(1968)
LOVE FEAST
When A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada arrived in New York with a trunk of books and a mission to spread devotion to Krishna, few could have imagined what would follow. Within a decade, the Hare Krishna movement had grown from a Lower East Side storefront into a nationwide network of temples, schools, festivals, and devotional communities, built largely by white American converts. As Kalpana Jain shows, those institutions would soon take on an unexpected new role.
On September 17, 1965, Abhay Charan De—whose spiritual name was A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada—landed in the United States with a mission: to make the Western world remember God.
His spiritual teacher back in India had instructed him to carry the teachings of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, a Hindu tradition centered on Krishna as the supreme deity, to the West.
He waited until he had completed duties towards his family and, at the age of 69, he undertook the long voyage aboard the cargo ship Jaladuta. Along the way, he suffered two heart attacks.
Relying on divine assistance, he landed in Boston with no money, just a trunk full of books. He knew almost no one except for a small number of Indian contacts, with whom at first he stayed. He had little hope for success. In India, some of Prabhupada’s peers had expressed skepticism about preaching a tradition with such strict discipline—no intoxication, no illicit sex, and no meat eating—believing these practices to be incompatible with a Western lifestyle.
South Asian immigration had been severely restricted in the US for decades, going all the way back to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. For many Americans, India was often imagined through exotic stereotypes—a mystical land, with ascetics capable of supernatural feats. Prabhupada arrived as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 passed, earlier racial quotas restricting Asian immigration. Indian immigration, however, did not begin in significant numbers until the early 1970s. Many early devotees of Prabhupada recall that they rarely, if ever, encountered Indian immigrants until the late 1960s.
But in the mid-1960s, a counterculture was emerging, and a growing number of Americans were searching for alternative spiritual paths. Post-World War II America was a fertile ground for such a movement. Many young people raised in affluence grew disillusioned with mainstream life and experimented with new ideas, substances, and lifestyles.
The Swami and His Followers
Courtesy of Hridayananda Goswami (Howard J. Resnick)
Some Americans had already been drawn to Hinduism, largely through an intellectual engagement with Vedanta philosophy introduced by Swami Vivekananda at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893.
Hinduism’s early presence in the US reflected this style. A November 2, 1967, New York Times article described a small “Hindu chapel,” the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center on East 94th Street, featuring a white marble bust of Ramakrishna, the nineteenth-century mystic central to the Vedanta tradition, alongside an image of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child. Most American cities at the time had no dedicated Hindu temples, and certainly none that reflected the diversity of Hindu beliefs and practices found in India.
When Prabhupada first arrived in New York City, he shared a living space with a 17-year-old artist in a loft at 94 Bowery, in what was then a rough and impoverished part of Manhattan. Within a year, Prabhupada would lay the foundations of a new global religious movement: the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON)—soon to become better known as the Hare Krishnas.
Hridayananda Goswami
in a ceremony with the Swami.
Courtesy of Hridayananda Goswami (Howard J. Resnick)
One of the first young people Prabhupada met in New York was Michael Grant, a jazz musician searching for meaning. Prabhupada struck many early followers as accessible, warm, and deeply convincing. Grant found him trustworthy, “almost like a grandfather.” Grant, Prabhupada, and a small group of his followers rented a storefront at 26 Second Avenue, a former curio shop called “Matchless Gifts.”
The place was run down and dirty, but it served both their purpose and their modest means. Devotees set up a small kitchen in the back and living quarters for Prabhupada upstairs. The front room became the temple space. Prabhupada had brought small deities from India, and once they were installed on a simple altar, the space began to resemble a functioning shrine.
Soon afterward Prabhupada formally incorporated the organization, drafting a document called the “Seven Purposes of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness,” which outlined its goals. These included propagating spiritual knowledge, teaching Krishna consciousness from the Bhagavad Gita, encouraging congregational chanting, and establishing places of worship. Grant and his partner Jan Stockman were asked to sign the incorporation papers.
Grant notes in his memoir, “Miracle on Second Avenue,” that in their early twenties, they were likely the oldest people in Prabhupada’s group, and so it made sense that he would ask them to be signatories. But the legality of it all, he writes, “seemed a bit excessive.” As the movement, he notes, “consisted of nothing more than a handful of alternatives and a rented storefront.”
Chanting the name of Krishna together soon became the centerpiece of ISKCON practice. This was derived from Prabhupada’s background in Gaudiya Vaishvanism, and so was the mantra they most frequently chanted: “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare / Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.” They believed it would "purify" devotees from past karma and help them connect with the divine.
Sometimes chanting was combined with dancing, as in one event Grant described where Prabhupada stood up, raised his arms above his head, and in a “graceful swaying motion began to move forward in a clockwise circle around the room.” He gestured for others to follow, and then formed a “single conga-like line,” continuing to dance for more than an hour.
The early followers bought beads from a small shop called Wall Beads and learned that chanting on beads was called “japa.” Prabhupada explained to them that everyone was “impure” in the material world and anyone, “clean or unclean,” who remembered Krishna or did japa “would become cleansed.” They learned to celebrate and fast for Janmashtami, Krishna’s birthday. Prabhupada explained that it was “like Christmas.”
Prabhupada cooked large vegetarian meals for his followers: rice, dal, chapatis, vegetable dishes, chickpea stew, and halva. He called these gatherings “love feasts” and explained that Krishna devotees do not eat without first offering food to Krishna, because “God is a person.”
Many had never eaten vegetarian food, or never considered food and hospitality as part of spirituality. In talking to me, even decades later, Grant, now in his eighties, still vividly recalled the image of Prabhupada “plopping helping after helping on these paper plates that we had.”
Rituals were improvised with few resources. In the first official ceremony, initiating the disciples, Prabhupada sat before a rectangular mound of soil taken from his courtyard in New York City. Around it, pieces of an orange crate were arranged to form a small, makeshift altar, atop which sat a small, framed picture of Krishna. The young devotees were mostly unfamiliar with Krishna’s appearance. Grant describes the painting as “El Greco-like in style—with a glowing halo reminiscent of a Christian saint.”
In this ceremony, Prabhupada’s devotees were given one of Krishna’s many names. Michael Grant became Mukunda Goswami. His partner became Janaki Devi Dasi, a name of Sita, consort of Rama, who, in Prabhupada’s Gaudiya tradition, is understood to be an incarnation of Krishna.
The “ritual felt like a passage—a movement from one life into another,” said Goswami.
Brahmatirtha Dasa (1972)
Courtesy of Brahmatirtha Dasa (Bob Cohen)
The Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, California, on America’s West coast, was emerging as a center for experimentation with music, drugs, and alternative forms of spirituality. Tens of thousands had gathered in Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In, a major counterculture event.
One of Mukunda Goswami’s school friends, Sam Speerstra, would be later given the name Shyamsundar, one of Krishna’s names when he’s playing his flute. His girlfriend Melanie Nagel became Malati, a jasmine flower that is dear to Krishna. Shyamsundar, like many in the counterculture, had done all the experimentation he could with drugs and was searching for spiritual direction. He was “near ruin,” as he writes in his detailed three-volume memoir, Chasing Rhinos with the Swami.
He was impressed with the change in his friends Mukunda, Janaki, and others: “They glow. They refuse meat, drugs, even coffee.” He hadn’t met Prabhupada, but he trusted his friends. He also knew that Prabhupada was fast finding a following among counterculture writers and poets like Allen Ginsberg, known for anti-conformist style, who frequented California.
Shyamsundar helped hatch a plan to invite Prabhupada to San Francisco, directly into these emerging spiritual currents. In December 1966, a few weeks before Prabhupada’s arrival, he rented a storefront at 518 Frederick Street in the Haight-Ashbury. Not knowing anything about Krishna, an artist instead painted a large image of Vishnu: blue with four arms and seemingly emerging from a volcano.
The devotees had pooled all possible resources to organize a benefit concert called the “Mantra-Rock Dance,” where psychedelic bands like the Grateful Dead and Moby Grape would play to raise money for Prabhupada’s travel and for the second storefront temple.
“They glow. They refuse meat, drugs, even coffee.”
The attention Prabhupada received on the West Coast was much bigger than in New York. For the first time, mainstream America came face to face with Krishna devotion. On January 17, 1967, a small group of followers gathered at the San Francisco airport to meet Prabhupada’s United Airlines DC-8, wearing the characteristic tilak and saffron robes. Later, the ISKCON presence at airports would become a common sight, but in 1967 it was a major defining moment for the movement. Shyamsundar, who would later work as Prabhupada’s private secretary, recalled being “on the floor, overwhelmed.”
He wrote: “The hippies who dwelt in Haight Ashbury were independent thinkers, unattached to cultural norms and dress, keenly aware. In their midst the Swami, with his knowing look, his easy manner, and exotic dress, seemed hipper than the hip.”
The visibility of the new movement grew. Hundreds of hippies would gather and chant on a meadow in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, now known as Hippie Hill, led by Prabhupada himself. The chanting was powerfully accompanied first by the mridangam from India, a double-headed clay drum used to accompany devotional singing. Eventually, Mukunda would get the kartals, small hand cymbals used in spiritual sessions, cast at a Mexican foundry in the US.
Invitations for Prabhupada flowed in from all over America: universities, yoga centers, Unitarian churches. The movement was covered in Life, Time, and Newsweek magazines. Joan Didion famously wrote: “Maybe the trip is not in Zen, but in Krishna.” Prabhupada even appeared in a televised exchange with Christian evangelists on “The Les Crane Show,” a bold, confrontational mid-1960s talk show that reached millions. Prabhupada emphasized the universalism of the beliefs of Krishna consciousness. God has many names; “Krishna is one of the many names of God,” he said in response to a question. He did not reject other faiths: Jesus, he said, could save; the Bible could lead to God, “any word of God” could. The show was pivotal: it presented Prabhupada as “wise” and “charming” and not, as some feared, a “cult leader.”
From here the movement exploded. Within a few years, temples began appearing across North America: Boston, Santa Fe, Seattle, Denver, Florida, Los Angeles. In Dallas, the movement opened its first major gurukul, a school for children.
In Los Angeles, they bought a former Methodist school building and converted it into the movement’s first full-scale temple, eventually to become ISKCON’s world headquarters. Mukunda became somewhat emotional discussing this temple. “It felt like ours,” he said, “We could do almost anything—it was like a miracle.”
The movement also spread globally.
In 1969, the young missionaries traveled to London. Mukunda recalls how they kept “trying to find a temple, walking through the dismal, drizzly, old streets of London, day after day.” But when a letter arrived from Prabhupada, “we would gather around and read it aloud—and it kept us going.”
Eventually they gained support from George Harrison of the Beatles, who helped record and perform the “Hare Krishna Mantra.” Mukunda played the mridangam, while Shyamsundar was among the lead vocalists. The single climbed to number 12 on the UK charts and found a place on popular television shows such as BBC-TV’s Top of the Pops.
Soon they were traveling as a “pop group,” performing concerts across Europe, which helped pay their rent, Mukunda recalled. It also made ISKCON’s “Hare Krishna” chant familiar all over the world, as it continues to be today. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare. Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.
Within just six years, ISKCON had become a global religious movement. It also became increasingly visible across smaller towns and cities in the United States. One of the key ways it did so was through “traveling sankirtan” buses, Greyhound-style vehicles that had been painted in bright colors with images of Lord Chaitanya, a sixteenth-century saint whose devotion to Krishna shaped the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. Loaded with ISKCON books, they traveled to far-flung areas, spreading the movement’s message, collecting donations, selling literature, and attracting young people curious about a new spiritual way of life.
One devotee later recounted how she had seen one of the sankirtan buses in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1973. She had never heard of Krishna and did not know that a vegetarian way of life was possible. But a glimpse inside the “beautiful” temple set up within the bus, with its altar of deities, was enough to prompt her to leave her Catholic faith and join the movement.
ISKCON Members Honor the Swami
Courtesy of Hridayananda Goswami (Howard J. Resnick)
Prabhupada’s early life was marked by challenges. He worked at a pharmaceutical company before starting his own business, facing several setbacks along the way. When he set out to carry out the instruction of his teacher, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakur, to spread Krishna consciousness in the West, he found criticism from some conservative members in India for theological issues, including initiating Western followers too soon.
This did not deter Prabhupada, and in September 1970 he returned to India, accompanied by American and European disciples. The reception was enthusiastic, and the visit received extensive coverage in the Indian media. “We were a national sensation in India for almost a year,” recalled Shyamasundar.
Prabhupada affectionately referred to his disciples as his “dancing white elephants.” The group toured India for a year, holding large public programs in cities such as Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai. At the Kumbh Mela, considered to be the largest religious gathering in the world, when millions gather to bathe as an act of spiritual purification on the banks of a sacred river, ISKCON’s compound reportedly drew enormous crowds.
The movement’s success also enabled Prabhupada to construct major ISKCON pilgrimage centers in India, with temples in Mumbai, Vrindavan, and Mayapur in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. Vrindavan is one of the most sacred places in the tradition, associated with Krishna’s childhood and divine play; Mayapur is believed to be the birthplace of Lord Chaitanya.
In 1977, Prabhupada passed away. His death created a leadership vacuum just as the movement faced internal crises and growing external pressures. It was a period of profound overall change for the movement.
The 1978 Jonestown tragedy, in which over 900 followers of Jim Jones died in a mass murder-suicide, made Americans more wary of new religious movements. “Parents no longer saw participation as eccentric but dangerous,” recalled Hridayananda Dasa Goswami (Howard Resnick), who had joined ISKCON in 1969.
The movement’s original base of highly motivated and entrepreneurial young missionaries was also aging, marrying, and no longer sustaining it as they were before. Scandals involving child sexual abuse, as well as drug and weapons charges against some leaders during the 1970s and 1980s, further damaged the movement’s public image. E. Burke Rochford Jr., Professor Emeritus of Religion at Middlebury College, who researched abuse in ISKCON boarding schools or gurukuls, told The New York Times in an October 9, 1998, article that “severe sexual and physical abuse was common” in some of these institutions.
One of the most serious controversies involved the New Vrindaban community in West Virginia, which was temporarily excommunicated from ISKCON after criminal convictions involving senior members. Abuse was also reported at ISKCON schools in Dallas and Seattle. ISKCON later established child protection mechanisms, issued public apologies, and paid millions of dollars in settlements to former students. However, many survivors have argued that the organization fell short in ensuring accountability and preventing future abuse.
The movement was also affected by the Robin George v. International Society for Krishna Consciousness case, in which the parents of 14-year-old Robin George alleged that ISKCON members had “brainwashed” her into leaving home and joining the movement in 1974. In 1984, a California jury initially awarded more than $32 million in damages, though the amount was later reduced on appeal. The prolonged legal battle placed additional financial strain on the movement at a time of growing internal crisis.
Around the same time, during the mid-1970s and 80s, increasing numbers of Indian professionals began settling permanently in American cities. The 1965 immigration reforms had given preference to professionals and skilled workers. As a result, thousands of doctors, engineers, scientists, and academics came to the US, many of them from Southeast Asia.
ISKCON temples allowed these new immigrants to find familiar forms of worship—and also Indian vegetarian food, which was hard to find at the time in the US.
For many Indians emerging from a recently independent nation, the conversion of Western devotees offered “confidence in their own religious beliefs,” writes Raymond Brady Williams, whose research sheds light on this transition period in ISKCON. As some saw it, “If Westerners believe in it, then it must have value.”
The new Indian immigrants were often financially secure, and ISKCON’s leadership made concerted efforts to attract them, encouraging them to affirm the movement’s standing within Hinduism and help counter accusations that it was a “cult.” In 1984, the organization sponsored the formation of the Hindu Alliance in Washington, DC. Members also collaborated with groups such as the right-wing Vishwa Hindu Parishad, advertised in diaspora newspapers, invited families to festivals, and conducted outreach in homes.
By January 1984, ISKCON had about 30,000 Life Members worldwide, more than half of them, surprisingly, in India. In the United States there were only 1,684 members, almost all of them Indian immigrants. Many of them became key financial contributors. In Detroit, for example, Indian immigrants donated $100,000 to the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, which had been founded in 1972 by Prabhupada to publish and distribute his works. In Philadelphia, they contributed about $1,000 per month in 1982 to support temple activities.
A new congregational model began to take shape.
Immigrant participation varied across temples. In some locations, Indian devotees made up 70% to 80% of those attending Sunday programs, rising to as high as 90% during major festivals such as Krishna Janmashtami, which celebrates Krishna’s birth.
Many immigrants were also encouraged to support temple activities through initiatives like “adopt a cow” programs. At the same time, because regular temple attendance is not always part of everyday practice, some immigrant families formed their own Hare Krishna satsang mandals: small devotional groups that met in homes on Friday or Saturday evenings to sing devotional songs.
What began as a movement of American converts has become one sustained largely
by Indian and diaspora communities,
both in the United States and globally.
Western ISKCON devotees, for their part, often played an important role in bridging cultural gaps for children of immigrants navigating identities across two worlds.
The relationship with Indian immigrants, however, was not seamless. Tensions emerged over ISKCON’s public image, which, some said, had “given Hinduism a bad name,” according to Williams. He also describes how social and educational differences widened the divide. Many early ISKCON members had limited formal education, while immigrant Hindus were often highly educated. In some places, such as a temple in Dallas, separate Sunday programs were introduced. Differences also emerged over temple practices, some of which departed from those in parts of India.
Some of these tensions continue to surface in conversations with Western missionaries even today. In my interviews, I also encountered a broader perception that Indian immigrants had entered spaces ISKCON had built and, in the process, transformed them. Some ISKCON Western devotees felt that temples became more ritualistic and increasingly oriented toward the needs of Indian congregants.
Brahmatirtha Dasa (Bob Cohen), who had helped expand ISKCON’s Life Membership program in Houston, recalled that Sunday gatherings became so crowded they resembled “a Bombay train crowd.” Reflecting on the shift, he noted that some practices departed from what he understood as Prabhupada’s original vision. For example, he recalled that some Indian immigrants would bring their new cars to the temple, where rituals were performed to bless the vehicle for safety.
Prabhupada, he said, envisioned a universal mission to spread Krishna consciousness globally, not a temple-centered system catering primarily to the ritual needs of Hindu immigrants. Other devotees recalled this “Indianization” in everyday ways, such as food becoming spicier and less to their taste.
For Western devotees, this tension with Indian immigrants appeared to happen in three stages. Hridayananda Goswami described it as: “visitation,” “integration,” and “domination.”
Visitation was when Indian immigrants, surprised to find Krishna worship in the US, began visiting and donating to the temples. “They were respectful and grateful,” he said. As Western recruitment declined and ISKCON went through a financial crisis, Indian devotees became not just donors, but leaders who shaped and changed temple practices—this he called integration. Over time, many temples, he said, became largely Indian congregations. “Western devotees sometimes felt like outsiders in what had once been their temples,” a stage of domination, according to him.
What had begun as a largely Western, countercultural movement gradually evolved into a community centered on Indian families. Williams notes that the shift was both practical and structural. ISKCON was moving beyond its origins as a “youth social protest group” and toward a more stable, congregational form.
Procession of ISKCON Members
Courtesy of Hridayananda Goswami (Howard J. Resnick)
Religion scholar Vasudha Narayanan agrees that ISKCON temples became among the first spaces where Hindus gathered in significant numbers. But they often functioned as temporary gathering places until immigrant communities could establish temples of their own.
In fact, adaptation had characterized Hindu institutions in America from the beginning, long before Indian immigration accelerated. In A Nation of Religions, Narayanan notes that the first Hindu temple of the Vedanta Society in the Western Hemisphere, dedicated in San Francisco in 1906, was consciously designed for an American setting. It incorporated American symbols, including an eagle, which some devotees came to interpret as Garuda, the eagle mount of Vishnu.
By the 1970s and 1980s, Indian immigrants began building temples of their own, balancing the desire for authenticity with the realities of adaptation, limited resources, and life in a new country. These temples often brought together traditions such as Jains, Sikhs and Hindus that would remain separate in India; temples also functioned as cultural as well as religious centers. Adaptation was evident in rituals that symbolically merged sacred geographies, as immigrant communities mingled waters from India's sacred rivers—the Ganga, Yamuna, and Kaveri—with those of American rivers such as the Mississippi and Hudson.
A similar process of adaptation was unfolding within ISKCON, which evolved alongside the broader Hindu immigrant community. Today, the United States has more Hindu temples than any country except India.
Hridayananda Goswami
with ISKCON members in India
Courtesy of Hridayananda Goswami (Howard J. Resnick)
As for ISKCON, what began as a movement of American converts has become one sustained largely by Indian and diaspora communities, both in the United States and globally. ISKCON itself estimates that it has more than a million Life Members worldwide, and in many North American congregations, Indian devotees make up a large majority of those, often around 80%.
Practices can vary. Some early devotees, including Hridayananda Goswami and Brahmatirtha Das, remain committed to what they see as Prabhupada’s original emphasis on education and philosophy rather than enforcing a fixed religious identity. “He wanted literature everywhere. He encouraged everyone to write,” Brahmatirtha recalled. Institutions such as the Bhaktivedanta Institute for Higher Studies in Gainesville, Florida, continue that intellectual mission, with both Hridayananda and Brahmatirtha playing key leadership roles.
At the same time, immigrant communities have their own religious needs. In some places, immigrant Indians still go to ISKCON temples while trying to build their own. In Gainesville, for example, where the small Hindu community has found it hard to raise money, many go to a large ISKCON temple ten miles away for Janmashtami and festivals. Yet, they don’t rely on it for regular daily worship and continue efforts to build a temple of their own, said Narayanan.
If an “Americanization” of Hindu practice has taken place in the United States, ISKCON, though born in America, has also been absorbed into the broader spectrum of Hindu traditions in India. At ISKCON’s Bengaluru temple in southern India, Lord Venkateshwara and Narasimha are also worshipped. In the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition followed by ISKCON, these deities are understood as manifestations of Krishna, the supreme form of the divine. Because they are widely revered in southern India, their presence in the temple reflects a blending with regional devotional traditions.
Mukunda described ISKCON’s early years in the United States to me as “a magic carpet ride, an adventure,” a phrase that captured not only the uncertainty of those beginnings, but also the joy and exhilaration in that adventure.
Decades later, I saw a similar journey unfolding in India. New temples continue to be built, even as parts of the movement have expanded into large-scale social initiatives, including food programs addressing hunger in India and other parts of the world.
The “dusty village” that Shyamasundar visited in 1970, where he felt “Krishna consciousness was almost extinct,” is now a bustling global pilgrimage center, so crowded with devotees that it can be difficult to move through its narrow lanes.
The blending of sacred landscapes continues in quieter ways—echoing journeys that began on the rivers and streets of the United States and converged in Vrindavan, on the banks of the Yamuna. At the ISKCON temple, I was surprised with the voice of the first aarti of the morning ritual, Govindam Adi Purusham. This Sanskrit hymn glorifies Krishna as the original divine being. It was recorded in the 1960s by George Harrison, featuring the voice of Yamuna Devi Dasi—a Western devotee born Joan Agnes Campanella. Prabhupada encouraged its adoption as the morning aarti across ISKCON temples worldwide.
In India’s Hindi heartland, where few might typically listen to English melodies, the hymn was at once beautiful and spoke directly to the heart. I’m not sure how many followed the words, but many swayed in devotion to its rhythm and melody, before the freshly adorned icons of Radha and Krishna. I watched as the chanting deepened into a dance and then into prostration before the deities Radha and Krishna, and before Prabhupada’s icon as Krishna’s ever-faithful servant.
What began on the United States’ eastern shores traveled far, becoming at once global and ultimately part of the sacred landscape from which its traditions draw.
SOURCES & FURTHER READINGS
Shyamasundar Das, Chasing Rhinos with the Swami Mukunda Goswami, Miracle on Second Avenue: Hare Krishna Arrives in New York, San Francisco, and London 1966–1969 (Torchlight Publishing, 2016) A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, “Bhagavad-gītā As It Is,” Bhaktivedanta VedaBase, https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/ Kalpana Jain, “Walking with the Sacred: Revisiting ISKCON — the Hare Krishna Movement,” Substack, December 9, 2025 Edwin Bryant and Maria Ekstrand, eds., The Hare Krishna Movement: The Postcharismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant (Columbia University Press, 2004) E. Burke Rochford, Hare Krishna Transformed (New York University Press, 2007) Timothy Leary, Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out (Ronin Pub, 1999) Raymond Brady Williams, Religions of Immigrants from India and Pakistan: New Threads in the American Tapestry (Cambridge University Press, 1988) Stephen Prothero, A Nation of Religions (The University of North Carolina Press, 2006) Vasudha Narayanan, “Prestige Temples, Performing Arts, and Power: Hindu Immigrants in the United States,” in Hindu Diasporas, ed. Knut A. Jacobsen (Oxford University Press, 2023) “When Bhakti landed in London,” ISKCON London, https://iskcon.london/iskcon-established-in-london/.
Kalpana Jain
is an award-winning journalist and author specializing in religion, ethics, and global social issues. She is senior ethics and religion editor and director of the Global Religion Journalism Initiative at The Conversation US and was previously a visiting researcher at the National University of Malaysia (UKM), studying misinformation and media ecosystems. Her reporting has explored social justice, public health, and religion, including investigations into India’s health sector and coverage of the emerging AIDS epidemic. She is the author of Positive Lives: The Story of Ashok and Others (Penguin Global, 2003) and “Fighting Bonded Labor in Rural India: Village Activist Gyarsi Bai Tackles an Entrenched System of Coercion” (October 13, 2015), a case study on grassroots leadership centered on Gyarsi Bai, taught at Harvard Kennedy School. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, she also writes the Substack Walking with the Sacred. See Jain’s website here.
