Religion in India: A Historical Introduction

(WallPaper) #1

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 enlight-
enment 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 tech-
nique 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 con-
sciousness” 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


India’s Global Reach 233
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