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 gurdwa ̄ra ̄, 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 hege-
mony. 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 accom-
modate “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 ̄ Vais.n.ava 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
India’s Global Reach 235