Global Hinduism & the Guru Movements

On 11 September 1893 the World's Parliament of Religions opened in the hall of the new Art Institute building in Chicago, part of the World's Columbian Exposition. Late in the day a thirty-year-old Bengali monk in an ochre robe and turban, almost unknown in America, rose to speak for India and for Hinduism. His name was Swami Vivekananda. He began with five words: "Sisters and brothers of America". The audience, reported at some seven thousand, gave him a standing ovation that lasted, by the accounts, two minutes. The short speech that followed, a plea against sectarianism and fanaticism drawn from the Bhagavad Gita and the idea that all religions were paths to one truth, made him famous overnight. A year later, in November 1894, he founded the first Vedanta Society in two rented rooms on West 33rd Street in Manhattan. It was the first organized Hindu institution in the West, and Vivekananda's version of Hinduism, universal, philosophical and experiential, became for many outsiders what Hinduism simply was. The century and a quarter since has turned Hinduism, the religion of perhaps 1.2 billion people, overwhelmingly in India, into a global presence of three quite different kinds: - Diaspora Hinduism, carried by migrants from the plantations of the nineteenth century to the suburbs of the twenty-first. - Export Hinduism, the gurus, yoga and meditation movements that won Western converts and clients. - Political Hinduism, the ideology of Hindutva, which remade Indian politics and followed the diaspora abroad. This chapter covers all three, with the controversies that each has carried.

Before Chicago: reformers and a new self-image

Nineteenth-century Hinduism had been reshaped under British rule, in dialogue and argument with missionaries and orientalist scholars.

• In 1828 the Bengali scholar Rammohan Roy founded the Brahmo Sabha (later Brahmo Samaj) in Calcutta. It preached a rational monotheism grounded in the Vedas and Upanishads, and incorporated what it held to be the best teachings of other religions.
• On 10 April 1875, at a first meeting in Bombay, Swami Dayananda Saraswati founded the Arya Samaj (some accounts give 7 April). It called Hindus back to the Vedas as the source of all knowledge, and it promoted social equality and rejected image-worship.
• Vivekananda himself was a disciple of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna (1836–1886), whose ecstatic devotion to the goddess Kali and experiments with other paths, including Islamic and Christian practice, Vivekananda interpreted as proof that all religions lead to the same realization.

Historians describe this period as producing a "neo-Hindu" or "modern Hindu" self-image that stressed:

• the Upanishads and Vedanta over temple ritual;
• experience over caste law;
• universality over the local.

It is this version that travelled west first.

The plantation diaspora

The largest Hindu migration of the nineteenth century was not to Chicago but to the sugar colonies. After the abolition of slavery in the British empire, planters imported indentured labourers from India:

| Colony | First arrival | Indians arriving | |---|---|---| | Mauritius | 1834 | — | | British Guiana | 5 May 1838 | 238,909 (1838–1916) | | Trinidad | 30 May 1845, on the Fatel Razack, with 217 people after a 96-day voyage from Calcutta | 147,596 | | Fiji | 1879 | 60,995 |

Natal, Suriname and East Africa also received Indian migrants. The last ship sailed in 1917. The migrants carried their religion in what Trinidadians call the jahaji bundle, the ship-bundle of belongings, which held tattered copies of Tulsidas's Ramayana (the Ramcharitmanas) and the Hanuman Chalisa.

On the plantations, cut off from their villages and castes, the migrants rebuilt Hinduism in a new shape:

• caste distinctions weakened;
• the Ramayana recitation and the congregational temple became central;
• festivals such as Diwali and Phagwah (Holi) became public markers of community.

Indian Arrival Day is today a public holiday in Trinidad and Tobago. This diaspora is older than the guru movements and largely independent of them.

The gurus come west

In the twentieth century the traffic in teachers grew:

• Paramahansa Yogananda arrived in Boston on 19 September 1920 to speak at the International Congress of Religious Liberals. He founded the Self-Realization Fellowship, which established its headquarters on Mount Washington in Los Angeles in 1925. His Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), full of miracles and saints, has been translated into more than fifty languages and has shaped Western ideas of Indian spirituality more than almost any other book.

After US immigration reform in 1965 opened the way for large-scale Indian migration, and in the counterculture of the same years, several movements became household names.

ISKCON. In 1965 A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami (Prabhupada), sixty-nine years old, sailed from Calcutta on the cargo ship Jaladuta and arrived in New York with almost nothing. In July 1966, from a storefront on the Lower East Side, he founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. ISKCON was a Western branch of the Gaudiya Vaishnava devotion of Chaitanya (Chapter 30), with shaven-headed devotees chanting the Hare Krishna mantra in the streets.

It also produced one of the grimmest reckonings of any new religious movement:

• In 1998 the movement's own ISKCON Communications Journal published a study by the sociologist E. Burke Rochford documenting widespread physical, emotional and sexual abuse of children in its boarding schools (gurukulas) in the 1970s and 1980s.
• A lawsuit followed, filed in Dallas in 2000.
• In 2002 ISKCON entities in the United States entered bankruptcy.
• A settlement of about $9.5 million compensated some 450 former pupils.

Transcendental Meditation. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation (TM) presented mantra meditation as a scientific technique, not a religion. In February 1968 the Beatles went to his ashram at Rishikesh for a teacher-training course, with Donovan, Mike Love and Mia Farrow, and wrote much of the "White Album" there.

TM was tested twice on its claims:

• In court. In Malnak v. Yogi (1979) the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld a ruling that teaching TM in New Jersey public high schools was an establishment of religion. The course required a puja, a ceremony of offerings before a picture of the Maharishi's teacher, Guru Dev, at which students received their mantras.
• In science. The movement's claim of a "Maharishi Effect", that group meditation lowers crime in the surrounding society, rests on its own studies, such as a 1993 project in Washington, DC. Critics found the theory and its statistics unpersuasive and complained that the raw data were not shared.

Rajneesh. Rajneesh (1931–1990), later called Osho, taught a provocative mix of meditation, psychotherapy and sexual freedom from his ashram at Pune (from 1974). In 1981 he moved to Oregon, where his followers built the city of Rajneeshpuram. In 1984, to swing a county election, members of the leadership around his secretary Ma Anand Sheela contaminated salad bars in The Dalles with Salmonella. 751 people fell ill and 45 were hospitalized: the largest bioterror attack in US history. Sheela and others were convicted. In 1985 Rajneesh pleaded guilty to immigration fraud and was deported. He died in Pune in 1990, and his movement continues as Osho International.

Quieter teachers. Other teachers left quieter legacies. The Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert, renamed Ram Dass by his guru Neem Karoli Baba, published Be Here Now in 1971. Vedanta societies, the Self-Realization Fellowship, Siddha Yoga, Sri Chinmoy's centres and many others established permanent institutions.

India's own godmen. In India itself, gurus became mass phenomena and targets of criticism:

• Sathya Sai Baba (1926–2011) drew millions of devotees, who believed he materialized holy ash (vibhuti) and small objects. Rationalists and stage magicians called these conjuring tricks. A 2004 BBC documentary, The Secret Swami, aired allegations of sexual abuse by former devotees; he denied them and was never charged.
• The physician Narendra Dabholkar spent decades exposing "godmen" and their miracles through his Committee for the Eradication of Superstition in Maharashtra. He was shot dead in Pune on 20 August 2013. Maharashtra's anti-superstition ordinance was promulgated four days later.

Yoga

The most successful Hindu export is not a movement but a practice. Postural yoga, taught in gyms and studios worldwide, is often presented as an ancient discipline unchanged for millennia. In Yoga Body (2010) the scholar Mark Singleton argued otherwise: that modern posture practice, with its sequences of asanas for health and fitness, is in large part a twentieth-century creation. On this view it drew on:

• Indian nationalism;
• European physical culture and gymnastics;
• teachers such as T. Krishnamacharya at Mysore.

Hatha yoga's texts are old, but they did not describe a fitness practice. The argument is influential and contested: some practitioners and scholars see it as understating continuity with older hatha traditions.

On 11 December 2014, at India's proposal, the UN General Assembly declared 21 June the International Day of Yoga; the resolution had 175 co-sponsoring states, a record. Whether yoga is "Hindu" is itself a live argument:

• Some Hindu organizations object to yoga's detachment from its religious roots.
• Some Christians object to yoga as religious.
• Many practitioners regard it as neither.

Hindutva

In 1923 V. D. Savarkar published Essentials of Hindutva, coining a political definition of "Hinduness". On his definition a Hindu was one for whom India was both fatherland and holy land, bound by common nation, race and culture. That excluded, by design, Muslims and Christians whose holy lands lay elsewhere. The ideology was carried by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliates, and it came to national power with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Its defining campaign concerned Ayodhya, held to be the birthplace of the god Rama:

1. In 1992 Hindu activists demolished the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid there, setting off riots in which many were killed. A judicial commission reporting in 2009 blamed leading BJP figures. 2. On 9 November 2019 India's Supreme Court awarded the disputed site to Hindu parties. It directed that five acres elsewhere in Ayodhya be given for a mosque. 3. On 22 January 2024 Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over the consecration (prana pratishtha) of the new Ram temple.

Supporters see a civilizational wrong righted; critics, Indian and foreign, Hindu and Muslim, see majoritarian nationalism. This chapter reports both views; the violence is documented fact.

Hindutva's reach abroad is itself contested. Some diaspora organizations are accused by critics of advancing it; they reject the charge and say criticism of Hindutva often slides into anti-Hindu prejudice.

Numbers and the new temples

The Pew Research Center counted a little under 1.1 billion Hindus in 2010 and nearly 1.2 billion by 2020, about 94% of them in India. In the United States:

• about 11% of Asian Americans identify as Hindu (2023);
• about 48% of Indian Americans do, while about two-thirds either identify as Hindu or say they feel close to Hinduism.

In England and Wales the 2021 census found Hindu shares of 25.8% in the London borough of Harrow and 17.9% in Leicester.

The diaspora has built on a monumental scale. On 8 October 2023 the Swaminarayan organization BAPS inaugurated its Akshardham in Robbinsville, New Jersey, described as the largest Hindu temple in the Western Hemisphere. It was built over twelve years with 12,500 volunteers from Italian marble and Bulgarian limestone carved in India. It was also the subject of a 2021 lawsuit by stoneworkers brought from India. They alleged that they had worked long days for about $1.20 an hour under coercive conditions. BAPS denies the allegations. A federal criminal investigation was closed without charges in 2025. The civil case, stayed during that investigation, is proceeding; its claims are allegations, unresolved as of this writing.

In India, the Maha Kumbh Mela at Prayagraj in 2025 was announced by the Uttar Pradesh government to have drawn more than 660 million bathers over six weeks. That would be the largest gathering in history, but the count is an official estimate whose methods have not been independently verified. A crowd crush at the Sangam on 29 January 2025 killed at least 30 people there; the official count for that day, given to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly on 19 February, was 37 deaths in all, while a BBC investigation published in June 2025, using hospital and police records, identified at least 82.

The believer's lens

For Hindus, the global spread of their tradition is often seen as the natural reach of sanatana dharma, the "eternal way", which Vivekananda taught had room for every sincere seeker. For devotees of ISKCON, Prabhupada's voyage fulfilled Chaitanya's prophecy that the holy name would be sung in every town and village of the world. For meditators, practice is its own verification: the peace or insight they experience is the evidence that matters to them. For supporters of the Ram temple, Ayodhya is the restoration of a sacred place, and for diaspora temple-builders, a temple like Robbinsville is an offering and a home. Each of these is a religious judgement; none is a historical or scientific finding.

The skeptical lens

The historian notes, first, that "Hinduism" as a single world religion is partly a modern construction. The term was used by outsiders before insiders; it was consolidated in colonial census categories and in the reformers' own presentation, and it gathers traditions (Vaishnava, Shaiva, Shakta, Smarta and countless local cults) that did not always see themselves as one. The export version, philosophical and non-sectarian, is one strand among many, not the whole.

Second, the guru movements show patterns seen across new religious movements (Chapter 35): charisma without accountability, and abuse where power went unchecked. That is not true of every guru or group, and some movements have faced it openly; ISKCON's 1998 report is an example.

Third, claims such as the "Maharishi Effect", materializations and miraculous cures are testable, and when tested have not been confirmed by independent research. Meditation's more modest effects on stress and wellbeing are a separate question, studied separately and with mixed results.

Fourth, the numbers in this field (Kumbh attendance, sect membership, the "hundreds of millions" of yoga practitioners) are frequently estimates or advocacy figures and should be read as such.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• Om (Aum). The sacred syllable of the Upanishads, analysed in the Mandukya Upanishad as three sounds and a silence corresponding to waking, dream, deep sleep and the fourth state beyond them. In the diaspora it is the commonest visual sign of Hindu identity: on temple gates, pendants and yoga-studio walls.
• The swastika. The Sanskrit svastika, a sign of auspiciousness drawn at thresholds and on account books at Diwali, sacred to Hindus, Jains and Buddhists for millennia, was appropriated by the Nazi party. Hindu, Jain and Buddhist groups in the diaspora have campaigned to distinguish it from the Nazi Hakenkreuz ("hooked cross"). California's law AB 2282 (2022), which criminalizes certain displays of hate symbols, exempts the sacred swastika and names the Nazi emblem the hakenkreuz. Campaigners welcomed it while regretting that it still calls both symbols swastikas. This is a real and continuing case of a symbol's meaning being fought over.
• The maha-mantra. "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare / Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare": sixteen names, thirty-two syllables, found in the Kali-Santarana Upanishad. It is chanted on a string of 108 beads (japa mala). ISKCON gives devotional reasons for the number, such as the 108 Upanishads and the 108 companions of Krishna; 108 is sacred across many Indian traditions. The numbers are part of the structure of the practice, not a hidden code.
• Tilak and marks. The vertical U-shaped tilaka of clay worn by Vaishnavas, including ISKCON devotees, is explained as the footprint of Vishnu with a tulasi leaf. Shaivas wear three horizontal lines of ash. The mark announces sect and devotion at a glance, a visual code as old as the sects themselves.
• Consecration. Prana pratishtha, "establishing the breath", is the rite by which a temple image becomes, for worshippers, a living presence of the deity, as at Ayodhya in 2024. From outside it is a ritual; within the tradition it is a real transformation. These are two different kinds of statement.
• Architecture. The great diaspora temples reproduce the mandir plan, a sanctum (garbhagriha, "womb-house") beneath a towering spire, encoding the ascent from the human to the divine. Built abroad from stone carved in India, they are statements of continuity as much as places of worship.
• The saffron colour of the renouncer's robe has become, in politics, the colour of Hindutva; the same colour signifies renunciation in one setting and nationalism in another.

Connections

This chapter closes the modern era by returning to the oldest threads of the work:

• the Vedas and Upanishads (Chapters 5, 69) that the reformers made central;
• the Bhakti devotion (Chapter 30) that ISKCON carried abroad;
• the yoga and Tantra (Chapter 24) behind the export practices;
• the Mughal encounter (Chapter 82), from which Dara Shikoh's Persian Upanishads reached Europe via the Oupnek'hat, which fed the Theosophists (Chapter 37) who prepared Western audiences for Vivekananda.

The guru movements belong with the other new religious movements (Chapter 35). The plantation diaspora parallels the African diaspora religions (Chapter 40). Hindutva belongs beside the other religious nationalisms of the twentieth century, and the "nones" (Chapter 74) are among yoga's and meditation's largest markets.

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch83.html · a comparative library of the sacred.