The westward impetus

Early contacts

Contacts between India and the Mediterranean world were numerous in ancient times. Since 975 bce when the Phoenicians traded with Western India, contacts increased between the two arenas.

After Alexander, contacts increased. Not only did influences come into the subcontinent, during the time of the Mauryas, Kusanas, and Bactrians; they went out as well. Asoka sent emissaries into cities in the Greek world and subsequently one finds small settlements of Indians in such cosmopolitan cities as Alexandria, Antioch, and Palmyrah. By the end of the first century ce, Alexandria was a major port where one-half of the world’s ships were said to dock, and there is relatively frequent reference to Indians living in the city, more than likely Buddhist or Jain as orthodox brahmans may have been reluctant to cross oceans into unknown (and from the standpoint of brahmanic cosmography, profane) spaces.

By 762 Baghdad had replaced Alexandria as a major cultural center. Under the fourth and fifth ‘Abbasid caliphates, scholars were brought to the city from all over the world. The sciences brought from India included aspects of astronomy, medicine, and math (the “cipher” and “Arabic” numerals are said to have their origins in India). Literature and folk stories informed Arabic and eventually European cultures. The Pancatantra, for example, that anthology of Indian folk tales, was translated into Pahlavi in the sixth century and thence into Arabic (c. 750), then into Persian, Syriac, Hebrew, and Spanish. A German version (1481) was one of the first printed books in German, and translations into Italian and English followed. Among the themes in “European” stories that may have had Indian origins are talking beasts; Sinbad the Sailor (found in the Arabian Nights with many Indian references); the princess and the pea; and many others. One intrigu­ing story that appeared by the fifth century in Greek is that of Josaphat, a young Christian prince who renounces the world to become an ascetic.

The colonial period

The coming of the Portuguese and other European colonial powers to India, in addition to the impact it had on the subcontinent, also spawned con­siderable interest in Europe about India.¹⁷ Travel reports and literature stimulated and perpetuated this intrigue, obviously filtered through European lenses. Goa, for example, became a center for European visitors and one of the earliest reports was that of Camoens (1525-80), who roman­tically described Vasco da Gama’s landing post facto. Thomas Stephens, an English Jesuit living in Goa as of 1575, wrote a grammar in Konkanl; a poem Kristana Purana (the Purana of Christ) was written by an admirer of the Marathi language. Van Linschoten, a guest of the archbishop in Goa from 1583-89, wrote a rather sensitive report, entitled “Itineratio,” which was published in 1595.¹⁸

The Mughal court had a variety of European visitors. One of the earliest, an Englishman named Fitch, returned to England with such glowing reports it prompted the East India Company to request permission to set up a factory in Surat in 1608. Two East India chaplains (Lord, 1630 and Ovington, 1689) reported on Surat. That and other travel literature influenced the poetry of John Milton. There were resplendent descriptions of the Mughals by Dryden (1675), Tavernier and Bernier (1684), and others.¹⁹ Perhaps the most important development during the Mughal period were the trans­lations of Dara Shikoh into Persian. The translations of fifty-two Upanisads were completed in 1657, then translated into French by Duperron in 1801.²⁰ Imperfect as these translations were and being presented through Islamic, then European, eyes, they became the stimulus for generations of study of Indian languages and thought and a resource for a number of philosophers and writers.

It is believed the study of Sanskrit was actually introduced into Europe by Alexander Hamilton, an official in the East India Company detained in Paris during the Napoleonic wars.²¹ One of his students was van Schlegel, who published in German, “On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians,” a text which in turn helped fuel German romanticism and, at least indirectly, the thinking of Schopenhauer, Kant, Schiller, Goethe, Herder, and Schleiermacher. The race, one might say, was on.

Interestingly, the first novel in English about India was a relatively sensitive one. Hartley House, Calcutta, published in 1789, was written by an anonymous woman in the form of a series of letters back home.²² The novel describes the life of the powerful in Calcutta and proved to be relatively sympathetic to Hinduism.

The explosion of Europeans’ interest in India in the nineteenth century is too extensive to recount in this context: it proved to be a wide spectrum in both discipline and attitude. Some of the early pioneers in Buddhist studies, for example, included Barnouf, Lassen, the Rhys Davids, Stcherbasky, and Trenchner, among others. Invariably these scholars read into Buddhism and its notion of nirvana their own prejudices and value systems.²³ Archaeologists included Cunningham (whose interpretations of the Ayodhya shrines are believed to have helped sour Hindu-Muslim relations) and, somewhat later, the work of Marshall and Wheeler in the Indus Valley.

America’s fascination with India, while not as long as Europe’s, none­theless goes back at least a couple of centuries to the time of the Transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson read translations of Sanskrit, Pali, and Persian literature which informed his Unitarian vision, while David Henry Thoreau found Indian ideas spiraling through his own reflections. By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States’ interest in India had reached a peak of sorts. Well over half of the ships in Calcutta harbor were from the US. The completion of the railroad across the US was hailed by Walt Whitman as a “passage” to India. Whitman gave further voice to this romanticism in his Leaves of Grass where he describes India as the source of “primeval thought,” “reason’s early paradise,” the “birthplace of wisdom,” and the home of “innocent institutions” and “fair creation.”²⁴

The modern era

The impact of Indian religion on the “West” in the modern period might be divided into three stages. The first was the period before the First World War. Following on the heels of the fascination with India of European romantics and German philosophers, there was a flood of translations making accessible in English various texts of classical Indian thought. Max Muller’s translations of the Sacred Books of the East were an enormous undertaking, and along with other texts, such as G.

But religious interest in India was also piqued by the visits of Swami Vivekananda to the US. After lecturing at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, he was invited to lecture to a variety of groups in cities along the eastern seaboard. He established “Vedanta societies” in many of the cities. Those Vedanta centers were a highly protestantized form of Neo­Hinduism which affirmed a simplified monism, the universality of truth, and the divinity of man. Their chapels hosted worship on Sunday mornings; their walls were lined with pictures of Christ along with those of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda’s mentor, and other Hindu and Buddhist figures. These Vedanta groups, still extant in North America, provided a mixture of medi­tation, devotion, work, and thought. Another group through which Indian ideas were filtered into Western idiom was the Theosophical Society. While it claimed to be rooted in ancient Egyptian and Celtic mythology, it had selectively borrowed from a Hindu vocabulary and both Madame Blavatsky, its founder, and Annie Besant were enamored of Indian thought. Indeed, Annie Besant was so committed to India that she moved to Adyar, just outside of Madras, to set up the international headquarters of the movement and enter into the social and cultural life of her adopted country.

In addition to these two major sources of Indian ideas in North America, there was a variety of other less well-known influences which left an impact on some of America’s religious “free thinkers.” There was a trickle of “gurus,” both Euro-Americans and Indian-born, who planted small groups in American cities or left a literature reflecting Indian sentiments. Baba Premanand Bharati, for example, came to the US in 1902 from Bengal and started his “Krishna Samaj,” a form of Caitanya’s Krishna Consciousness movement, in New York City and Los Angeles.²⁵ A somewhat more ambiguous character was American-born William Walker Atkinson, who combined elements of “New Thought” (the generic term used for such alternative religious ideas as Mesmerism, Pantheism, Perennial Philosophy, etc.) with more explicitly Hindu notions expressed in his persona as “Yogi Ramacharaka.”²⁶ The result of these various strands was an openness on the part of some Americans of European descent to ideas and rituals that had their origins in India.

The second significant wave of Indian influence occurred between the World Wars. During this period, an increasing number of yogins and gurus made their way to North America to establish ashrams for meditation and “self-realization.” These meditation centers and techniques, while based on Indian tradition, were usually eclectic. They were presented as being “attachable” to Christianity or any other religion. Such was the case with the Self-Realization Fellowship, founded in California in 1920 (see below). Worship in the center of that movement included hymns and scriptures of various traditions. Among the gurus who came to offer lectures and enlight­enment or whose movements impacted North America were Sri Deva Ram Sukul, an Indian living in Chicago, who founded the Hindu Yoga Society in Chicago and California in the 1920s; Srimath Swami Omkar, a Tamil, who established a branch of the Sri Mariya Ashram in Philadelphia in 1923; and Rishi Krishnamanda, who founded his “Para-Vidya Center” in Los Angeles in the 1930s; and others.²⁷

We might look a little more carefully at two of the persons who figure prominently in the developments of this period. One is Swami Paramahansa Yogananda. Born in Bengal in 1893, he decided in his youth to follow a religious life. From his family’s guru, Lahiri Mahasaya, he learned a tech­nique known as “kriya yoga,” which became his “special message” to the world. At the age of seventeen, he became a disciple of Sri Yukteswar, a disciple of Mahasaya, who led him through an experience of “cosmic con­sciousness” and encouraged him to receive a college degree. After a period of apprenticeship in India, Paramahansa was sent to the US in 1920, where he crisscrossed the country for the next three decades, lecturing and gathering devotees, first in Boston and eventually Los Angeles, where he established the headquarters of the Self-Realization Fellowship. Yogananda was a charismatic speaker and skillful marketer. He taught yoga and wrote, most notably, the book Autobiography of a Yoga, which was published eventually in 1946. Yet the signature feature of his work was the technique he marketed known as “kriya yoga.” “Kriya yoga” selectively appropriated aspects of the traditional yoga system, but he simplified it for adaptation for any modern person. He claimed the technique had been used by ancient sages, including St. Paul and Christ and that it could be used irrespective of one’s religious orientation. At the same time, he used a quasi-scientific vocabulary to give the technique a modern rationale.²⁸

Yogananda developed a significant following partially because of his ability to appropriate a Western and liberal Protestant vocabulary, partially because of his charismatic personality and partially because his promise of a “ritual that worked” appealed to an audience that sought just that.

If Yogananda’s appeal lay largely in the offering of a ritual technique, that of Jiddu Krishnamurti claimed to be of a different sort. Krishnamurti was born into an orthodox brahman family in South India in 1895.²⁹ By 1909 he had begun to work at the headquarters of the Theosophical Society, by then located in Adyar near Madras city. Members of the society saw spiritual leanings in the young man; indeed, before long he was understood to be an incarnation of the “Maitreya,” the future “world teacher” and as such was worshiped by devotees. Nonetheless, by the time he was twenty-six, Krishnamurti became increasingly disenchanted with the Theosophical Society - its ideas, its constraints, and the way it was using him. Before long he was undergoing his own spiritual experiences and developing his own ideological system. While he continued to work within the system until 1928, he eventually set out to lecture on his own, giving his first public lecture (one not intended exclusively for Theosophical Society members) in May 1928. For several decades, he lectured in the US, India, and Europe. His message insisted that the truth was not to be found in any particular religion. Rather, while he claimed a special status as a universal teacher who had a sense of the truth, he sought not for men to follow him but to be “free.” While he tended to eschew all rituals, he nonetheless, claimed that “mindless awareness” was a form of meditation - much like zen practice - which could make persons free.

As ideas such as these made their way into North America several indige­nous movements were spawned that at least purported to have an Indian flavor. The I Am movement, for example, was founded in the 1930s by one Guy Ballard (1878-1939). Ballard’s movement Americanized aspects of Theosophy and certain occult practices. Mt. Shasta, California, for example, became the group’s mythological center and they believed themselves able to see auras around people’s heads. Scientology, founded by Ron Hubbard in 1911, adapted Buddhist terms to describe the religious experience and declared its leader to be a shaman and “magus” (wise spiritual leader). Science fiction terms were adopted to describe the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm as perceived by the founder.³⁰ The emphasis during this period seemed to be experimentation and openness to rituals that were thought to create community and/or self-realization and to ideas that were considered universal. Clearly, charismatic leaders were able to attract those who sought some embodiment of authentic humanhood and spiritual insight. Nonetheless, it must be made clear that such movements were far removed from classical forms of Indian religion. Indeed, orthoprax Hindus insist such hybridizations as these were inauthentic, even bastardized forms of Hinduism or Buddhism.

Meanwhile, some of the first immigrants were trickling into North America in the twentieth century. The first South Asians to appear and settle were primarily Sikhs, who were arriving in British Columbia by 1899 and by 1906 had made their way into the Western US. By 1907, these migrants were the target of various forms of discrimination - from “anti-Hindu” riots to editorials favoring their deportation in various newspapers in both British Columbia and Washington State.³¹ Undaunted, the Sikhs, virtually all of them bachelors and sojourners, made their way southward into California, where eventually they generally married Mexican women and set up the first Indian religious establishment in the US, a makeshift gurdwara, in Stockton, California, in 1906, followed by a more permanent structure in 1929.³² But, while Indians had been migrating voluntarily into such places as the Malay Straits and East Africa for over a generation, the flow into Europe and North America was modest indeed. As late as 1950, there were fewer than 1,000 Indian women living in the US. The trickle was to become a significant stream, however, within decades.

The third period of this modern influence is that which followed the Second World War and especially since the 1960s. For one thing, things Indian had influenced American popular culture and subsequently global culture. There were several factors contributing to this phenomenon. There was, on the one hand, a certain alienation by 1965 especially on the part of the young with “Western” values of consumerism and international hege­mony. There was a perceived loss of respect for authority figures exacerbated by the Vietnam War and the Nixon years. There was an increased sense of mobility and depersonalization, a perceived need for community and roots. One of the results of this relative malaise was a willingness to accom­modate “newer” or more eclectic forms of religion. Some have estimated that perhaps as many as 1,000 “alternative” religious movements have been spawned in North America alone since the Second World War. Among these alternatives was the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, a movement shaped in the Gaudia Vaisnava tradition founded by Caitanya and brought to the West by Swami Prabhupada. While the movement has remained relatively small in the US and Europe, many “outsiders” became familiar with the rigorous discipline of the movement, its characteristic garb, and public chanting of “Hare Rama, Hare Krisna.” Yet another movement was forged by Swami Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his technique of meditating for “transcendental consciousness” (“TM”), packaged and sold as twenty minutes a day of meditation designed to focus the mind and clear it of un­necessary debris. Other gurus have come and gone - Rajneesh of Oregon fame is but one of hundreds who have made their way through North America and Europe. Scores of other “alternative religions” have also been engendered, some for brief periods before returning to relative oblivion. Anand Marg and Eckankar are but two such. The latter, founded by one Paul Twitchell, takes its name from the Panjabi term for God (Ek - the One) and purports to enable the devotee to free the soul to travel through the multiple planes of the cosmos only to return totally enlightened.

These impeti, especially those of the TM and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness groups, were given popular currency by the Beatles, whose songs resonated with Indian idioms and whose donations supported such movements. Not least important in this process of popularization has been the way yoga has been made available throughout the West - as a form of exercise, virtually stripped of its cosmological and soteriological context. Such South Asian terms as “karma” and “nirvana” have become part of the English language, obviously nuanced with their new cultural trappings. While the fascination with India cooled in the 1980s and 1990s, it was piqued further as the emigration of South Asians increased.