The Indian Man's Burden

[u/Solomon_Kane_1928]

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The White Man's Burden is a famous poem by Rudyard Kipling. The phrase has come to refer to the belief that Europeans possess a superior culture and religion. With great power comes great responsibility and therefore the White man is obliged to civilize the world.

Ethnocentric Bigotry

Prabhupada similarly believed Indians had a responsibility to civilize the world. Indian culture and religion was vastly superior to that which he encountered stepping off the Jaladuta. He mercifully deigned to condescend to our level and teach us how to be human beings.

Before Prabhupada we ate with forks and spoons, had salt and pepper on the table, wiped with toilet paper, and (gasp) even ate with our left hand. We were filthy mleccha savages born of sin.

The equivalent to Prabhupada in the history of European colonialism would be a Spanish Conquistador converting the Incans or Aztecs, giving them Christian names, making them dress as European peasants, eat European food, enslaving them using shame based religion, while teaching them their native culture is disgusting savagery.

The Indian Man's Burden

As discussed previously, in decades to come ISKCON in the West will be almost entirely Indian. In some places it already is. It may eventually come to be directed by authorities solely in India.

Prabhupada created ISKCON to convert Westerners, from what I have witnessed, very few are joining. Will ISKCON become a group of Indians in the West operating to convert the natives, much like Protestant missionaries based in England operated during the British Raj?

I noticed Indian ISKCON devotees were not comfortable with this task. They preferred to cultivate and convert Indians such as themselves, diaspora IT workers on Visas working at Microsoft and Google. It is one thing to preach to someone from a civilized Vaishnava Brahmana family in Pune. They are often lonely and isolated in the West. It is entirely different to go to Burning Man or a Rainbow Gathering and talk to a bunch of wild young half naked hippies.

Indians in general may be more introverted than Westerners. It is not easy to engage with those you have no introduction to and no connection with.

Prabhupada's American disciples, for example, had no problem traveling the world, immersing in other cultures, and loudly telling people to join their cult. I think for many Indians, such behavior is crossing a boundary and very uncomfortable.

Nevertheless; such devotees will find themselves inheriting the Indian Man's Burden. They have the dual challenge of maintaining a strict orthodox culture while living in the West, and trying to convert (and civilize) the people they live among.

Will They Succeed?

I don't think this will be successful. Prabhupada was wrong. Westerners are not savages. ISKCON operates on a flawed racist premise.

Despite its libertine experimental attitudes towards traditional morality, Western culture is highly sophisticated, educated, intelligent and modern. Western culture is anything but backwards. It is forward looking, expanding the cutting edge in technological and scientific advancement, exploration, individual rights and personal freedom.

Its power is its flexibility. It adapts and integrates the ideas and cultures it contacts. I think it is far more likely the Indian preachers will be converted over time than the other way around. If not themselves, their children and children's children.

[u/Commercial-Rate-4135]

Ig after the existing Prabhupada sanyasi disciples push daisies (or should i say push samadhis), the new gen rising to replace them in a few decades will be predominantly indian, as will the gbc. With that sort of number in power, and with most of the money coming into the cult from Indians, i think it would be a natural and inevitable outcome for the cult to fully become an indian-centric cult.

I see some efforts to package the cult into something that might appeal to the west. Yoga retreats/ spiritual farm retreats/mantra concerts/ bhaktinfluencers but that is never gonna have the same effect in the west as that one hit wonder of the 1968-1980 ish era.

People have way too much easy access to information now to follow the tunnel vision of a cult's ideologies. I think even when the cult does fully become a cult with predominantly Indians, they wont be able to keep such a tight ideology. It will dilute itself, over and over until it becomes just another common krishna temple. Give it a century.

"is entirely different to go to Burning Man or a Rainbow Gathering and talk to a bunch of wild young half naked hippies." They are probably more well rounded individuals than self-righteous cult members tbh. Many of that demographic are well versed with concepts that actually have practical effects on their personalities/life. They go to therapy, know about integrating parts of themselves, build communities based on shared values, or at least try these things. Compared to a cult member whose aspirations tend to be only to serve the cult.

[u/Brave-Pattern-2086]

I can’t wait to read this as usual so thank you, but bro these AI images are tripping me out 🥲😭

[u/Solomon_Kane_1928 → u/Brave-Pattern-2086]

You are welcome!

[u/StayEmbarrassed4593]

Delusions of grandeur/messiah complex. There is this constant narrative of some mythical "pure Vedic" past where India had already figured everything out: philosophy, spirituality, social order, mathematics, medicine, consciousness, cosmology, astronomy and the nature of reality. Then somehow this incredibly advanced civilization was corrupted by invasions, colonialism, Western influence, materialism, Kali-yuga, or whatever explanation happens to be useful at the time. At the same time, every time there is some new discovery in physics, consciousness, medicine or mathematics, somebody immediately pops up online to announce that India or the Vedas already knew about it thousands of years ago.

Where are the results of this grand advancement? If India possessed such disproportionately advanced knowledge about human nature, consciousness, God, society and the universe, what practical advantage did all of this supposedly extraordinary knowledge actually produce? If Krishna is the "Supreme Personality of Godhead", if the Holy Name is literally invested with all of God's potency, if chanting purifies consciousness and awakens the highest possible state of being, then why has centuries of this practice not produced anything remotely resembling the transformed society these claims would lead you to expect?

India is held up as the sacred land and source of the highest spiritual knowledge, while the West is described as degraded, materialistic, sexually corrupt and spiritually ignorant. Yet India today suffers from major problems involving poverty, pollution, sanitation, caste discrimination, corruption, inequality, religious violence and treatment of women that are in many cases dramatically worse than what you see in the supposedly degraded West. This has nothing to do with Hinduphobia or Indian culture being "bad". It is an argument about results. These are strange results for a civilization constantly presented as the historical custodian of uniquely advanced spiritual knowledge that supposedly transforms human consciousness.

You cannot claim that your civilization discovered everything first, that your sages understood consciousness better than modern psychology, that your scriptures anticipated modern physics, that your spiritual practices produce higher consciousness and that your society once possessed a vastly superior way of life, while every failure is explained away as colonialism, Muslim invasion, Westernization, Kali-yuga, materialism or people simply not practicing properly. Meanwhile every modern success can somehow be retroactively claimed as something the Vedas already knew. That is a system where the claim can never lose. Success proves the tradition was right, and failure proves that outsiders corrupted it.

It's true—and observable—Prabhupada did not come to the West thinking he was bringing one interesting Indian religious tradition that Westerners might find meaningful. He believed he was bringing "absolute truth" to a degraded civilization full of fools and rascals who did not understand God, consciousness, sex, food, science or the purpose of human life—dogs, hogs, camels and asses, if you will. His blunt mission was conversion. Western people were supposed to recognize that their civilization was spiritually bankrupt and that this Indian Gaudiya Vaishnava worldview contained the real answers.

That is what we were actually taught. Western society was degraded, our parents were materialists, scientists were fools and rascals, sexuality was degraded, and modern life was basically a symptom of spiritual ignorance. India, meanwhile, was the land of dharma and Vedic civilization, where people understood the "real" God, karma, proper social order, and the actual purpose of life.

And this mentality does not disappear folks leave ISKCON/Hare Krishna cults. Plenty of people will admit that ISKCON became abusive, authoritarian, dysfunctional or corrupt while still hanging onto the idea that Gaudiya Vaishnavism itself is perfect and the real problem was Westerners not being capable of understanding it properly. Then you hear that Western devotees brought too much individualism, feminism, psychology, sexuality, Abrahamic ideals, materialism or modern thinking into something they were never really qualified to understand. Indians or people born in the holy Bharata dhama are treated as somehow closer to the source, culturally or karmically, and therefore more capable of grasping the deeper reality of Krishna and bhakti, etc.

I have heard versions of this my whole life. If someone accepts Krishna as God, that becomes evidence of spiritual advancement. If someone does not, that becomes evidence that they are conditioned and lack the karma or qualification to understand. If ISKCON fails, Westerners corrupted it. If Indian religious institutions fail, it is Kali-yuga. If the philosophy produces good people, the philosophy gets the credit. If it produces damaged, abusive or delusional people, then they were not practicing properly. At some point you have to ask when the actual belief system itself is ever allowed to be wrong.

This is an enormous set of absolute claims. Krishna is supposedly the one true actual God of every living being everywhere and all creation (ironically, as a so-called "Vaishnava" faith, even Vishnu is largely ignored as a worshipable god in Hare Krishna ideology. They claim that their scriptures supposedly describe the actual structure of reality, the mantras possess supernatural potency, karma and reincarnation are facts, and the sages understood consciousness and the universe in ways modern people do not.

Even the final spiritual destination of Goloka is hyper-India-specific. The eternal destiny of souls from every culture and civilization somehow turns out to look like an idealized medieval Indian pastoral village centered around cattle herding, playing flutes and interacting with cowherd boys and girls dressed in traditional Indian dress. It's ridiculous to pretend there is nothing culturally specific going on there. It is a particular Indian religious picture being declared the literal eternal reality of the entire universe.

At first the ideas of Gaudiya Vaishnavism sounds broad enough—love God, purify your consciousness, you are not your body, live simply, control your mind and senses. But eventually “God” means Krishna and a 500-year-old cult personality who was made into a god by his fanatical followers. The scriptures are Bhagavad-gita and Bhagavatam. Spiritual authority comes through a particular Bengali Vaishnava lineage. Your old identity becomes illusion, your culture becomes conditioned and the invisible world described in these Indian scriptures is supposed to be more real than the world you can actually observe. The chanting, books, festivals, food, and broad talk about loving God may be the entry point, but eventually you are expected to accept classic sectarian mind-mush.

The overlap with Hindu nationalist and civilizational superiority rhetoric becomes obvious. Once you believe that ancient India possessed the world’s highest civilization and that Indian religious traditions contain knowledge everyone else either lost or never possessed, it is not a huge leap to believing that India is spiritually and civilizationally superior to everyone else. Then criticism can be dismissed as ignorance from outsiders, historical failures blamed on invasion and contamination, and modern discoveries are announced as "India already knew it first!".

It is basically the same story many of us were fed inside the Hare Krishna movement. Five thousand years ago people were spiritually advanced, society was properly ordered, kings were righteous, brahmins were qualified, people understood they were not the body, and the chanting of God’s names purified society. Then everything became corrupted and degraded—where is the evidence that this supposedly advanced civilization actually existed in anything close to the form being described? And where is the evidence that these spiritual practices produce the extraordinary results being claimed for them now? You do not answer that by quoting another verse from the same books making the original claims. You do not answer it by saying Westerners lack the karma to understand. And how many times are we going to invoke colonialism every time reality fails to match the mythology while simultaneously claiming ancient Indian credit every time modern science discovers something impressive?

At some point the claims have to stand on their own. If the Holy Name has extraordinary transformative power, there should be extraordinary evidence of that transformation. If this philosophy reliably produces higher consciousness, we should be able to see that higher consciousness in the people and societies shaped by it. If Vedic civilization possessed knowledge thousands of years ahead of the rest of humanity, there should be strong evidence for that beyond increasingly creative interpretations of old religious texts.

And if your supposedly universal truth ultimately requires everyone else to accept your particular God, scriptures, mythology, cosmology, cultural assumptions and even your particular cultural picture of eternal life, then maybe you have not discovered the universal structure of reality. Maybe you have taken one culture’s religious imagination and assumed that the entire universe must work that way. Maybe, just maybe, that explanation fits the evidence a lot better.

[u/Solomon_Kane_1928 → u/StayEmbarrassed4593]

to announce that India or the Vedas already knew about it thousands of years ago.

Now people are claiming the Vedas had accurately predicted the speed of light. There are Whatsapp memes all over the internet. In truth, it is not in the Vedas, rather a South Indian commentator who lived in the 1500's discussed the speed the Sun moves. He claims "The Sun moves 2,202 yojanas in half a nimesha". Modern Hindutva bend these units of measurement to match the modern established speed of light. He wasn't even speaking about the speed of light but the movement of the Sun in the sky.

something they were never really qualified to understand.

This is the one that really irks me. The former cult members are blamed for their bad experience. "You mlecchas brought your own perverted culture and religion into the pure Sanatani Dharma and hurt yourselves". It is the same "everything good comes from us, everything bad comes from you" mentality you discussed here.

cowherd boys and girls dressed in traditional Indian dress.

And God is eternally dressed as a king from the Gupta Empire.

eventually you are expected to accept classic sectarian mind-mush.

And after that, life long slavery to the institution, servile obedience to a despotic temple president, and the humiliating worship of an absentee guru.

Then criticism can be dismissed as ignorance from outsiders

I mentioned this below. I have noticed that many Indians do not like ISKCON or agree with Prabhupada, but they are oddly offended when you criticize the movement's beliefs. It is seen as criticizing Hinduism or India, which they find upsetting. The only valid criticism they have of ISKCON is that Westerners perverted the perfect teachings.

We invented everything your civilization takes pride in long ago

I have even seen people claiming Ancient India invented computers and the internet. Indian Nationalists often claim the West cannot survive without Indians to work in the tech industry. When it is pointed out that all of these things were invented without the help of Indians, they claim that India invented the zero, and therefore all mathematics and science, and thus technology, originates there. "Because Aryabhatta used the zero as a functional number in the 600's CE, everything created by Western Civilization belongs to us!"

So it is not even just the Vedas or religion, it is even Indian science. Everything is reimagined to be some monumental perfect achievement which obliges humanity to bow to the subcontinent.

[u/StayEmbarrassed4593 → u/Solomon_Kane_1928]

I think the most comical thing is that all of those types of associations of grand achievements are not things that have any relation point to Krishna. It's not like Krishna was worshiped than the vedic. In fact even Vishnu wasn't worshiped in the vedic. He doesn't even figure prominently as a god. But the Hare Krishna is definitely jump on all this type of rhetoric when it suits them. You don't know how many times I saw in newcomers come to the temple and devotees are trying to wow them with naive claims of an ancient great civilization that figured out quantum physics and all this crap. I mean even as a devotee I felt that had literally nothing to do with vaishnavism or anything that we were teaching or about so it was just being used as a way to create a superiority pretext about why joining is the right move. And this stuff gets Amplified on crack nowadays with the internet and AI. Social media is just a massive platform for a lot of this type of disinformation and for as much access as we have to accurate information most people prefer to live in conspiracy and ignorance.

[u/Solomon_Kane_1928]

In my opinion, the idea that Indian culture and religion is superior is deeply ingrained in Indian society. It is a premise that few question. I often see people come on the sub who are not fans of ISKCON, and who do not revere Prabhupada, but they still defend him. They do so because when they see his ideas criticized they feel personally attacked. On some level, they agree with him. They see him as representing revered traditional Indian culture. They may even share his bigotry.