style="font-size:15px;"> He is quite a free thinker, and feels the use of Prabhupada in an absolute way is very recent. He feels that a fundamentalist approach to scripture is dangerous. He finds the way the ISKCON leadership went was worrying, as the Governing Body Commissioners just chose themselves. He spent ten years in Vrindavan, and had an arranged marriage with an Indian South African. As he reflects on the movement now, he feels it is brilliant for the Indian diaspora, working out how to be Hindus in the West. But he wonders whether it has the language any more to talk to Westerners, and talking of karma, reincarnation etc. is no longer enough. We are in a post-colonial religious time, when spirituality is more important than church attendance. The movement should spend less time trying to convert, and more in affirming people where they are and building on this. The five principles of ISKCON are no longer enough: ‘Dream on, if you think Western people will accept all this.’ It will just lead them to neuroses. We need to be less judgemental. It is not surprising that he joined the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (SOAS), and studied religion for three years, the last year without wearing his ISKCON clothes. He is devoted to the garden in the Manor, and showed me with reverence that which had been designed by John Lennon’s widow, a meditation garden.
Gauri introduced me to Sruti, the current president of the Manor, and a Ugandan Asian. He was another who was influenced by hearing George Harrison on Top of the Pops and then saw a Hare Krishna group outside in London. He found them very attractive, and visited the Manor when Prabhupada came in 1977 for the opening. Sruti was 18, and was deeply impressed by his charisma and purity, and determined, after he finished his master’s degree, to join the Manor. He did not receive enthusiastic support from his family, thinking it was like Swaminarayan, and also because most residents at that time were foreigners; ten only from India out of 100 in the late 1970s. Now there are 50 residents, 60 per cent of Indian origin. Congregation figures for today are that there are around 10,000 members, 80 per cent from London, and 80 per cent being Indians. Half are committed; the rest are eclectic searchers. He remained a celibate monk for 20 years, and then married through the ISKCON marriage board.
As leader, he has been very committed to interfaith relations, and is very proud of having recited Sanskrit prayers in the church in Harrow when he became a chaplain to the Hindu mayor. He prayed for ‘wisdom, strength and love’. The local church support to the Manor has been very important and helped to remove the stigma that ISKCON is a cult.
He appreciates that there are no philosophical blocks between some aspects of Christianity, and Hinduism. He sees Chaitanya as being of the personalist school, and opening up the faith across caste, creed and colour. Chaitanya, he believes, was predicted to come in the Vedas. But he quotes Prabhupada, who said that anyone who claims to be God is God spelt backwards! There were 108 centres in the world when Prabhu died, and now there are 690, 200 in the south and 10,000 devotees in Russia, with groups also in Ukraine and the Czech Republic.
A final document of special interest is the doctoral thesis written by Daphne Green in the year 2000. It is entitled, ‘A Comparative Study of Krishna Consciousness in ISKCON, and the Practice of the Presence of God in CSMV (the Community of St Mary the Virgin, with Headquarters in Wantage, Oxfordshire)’. She spent a considerable amount of time with members of both communities. She wanted to study how Brother Lawrence’s concept of the practice of the presence of God could aid in learning to encounter God in all things and all situations. She found many similarities but also differences. The place of the guru was much higher in ISKCON, and the role of chanting. The place of silence was much stronger in CSMV, and also their lifelong commitment to celibacy. The ISKCON devotees saw Krishna as eternally youthful, joyful and playful, expressing this in the fullness of Creation. The task is to go beyond the illusions of this world, in order to serve Krishna through seeing him in all living beings. The sisters were focused on the Trinity, and on a suffering Christ, and sharing in his sufferings for the sake of the world. One of her surprising conclusions is as follows, summarizing from her challenging concluding chapter:
Members of ISKCON perceived Krishna consciousness as expressing their awareness and encounter with Krishna in the world, whereas CSMV members increasingly perceived the practice of the presence of God as the religious life faithfully lived out in the convent with an accompanying withdrawal from social and community involvement.10
As a member of the clergy, what did Daphne herself learn from ISKCON? She is now Chaplain to the Archbishop of York. She learned of the need for clear structure and discipline in the search to encounter God, and that she has a responsibility for this search herself. She learned of the importance of the senses in that quest, including the richness of the devotees’ worship of the deity, and ‘the ecstatic, exuberant forms of devotion’, shown, for example, in kirtan and sankirtan, the former personal, and the latter congregational chanting to glorify God. This helps them to have confidence in their evangelism, and assured engagement with the world. They practise Krishna consciousness, whether in an ashram or outside in the world. She appreciates their devotion focused on the deity, in a way that could also be offered in her tradition around ikons, candles, the cross, statues. She is impressed with the concept of lila,11 not found much in Christianity, the transcendental playfulness of Krishna and the sheer delight found in worship. Clearly Pentecostal, charismatic Christian traditions come closest here.
Three bhakti movements in the UK, and Christianity: 2. South Indian bhakti movements through temples
I worked for a long time as a theological teacher in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. Being in this most Hindu of Indian cities introduced me to Hinduism in all its complexity, in a way that books and lectures never could. I went for a six-month training programme in Selly Oak, Birmingham, and Lesslie Newbigin, who had been Bishop in Madurai, gave us teaching. But he wisely said that we would learn more in a week in India than in six months with him, not least from learning from Hindus themselves. This city of more than one million people was nearly 90 per cent Hindu, and a great centre for pilgrimage to its enormous city-centre Meenaakshi Temple, as well as to major temples in the region around, and to the thousand shrines and mini-temples on all street corners and village lanes. Apart from this, and most importantly, there was the religion of the home, where devotion was expressed at all kinds of levels, to all kinds of gods, on all kinds of occasions, routinely and daily, with prayer on the ‘good and bad occasions’ of life. And within all this, the focus on festival, of which there seemed to be a major one every week. An anthropologist friend researched the Meenaakshi Temple; he reckoned that on average, in a 12-month period, there were 10,000 people a day entering the temple, and probably three times as many for festivals. And the deities were not confined, but were taken out onto the streets of this amazingly busy and noisy city, for such occasions.
Whatever the philosophy or theology behind the classical dimensions of Hinduism – the Advaita Hinduism I had learned of in Selly Oak – what I encountered here was bhakti, or a kind of charismatic devotional practice, that had to be taken very seriously. Alongside it there was village Hinduism, as I encountered it on village visits, a kind of animism as I might term it, but which sustained people, in its marking of the stages of life and in giving an annual framework to their tough lives. I learned too of the faith and practice of Dalit Hindus, known then as ‘untouchables’, ‘scheduled castes’ or ‘Harijans’. Was this Hinduism at all? How did it relate to so-called Sanskrit traditions, or Brahminic traditions, which they felt very oppressed by? What of their oral traditions, and longing for liberation, to be free to be what God, not human society, made them? This was, and remains, an intense topic of debate and much more so in the seminary, and within the whole Christian community, 70 per cent of which was from Dalit background in the south, and 90 per cent in the north.
This chapter is about South Indian
