur, I was told, because they are the most merciful. Since Rama has taken on this responsibility, Mohini noted, there has been a dramatic change. He now rises at 5am every day, prepares offerings and performs arati for the

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deities. He has been chanting sixteen rounds consistently and feels his sadhana is progressively improving. In this case, Rama (with Mohini’s help) did not attribute his ‘dip in sadhana’ to his failure to attend mangala arati or morning classes, or even his poor chanting. These were symptoms rather than causes. His failure, and the reason for his dip in sadhana, was his inability to identify maya in his daily life. He knew what maya was, as does the most neophyte of devotees, though in letting his guard down, he failed to recognise that he was losing the battle to fend maya off in his own life. It was only with Mohini’s help and their mutual ‘realisation’ that he was now getting back on track. Realisation, then, as in Rama’s, refers to the practical application of knowledge in everyday life (vijnana). Sabuj Das (who we met in Chapter 2) often emphasised to me the distinction between jnana and vijnana. ‘Knowledge and realisation are not the same thing’, he often told me. By ‘knowledge’ in this case, he was referring to the mundane use of the term, which for him connotes an objective or detached cognitive representation. By realisation, he was referring to how one practises that knowledge in everyday life. Another devotee in the Bhakti Sastri course remarked, ‘as we identify ourselves more and more as a soul, as a servant of Krishna, it changes our behaviour … and that type of knowledge which changes our behaviour … that’s a realisation’. This is the telos for the knowing subject.

Conclusion The categorical dichotomy I have presented in this chapter between Western ‘knowledge’ as disembodied, objective and representational, on one hand, and Vaishnava ‘knowledge’ as subjective, transformational and inherently practical, on the other, is an ethnographic one, and one that any ISKCON devotee would be familiar with. Considering Prabhupad’s difficult task of transmitting a complex theological tradition into the West, it is not surprising that ISKCON’s pedagogical priorities are underpinned by what Saba Mahmood describes as ‘a concern for ease of comprehension and practical applicability’ (2005, 119). In terms of ISKCON’s rapid transformation from a monastic movement to a predominantly lay congregation, of course, ISKCON’s survival depends on the institution’s ability to render Prabhupad’s teachings meaningful for devotees outside of the ashram setting and faced with new challenges that recourse to Prabhupad’s books can only partially inform. As the distinction between jnana and vijnana suggests, knowledge is not only embedded in, but by definition, constitutes practice. Furthermore, knowledge, as it is meaningful in the lives of devotees in Mayapur, is transformational. Knowledge can only be defined as such if it is conducive to the pursuit of Krishna consciousness and brings about a profound transformation in the knowing subject. An emphasis on practicality is not of course restricted to Vaishnavism, nor is it only found in Hinduism (see, for example, Jordt 2007, Cook 2010,



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Luhrmann 2012). Laidlaw (2010, 69), for example, has shown how ‘as an ethic of self-formation, Jainism embodies a practical rather than a rationalist conception of knowledge … and its conclusions are not logically derived from self-evident axioms but need to be learned, experienced, and enacted in practical terms by each person for him- or herself ’. Lawrence Babb (1982, 59) similarly notes of the Brahma Kumari, ‘what is at issue is not what the world is, but what we are in relation to the world. It is not a question of learning that the world is not what it seems to be, but of cultivating the ability actually to experience existence in the world in a new way. It is not conviction that counts, but the experience of being changed in relation to the world’. He continues, ‘as in other forms of Hinduism, the emphasis is not just on knowing, but on knowing-as-an-experience’. Making a similar point, O.B.L. Kapoor cites M.N. Sircar’s Hindu Mysticism (1943) where he writes, ‘to [the Vaishnava] knowledge and life are eternally associated. To know is to act. Every fresh acquisition of knowledge makes the movement of life more graceful, for it reveals the love that is at the heart of existence; and the two axes of love are knowledge and service’ (Kapoor 1976, 182). The pragmatic question of how to pursue a virtuous life is an important one for any religious tradition, and indeed success often depends on the ability not only to make philosophical principles comprehensible but also to render them meaningful in broader projects of ethical striving. Mahmood (2005) makes this point in the context of the women’s mosque groups in Egypt. Rather than attending weekly classes on Islam to simply acquire knowledge about the Quran, women go with the expectation of learning how to mobilise Islamic ideals in the pursuit of a virtuous life. Mahmood notes that ‘participants’ engagement with classical commentaries on the Quran … is geared not so much at developing abstract understanding of these texts but at a practical knowledge bearing on daily conduct’ (2005, 120). She continues, ‘The mosque participants often encounter practical problems when trying to realise an ethical life based on orthodox readings of Islamic scriptures’ (ibid.). In this case the women Mahmood worked with must follow the Quranic injunction not to associate freely with men on one hand, but on the other, their lives are lived in secular institutions such as the university, where such injunctions are impossible to fully realise. It is only by frequently attending the mosque lessons that the women can cultivate the ability to navigate such inevitable conflicts. While this chapter has been informed by a distinction between Western and Indian epistemological traditions, ISKCON’s conception of knowledge is not all that unfamiliar in the West. Indeed, in many respects it resonates profoundly with how the ancient Greeks conceived of philosophy. As Pierre Hadot eloquently describes (1995, 83): Philosophy did not consist in teaching an abstract theory – much less in the exegesis of texts – but rather in the art of living. It is a concrete attitude and determinate life-style, which engages the whole of existence. The philosophical act is not situated merely on the cognitive level, but on that of the self and of being … It is a

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conversion – which turns our entire life upside down, changing the life of the person who goes through it.

Ancient philosophers (Hadot makes particular reference to the Stoics), then, were not ‘dealing with mere knowledge, but with the transformation of our personality’ (ibid., 85). In ancient Greece philosophy was a ‘mode of existing-inthe-world, which had to be practised at each instant, and the goal of which was to transform the whole of the individual’s life’ (ibid., 265).15 While we might look to Descartes then for instigating, and Kant for cementing Western philosophy’s representational bias, it is worth keeping in mind when talking about any particular cultural construction of knowledge, that our own intuitions, practices and assumptions have a rich history of their own (see Foucault 2005). Dealing with the problem of knowledge, anthropologists have often smuggled the philosophical definition of ‘justified true belief ’ into their analysis. More recently, there have been those who have sought to redress this bias. Addressing puzzles of epistemological alterity, some anthropologists, more or less explicitly, have taken as a point of comparison the Western dyad of reason and emotion (Lutz 1988, Wikan 1990, Parish 1994, Hirschkind 2006, Pandian 2009, Cook 2010). In these accounts an ethnographic distinction often arises between (various permutations of ) the heart and the mind. For example, in describing the ethical potency of both meditation and the power of Pali in Northern Thai Buddhism, Joanna Cook outlines the difference between the brain and the heart/mind (jai): ‘What makes Pali suitable for … practices of ethical self-formation is its capacity to act on the “heart/mind” and it is through correct attention to the effects of Pali language that the sensibilities of the ethical subject are formed’ (2010, 104).16 There is a clear distinction, she notes (2010, 106), ‘between knowing dhamma and having dhamma’ (analogous, I would suggest, to what I have referred to above as accumulation and assimilation). With respect to popular cassette sermons in Cairo, Hirschkind (2006) similarly writes about how adherents must learn to ‘hear with the heart’ (as Cook also discusses in a related passage). Although certainly relevant to any discussion on epistemology and ethics in Mayapur, I have deliberately not focused here on the role of emotion in ISKCON’s conception of knowledge for two reasons. Firstly, while I sympathise with the move to undermine the Cartesian assumptions that often serve to misinform our attempts to understand ‘knowledge’ in the field, to reconfigure the knowing subject along the lines of reason and emotion in the case of ISKCON would be a misrepresentation of their own understanding of their tradition. As we will see in the next chapter, emotion is systematically theologised alongside, and entangled in, ISKCON’s conception of knowledge; it would certainly not be uncommon for devotees to make reference to something akin to ‘knowing with the heart’ to explain how they came to understand the truth of Krishna consciousness. However, in this particular case, introducing the affective aspects of their own epistemological discourse would be to shy away from the rich Gaudiya Vaishnava argumentative tradition that

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elaborates on, and confidently challenges Western understandings of knowledge on its own terms. Secondly, emotion as a site of moral action will be the subject of the next chapter. Based on the soteriological hierarchy I outlined in Chapter 2, I elaborate on the ethico-aesthetic trajectory that guides devotees on a path from knowledge to emotion. While this chapter has argued that knowledge is virtuous when it is deemed conducive to devotion (and therefore emotion), I will describe in the next chapter how cultivating the ability to respond to ISKCON’s teachings in an affectively appropriate manner is considered a higher goal.

Notes  1. As Foucault (2005) has argued in the case of the West before Descartes, such a conception of knowledge as transformational and subjective (rather than methodological and objective) was widely familiar. With particular reference to subjectivity, to know oneself (gnothi seauton) and to care for oneself (epimeleia heauton) were not so easily disentangled before what he calls the ‘Cartesian moment’.  2. First outlined in Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949).  3. This is a biennial conference where leading figures such as temple presidents and gurus gather in Mayapur to attend a series of seminars on a range of themes relating to ISKCON’s worldwide mission, including preaching, leadership and management.  4. Knowledge of spiritual matters (vidya), furthermore, is distinguished from mundane knowledge (jnana), and although both are important for devotees, the term jnana often encompasses both material and transcendental knowledge in everyday usage.  5. As Karen Prentiss notes, there is an inherent tension in bhakti traditions between emotion and intellection (1999, 20).  6. The term vijnana is translated variously depending on the source or the tradition in which it is contextualised. Surendranath Dasgupta (1922, 143) translates it simply as ‘consciousness’ while Karl Potter (1977, 482) translates is as ‘inner flow of consciousness’. Prabhupad himself is inconsistent in his translation, though context is important. His translations include ‘pure knowledge’ (Srimad Bhagavatam 10.40.29), ‘realised knowledge of the soul’ (Srimad Bhagavatam 11.18.46), ‘direct realisation of His opulence and sweetness’ (Srimad Bhagavatam 12.6.7), ‘spiritual potency’ (Srimad Bhagavatam 10.16.40) and ‘transcendental knowledge’ (Srimad Bhagavatam 12.3.14), for example. An approximate translation that best represents devotees’ colloquial usage of this term would be ‘practical realisation of spiritual knowledge’ (see www.krishna.com/glossary, last accessed 19 July 2019).  7. Devotees do, however, make frequent use of other pramanas, such as analogy (upamana) and experience (anubhava) in everyday discourse.  8. The sloka is written in Roman alphabet as the vast majority of international devotees cannot read Devanagari. This is not to suggest however that they do not understand the Sanskrit (unlike the example of Pali in Northern Thailand that Cook [2010] describes). Although Sanskrit is not spoken (nor was this ever considered an ideal to aspire to), devotees typically have an extensive vocabulary of foundational concepts and, as in this class, are guided carefully through slokas to ensure comprehension.  9. Almost all attending this class are international devotees as there is a separate class in Bengali downstairs, attended by local brahmacharis and Bengali pilgrims. 10. Although in the printed edition Prabhupad included Devanagari at the beginning, for practical purposes, this is left out of the morning classes. I have included diacritics here

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11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

as they appear in both print and in the class. For this sloka, see http://www.vedabase.net/ sb/6/1/64/en, last accessed 19 July 2019 The Puranas, sometimes called the ‘fifth Veda’, represent a continuation of and development on the themes expounded in older Vedic literature. Wendy Doniger (1993) dates the (written) Puranas, in stages, from 250 ad to 1000 ad, though they originate from a much older oral tradition. The distinction devotees often pointed to between ‘hearing and ‘listening attentively’ is similar to what Hirschkind (2006, 70) describes in the Egyptian context where yasma’ (to listen) and yunsit (‘to incline one’s ear toward’) are distinguished. For a similar distinction in Thai Buddhism, see Cook (2010, 103–108). This is Charles Hallisey’s (2010, 144) translation, which also connotes moral prudence. Antagonism between family commitments and spiritual life is a pervasive theme in Indian religious traditions (see Babb 1986). It should be kept in mind that philosophy in ancient Greece was not universally perceived as a virtuous pursuit, but was at times deemed morally dubious. See Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds for an alternative to Hadot’s somewhat idealist account presented here. Rajiv Malhotra (2011) makes a similar case for Sanskrit.

4 Learning to Love Krishna

The predominant feature of the Gaudiya is always looking for Krishna… not ‘I have him!’… In Gaudiya theology, we are always looking for that union with Krishna, always feeling that we fall short of it, always feeling that we’re not getting it and then immediately taking that back upon our own lack of qualification… so the love has to show in the eagerness for that union and the more that becomes an overwhelming desire to just dedicate everything to Krishna and to practically not be able to spend a moment without Krishna. —Kadamba Kanana Swami1

There is a popular story that ISKCON devotees often tell about an incident that happened in the early years of the movement in America.2 One day, a man was overcome by emotion during kirtan and began rolling on the floor with his eyes closed and arms outstretched, apparently in some sort of fit of divine ecstasy. Unsure how to handle the situation, some of the devotees reported this to Prabhupad and asked him what they should do. Without a second thought, Prabhupad dismissed the episode as nonsense and instructed them to kick the devotee rolling on the ground and see if he felt any pain. That, he assured them, would demonstrate the difference between ecstasy and exaggeration. This story, and its frequent retelling, reflects a deeper institutional aversion to what are considered over-the-top displays of emotion in ISKCON. Such displays, although not uncommon in other Vaishnava sects, have no place in ISKCON’s devotional aesthetic. If something like this were to take place, it would be met with severe scepticism, and likely ridicule. Despite attending the temple several times a day, I never once came across anything like what this story describes. Nor could anyone I asked recall ever seeing such a spectacle. And as devotees were often quick to point out, not even Prabhupad himself displayed such ‘ecstatic symptoms’ in front of the deities. The latent understanding is that no devotee would be so naïve as to think themselves so spiritually advanced as to be capable of such transcendental emotions, reserved as they were for only the most exalted devotees.

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This is not to say devotees should not be emotional; they should. Indeed, the whole purpose of Krishna consciousness is to facilitate a deeply emotional relationship with Krishna. Emotion is both the means and the ultimate end of a life of devotion. Everyday spiritual practices such as chanting or kirtan are geared towards the evocation of emotions, which helps devotees to put Krishna at the centre of their lives. Kirtans are designed to elicit a variety of emotional responses, ranging in tone from reverence to revelry (as described in Chapter 2). In the temple, devotees sing while gazing affectionately at the deities. They dance, often with their head tilted upwards, their eyes closed and the palms of their hands turned to the sky. While one should certainly be moved, however, one should always be measured. In other words, devotees must cultivate the ability to manage their emotional worlds (Zigon 2010). They must learn to aspire towards particular emotions, or affective dispositions, and eschew others. They must learn to cultivate a particular loving relationship with Krishna while at the same time paying attention not to wander outside the institutionally prescribed modes of relationality that ISKCON espouses. Emotions that pertain to mundane sociality (such as compassion) are not ignored, but they are sidelined in a theology of moral emotions that centres on the pursuit of the highest stage of spiritual advancement, prema (‘pure love for Krishna’). In the previous chapter I outlined how the path of knowledge (jnana-yoga) is important only in so far as it is conducive to the path of devotion (bhakti-yoga). Devotion, of course, implies a strong affective undercurrent. For centuries, a striking emotional aesthetic has served to set Gaudiya Vaishnavism (and similar bhakti sects) apart from other Hindu traditions. Performances and displays of ecstatic devotion, as we will see, have often invited negative attention. Behind the apparent ‘unfettered emotionalism’ (T.K. Goswami 2012, 129), however, is a highly systematic theology of moral emotions through which ISKCON, like all Vaishnava sampradayas, has had to negotiate its own path. In what follows, I turn to the rich history of the moralisation of emotions in the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition and outline how ISKCON’s philosophy has been informed by the context of its cross-cultural transmission to the West and back again to India, paying particular attention to moral narratives that cohere around the seemingly unattainable spiritual goal of prema. While prema is the ultimate goal towards which devotees understand their spiritual practice to be directed, they also understand that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to attain in this lifetime. In place of this central but effectively unrealisable ideal, I describe how devotees come to rely on Krishna’s mercy. In conversation with what Julia Cassaniti (2014) has termed the anthropology of moral emotions, I suggest that the careful aversion to displays, or indeed claims of particular kinds of overt emotional experience is best understood by treating emotions as sites of moral self-cultivation. In Mayapur, this entails not only striving for particular emotional states, but at times managing their impossibility.



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The Anthropology of Moral Emotions This chapter speaks to a body of anthropological literature that with varying levels of explicitness engages with what Steven Parish (1994) and others have referred to as moral emotions (Briggs 1970; Rosaldo 1980; Abu-Lughod 1986; Lutz 1988; Laurizten 1988;; Wikan 1990; Ahmed 2004).3 Although moral emotions are just recently taking centre stage, anthropologists have in fact been writing about, or in and around, them for a long time (see Throop 2012). Indeed, within the anthropology of emotions morality has been a persistent but peripheral subtheme. Earlier ethnographic accounts, however, tended not to identify moral emotions as their subject, nor did they mobilise a consistent theoretical vocabulary to deal with the theme of morality. This is largely attributable to the fact that much of the anthropological literature on emotions appeared before the ‘ethical turn’ (Faubion 2011). In recent years, however, there have been several more explicit attempts by anthropologists working on emotion to engage with moral philosophers, such as Foucault and Heidegger (Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006; Throop 2010, 2012, 2014; Zigon 2010, 2013; Cassaniti 2014; Hollan 2014). Within the fledgling anthropology of moral emotions the idea of ‘managing emotions’ has emerged as a particularly salient trope. The concept of managing emotion, or ‘emotion work’ (Hochschild 1979), finds a precedent in Unni Wikan’s work on Bali (see also Hollan 1992). In her influential ethnography Managing Turbulent Hearts (1990), Wikan describes how ngabe keneh (translated as ‘managing the heart’) becomes a moral injunction in Balinese culture. She attempts to redress what she argues are inaccurate interpretations in previous works on Bali, in particular targeting Geertz (1973) for criticism. One of her central vignettes is a story of a young girl, Suriati, whose fiancé had recently died. Several days after leaving for his funeral (some distance away), a cheerful Suriati returns, appearing to be her ‘usual sparkling self ’. Wikan was struck by the atmosphere of merriment and the constant joking that surrounded her return from what surely was an occasion for grief. Here was an example of the ‘studied drama’ Geertz had famously described. Seeking to explain the ‘semblance of [the] emotionally erased’ (that she argues Geertz misinterpreted), Wikan contextualises the role of emotion in the Balinese understanding of health and balance, linking individual conduct with concerns of self-value, amongst other ‘cultural facts’ overlooked by Geertz. The constant jeering and laughter that Wikan observed is justified by Suriati as necessary to keep her from falling further into sadness. This, Suriati explains, would be detrimental not only for her own health but for others around her. Wikan argues that ‘making one’s face look bright and clear’ is not, as had been previously presented, an ‘innate aesthetic mood or ingrained disposition’ but a ‘deliberate attitude, a willed response’ (1990, xvi) that can only be understood in the context of wider conceptions of personhood, morality and the collective good. The apparent aversion to, or as Wikan

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observes, the repression of, public mourning is not to be thought of as simply erasing emotion, but rather managing it. Although she does not refer to Wikan, Julia Cassaniti (2014) provides a strikingly similar account of emotion management (Hollan 1992) in the northern Thai Buddhist town of Mae Jaeng. Cassaniti focuses on the virtue of tham jai (which she translates as ‘acceptance’ or ‘making the heart’). Like Wikan, Cassaniti describes her initial confusion at the seemingly emotionless responses of a family to their loved one, Sen’s, downward spiral into alcoholism-related illness. What Cassaniti at first had identified as curiously unemotional detachment, however, as was the case in Wikan’s account, turned out to be a reflection of a particular moral-emotional aesthetic in which she identifies the pervasive ideal of acting ‘without intentionality, to do things without emotional attachments’ (2014, 289). Like Suriati, Cassaniti’s informants understood it as necessary to respond to their loved one’s illness in a particular manner that reflected wider understandings of what it means to be a good person. Emotional dispositions such as tham jai, along with jai yen (calmness) and ploy wang (letting go), Cassaniti shows, are not merely the ‘underpinning of moral judgments’ but are themselves ‘objects of moral assessments’ (2014, 280). The ability to manage one’s emotions properly, in other words, is not simply facilitative of virtue, but is itself a central moral imperative. As has often been the case in the wider anthropology of emotions, both of these accounts focus on temporal episodes of rupture, or particular instances of explicit emotion management. In other words, they engage with the performative dimension of emotion work. In Cassaniti’s case, this focus informs her engagement with the anthropology of ethics, which centres on Jarrett Zigon’s (2008) Heidegger-inspired concept of ‘moral breakdown’. Zigon’s moral breakdown rests on a particular distinction between morality and ethics, wherein morality refers to a mundane or habitual unreflective disposition, while ethics implies explicit and distanced reflection on the rightness or wrongness of one’s actions. Ethics arises in moments when the otherwise everyday unreflective disposition (morality) is disrupted. Of course, as Cassaniti presents a moment of rupture, Zigon’s moral breakdown certainly proves a useful analytical framework. However, as Zigon himself has elsewhere shown, learning to manage one’s emotional world often necessitates going beyond temporal episodes of rupture, and takes the form of sustained projects of moral selfcultivation. In his article ‘A Disease of Frozen Feelings’ (2010), Zigon looks at how drug addicts in a church-run rehabilitation programme in St Petersburg are enjoined to learn how to manage their emotional worlds so as to be able to engage appropriately in normal social relations (the inability to do so being one of the common characteristics of recovering addicts). Zigon describes this, using the language of his informants, as a process of ‘thawing frozen feelings’. The ethical goal, Zigon explains, is ‘the cultivation of a new moral person who can properly control and manage his emotional world’ (2010, 341). Of course, while this process of thawing frozen feelings may be punctuated by episodes of rupture, learning to manage one’s emotional world entails a



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sustained project of self-cultivation that an emphasis on rupture runs the risk of obscuring. Zigon is not the first anthropologist to pay attention to the cultivation of enduring affective dispositions. In Politics of Piety (2005), Mahmood outlines the centrality of emotions in Islam. Mahmood describes the significance to Islamic ethical life of what she calls the classical triad of fear (al-khauf), hope (al-raja’) and love (al hubb). While women’s mosque lessons are geared towards cultivating a pious disposition, they are also, Mahmood suggests, important spaces for the ‘creation and orientation of the emotions such a disposition entail[s]’ (2005, 233). However, fear is not in and of itself a virtue. It only becomes a virtue when it is directed towards God, at which point it is described as taqwa (which also translates as piety), a mode of relationality, or to use Jason Throop’s (2014) term, a moral mood.4 A mode of relationality, much like a moral mood, connotes an enduring affective disposition that transcends the distinction between explicit ethical reflection and mundane or habitual morality. Importantly, it also transcends the temporal boundaries of episodes of rupture. What emerges from these and other recent attempts to account for moral emotions is that emotions are not, as they have often been portrayed in the Western philosophical tradition, ethical epiphenomena (Nussbaum 2003). They do not simply constitute motivational devices or ‘underpinnings of moral striving’ but are themselves objects of ethical evaluation. And while emotions seem to be particularly amenable to moralisation during episodes of rupture, as Zigon, Mahmood and Throop have shown, they also appear as objects of broader sustained projects of self-transformation. In the case of emotions in Mayapur, temporal episodes of rupture certainly provide insight into devotees’ wider ethical projects, but prema is typically conceived not in terms of moments, but, as we will see, lifetimes. Unlike tham jai (acceptance) or jai yen (calmness) in Thailand, to take Cassaniti’s examples, prema cannot be performed (at least by an average devotee). Its moral import then is not to be found in its explicit performance, but rather in how devotees articulate its place in their own sustained projects of self-transformation. In this respect, Mahmood’s observations about taqwa more closely reflect the centrality of prema in Mayapur, but again there are some instructive differences. While for many Muslims ‘the absence of fear is regarded as the marker of an inadequately formed self ’ (2005, 235), the apparent absence of prema in Mayapur is not a marker of inadequacy. Its moral significance does not necessarily lie in its attainment, but in how devotees manage its effective impossibility within the prescriptions and prohibitions of Prabhupad’s pedagogy. In what follows, I turn to Mayapur and to the moral narratives that cohere around the pursuit of prema. I then trace the deeper Gaudiya Vaishnava theology of moral emotions before outlining how the history of Prabhupad’s cross-cultural mission has helped to shape the kinds of emotional worlds today’s devotees can strive to inhabit.

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The Paradox of Prema I had arranged to meet Vallabhi (who we met in Chapter 2) for an interview at her apartment in the grihastha area. Arriving, I took my shoes off and upon entering paid obeisances to the deities. As Vallabhi was finishing a phone call, I was invited to make myself at home. Having just cycled from outside of the ISKCON complex in forty-degree sticky heat, I was happy to wait in the airconditioned living room. Vallabhi’s apartment was similar to most of the homes of Western devotees I had been invited to in Mayapur. There was a smell of burning incense along with freshly cooked prasadam, and kirtan was playing through speakers in the living room. The décor was minimalist and everything was immaculately clean. There was not a lot of furniture aside from a small bookshelf full of Prabhupad’s translations and some mats and cushions on the ground, where devotees would sit, sometimes for meals, sometimes for gatherings. The walls were bare, with the exception of a couple of paintings, one of Gaura-Nitai (Chaitanya and Nityananda), and another of Prabhupad. On the floor there was a harmonium and two mrdungas, which would often be used at home programmes (kirtans held at devotees’ houses). The focal point of the living room, as is the case in almost all devotees’ homes, was the altar for the deities. Vallabhi’s altar had a range of deities, including Radha-Krishna, Gauranga (Chaitanya), and Jagannath. She also had images of the Six Goswamis, the guru parampara (lineage) and her own guru. Beside the altar was a small table where utensils were kept for offering arati to the deities, including a conch, a small cup of water and a bell, amongst other items.

Illustration 4.1  Vallabhi’s home altar. Photograph by the author.



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Vallabhi is a devotee of Indian descent in her early fifties from New Zealand. Her parents had moved to New Zealand, where she was born, though she came to live in Mayapur eight years ago with her husband. As her parents were ISKCON devotees she had been familiar with the philosophy growing up, but she was, in her words, a ‘diehard atheist’. It was ironically through her husband, a Caucasian New Zealander, that she had developed an interest in Prabhupad’s teachings. It was, she tells me, ‘Krishna’s arrangement’ that she met her husband and it was ‘by Krishna’s mercy’ that she has found her way to the path back to Godhead. Her conversion was total, and has profoundly changed her, she feels, for the better. ‘I see the world through different glasses now’, she tells me, ‘I see everything in connection to Krishna … and I can’t undo it’. Although, like a lot of devotees from the West, she found it difficult to adjust to life in India, she now cannot imagine ever leaving Mayapur and has several times expressed the hope that she will have the opportunity to ‘leave her body’ (die) here, surrounded by devotees chanting the holy name. As I often encountered during interviews and casual conversations, Vallabhi was uncomfortable talking about the politics of Mayapur’s development. She was unsure about exactly how management worked, who made decisions and what direction this spiritual city would take. She felt it was not her place to criticise the sincere efforts of those devotees whose job it was to make difficult management decisions, and she shied away from speculating about corruption and who was to blame for Mayapur’s problems. She found such issues distracting and was more concerned with her own struggles with her spiritual practice. Our conversation revolved, as was often the case, around her sadhana. We began talking about chanting. I had been finding it difficult to chant more than a handful of rounds each day and was looking for advice. I wanted to know what one should expect to experience during japa meditation: It’s not like I experience anything grossly mystical … nothing really gross or overt, but subtly there’s something happening … there’s definitely something happening, despite my very poor rounds … A good round is when you’re really attentive, when you really hear the Lord’s names … I don’t think I experience any overt emotional experiences, but I pray for the day where it could be [emotional] … but it doesn’t diminish my connection with Krishna … I don’t have that need, because I have such deep faith in my relationship with Krishna, I don’t have a really strong need to really have to experience anything overtly … Internally I feel that subtly it’s going on and I feel that my connection is already so anchored there with Him that I don’t have any expectation of Him … I don’t need any miracle to happen with Him … there’s enough little things that have happened in my life where I feel His presence … Every step you take towards Krishna, He takes so many more steps towards you … I hope I don’t have to take birth again, but um, I can only do what I can do … I have a weak heart, I struggle with my spiritual practices and I’m aware of my weaknesses, so I’m just trying really hard to strengthen myself, and the best way I know to do that is to get up, chant Hare Krishna, to hear from the devotees, to read Prabhupad’s books, to serve the devotees … for me it’s simple. I’m complicated but the process is pretty

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uncomplicated … I’m full of material desires, I’m full of sensual desires … but in spite of that I’m trying to be a good human being, a good devotee.

As was the case with many devotees I spoke with about spiritual practices, Vallabhi was quick to point out that what she experiences during chanting is anything but ‘grossly mystical’. Something was happening, Vallabhi felt, despite her ‘poor rounds’ but that something was subtle, internal and incremental. Developing a relationship with Krishna was expected to take a lifetime of surrender and was not going to happen overnight. It was not in emotionally charged transcendent experiences that Vallabhi had expected to develop her connection with Krishna, but in the everyday striving to depend on him in everything she does. Through waking up early, performing seva, attending classes and chanting, Vallabhi was endeavouring within Prabhupad’s pedagogic framework to put Krishna at the centre of her life. She felt that following the injunctions laid down for her would allow her to live a good life, at the end of which she hopes she will not have to ‘take birth’ again in this world but will go back to Godhead. While she considers herself responsible for her spiritual progress, the fruits of her endeavour then are not achieved by her efforts alone but depend on Krishna’s reciprocation. Following ISKCON’s path to salvation, she could only aspire to make advancement slowly, given her fallen condition, by following the rules and regulations as Prabhupad had outlined, and hope at the end of her life to be deserving of divine grace. While learning to detect ‘Krishna’s arrangement’ in one’s life sometimes entails post-hoc interpretations of mundane events, it also involves learning to hope. One can detect Krishna in one’s life by noting, as Vallabhi has here, that there were ‘enough little things that have happened in my life where I feel his presence’, but devotees almost must learn to hope, or to have faith, that Krishna will continue to guide them on their spiritual path. As discussed in Chapter 2, this requires a negotiation of agency. On the one hand devotees are responsible for their own sadhana, but on the other, it is only by Krishna’s mercy that they can make spiritual advancement. I was told time and time again that Krishna reciprocates according to the desire of the devotee. As Vallabhi told me, ‘Every step you take towards Krishna, he takes so many more steps towards you’. If I had not developed the sincere desire to understand and engage with Krishna, he would not make his presence known. If I did not look for Krishna in my everyday activities, if I did not strive to depend on him for everything, I simply would not understand, nor would I advance in, Krishna consciousness. Vallabhi’s account employs some now familiar tropes, namely humility, weakness and a commitment to strict regulative spiritual practices. She was insistent that her rounds were poor and that she was full of material and sensual desires. She was ‘fallen’. Any responsibility for her lack of spiritual progress rested solely on her shoulders. Vallabhi made sure that I understood that her spiritual practice was lacking, that she had a weak heart, but despite this, and most importantly, she was trying. What was striking about her



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account, and as I had found through conversations with other devotees, was her aversion to claims, or indeed displays of, overt emotionally charged experiences. Vallabhi had come to understand this lack of ‘overt emotional experience’ as an obvious consequence of her fallen state. Why would she, so full of material and sensual desires, expect to experience deep mystical experiences symptomatic of only the most advanced devotees? I had come to expect these kinds of responses, as devotees understood humility (and self-deprecation) to be essential elements of the Vaishnava aesthetic, but what I could not understand was the explicit aversion to any insinuation of emotional experience. Why were deeply emotional experiences reserved only for advanced spiritual practitioners? Considering that one of the defining characteristics of Gaudiya Vaishnavism (particularly in Chaitanya’s case) has been the intensely emotional display of devotion for Krishna, why were ISKCON devotees so careful to point out that they could only hope one day to experience such emotion? Picking up on the theme of her relationship with God and trying to bring the conversation towards the highest goal of prema, I asked Vallabhi if she loved Krishna. Her answer was telling. ‘I’m not sure if I love Krishna … but I’m learning to love Krishna’, she resolutely responded. This was not the first time I had heard this answer. Devotees often made the distinction between love and prema, the former implying a mundane and somewhat selfish emotion, while the latter connotes a transcendental virtue and the highest stage of spiritual perfection. ‘I do love Krishna … but I don’t have Krishna prema’, another devotee told me. Loving Krishna in the mundane sense of the word is something most devotees are comfortable with, knowing that in Prabhupad’s terms, this implies something very different to what is connoted by prema, the topmost level of spiritual advancement.5 Prema, translated loosely as ‘pure love for Krishna’ is the explicit goal of Krishna consciousness. As the Chaitanya Charitamrta (Madhya-lila, 23.7) describes, ‘When that bhava [emotion] softens the heart completely, becomes endowed with a great feeling of possessiveness in relation to the Lord and becomes very much condensed and intensified, it is called prema’. Prema is the last of the ‘nine stages of bhakti-yoga’ and the most exalted spiritual level one can aspire to. It is selfless love, free of material contamination. It is not of this mundane world but is transcendental and can only be achieved by those advanced devotees who are free of all anarthas, those who have achieved self-realisation and are therefore fully ‘Krishna conscious’. It is the culmination of a lifetime (or lifetimes) of piety, sincerity and surrender, though it is far from a given. It is extremely difficult, if not almost impossible to attain in this lifetime. Despite this, devotees perform devotional service, follow the regulative principles, chant the holy name and follow Prabhupad’s teachings in the hope that they will attain prema and go back to Godhead. Prema is understood to be attained by coming to be completely dependent on Krishna, as we all had been before falling into the cycle of death and rebirth (samsara). It is not something to cultivate ex nihilo but something in everyone’s heart that can be rediscovered through prescribed spiritual practices. But love, of course, even in this particular theological

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sense, is still quite an ambiguous term. What did it actually mean to love Krishna, in the sense of ‘having Krishna prema’? And how do devotees go about ‘learning to love’? In every class I attended, and in most discussions I had with devotees, the goal of prema was what spurred devotees through the sacrifices and austerities of devotional life. It was the hope that catalysed their conviction and constituted an imaginative horizon that pervaded daily life. While I was confused at times as to exactly what was implied in the institutional narrative of ‘learning to love’, there seemed to be a more obvious problem. In all my time in Mayapur, I never met anyone who had attained prema. Everybody seemingly ‘loved Krishna’ in the more mundane sense, but as far as I could tell (and as far as anybody told me) nobody ‘had Krishna prema’. An obvious explanation could be offered for this, which relates to the foundational virtue of humility. As prema is the most exalted level a devotee can hope for, to claim to have attained it, one has shown oneself to be unqualified. You can only attain prema by completely ridding oneself of all anarthas, and any overt display of pride, such as claiming to have prema, is the clearest indication that one is not at all qualified, and therefore cannot possibly have prema. Humility, however, only explains why one cannot attribute prema to oneself. Magnanimity is also a virtue, and devotees are usually quick to ‘glorify’ (praise) others, highlighting their strengths in the same breath as outlining their own weaknesses. Although it was understandable that nobody would claim to have prema, devotees are almost equally reluctant to attribute it to anyone at all, aside from the rare exceptions of Chaitanya and Prabhupad. How then, I thought, could devotees commit to the pursuit of what seemed like a practically impossible ideal? What did Vallabhi mean when she said ‘I’m not sure if I love Krishna … but I’m learning to love Krishna’? What I have called here the paradox of prema speaks to a deeper Gaudiya Vaishnava history of moral emotions. ISKCON’s is one of many soteriological strategies that has emerged within, and has given rise to, different Vaishnava sampradayas through the centuries. Within this history, ISKCON’s path to salvation, centred as it is on a particular prescribed mode of relationality with Krishna, can be traced back to the practical difficulties that Prabhupad came up against during his preaching mission, both in the West and in India. As is the case with devotees’ spiritual practices more generally, emotions are the subject of elaborate systematisation and are prescribed from the outset. As Charles Brooks notes (1989, 177), ‘Perhaps in no other religious system have human emotional potentials been so considered, categorised, and sacralised than in the codification accomplished by the Bengal Vaishnavas’. Taking up some of the themes touched upon by Vallabhi above, this chapter centres around discourses of emotion in Mayapur, with particular emphasis on the idea of ‘learning to love’.6 As was the case with knowledge in the last chapter, ISKCON’s institutional narratives of emotion are a product of a rich exegetical tradition around which a variety of idiosyncratic conceptions of Krishna flourished between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries throughout India. I



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discuss here critical points of theological interpretation and improvisation that have given shape to the institution ISKCON has become, and in turn have informed the ethico-aesthetic trajectory that today’s ISKCON devotees can hope to inhabit. I suggest that while devotees today may lack the tools to realise the ideal of prema in this lifetime, in its place they have come to embrace a theology of grace that informs how they imagine the pursuit of a good life. I describe how, given ISKCON’s ambivalent relationship with the ideal of prema, in ‘learning to love’ devotees must learn to hope.

A Genealogy of Vaishnava Emotions A natural starting point for any account of emotions in India, either sacred or profane, is the rasa theory. The rasa theory, as outlined by Bharata in his magnum opus Natyashastra7 (somewhere between 200 bc and 200 ad) emerged from a (secular) tradition of inquiry into the aesthetics of drama and poetry. Rasa translates literally as ‘sap’, ‘juice’ or ‘essence’ (Haberman 2007, 411) and refers in its original context to the emotional experience of an audience during a dramatic performance. As David Haberman (2007) notes, while Aristotle’s central concern was with narrative or plot, for Bharata, the focal point was the aesthetics and techniques of evocation of emotion, for the most part in the performative context. ‘Aesthetic forms’, Owen Lynch summarises, ‘ought to activate an emotion already present in participating members of the audience who must cultivate their own aesthetic sensibility’ (1990, 17). In Natyashastra, Bharata posited that there were forty-one emotions (bhavas), out of which eight were of particular importance (Haberman refers to these as the ‘foundational emotions’).8 These include, for example, love (rati), humour (hasa), sorrow (shoka), anger (krodha) and disgust (jugupsa).9 Having identified these foundational emotions, Bharata built his theory around the mechanics of evocation in the context of dramatic performance and poetry. It was not until the sixteenth century however that in the hands of the Vaishnava theologian Rupa Goswami, the rasa theory was mobilised for theological ends (see Entwistle 1987, Toomey 1994). Rupa Goswami was one of the Six Goswamis of Vrindavan, most of whom were close associates of Chaitanya, and all of whom are credited with reestablishing Vrindavan as a centre of worship in the years following Chaitanya’s death. In his two major works, Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu (translated by Prabhupad under the title Nectar of Devotion) and Ujjvala-nilamani, Rupa Goswami outlined his ‘science’ of devotional emotion (Brooks 1989, 177). Rupa Goswami’s innovation was to take the framework of the secular rasa theory and put it to work to explain the means by which devotees could develop a relationship with Krishna. The categories he employed were very different from those of Bharata. While Bharata described emotions, Rupa Goswami outlined particular affective modes of relationality between the devotee and Krishna. And where Bharata had eight ‘fundamental emotions’,

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Rupa Goswami posited five modes of relationality. They are, as outlined by Brooks (1989, 179), in ascending order of spiritual advancement, shanta (quiet, peaceful devotion between man and Krishna), dasya (when Krishna is viewed as the master and the devotee his servant), sakya (Krishna is treated as a friend or companion), vatsalya (Krishna is treated with parental affection) and madhurya (‘the passionate, all-consuming pleasure that comes only when Krishna is taken as one’s lover’).10 Rupa Goswami’s modes of relationality between the devotee and Krishna were taken up in different ways by different Vaishnava sects. How these sects construct different emotional aesthetics depends on a range of factors, not least of which is their conception of Krishna. Krishna’s multifarious identity has proven fertile theological ground where a range of traditions have emphasised different stages of his life, and privileged particular modes of relationality between ‘alternative Krishnas’ (Beck 2005) and his devotees. ISKCON worships various Krishnas, including the beautiful infant (Gopal), the cowherd trickster (Govinda) and the sage charioteer of the Bhagavad Gita. Through the Bhagavad Gita, devotees come to know Krishna as a philosopher and a benevolent God, while through the stories from the Srimad Bhagavatam, they become familiar with the child Krishna killing the multi-hooded snake Kaliya, and Krishna as a youthful and frivolous prankster, stealing the gopis’ clothes as they bathe. At temple programmes in Mayapur, devotees worship Madhava, slayer of the demon Madhu, or during the holy month of Karttika, devotees worship Damodora, the infant Krishna tied to a boulder by his mother Yashoda for being mischievous. Along with these various aspects of Krishna’s identity comes a range of possible emotional relationships one can have with him. Krishna is a guardian, as one devotee expressed: ‘He’s my mom and dad, he’s everything for me. He takes care when I even cannot notice … he gives me air and food. With his energies he provides everything’. Krishna is a companion, as another devotee explained: It’s not all awe and reverence, I don’t see Krishna as God … even referring to him as God for me is weird, it’s Krishna! [emphasising familiarity] … and that does inspire a lot of disrespect … ya know ‘just leave me alone, I just want to do whatever I want to do’… it’s not that I don’t care for his presence, I guess I take it for granted or I don’t see it as if I do this I’ll get punished.

Regardless of what type of relationship devotees cultivate with Krishna, the fact that they do develop some sort of personal and emotional relationship is a central imperative of ISKCON’s philosophy. Rama (from Chapter 3), who had converted from Christianity, explained to me that one of the most attractive aspects of Vaishnavism for him was the relationship he could have with God: I transformed my relationship with Jesus, I think Jesus came here to give us a beautiful lesson about compassion and forgiveness. He was definitely an acharya, for sure, but I don’t think he was the son of god … this god of Abraham, old man with the beard … I didn’t have any connection, I was afraid of him, with Krishna I see him like a very compassionate God.



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It is not just the particular Krishna that is worshipped but more importantly the nature of the emotional relationship that defines the path to salvation. While some Vaishnava traditions can be characterised by their orientation to vatsalya or madhurya rasa, for example, ISKCON devotees are committed to the dasya rasa (when Krishna is viewed as the master and the devotee his servant) and the shanta rasa (characterised as quiet, peaceful devotion between man and Krishna). The sentiment of dasya (service) is pervasive in ISKCON and is significantly more important than any of the other rasas. A devotee’s spiritual name is always followed by Das (or Dasi, for women), meaning ‘servant’.11 One need look no further than Tamal Krishna Goswami’s account of the early years of ISKCON, entitled The Servant of the Servant (1984) to grasp the pervasiveness of this sentiment. Where the Pushti Marg, belonging to the Vallabhacharya sampradaya, tend more towards the vatsalya rasa, or maternal sentiments for the infant Krishna Gopal (Bennett 1993), ISKCON devotees are typically committed to a relationship that can be characterised as one of subservience and surrender, mostly to Govinda, the cowherd. Devotees, however, do not just pick and choose how to relate to Krishna but learn to know and love him within institutionally prescribed modes of relationality, outside which lie the pitfalls of spiritual immaturity. They do this by first of all ‘knowing their adhikara’, or in other words, recognising their level of spiritual competency. While devotees are encouraged and indeed do develop a reciprocal and meaningful relationship with Krishna, as a companion or guardian, for example, the path back to Godhead for ISKCON is in the recognition of Krishna as a merciful master, and oneself as a lowly servant. It is desirable to think of Krishna as a friend in some situations or appreciate the beauty of the infant Gopal in others, thus borrowing from the other rasas. This is possible however only in the wider context of surrender to Krishna as the Supreme Personality of Godhead. While the sakya rasa (where Krishna is treated as a companion) and vatsalya rasa (where Krishna is treated with parental affection), are not unfavourable modes of relationality, they are quite advanced and therefore not to be discussed publicly, if at all. The madhurya rasa (‘the passionate, all-consuming pleasure that comes only when Krishna is taken as one’s lover’), the most exalted and esoteric of Rupa Goswami’s formulation, however, is not just mildly discouraged but, as we will see, is almost completely absent in Mayapur.

ISKCON and Emotions When discussing emotions, as is the case with Prabhupad’s wider revitalising mission, there are two aspects to consider: adoption and innovation. In so far as Prabhupad’s mission was built around the translation of key Vaishnava texts, for the most part he is considered to have adopted the Gaudiya Math’s theological commitments, strictly following his guru Bhaktisiddhanta

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Sarasvati’s practices and teachings. Despite Prabhupad’s conservative inclinations, however, in bringing Krishna consciousness to the West, he was inevitably ‘transforming the tradition in the process of translating it’ (T.K. Goswami 2012, 6). In his translation of and commentary on Rupa Goswami’s Bhaktirasamrita-sindhu (Nectar of Devotion or ‘NOD’), Prabhupad adhered faithfully to the sixteenth-century text in an attempt to render the comprehensive ‘science of devotional emotion’ accessible for his Western audience. Today, the NOD, along with Prabhupad’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita and the Srimad Bhagavatam, amongst other texts, is considered essential reading for devotees. It is thought of as a handbook of spiritual practices and goes into great detail on topics such as ‘The Purity of Devotional Service’ and ‘Offences to Be Avoided’. Where the Bhagavad Gita expounds central tenets of ISKCON’s philosophy, the NOD is grounded in daily practice. It is within the covers of this book that devotees learn about the specifics of vaidhi-bhakti, or devotional service characterised by the strict following of rules and regulations. While expansive in its coverage of spiritual pragmatics, the NOD is largely based on two themes: devotional service and the devotee’s relationship with Krishna. There are four parts to this text. Part One is systematic, prescriptive and is considered the most practical source of guidance in the Vaishnava canon, dealing with ‘The First Stages of Devotion’, for example. This gives devotees a vocabulary with which to understand and evaluate their sadhana and it would be unusual for a devotee not to have read this. As I was reading the NOD during my fieldwork, however, I began to get a little confused. Once I got past Part One, I found myself reading about some quite unfamiliar topics: ‘Existential Ecstatic Love’, ‘Ways of Meeting Krishna’ and ‘raganuga-bhakti’. In Chapter 44, for example, Radha tells one of her companions, ‘My dear friend, who is this boy whose eyelids, dancing constantly, have increased the beauty of His face and attracted My desire for conjugal love?’ Finally, I thought, here was the Radha-Krishna of the Gita-Govinda. Here was the Krishna that India had fallen in love with (and caused the British so much consternation). Here was the adulterer, the Dionysus of the Hindu world. I had not come across any of this in the classes I was attending and I had never heard devotees discussing this side to Krishna. This was not the ISKCON I knew, nor was it the Krishna devotees around me were learning to love. I enthusiastically asked several devotees about these topics, hoping they could shine some light on why this seemed to be such a central feature of Krishna’s personality, but so absent in ISKCON’s philosophy. Unanimously they told me I should not have read past Part One of the NOD. Everything after Part One, I was told, is considered advanced material and should be read with great care and guidance, if at all. Not only had a lot of people not read past Part One, but most were visibly uncomfortable discussing these topics with me. When I would ask for clarification on Krishna’s ‘amorous pastimes’, devotees were evasive and quick to change the subject. Considering the central importance of Prabhupad’s books

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and knowledge generally, I could not figure out why devotees were not reading huge portions of his translations. How had ignorance become a virtue?12 Why were they actively avoiding a range of topics that seemed to constitute the highest teachings? What, I wondered, was this raganuga-bhakti that the NOD referred to? And more importantly, where was it?13 In order to explain this calculated ignorance, I will outline a brief history that accounts for ISKCON’s exclusion of raganuga-bhakti as a realistic goal of spiritual practice. I will then turn back to contemporary Mayapur to outline the profound implications that ISKCON’s contingent soteriological strategy has for the emotional relationships with Krishna that devotees seek to cultivate.

Raganuga-bhakti Raganuga-bhakti connotes spontaneous devotion for Krishna, and is opposed to vaidhi-bhakti, the strict following of rules and regulations. O.B.L Kapoor (1976, 194) describes it as ‘a continuous flow of raga or attachment to the Lord, which makes it impossible for the devotee to follow the rules and regulations of vaidhi-bhakti’. He continues, ‘vaidhi-bhakti may be described … as the Life of Law and raganuga as the Life of Love. Love is blind. It seeks the object of love regardless of the norms that usually guide the conduct of an individual in society’. In order to reach the platform of raganuga, one must follow the prescriptions of vaidhi until devotional service and attachment to Krishna are no longer ‘mechanical’ and become spontaneous. In wider Gaudiya Vaishnavism, raganuga is an important (but not universally pursued) stage on the path to prema. Without a spontaneous attraction to devotional service, a devotee simply cannot hope to achieve Krishna prema. Though raganuga is an important feature of esoteric Vaishnava practice, it comes with a set of caveats. Hearing about Radha and Krishna’s erotic pastimes is reserved for only the most advanced devotees, and one should guard oneself against premature engagement with this level of spiritual practice. Kapoor reminds us that in the sixteenth century, Jiva Goswami (another of the Six Goswamis) warned that ‘so long as our mind and senses are not purified and there is any possibility of our deriving vicarious erotic pleasure from the contemplation of the amorous pastimes of Krishna with the gopis, we must not contemplate them’ (1976, 219). While raganuga-bhakti is conspicuously absent from ISKCON’s framework in Mayapur, it was a central feature of Bhaktivinod Thakur’s theology and practices. In the 21st chapter of his Jaiva Dharma,14 Bhaktivinod writes: ‘Raganuga-bhakti very quickly bestows that fruit which one cannot obtain even by observing … vaidhi-bhakti with firm faith for a long time. Devotion on the vaidhi-marga [path of vaidhi] is weak, because it depends on rules and regulations; whereas raganuga-bhakti is naturally strong, because it is completely independent’. Depending on one’s adhikara, Bhaktivinod encourages devotees not to ‘waste time vainly deliberating on the righteous and

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unrighteous activities (dharma and adharma) mentioned in shastra … [they should] completely abandon shastric reasoning and logic, and engage in the sadhana of raganuga-bhakti according to the greed developed in your heart’ (Chapter 39).15 Not only did Bhaktivinod write in great detail about raganugabhakti, but he also practised it. One of the raganuga practices Bhaktivinod engaged in involved taking siddha-rupa initiation. After taking siddha-rupa, initiates are given a spiritual body through which they meditatively participate as a maidservant in the conjugal pastimes of Krishna with the gopis. Bhaktivinod, for example, took on the spiritual body of a maidservant in the spiritual world who was twelve years, six months and ten days old and whose name was Kamala Manjuri (Kapoor 1976, 225). For Bhaktivinod then, raganuga-bhakti was indispensible in the pursuit of Krishna prema. For his son Bhaktisiddhanta (Prabhupad’s guru), however, the tone had shifted. In a letter written from Mayapur in 1928, he writes: ‘We tiny living entities are followers of [vaidhi-bhakti], formal rules and regulations, but we are not against raga-marga [the path of raganuga-bhakti], the path of spontaneous attraction. Raga is the highest topic, but it does not look good in our mouth. Hearing big topics from a small mouth, the [devotees] on the spontaneous platform [raganuga], will laugh at us’. Bhaktisiddhanta quite consistently privileged the exoteric and warned against the dangers of prematurely practising raganuga, but he did not expel it completely. As we will see was to be the case in Prabhupad’s early ISKCON, spontaneity, charisma and independence are not conducive to institution building. I will return to the reasons for this shift later in this chapter in relation to Prabhupad’s own theological aversion to the esoteric. It should be noted at this point however that raganuga-bhakti was quite recently a central feature of the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition to which both Bhaktisiddhanta and Prabhupad traced their lineage. With this history in mind, ISKCON’s particular moral conceptualisation of emotion is best explained by turning to the pragmatics of Prabhupad’s mission in the 1970s.

Prabhupad’s Problem In his ethnography The Hare Krishnas in India (1989), Charles Brooks sheds light on the history of ISKCON’s aversion to raganuga-bhakti. It was in the early 1970s that Prabhupad first brought his Western disciples to India. One of his priorities, as we have seen, was to build a temple in Vrindavan, the centre of the sixteenth-century Vaishnava theological revival, and the town where Krishna lived some 5,000 years ago. Although he met with resistance, Prabhupad managed to establish an ISKCON temple in the heart of Vrindavan, and over the first few years devotees from the West came in their thousands. This was of course a huge achievement, but Prabhupad soon had cause for concern. By this stage, he was already becoming increasingly frustrated with his devotees’ misunderstandings of his lectures and their careless spiritual



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practices in the West. He struggled to maintain control of the fledgling centres that were springing up in major cities across the world, and had set up the GBC in this year to help with management. While in the West Prabhupad was able to guide his neophyte devotees through a carefully constructed pedagogy, in Vrindavan he was one of hundreds of gurus, and had little control over who his disciples might associate with and what they might learn. For the first time it was not just through his lectures and books that devotees could access Krishna consciousness. Despite his best efforts to shelter his Western devotees, avoiding advanced topics such as the rasa-lila16 or Krishna’s amorous encounters with Radha, it was ironically in India that Prabhupad was faced with some of his biggest challenges. As he had feared, while he was travelling around the world preaching, his Western disciples in Vrindavan were indeed exposed to advanced levels of spiritual teaching that he had been careful to conceal. After initial optimism, it was only in these early years in India, that Prabhupad began to realise just how ‘unqualified’ his neophyte devotees were. Vrindavan, as the traditional centre of Vaishnavism, both historically and theologically, is home to a mixture of rasas, some of which would appear strange, and some dangerous, for Prabhupad’s neophyte Western devotees. As Brooks writes (1989, 189): The types of bhakti practised in Vrindavan are limited only by individual inclination and imagination. One sadhu keeps his image of the infant Krishna (Gopal) in a cage so that he will not crawl away and get into trouble. A teacher worships a similar image with parental affection (vatsalya-rasa) by bathing and powdering her image before she gently rocks him to sleep with a lullaby. The emotions of friendship (sakya-rasa) are cultivated by a cloth merchant who imagines both he and Krishna are cowherd boys, and he sometimes accompanies his image into the fields to find fresh pasture for their cows.

While these might represent particularly extreme cases of the rasas of vatsalya or sakya, what Prabhupad was wary of was the predominance in Vrindavan of the madhurya rasa, the ‘emotions associated with intimate, conjugal love’ (Brooks, ibid.). Inspired by the holy land of Vrindavan, and impatient to advance spiritually beyond Prabhupad’s strict regulative framework, his devotees soon began to explore the depths of this esoteric rasa. The madhurya rasa, however, belongs in the realm of raganuga-bhakti. Only after having mastered one’s senses and having rid oneself of all anarthas can one aspire to such an advanced stage. The madhurya rasa in one sense simply connotes a particular mode of relationality with Krishna but this mode of relationality also manifests in particular esoteric practices, as we have seen in the case of Bhaktivinod Thakur. One of these practices, as Brooks recounts in his ethnography, involved a (non-ISKCON) male devotee dressing in a sari during meditation ‘to more fully experience the love that Radha has for Krishna’ (1989, 189). In participating in, or simply learning about the madhurya rasa, these devotees were essentially circumventing Prabhupad’s regulative path of vaidhi-bhakti and were jumping prematurely to the exalted stage of

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raganuga-bhakti. While they were sincere in their commitment to Krishna consciousness, Prabhupad felt they were simply not ready for this level of advanced spiritual practice. For Prabhupad, there was one sect that more than any other exemplified the dangers of miscomprehension with madhurya rasa. This was the sahajiyas (see Dimock 1966). For the sahajiyas, a deviant tantric sect, originally from Bengal, the theme of the union between Radha and Krishna is central to their religious practices of ritualised sexual intercourse.17 While some Vaishnavas imagine the rasa-lila through meditation, the sahajiyas imitate it in practice.18 ‘Sahajiya’, in ISKCON parlance, is a derogatory term. They were often presented by Prabhupad, as they have been by orthodox Vaishnavism for centuries, as an example of what happens when the intimate pastimes between Radha and Krishna are completely misappropriated, resulting in licentious imitation of the rasa-lila through mundane sexual intercourse. Kapoor appositely captures the sentiment of wider Vaishnava orthodoxy: ‘[the sahajiyas] are the dregs of the most degenerated and perverted form of Vaishnavism, which the Chaitanyaites have not only always disclaimed but condemned in the most emphatic terms’ (1976, 217). Although they were always controversial amongst wider Vaishnava traditions, in the nineteenth century in particular the sahajiyas came to represent for the British missionaries the apparent moral depravity at the heart of Hinduism, which only conversion to Christianity could redress. They were, and continue to be, a source of embarrassment for many Indians, and particularly for Vaishnavas with whom they are associated. While infamous for their illicit and unorthodox sexual practices, the term sahajiya, as was used liberally by Prabhupad and is still used by ISKCON devotees today, refers generally to anyone who extravagantly performs their devotion or loses self-control, during kirtan for example. It has come to be associated with a range of practices that indicate a lack of Vaishnava decorum. Fits of transcendent madness, speaking in tongues, or rolling around the ground are glossed by Prabhupad as uparasa (false expression), anurasa (imitation) and aparasa (perverted or misrepresented emotion), all of which he strictly warned his devotees against. Madhurya rasa then implies a passionate and absorptive engagement with Krishna’s erotic pastimes, and in extreme cases, such as that of the sahajiyas, it can lead to imitative sexual practices. Prabhupad’s worry was that, as his devotees had been practising Krishna consciousness for a couple of years at most, in trying to emulate exalted Vaishnava practitioners, they would confuse Krishna’s amorous pastimes with mundane sexual desire, and soon lose their way, as the sahajiyas had. They would, in Bhaktivinod’s terms, be ‘transgressing their adhikara’ (practising beyond their spiritual capacity). Despite Prabhupad’s best efforts to guide them away from the esoteric in favour of an emphasis on the basics, in ISKCON centres around the world devotees’ interest in madhurya rasa persisted. In 1976 Prabhupad came to learn about the ‘Gopi-Bhav clique’, a group of devotees in the LA temple who were secretly flirting with madhurya practices, such as meditating on the rasa-lila.



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Prabhupad angrily wrote a letter, rebuking their naïve misunderstanding of the philosophy he had presented, and warned against premature engagement with such esoteric practices (cited in Brooks 1989, 187): ‘Gopi is the highest stage, but you are on lowest, beginner, rascal stage, so how can you understand. Don’t become monkeys, jumping over to gopi’s rasa-lila. There are already enough monkeys in Vrindavan, we don’t need anymore’. By this point, Prabhupad had already committed to the institutionalisation of vaidhi-bhakti and decided that at least at this point his devotees were not ready for raganuga-bhakti. As he died in 1977, it is open to speculation whether or not he might have changed his stance and brought raganuga into his pedagogic framework. Despite Prabhupad’s explicit aversion to raganuga-bhakti, the problem of the madhurya rasa was to re-emerge, particularly in the chaotic years following his death. When it comes to the madhurya rasa and raganuga-bhakti, there were mixed feelings among ISKCON devotees. Some heeded Prabhupad’s warnings and stayed away from anything deemed outside his teachings. Others, however, embraced what they felt were opportunities for spiritual advancement. Brooks quotes one such devotee (who had left ISKCON because he felt that his spiritual practice was restricted by rules and regulations): ‘I came to Vrindavan in ISKCON, and I owe it a lot, but ISKCON cannot give you Vrindavan. In ISKCON, Vrindavan is actually a bother, but now Vrindavan is my salvation’ (1989, 81). The absence of raganuga-bhakti, then, became a problem of spiritual authority. How, some devotees were asking, could Prabhupad promise to bring us back to Godhead if he could not even give us raganuga-bhakti? Had Prabhupad not presented the highest teachings? This problem came to a head in the early 1990s, when one of Prabhupad’s god brothers (a devotee who shared the same guru), Narayana Maharaj, went on a preaching tour to ISKCON centres. During his lectures, ISKCON devotees would eagerly ask about concepts such as raganuga-bhakti and the madhurya rasa, as they felt this was a unique opportunity to open a discussion on these advanced topics with someone who was enough like Prabhupad to be accepted as an authority. Narayana Maharaj did not always agree with Prabhupad’s presentation of the philosophy and promised to share with devotees the ‘higher teachings’ that they were desperate to hear about. While there was widespread interest, it was soon decided by the GBC that in some cases, in directly contradicting Prabhupad and generally compromising his teachings, Narayana Maharaj was undermining his authority. ISKCON devotees were prohibited by the GBC from associating with him. In an official paper from 1996, the GBC states: ISKCON’s leaders have now all come to recognise that Narayana Maharaja’s singular emphasis upon raganuga-sadhana is directly opposed to the instructions given by Srila Prabhupada, who warns that such an emphasis will result in sahajiyaism … It is true of course that previous acharyas explicitly discuss the practices of raganugasadhana … However, seeing the fallen condition of human society in modern times,

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and understanding how raganuga-bhakti could be – and indeed already has been – misunderstood and misapplied, Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura and Srila Prabhupada very strongly warned people against attempts to concentrate on the confidential topics of Radha and Krishna and enter the practices of raganuga-bhakti prematurely … Narayana Maharaja acts in opposition to Srila Prabhupada’s direction by advocating the practice of extensive hearing about Krishna’s conjugal pastimes by those who are still in the conditioned state … Srila Prabhupada explicitly opposed these practices, and, whenever they began to occur in ISKCON, he smashed them. Therefore, one who wishes to remain faithful to Srila Prabhupada and to safeguard his legacy will not follow Narayana Maharaja.

Prabhupad’s strong preference for vaidhi-bhakti over raganuga-bhakti was directly shaped by the pragmatics (and the audience) of his preaching mission. He was not explicitly against the spiritual path of raganuga, nor are devotees today, but in the context of introducing Vaishnava philosophy to the West, he felt it was important that devotees grasp the basics before aspiring to the most advanced practices, prone as they are to misinterpretation. In his short twelveyear mission, and like his guru, Bhaktisiddhanta, Prabhupad’s focus was on institutionalisation, and so rules and regulations were the backbone of his mission. As he felt was crucial to the survival of the movement after his death, Prabhupad built an institution founded on the principles of vaidhi-bhakti, by which, and following Rupa Goswami, he gave his devotes a systematic path to salvation. Within the structure of this movement, there was little room for spontaneity and little time for his neophyte devotees to come near the stage of raganuga or engage with the madhurya rasa. In raganuga-bhakti, Kapoor writes (1976, 195): the hazards and conflicts of moral life and the strain and stress caused by the imperatives of moral sense are completely overcome. It is a life complete in spirit. It enjoys complete freedom from the sense of ‘ought’, which has necessary reference to an unaccomplished process and calls for striving and accomplishing. It is life fulfilled in love – love that is released from all fetters and sanctions. Sanctioned love is not true love. It is only training in love. It is love that is conditioned by will and intellect. It is love without the zest of love.

The institution that Prabhupad built, founded as it was on rules, regulations and bureaucracy, was simply incompatible with charismatic spontaneity. As all major theological amendments could only have come from Prabhupad, ISKCON as the institution it is today is bound to the soteriological path of vaidhi-bhakti, and at least in Mayapur, for the most part committed to the omission of raganuga-bhakti and the madhurya rasa. This seems to pose an obvious problem. Prabhupad instilled in devotees the ultimate ideal of Krishna prema on one hand, but on the other, he was unable to pass on some of the most central spiritual practices by which Vaishnavism has traditionally (that is not to say universally) gone about attaining that goal. Just as vaidhibhakti is now ingrained in the very fabric of the institution, raganuga-bhakti and the madhurya rasa are almost completely absent. ‘As is the case of many

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religious traditions’, Shukavak Dasa writes, ‘Chaitanya Vaishnavism operates in two modes: an exoteric mode that is tailored to the needs of its general followers … and an esoteric mode that embodies the mystical aspects of the tradition and which ignites spiritual inspiration’ (2002, 257). Dasa continues, ‘The form of Chaitanya Vaishnavism that has emerged here in the West is largely a vaidhi-bhakti tradition in which the approach of raganuga-bhakti-sadhana has largely been excluded as a viable path’, leaving today’s ISKCON devotees, he suggests, ‘alienated from the esoteric depths and spiritual inspiration of its parent movement’. In terms of institutional guidance, devotees in Mayapur are certainly ‘alienated from the esoteric depths’. Maybe unsurprisingly, however, this is not felt to be in the slightest a weakness of Prabhupad’s teachings. Rather, devotees understand Prabhupad’s particular presentation of Gaudiya Vaishnavism as an appropriate interpretation, based on his maxim of ‘time, place and circumstance’. As Bhaktisiddhanta had preached in the early twentieth century, the world is too degraded in this day and age of Kali Yuga and people are too contaminated by base material and sexual desires to aspire to the highest stages of spiritual realisation. One must engage with Krishna consciousness by a set of practices that suit the depravity of the times. They must learn that they are not in control but must surrender and depend on the benevolent will of Krishna. Adhering strictly to the basic rules and regulations, devotees learn that their endeavours can only get them so far, and in this case, raganuga-bhakti is most probably too far. The question remains, however, how do devotees conceive of their path to salvation? Having set aside raganuga-bhakti and the madhurya rasa, how do devotees imagine and actively pursue the then almost impossible ideal of attaining prema?

A Theology of Grace I want to return to the questions I raised at the start of this chapter. What did Vallabhi mean when she said ‘I don’t love Krishna … but I’m learning to love Krishna’? How do devotees deal with the seeming impossibility of the central goal of their philosophy? How has ISKCON’s soteriological strategy been shaped by the context of its transmission and translation? Later on, in the same conversation with Vallabhi, I asked her about raganuga-bhakti: I don’t really think about it … because it’s not my goal … I mean raganuga-bhakti is my goal but … it’s not like I wake up and think I want to achieve raganuga-bhakti … that is our goal, but it’s like … [pause] … I’m taking incremental steps to achieve that and I have faith that if I leave my body and I’ve been doing to the best of my ability what I’ve been doing that Krishna will make up for whatever is lacking.

As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Vallabhi has a strong reliance on rules and regulations. Getting up early in the morning and chanting her

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rounds, amongst other spiritual practices as were prescribed by Prabhupad, she hopes, will lead her back to Godhead. She feels no sense of urgency to aspire to the more esoteric spiritual stages, such as raganuga-bhakti. It was an advanced stage of spiritual practice that she, as a fallen and unqualified soul, could only learn to hope for, but did not know how to actually pursue. Ridding oneself of anarthas and transcending maya were so inconceivably difficult that anything beyond the path of vaidhi-bhakti was not a realistic ambition. All one can do is acknowledge how fallen one is, surrender to Krishna’s will and try one’s best. It was not by advanced esoteric spiritual practices that the devotee would reach Krishna, but by humbly following the regulative principles that Krishna would reach the devotee. This of course is a logical extrapolation of the ideal of cultivating dependence on Krishna. As Vallabhi told me at the start of this chapter, ‘Every step you take towards Krishna, he takes so many more steps towards you’. Frustrated with this aversion to the higher teachings of Krishna consciousness, I decided to seek out senior devotees, those considered ‘advanced in Krishna consciousness’. I was worried that in asking lay devotees about the highest esoteric teachings I was at risk of framing my observations in quite a misleading tautology; esoteric knowledge of course would not be esoteric if everybody had access to it. When I asked devotees about prema, or about concepts such as raganuga-bhakti, I was told I should speak to Jaganmitra Prabhu (whose Bhagavatam class I described in detail in the previous chapter). Devotees often commented on how humble and simple both Jaganmitra and his twin brother both are. Jaganmitra is regarded by some in Mayapur as one of very few examples of a ‘pure devotee’, and one devotee I spoke to went as far as to speculate that he might have Krishna prema (though he quickly backtracked and qualified his claim with caveats). I met Jaganmitra in a small room above the temple, where he was resting after conducting morning arati for the deities. I asked him about his level of spiritual advancement, suggesting to him that he and his twin brother were held by devotees in Mayapur as an ideal to aspire to: I guess the example may be good for the others … but still I feel my heart is very dirty … I’m still holding onto the conception of being the controller and the enjoyer … most of the devotees who are preachers, they give to others. That is much more advanced … I don’t feel Krishna prema … I should be more sincere. Krishna is very merciful … I’m trying. I’m trying to do my best. So that makes me feel I should be much more serious now towards the end of my life, and really prepare myself to go back to Godhead. Krishna sees what we do … he sees everything we do … the little bits that we do … And I’m just praying that Krishna will remember me when I leave my body … but better we have realisation now before we leave the body … The thing is it’s there in the heart of everyone. Krishna is there, you are there, the relationship is there, it just has to be uncovered. So this is the process of Krishna consciousness, we’re cleansing the heart … cleansing the heart to reveal something that’s already there. It’s not something we’re trying to attain … it’s there in the heart of everyone … And what is actually Krishna prema? It’s not as though Prabhupad was always



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displaying some ecstatic symptoms … sometimes he would go internal sometimes, for minutes on end, but generally … the body wouldn’t be able to take Krishna prema … as long as you have your material body, it’s not likely you’re going to get, you know, Krishna prema. As long as you are in your body, there’s material contamination … Prabhupad said if you are anxious for your next breath, it’s material attachment.

I asked Jaganmitra if Krishna prema is a realistic goal in this lifetime. ‘It’s there. The very fact a devotee has devoted his life to Krishna is proof that he loves Krishna. You can love Krishna in your own simple way … whatever attraction you have. Some people would think it’s only when you fall on the floor and you’re shaking, your eyes rolling, that’s Krishna prema [laughing audibly] … like the sahajiyas!’ As was often my experience, Jaganmitra was quite evasive and at times ambiguous on the mechanics behind the attainment of prema. While he was dismissive of the idea that he had Krishna prema, underlining that in this material body it is practically not possible, he was also keen to underline the fact that everyone in some sense has Krishna prema. It is not something one attains, but something already there, to be uncovered (much like knowledge in the previous chapter). Jaganmitra was moving the goalposts and essentially avoiding the question. Prema, he clarified, was not to be found in extravagant displays of divine ecstasy ‘when you fall on the floor and you’re shaking, your eyes rolling’. Such displays were assumed to be misguided performances of fanatical sentimentality (usually performed by the sahajiyas), but certainly not prema. What emerged from his account, as was the case with Vallabhi, was the idea that despite ‘holding onto the conception of being the controller and the enjoyer’, he was trying. Despite his ‘dirty’ heart, he was trying his best and in doing so, he hoped that he would be worthy of divine grace. Salvation, or Krishna prema, was not in his hands but depended on Krishna’s mercy. He should become completely dependent on Krishna, and in doing so learn to hope that Krishna will remember him when he leaves his body. In underlining the seeming impossibility of ridding oneself of material attachment, he was essentially placing the goal of prema beyond the reach of this lifetime, as had Vallabhi. Devotees then, even those as advanced and dedicated as Jaganmitra, cannot attain prema, but can only hope that ‘by Krishna’s mercy’, they will be given prema at the end of this lifetime. Nonetheless, he was trying, and had every faith that Krishna would reciprocate according to his endeavours. Several weeks later, continuing my search for prema, I sat down with Radha Mohana Das, another senior devotee and Prabhupad disciple from Hyderabad, who had been in the movement for over forty years. He lives with his German wife and teenage son within a few minutes of the ISKCON complex. He worships his own deities at home and chants thirty-two rounds every day, and by any standards would be considered a committed devotee. To my surprise he had a copy of Bhaktivinod’s highly esoteric Jaiva Dharma on his living room table. Finally (again), I thought I had found someone advanced enough to

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explain raganuga-bhakti to me. When I asked about his own pursuit of raganuga-bhakti, however, his response was as dismissive as it was telling: ‘No, no … I am not concerned with such things. Let me master my senses first … I have many anarthas … but I’m confident. We have to go forward with great determination’. I asked him then why he had a copy of Jaiva Dharma, to which he responded that he had never gone so far as to even open the cover. Confused, I asked him why, after decades of committed service to Prabhupad’s mission and Krishna consciousness, he was still unwilling to engage with the highest teachings. He paused, and in a moment, seemed to grasp my misunderstanding. ‘John prabhu’, he responded, with a knowing smile, ‘It’s not by works and deeds [that we go back to Krishna] but by grace’. The concept of grace is central to ISKCON’s soteriology but is often obscured by an idiomatic preference for ‘Krishna’s mercy’.19 For devotees, they are practically synonyms. A theology of grace has arguably been more central in the Christian tradition; as John Hare (1996) has argued, Christians often must rely on God’s assistance to bridge the ‘moral gap’ between the moral demands placed on them and their capacity to meet them – the gap, in other words, between ‘ought’ and ‘can’. This plays out in a rich Christian theology of salvation, atonement and forgiveness. Hinduism, however, has its own history with the concept of grace (Clooney 2001, Kulandran and Kraemer 2004). The idea of God as raksaka (‘redeemer’ or ‘saviour’) is quite central in Ramanuja’s (eleventh-twelfth century) thought (John 1970, 66), as indeed are associated ideas of forgiveness and redemption in South Indian Saivism. As a particularly extreme example, Vallabhacharya (in the sixteenth century) preached sole reliance on the saving grace (anugraha) of Krishna, ‘which placed absolute stress on the need for divine compassion rather than self-effort in the quest for salvation’ (Bennett 1993, 46). The significant difference that Mathew John identifies between the Christian and the Hindu concept is that while in the former, ‘grace is inseparably related to a historical person [Jesus Christ]’ in Hinduism, it is not as ‘rooted in history [or] in a person’. ISKCON in this respect comes closer to the Christian concept. Rather than the sometimes capricious and often vengeful Krishna, Chaitanya better suits the part of Jesus Christ in Gaudiya Vaishnava theology and is often invoked by devotees (particularly in Mayapur), as the perfect exemplar of grace. This was made clearer to me during an interview with Kadamba Kanana Swami (cited at the start of this chapter). I asked him about this paradox of prema. How could devotees imagine prema to be the goal of a lifetime of spirituality, service and surrender, when it seemed as though they were isolated from the very means of achieving this goal? Kadamba Kanana Swami again touched upon this idea of grace: The reason Mayapur is so important and Vrindavan is confidential and secondary is because actually Krishna prema on that topmost level is rarely attained in this life … it’s rather making a sacrifice for Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, living a life completely in sacrifice, giving up all selfish desires and just fully dedicating oneself, then getting behind Prabhupad as the pure devotee … then at the end it is mercy, it is mercy that

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comes in and that bridges the gap and one could say if one has satisfied the Lord and the pure devotee with his sacrifice then there may be the grace that one can return back to the spiritual world and at the door, Krishna prema is given.

Conclusion In the context of the Gaudiya Vaishnava theology of moral emotions, this chapter has explored the significance of the moral narrative of ‘learning to love Krishna’. I have focused in particular on how devotees in Mayapur understand the highest spiritual goal of prema, which despite its apparent unattainability continues to profoundly inform devotees’ projects of moral self-cultivation. I have described how the pragmatics that underpinned Prabhupad’s cross-cultural pedagogy helped to shape the kinds of emotional worlds today’s devotees can aspire to inhabit, and which they should avoid. What I had at first thought to be an institutional aversion to emotionalism of any sort turned out to be a reflection and indeed an enactment of a particular moral theology of emotions. My intention in this chapter has not been to resolve what may appear to be a theological contradiction but to describe how devotees navigate a moral system that subsumes the likelihood of failure. That there seemed to be a yawning gap between the ideal of emotional experience on one hand, and the impossibility of its realisation, on the other, is not a systematic failure. While the exclusion of raganuga-bhakti and the madhurya rasa is now deeply engrained in ISKCON’s institutional perspective and practices and has ‘alienated [devotees] from the esoteric depths and spiritual inspiration’ of the wider Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition, in my conversations with Vallabhi, Jaganmitra, Radha Mohana Das and others in Mayapur, at no point was the unattainability of prema framed as an institutional weakness or a failure on the part of the devotee. Rather, the acceptance that one was not qualified to attain such an exalted spiritual state and could only rely on Krishna’s mercy fit perfectly into wider narratives of humble surrender and dependence. In many ways, it was both a logical and an elegant resolution of these tropes. In narrating their own lack of qualification and underlining that they were not capable of attaining prema, devotees were in a sense narrating what we might recognise as moral failure. In the wider moral system, however, this apparent moral failure did not imply ‘failure’ at all but was an integral aspect of the moral system within which they understood themselves to be becoming Vaishnava. Grace, then, comes to act as a theological bridge, an alternative path that renders the otherwise essentially impossible ideal of prema a goal worth pursuing. Temporal episodes of rupture such as that which I described at the beginning of this chapter provide an interesting window onto ISKCON’s theology of moral emotions. Indeed, broadly speaking, incidents that force people to reflect upon and explicitly articulate their understandings of their own or others’ emotions tend to bring the moral dimension of emotions into sharp relief. This goes a long way to explaining the popularity of the story of

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Prabhupad dismissing the apparently overdramatic display of divine ecstasy; it serves an important didactic purpose. Maybe unsurprisingly, such temporal episodes of rupture have occupied a privileged place within the anthropology of emotions; that is to say anthropologists have tended to pay a lot of attention to the performative aspects of emotional experience. Such a focus, however, serves to obscure the less dramatic but no less important everyday dimensions of moral emotions. Although temporal episodes of rupture undoubtedly offer important insight into the moral dimension of emotion management, the anthropology of moral emotions must also attend to the various ways in which emotions are made objects of sustained projects of moral self-cultivation. In the case of Mayapur, what is particularly interesting is the centrality of enduring affective dispositions in devotees’ broader sustained projects of selftransformation. Devotees’ moral aspirations, and generally speaking Gaudiya Vaishnava ethics, cohere around particular emotional states. Devotees employ a rich Gaudiya Vaishnava vocabulary of moral emotions in evaluative narratives of their own spiritual journeys, at the centre of which is the ultimate telos of prema. Despite its apparent impossibility, prema remains central to devotees’ understanding of what it means to live a good life. Learning to love Krishna requires that devotees cultivate the ability to manage their emotional world, not only in terms of expression, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, but also in terms of expectation. And they must do so within institutionally prescribed modes of relationality, or moral moods, beyond which lie the perils of spiritual naïveté. This simultaneously implies both aversion to, and aspiration towards, esoteric emotional experience. As emerged in the moral narratives that cohere around emotion in Mayapur, the real virtue does not lie, as I had expected, simply in the attainment of prema, but in the striving towards its bestowal. Unlike Wikan’s example of ngabe keneh (‘managing the heart’) or Cassaniti’s example of tham jai (‘making the heart’), the moral import of prema is not to be found in its performance, nor is to be found, as in the case of the Islamic concept of taqwa (fear), in its cultivation. Rather, like many Krishna conscious ideals that devotees are presented with, the moral import is to be found in the management of its impossibility.

Notes   1. Personal interview, Mayapur, 2014.   2. This chapter is derived in part from an article published in Ethnos (Fahy 2017b), copyright Taylor & Francis, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/.   3. Ronald de Sousa (2001) has usefully outlined three philosophical approaches that can be grouped under the broader category of ‘moral emotions’ (see also Hare 1996, 182–88). Firstly, the Stoics argued that all emotions should be purged, antithetical as they were felt to be to the virtuous pursuit of reason. This perspective is in line with Socrates’ intellectualist understanding of moral knowledge (Coplan 2010) that underpinned the Enlightenment and continues to inform the category of emotion in the West today (Lutz 1988). In the Stoic tradition then, emotions are vices rather than virtues. The second



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position, espoused by the likes of David Hume, however, posits that some emotions are inherently moral in so far as they are conducive to moral consciousness (he uses the example of compassion). Not only are emotions inherently moral but against a pervasive assumption in the Western moral tradition that priorities rational judgement, reason is for Hume ‘the slave of the passions’. The third position is the Aristotelian conception of emotions as intrinsically relevant to ethics. This position suggests that, according to de Sousa, ‘the value of emotions to ethics lies not so much in what emotions can contribute to our moral behaviour, as in their nature as components of the good life, without which the very idea of morality would be pointless’ (2001, 110).   4. As part of his broader cultural phenomenological account of moral emotions, Throop defines moral moods as ‘temporally complex existential modalities that transform through time and yet often entail a durativity that extends beyond the confines of particular morally salient events and interactions’ (2014, 65).   5. The word prema (from Sanskrit) in colloquial Bengali is used to describe feelings between people, rather than for things. While in the wider Hindu context prema generally refers to love for the divine, in the Sathya Sai movement it is translated as ‘universal love’, or more particularly, ‘eternal love’ for Sathya Sai Baba himself (Tulasi Srinivas 2010, 62). In the categorisation of spiritual emotions in Gaudiya Vaishnavism, prema refers specifically to ‘pure love for Krishna’.   6. This chapter centres on what Brooks (1989) calls ‘mystical emotions’ that animate the relationship between the devotee and Krishna.   7. Translated by Lynch (1990) as ‘Treatise on Dramaturgy’.   8. Prabhupad translates bhava variously as ‘emotions’ (Chaitanya Charitamrta Madhyalila, 13.171), ‘emotional love’ (Chaitanya Charitamrta Antya-lila 1.147) and ‘the emotion of being a devotee’ (Chaitanya Charitamrta Adi-lila 6.91).   9. Translated by Haberman 2007, 412. 10. The madhurya rasa is defined by Kapoor (1976, 195) as ‘devotion as the sweet sentiment of pure love as between husband and wife or between lover and beloved, like the gopis’. 11. This sentiment is not confined to Vaishnavism. Siva devotees in Tamil Nadu, for example, self-identify as ‘Sivanadiyar’, or slaves of Siva (Venkatesan 2014). 12. See High, Kelly and Mair 2012. 13. It is important to note that what I describe here in the case of conservative Mayapur does not necessarily reflect the movement worldwide. 14. Published online at http://bvml.org/SBNM/JaivaDharma/, last accessed 2 August 2019. 15. Greed (lobha) in this context is a virtue, as it is a hunger for Krishna prema. 16. The rasa-lila is Krishna’s most famous pastime. It involves him dancing with and making love to the gopis in the forests of Vrindavan. It has long been the subject of controversy and often used as a prime example of Krishna’s (and therefore Hinduism’s) moral degradation. 17. At the heart of Vaishnava theology is the opposition between union (sambhoga) and separation (vipralambha), both of which are reflected in the relationship between Radha and Krishna. While the sahajiyas emphasise the sambhoga aspect in their sexual imitation of the rasa-lila, ISKCON is heavily centred on vipralambha, as reflected in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter. Although I never saw them, and ISKCON devotees never talked about them, there are sahajiya groups across the river in Nabadwip (Sarbadhikary 2015). 18. The Bauls (nomadic mystics, predominantly in West Bengal) are another example of what Prabhupad considered a dangerously esoteric and misguided sect (see Openshaw 2002). 19. Prabhupad translates the Sanskrit prasadat interchangeably as both ‘grace’ and ‘mercy’, although typically prefers the latter.

5 Simple Living, High Thinking

They have forgotten their own culture, the best culture, Vedic culture. So it is the first time that we are trying to conquer over the demonic culture with this Vedic culture… If you want to make the human society happy, give them this culture of Krishna consciousness. —Prabhupad (1976)1

When I asked devotees in Mayapur why they moved their lives, and in some cases relocated their families, to India, their responses often cohered around the concept of ‘culture’.2 Parents told me that they were keen to shelter their children from the hedonism of ‘Western culture’ on one hand, and on the other, they were determined that they should grow up amongst devotees in a ‘Krishna conscious culture’. Devotees would often describe Mayapur in terms of ‘Vedic culture’ or, somewhat interchangeably, ‘Vaishnava culture’. The pervasive narrative in any case was that this was a ‘spiritual culture’ within which one could pursue a good life and go back to Godhead. There seemed however to be a range of understandings of what constituted Vedic culture. For a more conservative minority of devotees, Vedic culture could only be truly realised with the establishment of Krishna’s socio-cultural system, varnashramadharma. For most, however, this was an impossible ideal. Vedic culture was not to be found in such an anachronistic social structure (ideal as it may be), but in the micro-practices that animate one’s daily life. Vedic culture inhered in attending the temple and reading the Srimad Bhagavatam. Growing vegetables, washing one’s clothes by hand, or generally what was referred to as ‘simple living and high thinking’, were fundamentally constitutive of Vedic culture. For others, aesthetics were a central concern. How could Mayapur represent Vedic culture if high-rise residential developments continued to spring up? Alongside divergent understandings of what was meant by Vedic culture, there was a range of commitments to the ideal itself, from passionate advocacy to reverential deference. The ‘Vedic culture’ that Prabhupad espoused was a particular assemblage that might more accurately be described as Gaudiya Vaishnava culture.



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Etymologically veda simply means knowledge, or more specifically ‘sacred knowledge’ (Witzel 2003, 68). The adjective ‘Vedic’, however, has also been used to refer to a historical period (between ca. 1500 bce and 500–400 bce), during which the sprawling corpus of Vedic texts were orally composed (the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda and the Atharvaveda). Different branches of knowledge that originated in this period are also described as Vedic, such as Vedic mathematics, Vedic astrology or Ayurvedic medicine. What falls under the banner of ‘Vedic’ more broadly, however, has for centuries been cause for much dispute amongst both Indologists and Hindus themselves.3 The debate around the usage of ‘Vedic’ in this case is made all the more difficult when paired with the inherently ambiguous and expansive concept of culture. In so far as devotees do not typically engage with the Vedas, the philosophy, practices or ‘culture’ to which ISKCON looks for inspiration are not ‘Vedic’ in a strictly literary sense. ISKCON’s philosophical precepts, however, can certainly be traced to both the Vedic period and the Vedic literary corpus. The Puranic texts that constitute the Gaudiya Vaishnava canon are understood by devotees to represent the culmination of the Vedic literary tradition; in Prabhupad’s words, the Puranas are the ‘ripened fruit of all Vedic knowledge’. Many Vaishnavas, including Prabhupad, elide the distinction between ‘Vedic’ and ‘Puranic’ by considering the Mahabharata (of which the Bhagavad Gita is a part) to be the ‘fifth Veda’ (Das 1996). While shifting distinctions can, and certainly are, made between the Vedic and Puranic texts, temporal or literary classifications only go so far in explaining how devotees themselves understand and practise what they refer to as ‘Vedic culture’ in their everyday lives. Whereas previous chapters have centred on the ethical import ascribed to notions of the self, knowledge and emotion, this chapter looks at narratives of and commitments to divergent conceptions of Vedic culture in Mayapur. My aim in this chapter is not to evaluate the accuracy or otherwise of either Prabhupad’s or devotees’ use of the term ‘Vedic’, but to unpack how the metonym of ‘Vedic culture’ informs aspirations for the future of Mayapur. Alongside a historical account of the culture concept in both anthropology and ISKCON, this chapter describes how recourse to ‘Vedic culture’ serves to legitimate varying, and at times competing, ambitions for the future of Prabhupad’s spiritual city, at the centre of which is the rising Temple of Vedic Planetarium. I suggest that, as is the case with the much-debated anthropological concept of culture, the very ambiguity of Vedic culture in Mayapur is not a semantic weakness but a necessary condition of its enduring importance.

The (Constructive) Ambiguity of the Culture Concept Culture, or what Roy Wagner (1975, 109) called anthropology’s ‘motto-concept’, has long been a central but problematic category, particularly in American cultural anthropology. In the early history of the discipline culture

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emerged as a politically expedient category through which one could speak about difference, according to Ian McKay, replacing ‘race’ as the ‘deus ex machina of social theory’ (1981, 218). Indeed, a similar move has been made in popular usage today, for example in post-apartheid South Africa where narratives of culture now frame the same socio-political debates as has ‘race’ in the past (Wilson 2002). Although much energy has been expended and dozens of definitions proposed (as early as 1952, Kroeber and Kluckhohn put together a list of over 160), by the second half of the twentieth-century anthropologists were becoming weary of the ambiguity of the term. As Leslie White (1959) pointed out, and as is still the case today, there was very little agreement on what exactly lay within the jurisdiction of culture as an analytical category. The very ambiguity that has caused so much consternation, however, has also proven to be a significant factor in the survival of the culture concept in anthropology. Its vagueness, McKay writes (1981, 213), ‘constitutes one of its chief attractions: culture is a term “rich in history” which can accommodate a nearly inexhaustible number of meanings’. While the concept of culture persisted then, in part due to its ambiguity as a difficult but apparently unrelinquishable concept, anthropologists’ relationship to what Aram Yengoyan in 1986 called the field’s ‘most cherished concept’ (1986, 371) has certainly changed. Writing on the ‘demise of the culture concept’, Yengoyan observed that ‘[w]ithin anthropology, both the concept of culture and cultural relativism have been severely attacked. No one seriously talks and does research on the culture concept, although we all talk about culture and cultures’ (ibid.). Culture, she noted, was ‘no longer either a point of departure or a point of convergence’ (1986, 368). Just as anthropology was renouncing the concept of culture, however, it found its way back into the discipline, not as an analytical but as an ethnographic category. In this new guise, anthropologists are finding – as indeed is everyone else – that the concept of culture is everywhere (Hannerz 1993). Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes that ‘[a]s culture became a thing, it also started doing things … culture shifted from being a descriptive conceptual tool to being an explanatory concept’ (2002, 43). Although anthropology may have had a hand in its popularisation, today, Trouillot continues, ‘culture is out there, and anthropologists have no control over its deployment … Culture now explains everything: from political instability in Haiti to ethnic war in the Balkans, from labour difficulties on the shop floors of Mexican maquiladoras to racial tensions in British schools and the difficulties of New York’s welfare recipients in the job market’ (ibid.). Anthropologists have now turned their attention away from an analytical definition of culture to focus on what culture does, and what people do with it in the world (Keesing 1989, Wilson 2002, Yúdice 2003). Culture then (as an ethnographic category) has become a signifier (Cowlishaw 2012), whereby its very ambiguity not only explains its persistence in anthropology (as an analytical category) but is a condition of its popular usage. Although importantly distinct from the anthropological category of



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culture, the ethnographic ‘Vedic culture’ that this chapter engages with thrives on this same constructive ambiguity. And it is down to this constructive ambiguity that Vedic culture in Mayapur serves to inform such a wide variety of sometimes incompatible aspirations. Before outlining a brief history of the culture concept in ISKCON, I will first describe an exchange that exemplifies both the pervasiveness and the ambiguity of Vedic culture in Mayapur.

Vedic Culture in Mayapur After the morning programme finished in the temple at 9am, I would often go straight to Madhu’s Bakery in the ISKCON complex where I would meet some friends over breakfast. Here, we would sit and talk for about an hour or so before going to Bhakti Sastri class at the Mayapur Institute at 10.30am. Most of the time, having woken up at 4am to go to mangala arati, we would be hungry and on occasion would struggle to stay awake. After taking prasadam (usually a bowl of piping-hot kitchari), we would chat about all things ISKCON, from the tenets of Vaishnava philosophy to differences between centres all over the world, or most often, our own experiences of and struggles with Krishna consciousness. At times we would discuss how difficult it was to concentrate properly on chanting, or how we were struggling to complete our sixteen rounds. If anyone had missed mangala arati, they were likely to keep to themselves and chant in the background, as it would be unthinkable to start the day without having at least made some headway with your rounds. Some would chant under their breath, coming in and out of the conversation at the same time. Often a devotee would raise a particular philosophical topic they had been wondering about or seek clarification on Prabhupad’s perspective on certain issues, such as the role of women or modern science. Conversation rarely veered outside of broadly speaking ISKCON-related topics, as to do so would be considered to ‘be in maya’. On this particular morning Kalesha Das had come to Madhu’s around the same time as the rest of us had just got our food. Kalesha is a charismatic brahmachari from a wealthy background in Nigeria. He had joined ISKCON after reading Prabhupad’s books and had come to Mayapur to improve his sadhana and advance in spiritual life. Kalesha had lived here for three years, where his seva was to lead the sankirtan party every day from 3pm to 6pm. This involved leading a party of six or so devotees around the complex (and once a week to neighbouring villages), singing kirtan through an old PA system mounted onto a small cart. On top of the cart are Gaura-Nitai deities (Chaitanya and his closest associate, Nityananda), making this effectively a mobile darshan unit. With his booming voice and seemingly endless stores of energy, Kalesha was certainlky suited to this seva. He attends mangala arati every morning, as is expected of brahmacharis, and he takes his sadhana very seriously, chanting a minimum of sixteen rounds per day, while pursuing various advanced courses in the Mayapur Institute. He is on the waiting list to become a sannyasi in the

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coming years and has no plans to enter into the grihastha ashram. Like all initiated brahmacharis, he always dressed in an orange dhoti and kurta, and wore tulasi beads and tilak. Like most devotees, he would wear his bead-bag around his neck when not chanting. Despite his seriousness in terms of his spiritual practice, he is a colourful character and often engages strangers in conversation, usually in a joking and upbeat tone. ‘Rice and paneer, please!’ Kalesha shouted as he arrived, trying to get the attention of the staff in the neighbouring restaurant. ‘I’m going to enjoy my senses!’ he screamed, playing on Prabhupad’s prohibition on the pursuit of sensual pleasure of any sort. Helping himself to a bottle of Sprite from the fridge, he continued, ‘if I can’t enjoy my senses taking prasadam, then I will enjoy my senses somewhere else’. This was a running theme, as we had often jokingly questioned him on how seriously he took his sadhana – with a beadbag in one hand, and a bottle of Sprite in the other. ‘What sort of Vedic culture is this?’ we would ask. Setting his Ipad on the table, Kalesha put his bead-bag away. With little regard for the conversation that was going on before his arrival, Kalesha (characteristically) interrupted, ‘I was at the kirtan last night!’ Pausing to make sure he had everyone’s attention, he continued, ‘I was at the kirtan on the roof of the pizzeria’. Some other devotees were also there and began to comment on how ‘ecstatic’ it was, how much energy people brought to the evening and how they could not wait for the next kirtan the following week. ‘This is not Vedic!’ he interrupted. The tone shifted. ‘There were people playing guitars, people screaming … it was like a nightclub! Why do devotees go to attend this kirtan, this is not entertainment! Kirtan is not entertainment! Why don’t they come to harinam everyday?’ Silencing everyone else, he continued to complain about the kirtan for several minutes. It was not, he argued, ‘Vedic’. ‘Kirtan is for glorifying the Lord, it is spiritual … it is not entertainment!’ One other devotee suggested that ‘if it’s in the service of Krishna, it’s Vedic’. Kalesha ignored their input, insisting that guitars and a ‘nightclub atmosphere’ undermined the spiritual purpose of kirtan. Although devotees would often discuss something like this at length, Kalesha was quite a strong personality, and everyone present seemed somewhat entertained, if nothing else, by his diatribe. Not finding the response he expected, Kalesha moved on to something else that was on his mind. ‘And these sexy pants!’ he announced. ‘I am a brahmachari, I can’t be around this! Why does she have to wear leggings … sexy pants! Why does she not wear a sari? This is not Vedic culture!’ Kalesha was referring to a Russian devotee who often chose to wear leggings and a kurti (a long loose shirt that covers the torso down to the knees) rather than the more common sari. As a brahmachari, he was pointing out that he should not have to deal with what he felt was an unnecessary display of immodesty, unfavourable as it was for his own commitment to celibacy. It was hard to tell how serious he was, as even when he was angry, he would never be far from laughter. Without much response from any of us, Kalesha, animated as ever, picked up his Ipad. ‘And some devotees tell me I can’t have this? I can’t have this Ipad



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because I am a brahmachari? I use it in the Lord’s service! But they tell me I shouldn’t have this … just because I have an Ipad doesn’t mean I am not living simply!’ Kalesha was angered at recently having heard that a couple of devotees had commented on the fact that modern technology such as Ipads did not fit the ascetic ideal of a simple and possessionless brahmachari. Kalesha continued, touching upon other criticisms he had heard had been directed at him. He should not, for example, as a brahmachari, talk to women. I pressed him and suggested that this was my understanding of what was expected of brahmacharis. While he was very aware that this was the ideal, laughing through his words, he explained, ‘I am a pure devotee! I am here to disturb devotees … if I can disturb you, your Krishna consciousness is weak!’ In responding to this particular accusation, Kalesha returned to a light-hearted tone. While Kalesha’s tone oscillated between humour and outrage, his repeated emphasis on Vedic culture was something that I had become quite familiar with. In complaining about what he deemed to be practices not befitting of Vedic culture, Kalesha was not advocating a radical reorientation of society, nor was he even seriously expecting that everyone around him would conform to his ideas of what Mayapur today should look like. Though couched in humour, however, he was making a serious display of his commitment to Prabhupad’s ideal of a traditional, and in his understanding, ‘Vedic’ aesthetic. To borrow Bourdieu’s terminology, he was trading in cultural currency with the aim of accruing spiritual capital (Guest 2007). Committed as he was to what he considered Vedic culture, in this case in terms of dress (though some would suggest, not disposition), he was happy to drink Sprite, keep up to date with Facebook on his Ipad or to talk to women, despite his understanding that none of this was to be found in Prabhupad’s Vedic culture. Kalesha’s defence of his use of an Ipad ‘in the Lord’s service’ is a reference to the popular, but in this case not explicitly articulated, Vaishnava concept of yukta-vairagya. Yukta-vairagya means ‘being yukta (associated) with these worldly affairs, while also being a vairagi (renunciate)’ (Sarbadhikary 2015, 231). It is, in other words, ‘maintaining a renunciate mentality within the material world’ (ibid.). While yukta-vairagya has varying connotations depending on the Vaishnava sect, in ISKCON it is often glossed as ‘practical’ or ‘feasible’ renunciation,4 and refers to the fact that in this material world living beings have no other choice but to act; it is impossible to completely renounce the world, and so proper renunciation demands that nothing be rejected if it can be used in the service of Krishna. In Mayapur yukta-vairagya arises frequently in pragmatic conversations about what aspects of modernity should be embraced, and what aspects should be rejected. While it serves as an important theological justification in a range of debates about what might be considered appropriate behaviour for devotees today, however, yukta-vairagya informs rather than necessarily resolves divergent interpretations of what might or might not constitute Vedic culture. As this brief encounter demonstrates, there are a range of both understandings of and commitments to the ideal of Vedic culture. While these

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understandings are informed by the concept of yukta-vairagya, devotees also have different interpretations of what can be justified within its scope; so while Kalesha was happy to use his Ipad ‘in the Lord’s service’, he would not accept this same reasoning for the inclusion of guitars at the kirtan, despite another devotee’s insistence that ‘if it’s in the service of Krishna, it’s Vedic’, and therefore appropriate. Although devotees do not necessarily agree on or often explicitly discuss their own definition of Vedic culture, the concept itself pervades everyday interactions, in most cases, appearing as an unpacked metonym. However conceived, it is generally understood that Vedic culture is something to strive for. This emphasis on culture has a long history in ISKCON.

A History of ‘Culture’ While, as we have seen in previous chapters, Prabhupad put much emphasis on sadhana and self-realisation, he also invested a lot of energy ensuring that his devotees understood the importance of culture in spiritual life. In the counterculture years in the West, what was conceived initially as ‘Indian culture’ was one of ISKCON’s strong selling points. Devotees enthusiastically donned the dhoti (or sari) and to Prabhupad’s surprise, the ascetic aesthetic became a defining feature of his early movement. Culture for Prabhupad, however, went beyond aesthetics. His was at once an educational, a spiritual and a cultural mission, not simply a religion. As Tamal Krishna Goswami (2012, 32) notes, ‘[Prabhupad’s] purpose was to transplant an entire culture – root, trunk, branches and all – into alien soil’. Vedic culture, Prabhupad taught, was ancillary to the pursuit of Krishna consciousness. Although such a cultural mission was conspicuous in a Western setting, Prabhupad’s crusade against secularism and the spread of Western culture began long before his journey to New York. From early on the concept of spiritual culture was foundational to his mission of spreading Krishna consciousness. Just as he was to be staunchly critical of what he found in the West, Prabhupad was often frustrated by what he felt were subpar spiritual standards in India, and it was with reference to the concept of culture that he often framed his objections. In a letter from 1949, for example, wherein Prabhupad referred to his mission as a ‘theistic cultural movement’, he wrote: There are thousands and lakhs of temples all over India but they are not always properly managed … Neither modernised gentlemen have any interest for these neglected theistic institutions. Originally the aim of these temples was to diffuse spiritual culture in every quarter. These temples or theistic institutions should therefore be reorganised as the centre of spiritual culture according to authentic principles as laid down in the scriptures like Bhagavad Gita.5

This same narrative underpinned his later critique of India’s deferential attitude towards the West. As noted in the introduction, growing up in early



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twentieth-century Kolkata, Prabhupad had seen first-hand what ‘cultural conquest’ and indeed cultural resistance looked like. As a supporter of Gandhi in his youth, he was well educated in the politics of cross-cultural power relations. Although Prabhupad’s critique of modernity was inspired by what he saw in India, and of course by what he experienced in the West later on, before arriving in New York in 1965 he was already deeply committed to the idea of India’s cultural superiority. He had come to be convinced that the cure for all of society’s ills was to be found in spirituality, on which India, he felt, was the accepted authority. This foundational assumption of India’s cultural superiority was something he inherited from his predecessors such as Bhaktivinod. In the late nineteeth century, along with the rise of secularism, as noted by Van der Veer (2013, 51), ‘the East comes to constitute a site of spirituality that is lost in the West’. Indeed, an important aspect of the anti-modernist agenda in India was the veneration of Indian traditions. Where Bhaktivinod measured India’s spirituality against Western secularism, Prabhupad pitched India’s ancient ‘culture’ against the West’s modern ‘culture’, metonymic as they were of purity and degradation, respectively. Prabhupad’s mission of spreading Vedic culture, as we have seen, often implied the rejection of ‘American’ or ‘Western’ culture but this was not a wholesale purging.6 In passionately rejecting certain aspects of the West, and embracing others, Prabhupad was following in the footsteps of Bhaktivinod (and the Brahmo Samaj) in the late nineteenth century. As a product of early twentieth-century Kolkata, Prabhupad inherited a late-colonial counterhegemonic tone. Although his movement was informed by a deep-seated enmity towards the Western world, it was nevertheless within Western discourses and institutional structures that Prabhupad forged his preaching mission. Though deeply conservative with respect to theology, Prabhupad framed his mission in the secular institutional language of the West, from the ‘Governing Body Commission’ to ‘temple presidents’ and the ‘international society’.7 Similar dynamics have been observed elsewhere, such as the European class struggle (Gramsci 1971) and the plight of the peasants in colonial India (Guha 1999). Bringing Gramsci to bear on the postcolonial Pacific, Roger Keesing aptly summarises (1989, 23); ‘counterhegemonic discourse pervasively incorporates the structures, categories, and premises of hegemonic discourse. In part this is because those who are dominated internalise the premises and categories of the dominant; in part, because the discourse of domination creates the objective, institutional realities within which struggles must be fought; and in part, because it defines the semiology through which claims to power must be expressed’ (see also Malhotra 2011). Although early twentieth-century counterhegemonic discourses did not cohere around the concept of culture as much as they did tradition and custom; for example, Prabhupad’s commitment to India’s spiritual superiority, coupled as it was with inherited assumptions of moral superiority, was to find neat articulation within the all-encompassing category of culture.

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Prabhupad’s insistence on Vedic culture was not of course restricted to discourse but manifested itself practically in the early years of the movement he founded in New York in 1966. His early disciples did not simply ‘convert’ or become ‘believers’, but they submitted themselves enthusiastically as subjects of an experiment in cultural transformation. Although ‘conversion’ to Krishna consciousness today looks quite different, in the 1960s almost all of Prabhupad’s committed disciples felt they were making not just a philosophical but also a deeply cultural shift. On one hand they were rejecting mainstream American culture (along with the counterculture), and on the other embracing what was considered superior ‘Indian culture’ (as was the rough conception at the time). Adopting a Vaishnava aesthetic and engaging in a wide array of Vaishnava practices was considered fundamental to one’s spiritual journey. To be culturally competent was itself a virtuous pursuit that any committed devotee would have to have taken as seriously as adhering to, or demonstrating faith in, the philosophical tenets presented by Prabhupad. Some ‘cultural practices’ were of course more difficult than others. For example, while devotees quickly took to wearing Vaishnava dress or eating only with the right hand, there was some reluctance in taking up Vaishnava bathroom etiquette (whereby toilet paper is replaced with the left hand). Although Prabhupad succeeded in some sense in presenting what he referred to as ‘Vedic culture’, his ambitions went far beyond aesthetics and basic practices. Prabhupad also passionately advocated what he felt was a blueprint for an ideal human society, within which, regardless of colour, caste or creed, everyone could live a good life and go back to Krishna. This was varnashrama-dharma.

Varnashrama-dharma as ‘Vedic Culture’ Varnashrama-dharma is the social system advocated by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. Varnashrama-dharma divides human society hierarchically into four varnas (brahmanas, kshatriyas, vaishyas and shudras) and four ashrams (brahmacharya, grihastha, vanaprastha and sannyasa). While the four varnas refer to one’s natural inclinations, the four ashrams refer to the stages of life one should pass through in the pursuit of salvation. Varna in a general sense refers to one’s caste and is typically outlined in terms of occupation and personal qualities. Brahmanas, for example, are intelligent and engage in scriptural studies, ritual, teaching or deity worship. Kshatriyas are the warrior class who engage in economics, politics, management and, of course, warfare. Vaishyas are involved with agriculture while shudras are typically artists and manual labourers. On top of this, the ashrams prescribe various stages of life. A brahmachari is a celibate student, who engages in scriptural study and spiritual practice. A grihastha is a householder who supports his family and pursues both economic and spiritual advancement. A vanaprastha is one who renounces intimate relations with his wife (in middle age) and gives up economic pursuits. Finally, a sannyasa (or sannyasi) is one



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who has renounced all activities that are not conducive to spiritual advancement and dedicates his days to spiritual practice. Depending on one’s natural inclinations, varnashrama-dharma prescribes a life trajectory, within which particular virtues or activities are deemed more or less important. The Bhagavad Gita lists the qualities of those in each varna: for brahmanas, ‘peacefulness, self control, austerity, purity, tolerance, honesty, knowledge, wisdom and religiousness’ (18.42); for kshatriyas, ‘heroism, power, determination, resourcefulness, courage in battle, generosity and leadership’ (18.43); for vaishyas, ‘farming, cow protection and business’ (18.44); and for shudras, ‘service, manual labour, arts and crafts’. Together, varna and ashram prescribe set duties (dharma) that, when distributed amongst a population, are conducive to an ideal society. For Prabhupad, varnashrama-dharma was fundamental to his conception of a worldwide Krishna consciousness revival. More than any of his predecessors, and especially towards the latter years of his mission, Prabhupad emphasised the importance of varnashrama-dharma.8 Ekkehard Lorenz (2004) has categorised Prabhupad’s references to varnashrama-dharma under the following accompanying definitions: ‘the perfectional form of human civilisation’, ‘the beginning of human civilisation’, ‘the natural system for civilised life’, ‘the beginning of actual human life’, ‘the beginning of the distinction between human life and animal life’ and ‘the most scientific culture’. Although Prabhupad had supreme confidence in varnashrama-dharma, he was acutely aware of the similarity between varnashrama-dharma and the modern caste system in India. In order to eschew any associations with the caste system, Prabhupad employed two disclaimers. Firstly, varnashrama-dharma is based on qualification, and not birth. One could not simply be labelled a shudra because of the social class into which one was born, but such a distinction could only be made based on one’s qualification or natural inclinations. Being born into a high-caste family similarly did not guarantee one would be a brahmana. Secondly, to further distinguish varnashrama-dharma from the widely criticised caste system, Prabhupad described the former as daiva-varnashrama. Adding the prefix daiva (God) serves to make God consciousness the telos of his ideal social system. In this way, the very system is understood not only as created by God, but also as conducive to the realisation of God in one’s life. The Indian caste system which was so at odds with Western conceptions of equality (and which as we have seen was a focus in the late nineteenthcentury colonial moral condemnation), for Prabhupad, was a degraded appropriation of the divinely created varnashrama-dharma. This was already a popular idea with Bhaktivinod Thakur, as indeed at the time was the wider sentiment that Indian religious traditions had been degraded by the priestly class. The caste system for Prabhupad was then a tool of social oppression based on material advancement, but varnashrama-dharma was a natural and timeless social framework for the spiritualisation and purification of society, one within which everybody could find a path back to God.

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While Prabhupad left behind no shortage of statements on what he conceived as an ideal society, he left devotees very little in terms of practical arrangements for pursuing the lofty social ideals that he advocated. In ISKCON today, for the most part varnashrama-dharma is considered an ideal that cannot be replicated in the modern world and that has in its literal form been all but abandoned. Particularly amongst international devotees, varnashrama-dharma is no more than a peripheral element of the moral imagination. As outlined in Chapter 2, devotees tend to aspire to quite a uniform set of virtues, typically those of the brahmana (humility, surrender, knowledge and tolerance). Devotees sometimes jokingly declare themselves to be shudras because they are artists or musicians, for example, but they do not as a consequence imagine a particular subset of virtues to be conducive to their being a good shudra. In other words, while devotees’ understanding of Krishna consciousness is informed by varnashrama-dharma, they do not exist within it in any meaningful way, nor do they for the most part aspire to it. This of course is unsurprising, given how strikingly at odds it is with modern liberal values. ISKCON then has thus far failed to implement Prabhupad’s ambitious sociocultural ideals, but varnashrama-dharma is still cherished by a small minority of more conservative devotees around the world. In Mayapur, they can mostly be found at what devotees refer to as the ‘traditional Vedic school’, the gurukul.

The Gurukul Time and time again during my fieldwork, in response to questions pertaining to all things Vedic, I was told by devotees to go to the gurukul. It was here, I was assured, that I would find a living and breathing example of Vedic culture. The gurukul (or ‘Bhaktivedanta Academy’ as it is officially called) is one of several schools in Mayapur. It was founded in 1984, since when, under the direction of Bhaktividya Purna Swami (a Prabhupad disciple from America) it has developed a curriculum based around what is referred to as ‘traditional Vedic education’. The gurukulis (male students between five and twenty-five years old) attend classes and live in the school all year around, in many cases separated from their families who live in different parts of the world. They are taught a range of subjects, including mantras, Sanskrit and philosophy, and through menial service and a demanding schedule, they are expected to cultivate a submissive disposition towards their guru in the pursuit of a Krishna conscious life. The gurukul boys are easily identifiable in the community as they typically wear a white dhoti, and instead of the more common kurta, a yellow chadar (a garment worn by males, thrown over their shoulder like a scarf ). Some also wear padukas, jokingly referred to as ‘Vedic flip-flops’.9 Although they are for the most part isolated from the main ISKCON campus, the gurukul boys often play leading roles in rituals and festival celebrations, and are widely considered to be exemplary Vaishnavas. Those who are committed to a traditional gurukul education are typically passionate advocates of



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a reorientation towards Vedic culture, and see the gurukul, as Prabhupad did, as the foundation of varnashrama-dharma, Krishna’s ideal society. Although it is only a short cycle ride from the complex, the gurukul is quite cut off from the rest of the ISKCON complex. Once you pass through the trees that mark the turn into the forest, you get the feeling you have entered into a different world (as is very much the intention). The gurukul campus is strikingly different from anything else in Mayapur and is recognisable by its red brick buildings topped by thatched huts that pierce the forest’s canopy. Aesthetically, it could be described as Bhaktividya Purna Swami’s own vernacular architecture, mixing elements of rural Indian bamboo and thatchwork and skirted by Japanese-inspired gardens, walkways and ponds, all built from locally sourced materials. The small campus consists of a three-storey building, where the boys sleep and some classes are held. Beside this there is a large domed hut that houses the temple. This space is often used for community events such as the school’s thirtieth anniversary celebrations held during my fieldwork, where kirtan, arati and yagnas (fire sacrifices) were led by Bhaktividya Purna Swami and the gurukul boys. Around these central spaces, there is an outdoor area for exercise (called ‘Hanuman Hut’) and another area, also outdoors, for cooking. There is a small goshala (cowshed) where the boys look after some cows and in nearby fields they engage in some small-scale agriculture with the aim of reaching self-sufficiency in the coming years. The gurukul itself is just one aspect of Bhaktividya Purna Swami’s wider ambitions that are collectively geared towards the implementation of varnashramadharma, at least in this small corner of Mayapur. In the coming years two

Illustration 5.1 Open-air kitchen area in the gurukul. Photograph by the author.

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major projects are planned in the forest surrounding the gurukul, ‘Bhaktivedanta Village’ and a ‘Varnashrama College’. While management are making plans then to build an ‘ideal Vedic city’, in his own small corner of Mayapur Bhaktividya Purna Swami and his team are envisaging what could perhaps be described as an ‘ideal Vedic village’. I had arranged on this particular afternoon to meet Madhura Nimai, one of the deans at the gurukul. I cycled a couple of hundred feet into the forest, where the gurukul is hidden away from the busy complex. When I entered the campus, to my left, some of the boys were playing with the cows, taking turns saddling them from behind while others sat with and petted them. To my right, another group of boys were preparing dinner. Huge pots were set on top of pits in the ground, which were stuffed with cow dung patties to fuel the open flames. One boy, sitting down, was milling some grain with a handstone as others were cutting vegetables. There were several boys chanting, some sitting, some walking with their hand in their bead-bag and one boy was sitting alone reading. As I entered the main building, I came across three more young boys. No older than six or so, they were all wearing dhotis and with freshly shaven heads and perfectly applied tilak were practising arati with some small deities. This was downtime at the gurukul. I had met Madhura Nimai several times, and he had also introduced me to Bhaktividya Purna Swami, who gave the morning classes I was now a familiar face at. Madhura Nimai was born in Mayapur, as his Australian parents were both Prabhupad disciples and had moved here in the 1970s. He was among some of the first Western boys to attend the gurukul here in the late 1980s. At

Illustration 5.2 Gurukulis perform a yagna (fire sacrifice). Photograph by the author.



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the age of fourteen, he moved to Australia where he had to get used to life in a regular high school. Although he always felt that Krishna consciousness represented the truth, he told me that in Australia, like other children his age, he went to parties and experimented with various intoxicants. Around this time, Madhura Nimai began practising martial arts, something that he would later make an important aspect of the gurukul’s emphasis on physical education.10 After school he came back to Mayapur, but he left again to work for a devoteerun company, ‘Scented Products’, in 1998. After having held a few jobs in Australia and completing his studies in business, he came back to Mayapur in 2004 where he met his wife. At this point he also began working in the gurukul and has been here since. I sat with Madhura Nimai on the third-floor veranda, where, unexpectedly, I found myself surrounded by a small group of curious gurukulis. Like a proud father, Madhura Nimai was keen for them to listen, and if they wished, to contribute to the discussion. We started by going through the schedule. The sixty boys, from countries all over the world, rise at 2am and after bathing at the water pump outside, chant for a couple of hours. Some will go to the main temple in the complex at 4.30am while others will stay and worship the deities at the gurukul. At 5.15am they begin their chores, which include cleaning, sweeping and laundry, for example. After classes on Sanskrit and mantras in the morning, they all gather for breakfast, prepared by some of the boys in the open-air kitchen area. They then have more classes including maths, English, Bengali, music, and what is referred to as ‘miscellaneous’, which lasts one hour per day, and covers everything deemed less important, from history and geography to business studies and science. The boys get twenty days’ holiday per year, and the schedule changes each term, moving between class-based courses, practical small-business experience in the community, and an annual pilgrimage. During the Gaura-Purnima festival for example, the boys are engaged in organising and running stalls that serve food to hundreds of pilgrims every day. The aim of this is to teach basic business skills at a young age, as the gurukul is geared towards producing capable leaders for ISKCON communities all over the world. For a few weeks every year, they undertake a pilgrimage on foot to Puri (around 300km), begging for food along the way. The aim of the pilgrimage, as with everything they do, is to cultivate humility and dependence on Krishna. Apart from these activities, and other ritual duties in the temple, the gurukulis are not meant to leave the campus area. There is no access to the internet as the idea of the gurukul is, within practical limits, to live by the motto ‘simple living, high thinking’. I asked Madhura Nimai to elaborate on the aims of the project: The aim of the gurukul is to produce human beings … According to the Vedic understanding, being born in the human form does not make you a human being. You have to go through a training process, a reformatory process to become a human being, and a human being is defined as someone who knows who he or she is, can function with other people who also know who they are, and can have an intimate

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and progressive relationship with God … In terms of the student, we want to provide a space where that person can realise his potential. We do that using a variety of traditional techniques based on relationships … cultivation of relationships … The Vedic system of education starts with the premise that the student approaches the teacher for knowledge. In order to gain that knowledge, he must surrender to the teacher, he must perform menial service, and he must enquire submissively … The aim of the gurukul is to train humans … It’s believed that … well no, it’s not believed … it’s understood that a man makes a man … You don’t have to teach a girl how to be a woman, but you have to teach a boy to be a man … Girls are innately already women, all you have to do is refine them.

Madhura Nimai’s presentation of the gurukul’s aims was in line with what one finds (maybe ironically) on the website: ‘Vedic education is culture, the process for the attainment of human life (spiritual birth), the foundation for a lifetime of Krishna consciousness, the means to attain the goal of life – re-establishing ourselves in our lost relationship with Krishna’. The emphasis on training, and the ‘reformatory process’ geared towards cultivating a relationship with God parallels the lifelong path of Krishna consciousness that everyone is, in their own way, pursuing in Mayapur. The particular attraction of the gurukul however is its perceived foundation in ‘purely traditional’ philosophy and practices of Vedic culture. Furthermore, as it strongly rejects modernity and isolates students from even the rest of the Mayapur community, the gurukul is felt by supporters to be the ideal setting within which to pursue Krishna consciousness. Vedic culture is often opposed to the modern educational system where, Bhaktividya Purna Swami insists, the inculcation of values and the formation of character are ignored in the blind pursuit of economic and material prosperity. There is of course a gendered aspect to the interpretation of this presentation of Vedic culture, as there is with the particular conception of varnashrama-dharma espoused by Prabhupad, both of which speak mainly to men. Despite the lack of a precedent in Vedic tradition, and Madhura Nimai’s insistence that ‘you don’t have to teach a girl how to be a woman’, a girls’ gurukul was opened ten years ago in another area on the periphery of the ISKCON complex and today has thirty-five students. This is a day school where the emphasis is similarly on spiritual practice and Vedic culture though what is taught here is more centred on the virtues of an ideal Vaishnavi (female devotee). When I attended a graduation ceremony at the girl’s gurukul, humility, tolerance, service to one’s husband, cooking, sewing and deity dressing, for example, were prevalent themes in the speeches from both teachers and students.11 As an ashram-based educational setting for boys, the gurukul is founded on similar principles as are adhered to in ISKCON temple ashrams around the world (also today, almost exclusively for men). The gurukul seeks to provide a highly regimented schedule within which ISKCON’s next generation can be trained, firstly as human beings, and secondly as leaders. Through spiritual practices such as chanting and deity worship, menial service and submission to authority, one is expected to cultivate a relationship with Krishna that will



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be the foundation for a life in God consciousness. While the focus is on selftransformation, the gurukul operates from the premise that one can only pursue particular ethical projects in particularly conducive socio-cultural settings. This setting is Vedic culture. The gurukul sees itself as producing brahmanas, men capable of leading a spiritual society.12 Not only is the gurukul designed to be traditional but it is also specifically designed not to be modern. In so vehemently opposing the Western educational system and, more generally speaking, culture, the gurukul deliberately eschews concerns relating to material prosperity or job prospects and instead focuses on devotional service. The gurukul system was introduced by Prabhupad in the early years, but the gurukul in Mayapur is today a fossil of a movement that has moved on from its radical beginnings. The ideal of renunciation of the outside world, while not wholly absent, is out of step with the profound transformation that ISKCON has undergone in the last few decades. As outlined in the introduction, ISKCON has matured into a congregational and ‘world-affirming’ movement that can no longer economically support temple communities as it did in the 1970s. Without ISKCON’s financial support, grihasthas can literally no longer afford to ‘reject’ the world but rather must rely on it to support themselves and their families. This is true for the vast majority of ISKCON devotees all over the world, and even, as we saw in Chapter 1, for residents in Mayapur. ISKCON’s institutional commitment to Vedic culture then has shifted with the economic tide. Culture, it seems, as is the case with renunciation, is an expensive business. As a result of this world-accommodation, a modern education, embedded as it may be in the material world that devotees strive to transcend, is today

Illustration 5.3 Gurukulis performing ritual duties in the main ISKCON complex. Photograph by the author.

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seen as a valuable asset for ISKCON devotees worldwide. The vast majority in Mayapur have chosen to educate their children in Sri Mayapur International School (SMIS). Located at the other end of the complex just beyond the grihastha area, SMIS is proudly referred to by staff and students as ‘Cambridge affiliated’ and has over 200 students from all over the world (between the ages of four and eighteen).13 It prepares students for A-levels, offering subjects such as maths, physics, English and chemistry. Along with these subjects there are what are referred to as ‘devotional subjects’ such as ‘Vaishnava philosophy’ and ‘Bhajans and harmonium’. The older children attend the morning programme in the temple every weekday between 7am and 8am, accompanied by their teachers. SMIS represents an attractive option for devotees, offering a modern academic education alongside an emphasis on Krishna consciousness. It prides itself on giving students the best of both worlds whereby children have the opportunity to go onto a prosperous career, on one hand, and can develop an appreciation of spiritual life, on the other. The divide between these two educational institutions reflects the quite dissonant ideas of ‘culture’ that prevail in Mayapur. On the one hand, the gurukul, characterised by strong commitments to Vedic culture (and varnashrama-dharma), attracts more conservative devotees who take very seriously the idea that one can meaningfully live within ‘Vedic culture’. On the other, SMIS attracts more liberal devotees prone to narratives of syncretism, who prefer the idea that one can live by Vedic culture. While those who support the gurukul strive to reject modernity and anything that is not ‘Vedic’, those who support SMIS lean towards modernity and are somewhat dismissive of the over-idealisation of varnashramadharma.14 Though these are not two completely exclusive camps, there were times when they seemed very much at odds. When I asked the gurukulis during my interview with Madhura Nimai why they did not mix with the nongurukul youths, their response was simple: ‘We have nothing in common’. While the syncretic approach espoused by SMIS might reflect ISKCON’s wider transformation, the idea of Vedic culture has not simply disappeared, even amongst those who consider its implementation today a fanciful ideal. This is particularly the case in conservative Mayapur where narratives of ‘Vedic culture’ are engrained in Prabhupad’s prophetic vision for the future. As we have seen, the concept of culture (however variously conceived) is central to devotees’ understanding of their own personal transformation. As I will now turn to describe, it also has emerged as a central concern in discussions and debates about what constitutes an ‘ideal Vedic city’.

The Temple of Vedic Planetarium I had arranged to meet a friend of mine, Braja, for a tour of the Temple of Vedic Planetarium (TOVP) construction site. Braja is Canadian but had lived in Mayapur for three years at this point, where she had worked in various



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roles. She was a teacher in SMIS but now was the secretary for the TOVP Project Director. We would often meet, sometimes in Madhu’s Bakery, and on occasion in a local restaurant across the road, where we would talk over a painfully sweet (but nonetheless caffeinated) glass of coffee. She had offered to give me a tour of the construction site, which started at her desk in the TOVP office next to the temple. Here in the ‘Long Building’ (once proudly boasted to be the longest building in West Bengal) and only feet away from the TOVP itself, engineers, designers and managers (all of whom are devotees) spend their days working on various details of this huge project. The walls around Braja’s desk were covered with large posters depicting various computer-generated images of what the TOVP will look like once completed (in 2023 or so). The TOVP is inspired by the Capitol Building in Washington DC, decorated with ornate columns, and overlooking immaculately landscaped gardens: I found myself wondering, as I had many times before, what was Vedic about this temple. After catching up with Braja at her desk, I was led around the various departments, including lighting, design and procurement. I met some devotees working on specific features of the temple’s design, including the LED lighting system and the main dome’s state-of-the-art acoustic technology. Not only, they proudly pointed out, did the TOVP make use of the best technology available, but it was all designed along principles of sustainability. After one of the engineers talked me through some designs for the altars and the marble floors, I was brought into the Project Director’s office. All over the walls were architectural drawings, blueprints and the same computer-generated images of the TOVP that adorned the wall behind Braja’s desk. There were several versions of the temple represented as the designs have changed over the last forty years (and particularly in the last ten). There was one large cross-section blueprint that traced the progress of the building on the ground. Everything but the domes were coloured in with blue highlighter, signifying that at this point the superstructure had been largely completed, minus the exterior brickwork. The focus now was to get the domes in place (though this was no small task). Beside this there was a poster that placed the TOVP alongside some of the world’s most iconic buildings (in ascending order of height): the Hagia Sophia, the Taj Mahal, St Paul’s Cathedral and St Peter’s Basilica. Mayapur after all, as Kadamba Kanana Swami later told me, is to be the ‘Vatican of the Hare Krishna movement’.15 From here, Braja led me over to the construction site. To get access from the second-storey TOVP offices, we had to cross a temporary scaffold bridge. Under our feet, the steel beams and wooden planks seemed to move in and out of place with every step. On the other side, the floor area of the construction site, at this point bare concrete, was roughly the size of two football pitches, punctuated by thick pillars and the occasional puddle, stagnating since the recent downpour. There were no workers, and there was no noise. The temple site felt more like an abandoned multilevel car park. It was hard to imagine that this would become the flagship preaching centre of the movement. Braja

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led me by a safe route towards our next stop, the art department. The art department is a small area in the corner of the construction site, cordoned off by a bamboo screen. Inside there are several workspaces where different aspects of the temple’s decoration are being worked on. Detailed sketches were strewn across desks, along with small-scale mock-ups of the temple’s ornate columns. By a wall covered with photographs of Prabhupad, some local artists were preparing a beautifully detailed clay Prabhupad statue, still far from completion. Half-finished life-size statues of the parampara (guru lineage) lined another wall. One devotee, who turned out to be the lead structural engineer, was working on (and in) a twelve-foot tall wooden model of the main dome, while another was working on a small-scale plaster cast of the kalash which when added to the top of the main dome will be fifty foot tall. After speaking with the artists, we went up a couple of flights of stairs to what will be the central temple room. We stood in the middle of the circular floor-space under the main dome, straining our necks to see the top (seven storeys up to the base of the dome). As we looked on, a crane was slowly lowering a large steel panel of the dome in place. Braja described for me what the TOVP would look like once completed. Pointing straight up, she told me, the main dome will be thirty-five storeys high. In front of us, there will be a 140ft wide altar, with three sets of deities (Radha-Madhava and the Pancha-Tattva, from the current temple, and the guru-parampara, currently being designed in the art department). This floor-space under the main dome will hold up to 10,000 devotees at a time. Under the smaller dome to the left (98ft tall) the large Nrsimhadeva deity (also currently in the existing temple) will be housed, while under the dome to the right there will be an exhibition hall.16 On different levels, there will be conference facilities, meeting rooms and seminar halls. While the outside of the temple will be decorated with white, blue and gold Turkish marble, the altars will be equally opulent, coated in onyx. Marble is being imported from Colombia and Vietnam and the domes will be finished with the best acoustic materials available. No expense is being spared. There will be an astronomical clock hanging over the entrance to the central temple room (directly inspired by the famous astronomical clock in Prague). The temple will be fully air-conditioned and surrounded by beautiful landscaping, street lighting and water features. As the name suggests, this is not just going to be a temple, but also a planetarium.17 Under what will be the main dome will be a giant ‘universal chandelier’ (as devotees are calling it) hanging from the ceiling. In keeping with Prabhupad’s wishes, this chandelier will be a model representing Vedic cosmology, as described in the Srimad Bhagavatam’s fifth canto, covering various planetary systems including Vaikuntha and Goloka Vrindavan.18 There will also be escalators to take devotees through the planetarium exhibition. Standing here with Braja in what will be the main temple room, it was difficult not to be moved by the sheer scale and ambition of this building. While I was confused about the extent to which much of what was being described was clearly not ‘Vedic’ (or even Hindu, or Indian) in terms of aesthetics, the TOVP



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at the same time seems the perfect symbol for today’s ISKCON. Within a largely non-Indian exterior, emulating buildings which themselves are inspired by Western classical architecture, and making use of the best of modern technology, the TOVP will house an artistic rendering of ancient Vedic cosmology which is expected to make scientists completely rethink their understanding of the universe. The TOVP, if nothing else, is a colossal monument to hybridity. Although Braja was a little reluctant to go any further (as she was scared of heights), with a little persuasion she took me a few storeys higher to the base of the dome (which was over 250ft). There was little in the way of safety or barriers, but we carefully made our way around the dome, from where we could see the whole Mayapur area for miles in every direction. To the south, behind Prabhupad’s Samadhi Temple, I could see the grihastha area on the periphery of the complex: redbrick apartment blocks hidden amidst the trees. Beyond this I could follow Bhaktisiddhanta Road towards Nabadwip on the horizon. To the west, I could see the nearby Ganges, while the rest of the ISKCON complex was to the east. In the distance, the thatched roof of the gurukul rose out of the thick forest. To the north, looking out over the guesthouses, administration offices and new buildings on the edge of the ISKCON complex, I could see the residential area of Gauranagar, where every other building is under construction. Past the high-rise apartments, and about a mile in the distance, was Yogapitha, the site of Chaitanya’s birthplace. From this vantage point, I could look out over the whole of Mayapur, an ideal Vedic city in the making.

Illustration 5.4 Local pilgrims take photographs near the rising TOVP (2018). Photograph by the author.

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Imagining an Ideal Vedic City Amidst much anxiety for the future, as described in Chapter 1, there is an excitement in Mayapur that Prabhupad’s dream of a spiritual city is finally becoming a reality. As the TOVP rises, many devotees are now asking: what is an ideal Vedic city? Some see the development as the fulfilment of a prophetic vision, while others are lamenting the doomed fate of Prabhupad’s dream. Ideas of what constitutes a Vedic city orbit a wide array of themes, from more traditional perspectives encompassing shastric interpretation and vastu principles (the branch of Vedic knowledge dealing with architecture and construction), for example, to distinctly modern concerns such as waste management, recycling programmes and sustainable energy. During my fieldwork, I spent a lot of time discussing with devotees this idea of an ‘ideal Vedic city’. While devotees have quite a robust vocabulary with which they can narrate and evaluate their own sadhana, when talking about concepts such as society or a ‘spiritual city’, devotees often lacked a broader framework within which they could make sense of Mayapur’s development. This is not to suggest they do not have opinions; they certainly do. What was apparent however was that while they have inherited from Prabhupad a blueprint within which they can imagine their own spiritual progress, when it comes to conceiving of a spiritual city, devotees often struggled to articulate a vision of what a Krishna conscious society should look like. As I described in Chapter 1, ISKCON has experience managing temples, or in some cases, small-scale rural communes, but has never overseen the development of a town, let alone a city. This spiritual city then is uncharted territory. One of the deputy directors outlined for me the basic task Mayapur management is facing: [We must decide] how to create this ideal Vedic city that is simultaneously true to Vedic principles but at the same time able to host an international group of people who will live here … but we have full confidence that it is doable, not least because it’s a prediction coming from ultimately the Supreme Person himself in the form of Lord Chaitanya, Lord Nityananda and great souls like Bhaktivinoda Thakur and Srila Prabhupad … So we have complete faith in that … and also we have great faith in the principles of Vedic life, being applicable at all times for all people.

Of course, not everybody shares this sentiment and there is much disagreement on which aspects of ‘Vedic life’ should be recreated, and which can be ignored. Although Prabhupad’s utopian ideals still inform aspirations for this troubled project, as ISKCON has failed in many respects to implement his grand socio-cultural ideals, devotees are equally likely today to turn to modernity and to the West, when imagining Mayapur’s future. Prabhupad’s vision, inspirational as it continues to be, simply does not constitute a comprehensive plan for how one might go about building a city based on Vedic culture. How then, considering the ambiguity at the heart of the idea of ‘Vedic culture’, and



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the various obstacles the project is facing, are devotees in Mayapur imagining the future of this spiritual city? Discourses on Mayapur’s development take as their point of departure the rather simple question: what did Prabhupad want? Prabhupad often enthusiastically referred to plans for, and inquired about the progress of, the Mayapur project, but he left his devotees on the ground to oversee the details of his grand ambitions. As he was constantly travelling and overseeing the establishment of temples and centres all over the world, he tended only to visit Mayapur for a couple of weeks in March for the annual Gaura-Purnima festival. While he inspired his young American devotees to invest their energy in building this spiritual city, he was quite open to their ideas as to how to go about this. The TOVP was central to Prabhupad’s plans. For him, the proposed temple project served several functions. It was first and foremost to facilitate deity worship, as had become central to his preaching mission in the West. It was also to demonstrate the superiority of Vedic cosmology over the modern scientific perspective, in incorporating a planetarium. Above all else, the temple was to be a world-class attraction, a preaching tool that would draw people from all over India, and indeed all over the world, to Mayapur, the Land of the Golden Avatar. In conceiving this temple, Prabhupad, as was characteristic of him, thought big. For him, this meant thinking international, and in particular, American. As he told his disciples on a morning walk in Mayapur in 1976, ‘My  plans are all American’.19Although ISKCON’s story, as we have seen, is often framed in terms of an Indian sannyasi bringing ‘Vedic culture’ to the West, Mayapur’s development is as much a reflection of an Indian sannyasi bringing ‘the West’ back to India. As the TOVP makes clear, Prabhupad was inspired by Western architecture. He often wrote to devotees telling them to incorporate in the design of the TOVP various aspects of what he saw on his travels. In a letter to Tamal Krishna Goswami in 1971 referring to the temple project, he wrote, ‘I have shown in London the Westminster Abbey to Shyamsunda… Perhaps you have also seen it. I want the inside [of the TOVP] just like the Westminster Abbey’. On another occasion he requested that devotees photograph Capitol Hill in Washington, and make sure to replicate its dome in the design. The Mayapur project was to be based on what Prabhupad referred to as ‘Vedic culture’, but he was determined that its development would emulate the highest Western standards of design and functionality. While the temple itself was Prabhupad’s top priority, it was but one aspect of his wider ambition for Mayapur’s development. Prabhupad seems, however, to have been undecided on what exactly Mayapur was to become. According to his most quoted phrase, it was to be a ‘magnificent international city based on this Vedic culture’. His ‘magnificent international city based on Vedic culture’, however, has come to be conflated with various descriptors such as ‘spiritual city’, or ‘Vedic city’. Indeed, this is where the slightly catchier, but somewhat misleading, ‘ideal Vedic city’ comes from (Prabhupad, importantly,

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never used exactly this phrase). Subtle as the slippage may be, all of these titles carry with them a range of connotations that have caused much confusion, and enflamed passions amongst advocates of divergent perspectives. In the last years of his life, the idea of a ‘city’ seemed quite central to Prabhupad’s plans for Mayapur. In a letter to a donor in 1976, Prabhupad wrote, ‘We are trying to construct a city where people from all over the world can visit and live according to Vedic tenets of “simple living and high thinking”’.20 By 1976, Prabhupad’s vision for Mayapur had far exceeded his earlier ambitions, though he was still far from clear on his plans for its development, wavering between descriptions of a ‘spiritual town’, a ‘small township’, and a ‘city’. In a conversation recorded in Vrindavan, a devotee helped to articulate Prabhupad’s vision:21 In ISKCON’s Mayapur project hundreds of persons operate spinning wheels and more than a dozen handlooms, dye the cloth, and … popular design, process rice and dal by hand, crush sugar cane for sugar products, and manufacture by hand, wooden shoes and other items of daily use. On twenty-five acres of agricultural land in Mayapur, ISKCON is developing and demonstrating scientific farming procedures such as crop rotation, organic fertilization, and using improved strains. ISKCON is also crossbreeding cattle from Canada and Australia with Indian cows to increase milk production. Thus the community provides … daily needs, acts as an agricultural development and demonstration centre, and additionally feeds thousands of people twice every week. Within the next ten years, according to ISKCON’s plans, the Mayapur project will extend into a complete Vedic city with fifty thousand [people].

In the same breath Mayapur is imagined as both a Gandhian rural utopia and a ‘complete Vedic city’ utilising the most advanced scientific farming methods. It seems that Prabhupad’s commitment to hybridity went beyond cross-breeding Indian and Western cows. Prabhupad’s vision for Mayapur represents the difficulties he had in bringing together the East and the West.22 While on one hand he wanted a ‘magnificent international city based on Vedic culture’, on the other, he insisted on the importance of agriculture and varnashrama-dharma as the foundation for spiritual life. He wanted to impress Indian devotees with an international city, but at the same time he wanted to provide a space for his foreign devotees to live according to Vedic ideal of ‘simple living, high thinking’. While these two ideas are not necessarily mutually exclusive, they have tended to represent divergent interpretations of what the Mayapur project should strive for. With Prabhupad at the helm, any such apparent contradictions could be managed under his charismatic leadership but in his absence inconsistencies in his vision and unforeseeable developments, both in Mayapur and ISKCON worldwide, have led the project into a difficult situation, where recourse to his instructions produces as much disagreement as it does consensus. From the gaps between his recorded statements on Mayapur much debate has sprung and there are divergent interpretations of what this spiritual city might look like. The ambiguities that pervade his vision have proven fertile spaces where



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competing interpretations and aspirations for Mayapur’s development are still being contended. In terms of imagining an ideal society, as is the case with their own personal commitments to ‘culture’, devotees in Mayapur often disagree on what aspects of Vedic culture should be replicated, and which should be considered impossible to achieve (however ideal they may be). Some are rejecting the label altogether. Thinking about the development of Mayapur, Kadamba Kanana Swami suggested to me an alternative: ‘It’s a Gaudiya Vaishnava City … it’s not entirely Vedic … it’s that Chaitanya Vaishnavism which has that special bhakti flavour focused on Radha-Krishna, Vrindavan and all that, right’. Another senior guru, in response to my question ‘What is Vedic?’, simply laughed, ‘You tell me!’ When I asked another devotee about Mayapur becoming an ideal Vedic city, he responded contemptuously (referring to the absence of varnashrama-dharma), ‘Where is the King? Where are the intelligent renounced Brahmans?’ The fact that not everyone agrees on what an ideal Vedic city might look like, of course, is unsurprising. As one devotee asked on the online forum, ‘Did [anyone] living during an age of “Ideal Vedic Culture” ever agree on what an “Ideal Vedic City” should be?’ The sources to which devotees turn to qualify their understandings are few, and in almost all cases, it is Prabhupad’s quotations on the topic that inform their commitments. A description in the Mahabharata of the ancient city of Indraprastha is sometimes enlisted in support of particular conceptions of a Vedic city (H.D. Goswami 1997). The elements of this city that devotees espouse are however filtered through a set of modern considerations. While a ‘well-designed system of wide roads’ and ‘parks and gardens lush with fruit’ have certainly made it into the imagined future, for some, not surprisingly, there was never any talk of the ‘deadly lances and missiles’ or ‘rows of turrets guarded by battle-ready soldiers’ (all of which are mentioned in the same passage). To fill the gaps in Prabhupad’s vision, devotees espouse a range of priorities. For some, passionate about vastu, for example, Prabhupad’s vision was quite simple. As one particularly zealous devotee posted on the forum: Even if the Mayapur city has the best karmi [non-devotee] standards in the world but does not implement VEDIC ARCHITECTURE then no one has the right to call it a VEDIC city because it’s not, it will be a spiritualised karmic city which is not ‘precisely’ what Srila Prabhupada ordered… Scholars all over India will laugh at us if we use the word Vedic when most of the architecture in Mayapur displays large scale ignorance of Vedic architecture. But it’s better than the slum city that is a total embarrassment which is fast emerging in many areas near the TOVP. Implementing at least the very basics of Vedic architecture cost nothing, so why push for only HALF of what Prabhupada wanted when the FULL package will not cost anything more? It’s a no brainer really. How can you have a Vedic city where there is no real Vedic architecture? [sic]

Underpinning discussions about the future of Mayapur, there is a tension, already evident in Prabhupad’s vision, between ‘Vedic’ and ‘international’. This

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tension reflects an interpretive fault line amongst residents in Mayapur. On one side there are those who are committed to the more ‘traditional’ or ‘back to the land’ elements of Prabhupad’s vision (often those involved in the gurukul), while on the other, the majority in Mayapur are more committed to what could be described as a more modern outlook, which typically means embracing urban development (and sending their children to SMIS). For those who are committed to a Vedic aesthetic, the gurukul represents the ideal towards which everyone should be striving. As in nineteenth-century Kolkata, the gurukulis, much like the Arya Samaj, look to an enchanted Vedic past as a resource for imagining an ideal future, while the majority of residents in Mayapur, more like the Brahmo Samaj, aspire to a synthesis between ‘Eastern spirituality’ and ‘Western technology’. For the most part, however, devotees in Mayapur have turned as much to modernity (perceived as ‘Western’) as they have to a Vedic past for inspiration. As ISKCON has changed dramatically since Prabhupad’s death, place-making ambitions have evolved not in isolation from, but in dialogue with quite modern understandings of what constitutes a good society. Ideas for this spiritual city often cohere around distinctly modern concerns. One senior Prabhupad disciple, when I asked about what constitutes an ‘ideal Vedic city’, listed the following amongst his priorities for Mayapur’s future: efficient public transport, low pollution, eco-friendly industries, large-scale waste-recycling policies, green taxes, effective employment programmes, sustainable gardening and parks, and sex education for the youths. None of these points address what might be described as Vedic, or even broadly speaking Vaishnava concerns. Indeed, they would fit comfortably into the agenda of most intentional communities, prioritising sustainability, employment, education and moral conduct. That devotees are divided as to what Prabhupad meant by Vedic culture is not wholly unexpected. One need look no further than the TOVP itself to understand the difficulty of implementing Prabhupad’s eclectic utopian vision of this spiritual city. Given ISKCON’s rich history of syncretism, so appositely symbolised by the TOVP, the obstacles Mayapur faces today are a direct consequence of the socio-cultural challenges Prabhupad himself faced in bringing Vedic culture to the West, and back again to India.

Conclusion Two themes undergird the quotation at the start of this chapter, reflecting a dyadic narrative that pervades ISKCON’s self-perception: the flow of ‘Western culture’ to the East and the counter-flow of ‘Eastern culture’ to the West. Although ISKCON for the most part has failed in its attempts to implement Prabhupad’s ambitious Vedic cultural ideals (most notably varnashramadharma), Vedic culture has not simply disappeared but has persisted in multifarious ways in Mayapur. It informs devotees’ understandings of their own ethical projects of self-cultivation and is central to imaginings of the future of



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the spiritual city. Coming to Mayapur, devotees bring with them from the West an ISKCON that has transformed dramatically since Prabhupad’s death. At times this clashes with some of the more conservative commitments that are so intimately tied to Prabhupad’s vision for the sacred land of Mayapur. In order to fill in the gaps in Prabhupad’s vision, devotees often turn to modernity, and to the West, for ideas of what constitutes an ideal city. The spiritual city then that devotees today imagine is informed by ‘Vedic culture’ but is also conceived within a quite secular and modern vocabulary that reflects ISKCON’s evolution away from Prabhupad’s ‘Vedic’ ideals. One need look no further than the TOVP to understand the disparate sources of legitimation that underpin the Mayapur project. This chapter has focused on two aspects of Vedic culture in Mayapur. Firstly, I have looked at how culture is understood by devotees to be indispensable to their own individual pursuits of Krishna consciousness. Vedic culture, variously conceived, is one of many resources by which devotees cultivate themselves as good Vaishnavas. Like the culture concept in anthropology, Vedic culture is profoundly ambiguous. While this ambiguity may be fertile ground for discontent, it is also a precondition of its widespread use. Meaning and hence value do not inhere in the culture concept but are produced in the myriad investments that devotees themselves make in mobilising narratives of culture in their everyday ethical striving. Vedic culture for the majority in Mayapur, like Kalesha, for example, is not something to live within but is something to live by. This chapter has also described how culture is used a resource to which devotees turn to qualify their imaginations of the future. Where previous chapters have focused on the individual as the ethical subject, this chapter has looked at how, through articulating imaginations of and commitments to the future of the spiritual city, the city itself becomes an object of ethical reflection. The city (as an object of ethical reflection) and the self (as ethical subject) can of course be conceived quite independently of each other. Devotees in Mayapur who advocate a traditional aesthetic, for example, need not necessarily do so by linking vastu principles of architecture to the cultivation of individual virtue (although that is not to say they cannot or do not at times). The justification behind particular commitments can be as simple as ‘this is what Prabhupad wanted’ or ‘this is what a Vedic city should look like’. Aesthetics then is an interesting vehicle for ethical evaluation in so far as the apparent concern for appearance often obscures deeper affective commitments upon which that concern is founded. Devotees sometimes had trouble, for example, in articulating why the TOVP has been inspired by a series of non-Indian buildings. When I would ask why it is designed to resemble the Capitol Building, beyond the basic understanding that this was Prabhupad’s wish, devotees’ explanations seemed complementary rather than foundational to their affective commitment. Of course, self-cultivation and place-making often coalesce. As we saw in the case of the gurukul, the two aspects of Vedic culture pertaining to both

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self-cultivation and place-making cannot easily be disentangled. The gurukul’s commitment to a Vedic aesthetic is an ethical pursuit in so far as it is understood to facilitate the cultivation of Vaishnava virtues in the gurukulis. The motto ‘simple living, high thinking’ subsumes social ideals, aesthetics and personal virtues, all of which are founded on, and in turn are understood to be conducive to, Vedic culture. Devotees’ understandings of what constitutes an ideal city, however profoundly informed by Prabhupad’s prophetic vision, are also shaped by their own attempts to live a life in Krishna consciousness in a changing world, between cultures. That devotees in Mayapur have left behind the comforts of the West for the ‘austerities’ of rural India attests to the fact that self-cultivation and place-making are constituent elements of devotees’ ethical projects. After all, in most cases devotees have come here because they felt they could not properly follow Prabhupad’s teachings in the West. Having arrived, however, as described in Chapter 1, devotees soon find that living in Mayapur comes with its own unique set of challenges. While devotees often narrate their sadhana in terms of their individual attempts to pursue Prabhupad’s programme of self-realisation, as I have outlined in this chapter, they also understand the importance of ‘transforming the conditions that make them’ (Moore 2011, 15). The future of Mayapur then is not just conceived in terms of aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake but is often framed in terms of the extent to which this spiritual city will facilitate the pursuit of a virtuous life. It is around the constructively ambiguous concept of culture that ideals and aspirations for both self-cultivation and place-making cohere.

Notes   1. Source: https://vanisource.org/wiki/760228_-_Lecture_SB_07.09.21_-_Mayapur, last accessed 19 July 2019.   2. This chapter is derived in part from an article published in the Journal of Hindu Studies (Fahy 2018).   3. Similar debates about classification have arisen within ISKCON around the usage of the term ‘Hindu’ (see Brzezinski 1998).   4. Prabhupad. Srimad Bhagavatam 9.4, summary. Source: https://vanisource.org/wiki/ SB_9.4_Summary, last accessed 19 July 2019.   5. Source: http://www.prabhupadaconnect.com/Letters3.html, last accessed 19 July.   6. For more recent accounts of ‘Indian culture’ in the context of globalised modernity, see Sen 2005 and Fuller 2003.   7. The name ‘Governing Body Commission’ was borrowed from Bhaktisiddhanta, who himself borrowed it from the Indian Railways Commission. Far from unique in ISKCON’s case, this is indicative of wider neo-Hindu trends.   8. Chaitanya himself had rejected varnashrama-dharma for the path of suddha bhakti (pure devotion), while Bhaktivinod presented varnashrama-dharma as conducive to, but not necessary for, the pursuit of Krishna consciousness (Kapoor 1976, 134).   9. Footwear made out of a flat wooden sole, with a knob that fits between the big and second toe. 10. Tong Long Kung Fu in particular is practised here. Although generally understood to be of Chinese origin, it is taught at the gurukul to be originally Indian. Regardless of its



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exact origins, however, its acceptance as a worthwhile discipline lies in the fact that it is Eastern rather than Western. 11. This reflects Prabhupad’s own interpretation of Vedic education. Women, he insisted ‘should automatically learn how to cook, to cleanse the home’ (Morning walk, 14 March 1974). This gendered approach to education is of course not limited to the Indian context (see Gilmore 1990). 12. Of course, varnashrama-dharma can only function with four varnas. Given that the gurukul produces brahmanas and that the vast majority of ISKCON devotees do not identify with a particular varna, the gurukul’s social goals are sometimes felt to be out of place in the wider movement today. 13. It conducts exams through ‘Cambridge International Examinations’. 14. Recently, a small movement called Krishna West has emerged within ISKCON. It advocates the freedom to reject ‘Vedic culture’ in an attempt to ‘make bhakti-yoga easy, relevant and enjoyable for Western people, without in any way compromising, diluting, or diminishing the purity and power of a glorious ancient tradition’ (source: http://krishnawest.com/, last accessed 19 July 2019). 15. The height of each building was marked, with the TOVP just beating St Paul’s Cathedral, for example, by two metres. 16. It has not yet been decided what will be displayed here. 17. The planetarium represents the centrality of cosmology in Gaudiya Vaishnava thought; however this is not unique to ISKCON. There is also a planetarium in the Sathya Sai complex at Puttaparthi (Tulasi Srinivas 2010, 143). 18. Along with the fifth canto, the TOVP takes its inspiration from the Brahma Samhita (5.43). 19. While India was, for Prabhupad, spiritually (and morally) superior, he often considered the West (and in particular, America) to be superior in terms of efficiency and ingenuity. 20. Source: https://vanisource.org/wiki/760605_- _Letter_to_Mr._Hunter_written_from_ Los_Angeles, last accessed 19 July 2019. 21. Source: https://vanisource.org/wiki/761106_-_Conversation_-_Vrndavana, last accessed 19 July 2019. 22. Importantly, the ‘Western culture’ (or the West) and ‘Eastern culture’ (or the East) to which I refer are ISKCON’s constructs, and not my own.

Conclusion Failing Well

One should not be discouraged in the discharge of devotional service. Failures may not be detrimental; they may be the pillars of success. —Prabhupad (1984)1

How international devotees strive, and at times struggle, to live a Krishna conscious life in the sacred land of Mayapur has been the focus of this book. Despite their sincere commitment to Prabhupad’s teachings, in trying to live in a lay setting according to a strict spiritual programme rooted in monasticism, devotees are faced with new obstacles that recourse to Prabhupad’s teachings can only partially inform. As a consequence of the socio-historic context of Prabhupad’s mission in both the West and India, and ISKCON’s subsequent transformation, devotees are having to find new ways of pursuing Krishna consciousness in a changing world. They are, in other words, having to find new ways of becoming Vaishnava. By their own assessment, both they and the institution they are so deeply committed to have often failed along the way. Rarely, however, is this a cause for despair. Rather, given the profound difficulty of always and everywhere adhering to the dictates of Krishna consciousness, devotees are well equipped to face failure. The real virtue is not to be found in simply avoiding moral failure, but in resiliently managing and responding to its inevitability. Devotees’ projects of moral self-cultivation, then, can be described in terms of a process of failing well. The ethnographies that I have engaged with throughout this book for the most part describe ethical life in particular religious contexts. Often in Foucauldian terms, these ethnographies engage with ethics by describing processes and narratives of self-cultivation in the particular socio-historical settings, traditions and institutions within which they are pursued. In other words, they look at the various ways in which people inhabit particular moral systems. In describing how people work on and make themselves subjects of ethical striving, however, as outlined in the introduction, anthropologists have often foregrounded how people imagine and work towards cultivating virtues. At the

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same time, the theme of moral failure, while certainly not wholly absent, has typically played a peripheral role. Anthropologists, then, have tended to privilege moral success as a measure of the extent to which adherents inhabit moral systems, while paying less attention to how people also do so through sometimes equally effective, and in many cases more expedient, narratives of failure. As already outlined, there is a growing body of literature within the anthropology of ethics that engages with the themes of ambivalence, uncertainty, imperfection, conflict, contradiction and failure. One particularly instructive example already touched upon was that of Robbins’ Becoming Sinners. In the case of the Urapmin, and as a direct result of what he calls ‘the inevitability of moral failure’, Robbins describes how ‘the Christian life is impossible to live’ (2004, 248). Even though their efforts are destined to fail, and often result in what he calls ‘moral torment’, they can still inhabit the moral system. They do so not by being good Christians but by failing to be good Christians in a particularly Christian way. It is, in other words, through sinfulness and moral failure rather than virtue and moral success that the Urapmin inhabit the moral system. Highlighting the difficulty of the situation the Urapmin have found themselves in, Robbins describes the moral system as a response to the question, ‘How does one live as a good person while existing in the midst of a social world that routinely draws one into sin?’ (2004, 254). Reflecting a similar deep-rooted ethical complexity, ISKCON’s moral system, I suggest, could be analogously described as a response to the question, ‘How does one live as a good person while existing in the midst of a social world that routinely draws one into maya?’ In what follows, I bring the book’s various strands together under the theme of moral failure and contextualise the concept of failing well in the broader anthropology of ethics. Before elaborating on the moral system that this book has described, I want to firstly comment on what is often referred to as ‘Hindu ethics’.

Hindu Ethics Most accounts of Hindu ethics begin by suggesting that there is no such thing as an Indian tradition of ethical enquiry (Widgery 1930, Creel 1977, Perrett 1998, Dhand 2002, Ram-Prasad 2007, cf. Malhotra 2011). That is to say, we do not find a sustained discursive tradition that takes as its subject a pure category that we could translate as ‘ethics’. The concept of dharma – variously translated as ‘the good’, ‘duty’, ‘justice’ or ‘moral order’, for example – is often presented as the best candidate.2 The impulse towards direct comparison, however, has proven quite problematic. Unlike ethics in the Western tradition, dharma in Indian philosophy cannot be disentangled from explicitly religious teloi, such as moksha, or in the case of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, prema. This has long since been a point of departure in any discussion on the topic of Hindu ethics (see Jhingran 1989). As far back as 1926, for example, Hanumantha Rao noted that in Hinduism,

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[p]hilosophy is not mere speculation divorced from the highest needs of life; nor is ethics merely confined to custom and precept divorced from contemplation. Each is in and through the other … The tendency of modern European philosophers to consider metaphysical problems independently of ethics and moral problems independently of metaphysics, thought apart from life and life apart from thought, is altogether alien to the Indian philosophers. (1926, 21)

Sushil Kumar De has similarly argued that in Hinduism, ‘morality is regarded as necessarily religious and religion as necessarily moral’ (1961, 542). The same is often said of knowledge in so far as it is never treated as a ‘pure’ category. It is only ever treated alongside its consequences, which are typically explicitly religious (Ram-Prasad 2007).3 Among other problems, as Arti Dhand (2002) underlines, there is no such thing as a ‘common dharma’ but multiple and sometimes conflicting dharmas (as Arjuna had to find out the hard way on the battlefield). Despite this, dharma is variously conflated with or subsumed under the Western category of ethics. This is not, however, just a taxonomical problem. Hinduism’s apparent under-elaboration of what we might call ethics has itself often been adjudged to be a moral deficiency. Scholars such as Sushil Kumar De have argued that not only is there a lack of explicit treatment of ethics, but that whatever little treatment can be found, embedded as it in religious discourse, is inadequate (1961, 542). As we have seen, the idea that Hinduism lacks ethical sophistication, and that Indians are therefore morally deficient, was pervasive in the nineteenth century. Hindu traditions generally, and Krishna in particular (whose ‘indubitable nonvirtuousness’ Weber was struck by), were often the objects of scathing denigration, morally inferior as they were found to be when compared with Christianity. The early twentieth-century missionary-scholar Melville Kennedy, for example, argued that ‘at best [Gaudiya Vaishnavism] has been non-ethical, and the tendency has been constantly towards the unethical’ (1925, 221). The only virtues he was willing to accept in Vaishnavism were those that seemed to reflect the ‘Beatitudes of Jesus’ (1925, 218), such as humility. Of Chaitanya, Kennedy writes, The powers of a magnetic personality that might have done great service were used up in an emotionalism that left him an ineffective nervous wreck, the object of incessant care on the part of disciples … In comparison with this stands the Cross of Christ … [that] gains in moral grandeur with each succeeding century, equally the inspiration and the standard of mankind’s moral advance. (1925, 222)

While we may have moved on from such naïve value judgements (and assumptions of the West’s moral superiority), there persists today the idea that there is no such thing as what could properly be called an ethical tradition in Hinduism. In a posthumously published article (2014), Joseph O’Connell attempts to outline that despite a lack of explicit ethical enquiry in Chaitanya Vaishnavism, there is inherent a ‘devotional ethics’ that takes its inspiration from Krishna’s lilas (transcendental pastimes). O’Connell writes that ‘there is

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no readily available systematic philosophical or theological texts within what we may call the Chaitanya tradition that explicitly elaborates ethical theory as such’ (2014, 147). While the Six Goswamis did not elaborate what might be described as an ethical theory, O’Connell rightly points out that ‘devotional ethics’ is inherent in Gaudiya Vaishnava philosophy, ‘that customised “devotional ethics” is ethics nonetheless’ (2014, 141). The problem remains as follows, however; if not explicitly elaborated in Gaudiya Vaishnava philosophy, where might we find what could be described as ethics, devotional or otherwise? O’Connell outlines the various resources that the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition offers adherents. First, is the explicit enumeration of moral virtues in Vaishnava texts, such as the twenty-six qualities of a devotee listed in the Chaitanya Charitamrta (see Chapter 2). O’Connell then cites the equally popular verse from Chaitanya’s Shiksastakam (‘Be more humble than a blade of grass…’), and underlines that elsewhere ‘personal humility, tolerance of injury or insult without retaliation, respectful treatment of others are virtues endlessly repeated in literature’ (2014, 149). He is quite right to suggest that devotees might rely on Vaishnava texts to frame their own projects of selfcultivation, but this says little about how they should actually go about it. While an ‘underlying ethics’ might be inherent in Vaishnava theology, history or shastra, a lot of work is left for the devotee to do in order to mobilise such an ethics in everyday life. That it is possible to extract patterns of ethical behaviour, as O’Connell does here, is only a preliminary and rather speculative step towards describing how devotees actually do it. As anthropologists working in the field of ethics have noted, the ideal and the real are often very distinct spheres of ethical life. It is the everyday striving to live the latter in light of the former that anthropologists mark as their point of departure. I have attempted to show throughout this book that ISKCON today represents a particularly interesting instantiation of what we might call ‘Hindu ethics’. Comprising an impressively systematic set of responses to the question of ‘how one ought to live?’, Krishna consciousness presents devotees with a sophisticated moral system within which they make themselves subjects of a profound lifelong transformation. Krishna consciousness, however, is a strategy, not a solution. The strength of the moral system is not just that it presents devotees with a range of ideals in pursuit of which they can live a good life, but, of equal importance, it also provides them with robust moral narratives that accommodate the inevitability of failure along the way. Beyond the immediate context of Mayapur, devotees’ attempts to inhabit this moral system speak to a range of debates in the broader anthropology of ethics.

Self-Cultivation and Place-Making This book has proceeded from a history of ISKCON that I have framed in terms of ‘two countercultures’. While scholars have shown relatively little interest in ISKCON in India when compared to the movement in the West (cf

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Brooks 1989), understanding ISKCON’s attachment to and aspirations for Mayapur requires engagement with both Indian history and the wider Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. Fittingly, this brought us back to Chaitanya’s own sixteenth-century revitalisation mission in the very land where today’s devotees imagine Prabhupad’s vision of an ideal Vedic city to be an immanent reality. Because of its centrality in Gaudiya Vaishnavism’s enchanted past and its prophesied place in its future, Mayapur, I suggested, represents an interesting site in which to examine how international devotees pursue Vaishnava conceptions of a good life. Chapter 1 described the history of Mayapur in terms of its ‘revealing’ and subsequent dramatic development, particularly since ISKCON’s arrival in the 1970s. Here I outlined how although Mayapur is understood to be the Land of the Golden Avatar, devotees must also come to terms with the fact that living here brings its own unique set of challenges. In place of a viable economic model for international devotees living in India, the sacred land itself is being urbanised, commodified and quantified in terms of material prosperity. Devotees participate in intense practices of individual self-cultivation with the aim of transcending the material world, but they have at the same time, as residents of Mayapur, inherited Prabhupad’s utopian ideal of building a spiritual city. Devotees then are presented with two somewhat antagonistic ideals, one soteriological and the other social. On the one hand, they must actively endeavour to transcend mundane reality, eschewing all things that are not directly conducive to Krishna consciousness. On the other, they must engage in an ambitious project of social and urban development, in contributing to or simply living in this fledgling city. Chapter 2 described the basic tenets and practices of Prabhupad’s Krishna consciousness. Based on a history of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, and in the context of wider Indic traditions, I outlined how in everyday settings devotees learn to mobilise a sophisticated theological framework through idioms of detachment, dependence and purification. I suggested that while in the early years membership was recognised as adherence to a strict moral code, as ISKCON has evolved it developed into an ethics whereby devotees somewhat idiosyncratically follow various rules or regulations, while disregarding others in their own sadhana. I described how, based on ongoing assessments of their own adhikara, Vaishnava theological categories come to constitute an ethical vocabulary with which devotees narrate and evaluate their own spiritual progress and identify and articulate their spiritual failings. Framing the chapter in relation to ISKCON’s conception of the self (or what I distinguished as the ‘mundane self ’ and the ‘essential self ’), I noted that while self-realisation is the telos towards which devotees’ practices are geared, nobody ever seems to actually ‘realise the self ’ in the sense of completely eradicating the mundane misidentification with the physical body. In place of achieving this self-realisation, devotees employ an oppositional narrative that subsumes the mundane and the essential self, the tension between which is narrated as a ‘constant battle with maya’. I suggested that while ritualised settings such as the temple



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morning programme are central to the cultivation of virtue, it is also in the rhythm of the everyday that devotees must learn what it means to depend on ‘Krishna’s arrangement’. Chapter 3 looked at practices of knowledge. In dialogue with wider Indian epistemological traditions, I outlined how devotees strive to ‘realise’ rather than simply accumulate knowledge. Knowledge, then, can only be defined as such in so far as it facilitates a profound transformation of the knowing subject. I contextualised the path of knowledge in ISKCON’s soteriological hierarchy, whereby, as in other bhakti traditions, knowledge is only virtuous if it is conducive to devotion. I described the popular Srimad Bhagavatam morning class as a ritualisation of Vaishnava pedagogy, and outlined how the ethical import is not only to be found in the accumulation of knowledge in the classroom but in its realisation in the flow of everyday life. In terms of anthropology’s engagement with the category of knowledge, I argued that anthropologists have often unproblematically privileged the Western philosophical definition of ‘justified true belief ’, which has served to obscure a set of interesting ethnographic questions that deal with non-Western epistemological traditions. While I sympathise with recent attempts in anthropology to account for epistemological alterity, I suggested that to explain ISKCON’s conception of knowledge with reference to the role of emotion would only serve to detract from the sophisticated Indian tradition that addresses epistemological questions on their own terms. Chapter 4 elaborated on the ethico-aesthetic trajectory by which devotees understand themselves to be advancing in spiritual life. In the context of the ultimate telos of Krishna prema, I set out to understand why it is that despite the pervasiveness of this goal I never met anyone in Mayapur who had attained it. After tracing the history of the prescribed set of modes of relationality in Gaudiya Vaishnava theology, I outlined what I called ISKCON’s institutionalisation of moral emotions. Looking back to the particular socio-historical context of Prabhupad’s preaching mission, I described how devotees have inherited the goal of prema but somewhere in transmission they have been debarred from the traditional means of attaining it. In its place, divine grace has become a mediator of agency whereby it is not solely by ‘works and deeds’ but by Krishna’s mercy that one can go back to Godhead. It is only by coming to understand emotions as sites of moral striving, I suggested, that one can properly grasp the ethical significance of ‘learning to love Krishna’. Chapter 5 described devotees’ various understandings and commitments to the ideal of ‘Vedic culture’. Framed by ISKCON’s failure to implement Prabhupad’s socio-cultural ideals, such as varnashrama-dharma, this chapter outlined how culture has become an object of both knowledge and practice with which devotees fashion themselves as ethical subjects and imagine the future of Mayapur. While devotees understand the path of bhakti to be transcendental, at the same time they understand Vedic culture to be the best way to pursue this path in the material world in this age of Kali Yuga (whether it is something to live within or something to live by). There are, however, various

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understandings of what elements of Vedic culture should be replicated. A minority of more conservative devotees support the re-establishment of varnashrama-dharma, but the vast majority of more liberal-minded devotees pick and choose quite selectively what aspects of Prabhupad’s Vedic culture they consider important in their own Krishna consciousness. Considering both ISKCON’s complex history of cross-cultural fertilisation and the difficulties that the Mayapur project faces today, this chapter looked at how ideas and aspirations of both self-cultivation and place-making cohere around sometimes competing conceptions of Vedic culture. While debates often cohere around aesthetics, narratives of Vedic culture are typically embedded in broader commitments that speak to how one might best pursue a virtuous life. In what remains, I want to bring these themes together by taking a closer look at the moral system by which today’s devotees navigate various, and at times conflicting, ethical imperatives in a changing world. In particular I focus here on narratives of becoming and what I call ‘failing well’.

The Moral System Alongside the dramatic social upheaval in ISKCON in the years following Prabhupad’s death, the movement has undergone another more subtle but no less profound transformation in terms of the moral system it presents devotees with. I noted in the introduction that in the early days of the movement, to be a devotee connoted strict adherence to a set of rules and regulations. In other words, to be a devotee was to follow a particular moral code. While this moral code has not changed – with respect to the prescriptions and prohibitions, the four regulative principles, or chanting sixteen rounds, for example – how devotees relate to the moral code has changed quite profoundly.4 This change has both led to, and in turn been influenced by, a fundamental shift in the understanding of what it means to be a devotee. As previous chapters have outlined, to be a devotee entails a lifelong transformation. This transformation encompasses epistemological (Chapter 3), affective (Chapter 4) and, for international devotees in particular, cultural dimensions (Chapter 5). As ‘conditioned souls’, entangled in an unwinnable battle with maya in the material world, devotees must relearn both themselves and the world around them within a constellation of concepts that allows them to identify Krishna’s agency in their everyday lives, be it his ‘arrangement’ or his ‘mercy’. More importantly than simply learning what the world or the self is, however, devotees must also learn to experience themselves in the world as evidence of the truth of Krishna consciousness. They must learn to interpret their own successes and failures, and those of others around them, as instructive examples of how to pursue Prabhupad’s path of self-realisation. In this way, devotees appropriate and mobilise Vaishnava theological categories in evaluative narratives of their own spiritual transformation. I have attempted to show how knowledge, emotion and culture, as constitutive elements of this



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transformation, become infused with ethical potentiality (more on which below). Devotees have extensive interpretive resources to help them go about this transformation. Gaudiya Vaishnava theology presents them with frameworks such as the ‘nine processes of devotional service’ (which include chanting, hearing, or deity worship, for example) by which they can identify core practices that will allow them to advance spiritually. Although all of these nine processes are recommended for the serious practitioner, devotees tend to prioritise some and disregard others according to ongoing assessments of their own ‘conditioning’. As a particularly extreme example, Vaibhava, who we met in Chapter 4, had given up on chanting altogether and defined his commitment to Prabhupad in terms of the tireless seva he contributed. Despite having, in his words, failed in one respect, he found in the ‘nine processes’ an activity that he felt suited his conditioning. This same theology presents devotees with a progressive framework within which they can imagine and evaluate their spiritual progress. The ‘nine stages of bhakti-yoga’ outlines a path from sraddha (faith) to bhajana-kriya (devotional service) and anartha nivrtti (ridding oneself of vices), all the way up to prema. This archetypal trajectory certainly frames devotees’ understanding of how one is supposed to progress in spiritual life, though it says little about how they should actually go about it in practice. While devotees sometimes attribute more elevated stages such as nistha (steadiness) or asakti (attachment) to others, they never do so for themselves. Even in aspirational terms, devotees tend to shy away from openly aiming towards any of these stages, instead preferring to emphasise their ‘fallen’ condition. When they do convey a desire to one day be able to love Krishna (attain prema), for example, they do so only in order to highlight that they are nowhere near that stage. While they may have centuries of theological insight to call upon in their own projects of self-cultivation, devotees must also contend with profound ethical indeterminacy. By their own understanding, and as a consequence of the socio-historic context of Prabhupad’s preaching mission, they are, as lay practitioners, somewhat betwixt and between, caught between ‘the East’ and ‘the West’, between tradition and modernity, and the sacred and the profane. This indeterminacy is reflected in the moral system. In some respects, as Tamal Krishna Goswami has noted (2012), Prabhupad said too much. In other respects, as we have seen in the case of his vision for Mayapur, he did not say enough. His pedagogy was at times comprehensive, and at others under-elaborated and even contradictory. Forty years later, and in the context of ISKCON’s dramatic transformation from ‘cult to congregation’, Prabhupad’s teachings today inform rather than determine devotees’ pursuits of Krishna consciousness in a changing world. Living as a lay practitioner according to a pedagogy shaped around a monastic movement brings devotees face to face with new dilemmas that they work through in quite inconsistent ways. As has been noted in the case of other moral systems (Robbins 2004, Laidlaw 1995, 2014a), Krishna consciousness does not do away with conflicts (any more than

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Christianity eradicates sin, to take Robbins’ example). Rather, it equips devotees with the interpretive and practical tools with which they must learn to manage conflict and negotiate indeterminacy themselves. To take one simple example, devotees are not expected to actually defeat maya (she is a devi after all). The ethical imperative, rather, lies in cultivating the ability to recognise and respond to maya appropriately. My aim in this book, however, has not been to resolve contradictions or try to bridge any apparent inconsistencies in the moral system. Rather, I have attempted to show how people live with and negotiate these indeterminate spaces in their everyday ethical striving. Such ambiguities and indeterminacies are, of course, not necessarily weaknesses, but are the very fertile ground of ethics. As Henrietta Moore has argued, ‘without ambiguity, then subjectification would not be possible … human beings would be too overdetermined to become human subjects’ (2011, 17). While ethical indeterminacy is in one sense a product of the particular situation that international devotees in Mayapur find themselves in, it is also, as I will now elaborate, subsumed within the moral system they strive to inhabit.

The Everydayness of Intense Ethical Reflection Striving to be Krishna conscious, one must engage in intense self-examination. As I have stressed throughout this book, it is not just in ritualised settings or through ascetic practices that one works on oneself. Particularly in the case of a lay community, the mundane flow of everyday life becomes what Cheryl Mattingly (2013, 2014) describes as a ‘moral laboratory’, wherein moral selves are routinely worked upon. In Mayapur, this often plays out through shared narratives of weakness and failure. Much like what Martijn de Koning observes in the case of Dutch Salafi Muslims, this is ‘not solely an individual project but a social one in which weakness is constituted, expressed and validated in social interaction with others’ (2017, 38). As we saw in Chapter 2 in the case of Sabuj and Acintya’s disagreement, the everyday is not just punctuated by moments of reflection but is profoundly infused with ethical potentiality. Although Sabuj initially understood Acintya to have breached Vaishnava etiquette in complimenting a waitress at the pizzeria, upon further reflection he soon realised that regardless of whether or not this was indeed the case, he himself had acted ‘not very Vaishnava’ in commenting on Acintya’s transgression. Sabuj was quick to turn what I had thought to be an innocuous incident into an opportunity for introspection (which he was keen to narrate at length). He came to identify this incident as one of many examples of how being in Mayapur brings about anartha nivrtti (ridding oneself of vices), or in idiomatic terms, purification. Sabuj’s original condemnation of Acintya was just one aspect of this episode. More significant was Sabuj’s response to realising his mistake and his subsequent articulation of his understanding of the incident. In couching his



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reinterpretation of events in terms of anarthas and Vaishnava aparadh, Sabuj effectively restaged the scene within a moral narrative that borrowed from Vaishnava theology an evaluative vocabulary with which he could make sense of his mistake. In one respect, Sabuj was simply doing what devotees are supposed to do; he was trying to understand the world and his actions through a Krishna conscious lens. He was bringing a particular ontological perspective to bear on an everyday event. At the same time, in so far as Krishna consciousness is also a moral disposition, in evoking Vaishnava theological categories Sabuj was also being a good devotee, albeit not in the conventional sense of ‘being good’. In taking the opportunity to reframe the incident as evidence of the truth of Krishna consciousness (we all have anarthas), Sabuj could cast himself in the role of a (fallen) devotee. And he was able to do so in this case not because he had embodied virtues such as humility or tolerance (although they were implicit in his reinterpretation), but because he could identify in his behaviour vices such as pride and arrogance. In other words, his being a devotee was not determined by whether or not he had failed to live up to the ideals of Krishna consciousness, but rather by his ability to mobilise a Vaishnava moral narrative that accommodated the inevitability of that failure. Simply put, Sabuj was able to inhabit the moral system not simply by avoiding failure, but by failing well. To be Krishna conscious is not only to learn that the world is a particular way, but to cultivate the ability to detect the pedagogical potential in everything one does. It is to attune oneself to opportunities for spiritual advancement, to find the meaningful in the mundane. Such intense ethical reflection speaks to a central debate in the ethical turn that coheres around the twin problems of identifying and locating ethics. That we have until recently had little to call upon in the social sciences to begin to address these problems is often traced back to Durkheim’s treatment of morality as a social fact, which, it has been argued, rendered dormant the themes of ethics and morality for the best part of a century. It has by now been widely acknowledged that Durkheim’s fundamental mistake was to conflate morality with society (Zigon 2007; Laidlaw 2002, 2014a; Robbins 2004). In doing so, rather than explaining anything about morality, he essentially explained it away. Anthropologists today are left to contend with the basic questions: what counts as ethics and where is it to be found? There are broadly speaking two responses to these questions. Firstly, the ‘ordinary ethics’ approach locates ethics in the everyday (Lambek 2010, Das 2007). Ethics, thus conceived, need not necessitate distanced reflective judgement (that is not to say it necessarily precludes it), but pervades the mundane in sometimes unconscious ways. In Michael Lambek’s words, ‘the “ordinary” implies an ethics that is relatively tacit, grounded in agreement rather than rule, in practice rather than knowledge or belief, and happening without calling undue attention to itself ’ (2010, 2). He continues, ‘the ordinary is intrinsically ethical and ethics intrinsically ordinary’ (ibid.). However, not everyone is in agreement with the ordinary ethics approach (see Lempert

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2013, 2015). Jarrett Zigon in particular has been a staunch critic, arguing that in so far as ordinary ethics (as he understands it) rests on the claim that ethics is everywhere, it essentially does away with the problems of either identifying what counts as ethics or locating where ethics might be found. Ordinary ethics, then, or what Zigon labels ‘Aristotelian Kantianism’, in ‘dissolving the ethical into the social’ (Lambek 2010) makes the mistake of reproducing the very Durkheimian misassumptions that it claims to resolve (Zigon 2007). In its place, Zigon has proposed his own framework. As we saw in Chapter 4, Zigon (2008) understands ethics to constitute a rupture of morality, which itself is conceived as a mundane unreflective disposition. While the goal of ethics in Zigon’s formulation is to return to the comfort of the unreflective disposition (which he calls morality), ethics is rather to be found in moments of ‘moral breakdown’ where people are forced to reflect explicitly on the rightness or wrongness of their actions. In so far as ethics is located in temporal instances of explicit reflection, and therefore requires a certain distance from everyday experience, the ‘ordinary’ for Zigon is where ethics is not. While Zigon’s ‘moral breakdown’ has proven generative, it becomes problematic when mobilised as a prescriptive framework. At first glance it seems to provide a structural narrative within which instances of ethical reflection, like Sabuj’s above, can be accommodated. Zigon’s approach, however, is founded on the false premise that the goal of ethics is to return to the comfort of an unreflective disposition (morality). As James Laidlaw (2014a, 125) has argued, and as this chapter attests, that the goal of ethics is to return to an unreflective disposition cannot be a premise of the anthropology of ethics, but is rather an open ethnographic question. Indeed, such an unreflective disposition, by definition, is the very opposite of Krishna consciousness, the goal of which is to make devotees vigilant subjects, always and everywhere attuned to opportunities for spiritual progress. One should always be seeking out opportunities for detachment, dependence and purification while actively eschewing the comforts that this world has to offer. Ethics in Mayapur, in this sense, is rather ‘ordinary’ in as much as Krishna consciousness is a moral disposition that one must cultivate in everything one does, however mundane. Alongside everyday practice, this also includes a more explicit performative dimension (see Lambek 2010) whereby the articulation of one’s self-assessment is itself an important moral imperative. However, Lambek’s ordinary ethics approach does not quite capture ethical life in Mayapur either. Where Lambek’s formulation posits that ‘the ordinary is intrinsically ethical and ethics intrinsically ordinary’, the aim of Krishna consciousness is to render the ordinary explicitly ethical, and the ethical explicitly ordinary. For devotees in Mayapur the questions of what counts as ethics or where ethics might be found are fundamentally familiar questions of how one should go about trying to be Krishna conscious in a changing world, beyond the confines of the ashram. In order to be Krishna conscious in the world, devotees, as we have seen, must recognise themselves as always and everywhere being surrounded by opportunities for spiritual advancement, or in Webb Keane’s

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(2015) terminology, ‘ethical affordances’.5 They must learn to detect the ethical potentiality in everything they do. And in so far as Krishna consciousness is at once an ontological perspective and a moral disposition, there is nothing that cannot potentially count as ethical. In other words, ethical potentiality inheres in everything and is everywhere. Importantly, this is not to simply suggest that ethics is everywhere. As Zigon (2014) points out, such a claim – that he mistakenly attributes to the ordinary ethics approach – would only serve to undermine the important contributions that have allowed the anthropology of ethics to escape the Durkheimian paradigm. This should not however preclude the distinct claim that everything is potentially ethical or that ethics is potentially everywhere. Beyond the structural challenge of identifying what counts as ethics or locating where ethics might be found, devotees’ efforts to follow the path of Krishna consciousness also shed light on two related, but often overlooked, dimensions of ethical life: how people relate to vices, and how moral systems accommodate the problem of moral failure.

Moral Failure As has been noted in previous chapters, between the imaginative horizons of moral success and failure, devotees’ understandings of their own spiritual journeys are often couched in narratives of becoming. Vallabhi in Chapter 4, for example, did not love Krishna, but was ‘learning to love Krishna’. Others did not feel like they were devotees but were ‘trying to be a devotee’. Despite the pervasiveness of this transformation trope, no one ever seemed actually to complete their desired transformation, just as nobody seemed to attain Krishna prema. No matter how elevated a devotee is held to be, they still tend not to refer to themselves as devotees, but as ‘aspiring devotees’. This is not to say they do not change. Narratives of conversion often cohere around tropes of transformation. Sabuj, for example, identified profound changes in his character, which he directly attributed to Krishna consciousness. In embracing Prabhupad’s teachings, he had transformed from hedonist to aspiring spiritualist. He was confident that he had acquired what he called a ‘higher taste’ and had changed for the better. These changes however are just the first step. Turning one’s back on meat-eating, intoxication or illicit sex is necessary if one is to follow the path of Krishna consciousness, but once a devotee, the transformation one imagined spiritual life would bring about is painfully slow. It is understood to be a lifelong (or lives-long) process. Of course, for Sabuj, who had only been in the movement for four years, it is unsurprising that he described himself as a neophyte. What surprised me, however, was that exactly the same narratives of becoming seemed equally pervasive among the most elevated spiritual practitioners. Kadamba Kanana Swami, for example, one of the most well-respected gurus in the movement, was, by his own understanding, a ‘neophyte’, while others who attend the temple daily and chant their

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rounds consistently described themselves as ‘aspiring devotees’. Everyone, it seemed, was perpetually in the process of becoming Vaishnava. There are several aspects to what I have identified here as narratives of becoming. In one sense, that devotees consider themselves unqualified is a natural consequence of the difficulties of Prabhupad’s preaching mission. In terms of ISKCON’s history, it makes sense that such narratives would have gained currency in the early years. As ISKCON was founded and developed for the most part in the West, ingrained in Prabhupad’s presentation of Vaishnava philosophy is a pedagogical approach that takes its audience as complete beginners. Given the difficulty of Prabhupad’s task, it is also unremarkable that he had to restrict his presentation of Vaishnava philosophy to the exoteric. Over the course of his mission, Prabhupad saw countless devotees try and fail, many leaving the movement because they found the strict ascetic discipline too difficult. He was often disappointed by how devotees misunderstood his teachings and how spiritually immature they proved themselves to be, particularly in his absence. As discussed in Chapter 4, Prabhupad made a conscious decision to foreground vaidhi-bhakti, prioritising rules and regulations over the more ‘spontaneous’ aspects of the Gaudiya tradition (raganuga-bhakti). Given the ignorance of his audience, and the difficulties of cross-cultural transmission, Prabhupad felt he had no other choice. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, what was a fundamentally pragmatic concern for Prabhupad became a moral imperative for ISKCON. As devotees understood the pedagogical structure of Prabhupad’s presentation of Vaishnava philosophy, alongside the pursuit of knowledge, they also learned the importance of cultivating ignorance. While history may partially explain why these narratives became central to Prabhupad’s fledgling institution, of course, it only goes so far in explaining their persistence today. Devotees were often at pains to convey to me their ignorance, their struggles and generally their lack of ‘qualification’. Jaganmitra in Chapter 4, though widely held in Mayapur to embody the virtues of an ideal Vaishnava, insisted to me that his heart was dirty, that he should be more sincere. After almost forty years attending to the deities in Mayapur, he was as convinced as anyone I had met that he was ‘fallen’. To insist that one is fallen or not qualified to be a devotee could of course be understood as the articulation of the foundational virtue of humility. Devotees are not unaware that such self-deprecation is itself a moral imperative (and they often made jokes within these narratives, as we saw with Kalesha in Chapter 5). That such declarations could themselves be considered virtuous enactments of humility, however, is not to say that devotees did not actually feel they were fallen. To my understanding, my informants did indeed feel that they were weak and undeserving of Krishna’s mercy. Despite their commitment to Prabhupad’s teachings, it was only by divine grace that they could possibly hope to escape the material world. Their best efforts, by their own assessment, always seemed to fall short. Moral success was always located in an imaginative horizon somewhere in the future, often beyond the parameters of this lifetime. Over the course of my fieldwork I was



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often struck by how, in the context of a moral system that presents such a systematised path to self-realisation, devotees seemed so much more prone to, and adept at, narrating moral failure. While ISKCON’s moral system can be presented in terms of how devotees pursue various teloi, or how they imagine and strive for moral success, I want to highlight here how this same system accommodates and accounts for failure. I suggest here that having matured around episodes and accounts of failure, ISKCON’s philosophy has subsumed these narratives into its wider moral system; moral failure has in a sense therefore been routinised. Rather than an aberration of the norm, moral failure is in fact a constitutive element of the moral system that devotees aspire to inhabit. To be an ethical subject in Mayapur is not just to strive for the lofty teloi of prema or self-realisation but to be able to recognise and respond to the inevitability of moral failure along the way. Of course, there are different kinds of failure, not all of which can be described in terms of what I have called ‘failing well’. Vaibhava was able to confidently present his practical failure to adhere to the demands of Krishna consciousness (and chanting in particular) as evidence of the truth of the maxim that ‘Prabhupad built a house the whole world could live in’. He found in devotional service another path to piety. Adideva’s sneaky coffee (in Chapter 2), to take another example, was not such a serious offence. His framing of the incident as a ‘little compromise with maya’, although more playful than apologetic, nevertheless served to justify his lapse (to himself as much as to me). In so far as these devotees made efforts to understand and articulate their inability to adhere to the ideals of Krishna consciousness within Vaishnava moral narratives, these can be described to some extent as examples of failing well; Vaibhava, Adideva and Sabuj were not simply ignoring the moral dictates they were presented with, but negotiating them according to their own self-assessment. Balrama’s tequila shots and tales of sexual conquests, however, were quite different. His logic that Krishna was his best friend and wanted him to be happy found little support in Vaishnava philosophy, and was met with little understanding amongst even his closest friends. While it would certainly be possible to narrate his indiscretions within a Krishna conscious framework, Balrama rarely mobilised terms such as anarthas or aparadh, for example, that otherwise might have allowed him to articulate his failings within a shared Vaishnava moral vocabulary that subsumes the inevitability failure. Balrama was not, like Sabuj, for example, identifying and articulating his weaknesses so as to address them. He was not striving to inhabit the moral system; he was simply disregarding it. And therein lies the difference between failing well and simply failing. In the years since Prabhupad’s death, by devotees’ own understanding ISKCON has failed in many respects. Although devotees would point to its very survival or the rising TOVP, for example, as evidence of its success, as an institution ISKCON has had to contend with failure on many fronts. As the epidemic of guru scandals and ‘fall-downs’ made clear, ISKCON has often fallen short of its goals of individual self-realisation. In terms of its social

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ambitions (utopian as they may be), ISKCON has also thus far failed to institute Prabhupad’s ‘Vedic culture’. Varnashrama-dharma, so central to Prabhupad’s conception of an ideal society, is today a distant ambition for a minority of conservative devotees, and for most an unrealistic ideal not worth pursuing. The gurukul system, which was to be the foundation of ISKCON’s future, a few exceptions aside, proved a disastrous experiment that most devotees would prefer to forget. In terms of the Mayapur project in particular, as Chapter 1 described, ISKCON has struggled to guide the development of the spiritual city and instead has had to stand by and watch as the promise of Prabhupad’s vision has catalysed greed, corruption and violence. As devotee Sasanka Das summarised in his hypothetical obituary posted on the Mayapur forum in the wake of the attempted murder, there are those who believe that ‘the movement’s core principles [have been] forgotten, and it [has become] a shadow of its original potential’. This narrative of failure has not just emerged in ISKCON’s short history but is a prevalent theme in wider Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Alongside heroes like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, Gaudiya Vaishnavism presents devotees with a range of exemplars that somewhat counter-intuitively tend to embody vices widely understood to be detrimental to the pursuit of Krishna consciousness. We saw in Chapter 1, for example, how devotees gathered around during parikrama to hear the story of Jagai and Madhai, two drunkards who due to a simple display of repentance were absolved by Chaitanya. While the central theme here is of course Chaitanya’s mercy, devotees most often refer to this story by identifying in themselves the same ‘lack of qualification’ exemplified by Jagai and Madhai. In Chapter 3, I described how devotees gathered to hear the story of Ajamila. Although a respectable Brahmin with a wife, Ajamila fell for a prostitute and became a drunkard. In calling out for his pet Narayana at the time of death, however, he attained salvation (through quite a morally dubious loophole). Again, although this story foregrounds the theme of mercy, it also presents devotees with an exemplar of moral failure, and in doing so serves to demonstrate the extreme difficulty of escaping the material world. Of course, I am not suggesting that ISKCON has no virtuous exemplars to call upon. Along with Chaitanya and previous acharyas, Prabhupad more than anyone is often held up as a ‘pure devotee’, embodying all the qualities that one should strive to emulate. There are senior gurus such as Jayapataka Swami, who, as we saw in Chapter 3, is often similarly cited as a source of inspiration. What I am suggesting, however, is that Gaudiya Vaishnavism in general, and ISKCON in particular, present devotees with a range of exemplars that embody vice as much as they do virtue. Or, at least, devotees in Mayapur are more likely to identify themselves in, and therefore identify with, Jagai and Madhai, for example, rather than Chaitanya or Arjuna. Jagai, Madhai and Ajamila, amongst many others, despite being far from ideal Vaishnavas, are what Robbins calls ‘moral representatives of their culture’ (2004, 206); they embody the moral conflicts, and not necessarily the ideals, that one is presented with in the pursuit of Krishna consciousness.



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In Mayapur, moral failure is as pervasive a theme amongst devotees as it seems to be amongst the Urapmin. Devotees, by their own assessment, seem to always be failing to live up to Prabhupad’s ideals. They struggle with the basic spiritual practices such as chanting. They often find it difficult to attend the temple on a regular basis (and for the most part very rarely attend mangala arati). They also struggle with their own anarthas. They seem to be, or at least present themselves as incapable of ridding themselves of pride, or attachment to ‘sense gratification’, for example. Despite the apparent pervasiveness of moral failure in Mayapur, devotees in most cases came across as incredibly resolute. Their protestations always seemed to be accompanied by resilience. As Vallabhi commented in Chapter 4, for example, ‘I’m full of material desires, I’m full of sensual desires … but in spite of that I’m trying to be a good human being, a good devotee’. Of course, such resilience depends on their faith that Krishna would note their good intentions. This narrative of failure, accompanied as it often is by resilience and hope, is not only found in devotees’ individual projects of self-cultivation, but pervades discourses on the wider Mayapur project. Despite decades of failed master plans, widespread accusations of corruption, an ever-growing ‘slum’ to the north of the complex, and of course, the recent murder attempt, devotees in Mayapur are clear in their conviction that Prabhupad’s spiritual city will soon be a reality. Despite having every reason to be jaded with the many obstacles that this spiritual city faces, devotees have faith that Prabhupad’s vision will come true. Any obstacles that arise in the meantime are simply to be expected in this material world, in this degraded age of Kali Yuga. Over the course of my fieldwork, in interviews and everyday conversations, and in terms of both individual moral striving and assessments of Mayapur’s development, the theme of failure seemed to be ever-present. However, I was never left with the impression that such failure led to what could be described as moral torment. Krishna consciousness is not meant to be easy and failure to consistently live up to its dictates is not only expected but widely accepted. For devotees, articulating their own failings is not a lamentation of their inability to be a good Vaishnava, but is itself a means of becoming Vaishnava. Indeed, as already noted in the Introduction, it is one of the ‘ingenious design features’ of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, as Robbins describes in the case of Christianity, ‘that they make the ever-renewed conviction of sinfulness an important condition of salvational success’ (2004, 252). Or, as Maya Mayblin and Diego Malara note, ‘failure in the form of sinfulness is … part of Christianity’s DNA: a basic and structuring principle’ (2018, 2). While devotees’ efforts are, as in the case of the Urapmin, ‘destined to fail’, professions of moral failure are almost always accompanied by articulations of hope rather than despair, and resilience rather than remorse. Such narratives in Mayapur resonate with Laidlaw’s observation of Jains in Jaipur where failure to live up to ideals was met not with dejection but an ‘acceptance of their own imperfectability’ (2014b, 498). The same can also be observed in other religious traditions. As Daan Beekers notes with respect to Christians and Muslims in

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Rotterdam, ‘feelings of falling short, sinfulness or imperfection are part and parcel of religious lives’ (2017, 80). Of course, we do not necessarily have to turn to religion to recognise the all too human propensity for moral imperfection; as Alexander Pope’s oft-quoted saying reminds us, ‘to err is human’. Should this be the case, it then becomes a central task of the anthropology of ethics to account for the various ways in which humans err. This book has sought to demonstrate that the extent to which people can inhabit a moral system is not simply a measure of their success in imbibing its virtues, nor is it a measure of their ability to consistently conform to its moral code. Rather, the extent to which people are able to inhabit a moral system is a measure of how readily they can mobilise its resources in evaluative appraisals of their own striving. One can inhabit a moral system, then, by recognising in oneself not just the virtues but also the vices it presents. Devotees’ spiritual journeys do not depend exclusively on their capacity to conform consistently to the strict ascetic practices and prohibitions of Krishna consciousness, but also on their ability to manage their failure to do so within the moral narratives that ISKCON presents them with. In so far as the various teloi, such as self-realisation and Krishna prema, are essentially unrealisable for today’s devotees, attainment of moral success is a rather unlikely means of inhabiting the moral system. In its place, devotees find ways to inhabit the moral system by mobilising shared moral narratives that subsume the likelihood of failure. Faced with the essential impossibility of attaining the ideals they are presented with, in other words, devotees inhabit the moral system by failing well. Indeed, the strength of Prabhupad’s programme of self-realisation is not just that it presents devotees with a range of ideals in pursuit of which they understand themselves to be living a good life; it also provides them with robust narratives that accommodate the inevitability of failure along the way. In Mayapur, then, it is not despite their failings that devotees become Vaishnava, but because of them.

Notes  1. This quotation is taken from the posthumously published The Light of the Bhagavata (1984, 43, purport), which was based on a presentation Prabhupad had prepared for a conference in 1961.  2. The term dharma is derived from the Sanskrit root ‘dhr’, which means to ‘sustain’ (G. Das 2010).  3. Of course, this is generally the case when moving between Western and Indian categories (such as ‘religion’).  4. As Foucault (1990, 29) has shown, ethics and moral codes can, and often do, ‘develop in relative independence from one another’ (see Robbins 2004, 217).  5. Webb Keane uses the term ‘ethical affordance’ to make a case for the potentiality of ethics, defining affordances as ‘any aspect of people’s experience and perceptions that they might they might draw on in the process of making ethical evaluations and decisions, whether consciously or not’ (2016, 27).

Glossary

Although many of these terms are recognisable across various Hindu traditions and therefore have varying connotations, the translations offered here reflect their common usage in ISKCON. Acharya Spiritual leader Adhikara Spiritual capacity or level of spiritual qualification Anarthas Vices or ‘unwanted habits’ Bhakti Devotion (or in ISKCON, ‘devotional service’) Brahmachari Male celibate monk Dham Sacred land (usually a place of pilgrimage) Grihastha Householder (or lay devotee) Gurukul Traditional school (where students reside) Jiva Spirit soul or ‘essential being’ Jnana Knowledge Katha Storytelling Kirtan Congregational devotional singing Madhurya rasa Highly esoteric level of spiritual advancement Mangala arati Early morning puja (4.30am) Maya Illusion (one of Krishna’s energies) Pancha-Tattva Chaitanya and his four closest associates Parikrama Pilgrimage Prema Pure love of God (the highest stage of spiritual advancement) Puja Worship Raganuga–bhakti Spiritual practice characterised by spontaneity Rasa-lila The ‘dance of divine love’ between Radha, Krishna and the gopis in the forest of Vrindavan Sadhana Spiritual practice Sannyasi Renunciant monk Sankirtan Public singing and dancing (and preaching) Shastra Scripture Seva ‘Devotional service’ or work Shiksastakam Eight short verses written by Chaitanya

176 Glossary



Vaidhi-bhakti Spiritual practice characterised by a commitment to strict regulative principles Varnashrama-dharma Socio-cultural system advocated by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita Vijnana The practical application of knowledge

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Index

A acharya, 7, 34, 48, 91–92, 114, 121, 171 Acintya, 74–76, 166 acintya bhedabheda, 56, adhikara, 116–117, 120, 162 Advaita Vedanta, 56. See also Vedantic agency, 60, 72, 76, 78n, 110, 163–164 Ajamila, 90–91, 172 ambiguity, 131–133, 154, 156, 166 America, 1, 3–11, 26n, 76, 78n, 95, 103, 137–8, 151, 157n ananda, 56 anartha-nivrtti, 64, 75. See also anartha anartha, 65, 75–77, 79n, 111–2, 119, 124, 126, 165–7, 171, 173. See also vice anatman, 56. See also non-self arati, 23, 60–64, 74, 88, 96, 108, 124, 133, 141–2, 173. See also mangala arati artha, 58 ascetic, 1, 2, 4, 9, 16, 19, 26n, 52, 54, 58, 72, 77, 78n, 135–6, 166, 170, 174, atman, 56, 77n. See also anatman avidya, 59, 79n B belief, 25, 81–85, 100, 163, 167. See also knowledge Bengal Renaissance, 12, 14 bhadraloka, 11, 13–14, 26n Bhagavad Gita, 13–14, 55, 56, 59, 74, 80, 85, 92, 114, 116, 131, 136, 138, 139, 172, Bhagavan, 56, 59 bhakti, 56, 58–60, 64, 74, 75, 78n, 80–81, 85, 88, 92, 98, 101, 104, 111, 113, 116, 117,

119, 153, 156n, 163, 165, 170. See also vaidhi–bhakti, raganuga–bhakti Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, 4, 15, 29, 31, 55, 77n, 115, 118, 122–3, 156n, Bhaktivinod Thakur, 4, 14–15, 31, 34–35, 40, 55, 65, 117–120, 125, 137, 139, 150, 156n bhava, 64, 111, 113, 129n. See also emotion brahmachari, 5, 8, 9, 29, 61, 88, 101, 133–5, 138 brahmana, 138–140, 145, 153, 157n Brahman, 56, 58, 59 Brahmo Samaj, 13–14, 137, 154 Brooks, Charles, 112, 118 C Carrithers, Michael, 54 Cassaniti, Julia, 104, 106–7, 128 caste, 12, 13, 34, 59, 91, 138–9 Chaitanya Charitamrta, 55, 63, 111, 129n, 161, 78n Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, 2, 4, 15, 26n, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 40, 41, 50n, 55–58, 61, 63, 71, 77n, 78n, 93, 108, 111, 112, 113, 120, 126, 129n, 133, 149, 150, 153, 156n, 160–162, 172, chanting, 1, 3, 5, 19, 23, 40, 41, 47, 51n, 55, 61, 62, 63, 67–69, 74, 76–77, 89, 90, 92, 95–97, 104, 109, 110, 123, 133–4, 142, 144, 164, 165, 171, 173. See also japa meditation cit, 56 class, 3, 5, 15, 23–24, 29, 42, 57, 63–65, 70, 71, 74, 80–81, 8–99, 101n, 110, 111–2, 116, 133, 140, 142–3, 163

192 Index

Cook, Joanna, 72, 100 Counterculture, 3, 4, 6, 10, 14–16, 136 cultural, 5–15, 18, 26n, 54, 75, 81, 85, 100, 105, 107, 127, 131–2, 135, 136–138, 145, 150, 154, 164, 170. See also crosscultural, Vedic culture D Das, Sabuj, 42, 74–76, 166–169, 171 deity worship, 1, 38, 80, 138, 144, 151, 165 dependence, 24, 54, 76, 124, 127, 143, 162, 168 detachment, 1, 24, 49, 54, 58, 63, 70, 76, 106, 162, 168 devotion, 24, 40, 41, 56, 58–61, 63–64, 100, 103–4, 111, 113–117, 120, 129n, 156n, 163. See also bhakti devotional service, 8, 56, 64, 68, 69, 73, 85–86, 111, 116–7, 145, 159, 165. See also seva dham, 30, 31, 37–44, 48, 50n, 64 dharma, 13, 58, 118, 139, 159–160, 174n dualist, 56, 77–78n E East, the, 13, 137, 152, 154, 157n, 165, emotion, 25, 41, 54, 60, 63, 64, 81, 100, 101n, 103–112, 113–128, 129n, 131, 160, 163, 164 emotion, anthropology of, 105–6, 128 emotion, moral, 25, 104–7, 112, 127–8, 128n, 129n, 163 epistemology, Indian, 25, 84–87, 99, 163 epistemology, 25, 81, 84–86, 94, 99–100, 163. See also Indian epistemology ethics, anthropology of, 16–22, 25, 78n, 106, 159, 161, 168–9, 174 ethics, Hindu, 159–161 ethics, Vaishnava, 22, 128 F failing well, 3, 20, 25, 158–9, 164, 167, 171, 174. See also moral failure Foucault, Michel, 10, 16, 20, 100, 101n, 105 four regulative principles, 5, 45, 65–67, 76, 92, 164 Gaudiya Math, 5, 15, 26n, 29, 34, 78n, 115

Gaudiya Vaishnavism, 1, 5, 10, 14–15, 24–25, 26n, 28, 31, 33, 34, 39, 40, 50, 50n, 52–53, 54–60, 76, 78n, 79n, 81, 84, 85, 93, 100, 104, 107, 111–2, 117–8, 123, 126–8, 129n, 130, 131, 153, 157n, 159–163, 165, 172–173 Gaura-Purnima, 29, 30, 34, 35, 74, 143, 151 Goloka Vrindavana, 57, 148 gopis, 13, 61, 114, 117, 118, 129n Goswami, Rupa, 113–116, 122 Goswami, Tamal Krishna, 11, 15, 26n, 53, 115, 136, 151, 165 Governing Body Commission (GBC), 7, 9, 36–37, 45, 119, 121, 137 G grace, 47, 51n, 58, 110, 113, 123–127, 129n, 163, 169–170 grihastha, 23, 33, 47, 90, 95–96, 108, 134, 138, 146, 149 gurukul, 8, 47, 80, 86, 140–6, 149, 154–6, 156n, 157n, 172 H Hinduism, 2, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 26n, 30, 40, 52, 56, 58, 77n, 78n, 79n, 92, 98, 99, 104, 116, 120, 126, 129n, 131, 149, 156n, 159–161 Hirschkind, Charles, 93 humility, 40, 63, 69, 7–72, 76, 88, 110–112, 140, 143–144, 160, 161, 167, 170 I ideal Vedic city, 2, 25, 28, 30, 38, 45, 46, 48, 49, 130, 142, 146, 149–156, 162 J Jagai and Madhai, 41, 172, 94, 98, 173 Jainism, 17–18, 58 Janmashtami, 30 japa meditation, 61, 64, 68, 80, 108. See also chanting Jayapataka Swami, 50n, 73, 95, 172 jiva, 55–58, 77n, 78n jnana-yoga, 58–60, 63, 81, 104 jnana, 58–60, 63, 81, 85, 86, 92, 94, 95, 98, 101n, 104. See also jnana-yoga, vijnana, knowledge

Index 193

K Kali Yuga, 49, 51n, 63, 75, 123, 163, 173 kama, 58, 79n karma-yoga, 57–60, 63, 65, 81, 91, 92, katha, 40–43, 49, 93 Kennedy, Melville, 55, 160 kirtan, 9, 23, 26n, 39–42, 61–64, 74, 78n, 89, 103–4, 108, 120, 133–6, 141, knowledge, anthropology of, 81–84 knowledge, 25, 52, 58–60, 80–101, 101n, 104, 113, 117, 124–5, 128n, 131, 139, 140, 144, 150, 160, 163–4, 170. See also epistemology Kolkata, 3–4, 10–16, 27, 34, 44, 137, 154 L Laidlaw, James, 17–19, 168 Lambek, Michael, 83, 168 M madhurya rasa, 114–115, 119–123, 127, 129n Madhvacharya, 56 Mahabharata, 27, 59, 92, 131, 153 mahamantra, 1, 3, 5, 9, 23, 39, 41, 6–62, 89 Mahmood, Saba, 17, 72, 98, mangala arati, 23, 60–64, 74, 88, 96, 133, 173. See also arati marga, 58, 117, 118 material world, 1, 5, 9, 19, 49, 52, 54–59, 63, 65, 67, 70, 73, 77, 78n, 94, 135, 145, 162–164, 170–3. See also prakriti maya, 56–58, 64–66, 73–74, 78n, 79n, 92–98, 124, 133, 159, 162, 165, 166, 171, mercy, 13, 33, 40, 41, 64, 70, 72, 73, 80, 104, 109, 110, 125–128, 129n, 163–4, 170, 172 modernity, 4, 11, 13, 15, 46, 135, 137, 144, 146, 150, 154, 155, 156, 165 moksha, 58, 59 monistic, 56, 78n moral failure, 3, 9, 16–22, 25, 26n, 76, 127, 159, 169–174. See also failing well moral narratives, 3, 19, 20, 104, 107, 127–8, 161, 187, 171, 174 moral system, 3, 16–22, 25, 127, 158–9, 161, 164–166, 167, 169, 171, 174 murti, 63

N Nabadwip, 28–34, 39–41, 89, 129n, Nectar of Devotion, 113, 116 neo-Hindu, 12, 14, 156n, new religious movements (NRMs), 6, 26n, nine stages of bhakti-yoga, 64, 111, 165, nirguna, 56 non-dualist, 56 non-self, 56. See also anatman P Pancha-Tattva, 35, 50n, 62, 63, 148 paramatman, 56 parikrama, 23, 39–43, 49, 50n, 172, pastimes (lilas), 13, 40–41, 92, 116–118, 120, 122, 129, 160 pedagogy, 1, 35, 80, 92–94, 107, 119, 127, 163, 165 philosophy, Indian, 11, 84–86, 159–160, philosophy, Western, 14, 25, 53–54, 82–85, 100, 107, 163 Prabhupad, Srila, 1–16, 25, 26n, 28, 31, 33–41, 43–50, 50n, 51n, 55, 56, 59, 63–65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 74, 78n, 79n, 85, 87, 89, 90–93, 96, 98, 101n, 103, 107–113, 116, 118–128, 129n, 130–133, 134–141, 144–7, 148–156, 156n, 157n, 158, 162–165, 169–174, 174n prakriti, 57, 58. See also material world pramana, 86, 101n prasadam, 23, 61, 71, 78n, 108 prema, 25, 58, 59, 64, 69, 104, 107, 108–113, 117, 118, 122–128, 129n, 159, 163, 165, 169, 171, 174 puja, 8, 28, 34, 63, 78n, pujari, 40, 61, 62, 80 Puranas, 14, 92, 101n, 131 purification, 24, 39, 47, 54, 56, 69, 72–77, 162, 166, 168 purusarthas, 58 Pushti Marg, 58, 115 R Radha, 27, 31, 35, 40, 60, 61, 62, 63, 78n, 108, 116, 117, 119, 120, 122, 127, 129n, 153 raganuga-bhakti, 78n, 116–128, 170 rasa, 113–116, 119–123, 127, 129n rasa-lila, 119, 120, 121, 129n

194 Index

realisation, 54, 56, 58, 74, 76, 81, 86, 88, 93, 94–98, 101n, 123, 124, 127, 139, 163. See also vijnana renunciation, 1, 7, 17, 30, 78n, 79n, 135, 145 revitalisation, 4, 10, 162, Robbins, Joel, 16, 17–19, 159, 172, 173 Roy, Rammohan, 12 S sadhana, 63–65, 67, 74, 76, 78n, 96, 97, 98, 109, 110, 116, 118, 123, 133, 134, 136, 150, 156, 162, saguna, 56 sahajiya, 120, 121, 125, 129n salvation, 1, 3, 4, 18, 52, 53, 56–60, 63, 91, 92, 110, 112, 115, 121–6, 138, 172, 173 sampradaya, 33, 104, 112, 115 samsara, 56, 111 sankirtan, 4, 6, 10, 32, 40, 133 sannyasi, 4, 7, 10, 26n, 71, 134, 138, 151 Sanskrit, 80, 89, 90, 91, 92, 101n, 102n, 129n, 140, 143, 174n sat, 6 science, 15, 87, 92, 113, 133, 143, 167 self-cultivation, 17, 21, 22, 25, 64, 81, 84, 85, 93, 94, 104, 107, 127, 128, 154–6, 158, 161–164, 165, 173 self-realisation, 1, 2, 28, 49, 67, 76, 77, 111, 136, 156, 162, 164, 171, 174 self-transformation, 41, 52, 65, 107 self, the, 16, 17, 24, 52–54, 58, 76–77, 80, 99, 131, 155, 162, 164 seva, 8, 23, 30, 37, 64, 66, 69, 94, 110, 133, 165. See also devotional service Shankara, 56, 78n shastra, 74, 87, 88, 118, 161 Shiksastakam, 71, 161 Six Goswamis of Vrindavan, 56, 58, 63, 77, 77n, 108, 113, 117, 161 sloka, 74, 80, 85, 89, 90, 91, 97, 101n spiritual city, 2, 28, 34, 35, 38, 42–46, 49, 109, 131, 150–156, 162, 172–173. See also ideal Vedic city Srimad Bhagavatam, 14, 55, 63, 64, 71, 80, 81, 85, 88–92, 96, 97, 101n, 114, 116, 130, 148, 156n, 163

T Temple of Vedic Planetarium (TOVP), 2, 27, 30, 32, 39, 46, 48, 49, 146–153, 155, 157n, 171 Transcendentalists, 10 twenty-six qualities of a devotee, 70–72, 161 V Vaibhava, 68–69, 165, 171 vaidhi-bhakti, 78n, 116–124, 170, Vaishnava Vallabhi, 70, 108–112, 123–125, 127, 169, 173 varnashrama-dharma, 130, 138– 142, 144, 146, 152, 153, 154, 156n, 157n, 164, 172 Vedantic, 56, 58 Vedic, 2, 5, 9, 25, 26n, 30, 52, 78n, 86, 92, 101n, 131, 140, 143, 144, 147–9, 150, 154 Vedic culture, 25, 35, 48, 49, 85, 130, 131, 133–142, 144–147, 150–6, 157n, 163, 164, 172 vice, 16, 17, 20, 22, 25, 65, 70, 71, 75–77, 79n, 87, 91, 93, 128n, 165–9, 172, 174. See also anartha vijnana, 81, 86, 87, 94, 95, 98, 101n, Vivekananda, Swami, 11–13 Vrindavan, 4, 7, 8, 13, 23, 33, 34, 41, 50n, 55, 64, 77n, 113, 118, 119, 121, 126, 129n, 152, 153, W West Bengal, 1, 19, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 38, 39, 42, 44, 49, 129n, 147 West, the, 1–4, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 26n, 33, 37, 38, 45, 48, 55, 64, 87, 95, 98, 99. 101n, 104, 109, 112, 116, 118–9, 122–3, 128n, 136, 137, 145, 150–2, 154–6, 157n, 158, 160, 161, 165, 170 Y yukta-vairagya, 135–6 Z Zigon, Jarrett, 106, 168 zonal acharya system, 7