Hinduism in the Public Conversation - Abhishek Ghosh

Hindu traditions have been around for an incredibly long time. As with any religious or cultural system, however, the beliefs and practices of Hinduism have developed and adapted to new environments and contexts. In today's conversation, we talk with Dr. Abhishek Ghosh from the Institute for Vaishnava Studies about the translation of Hinduism to the West. From early encounters in the 19th century, to shifts in migration patterns in the 20th century, to contemporary wellness practice and mindfulness, we consider the ways that these ancient traditions have been introduced and understood in these new times and places.

Show Notes:

• Institute for Vaishnava Studies (https://www.ivs.edu/)

Transcript

Chip Gruen: 0:03

Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host Chip Gruen. Today's conversation actually features an old acquaintance and you'll hear that a little bit in our conversation today. Abhishek Ghosh now serves as the director of the Institute for Vaishnava Studies in Gainesville, Florida. But before that, about a decade ago, he was on a postdoctoral fellow at Muhlenberg College, the home of the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding. After that, he moved on to be professor of religious studies at Grand Valley State in Michigan, and has sense, in the last couple of years, gone down and taken this post at the Institute for Vaishnava Studies. One of the things that I recall, and you'll hear in this conversation, from my time when Abhi was at Muhlenberg is that we had a shared interest in the way in which Hinduism is translated and imagined in the West, in ways that is very different from how it is been the lived experience for many in South Asia. So there are a number of waypoints that we'll talk about here, going back the last 100 and 150 years. One of the things that I really like to talk to Abhi about is the way in which Hinduism is translated or is interpreted in new contexts, whether that be in India itself, or in South Asia itself, or in the West, or in the United States. And we're going to talk about a number of those manifestations here from the World Parliament of Religions in the late 19th century, to when immigration patterns changed in 1965, when the number of migrants from South Asia went up dramatically due to change in laws, to the contemporary world, where Hinduism is imagined by many people, not of South Asian descent, as a way towards wellness, or spiritual awareness through things like yoga and meditation. And so we have these actions, these rituals, these, these practices that are taken from both their literal and metaphorical native soil, and put into practice in a new context. And while it's tempting to see that as something that has only happened in the last few decades, it actually goes back quite a while. And I think Abhi would contend that this is in the DNA of Hinduism as well, its adaptability, its malleability, its ability to to be what is needed for those who who are interested in picking up the tools it affords. So one of the words that I've used already, and that you'll hear me use throughout this conversation is the idea of translation. And we don't mean that in a metaphorical sense. But when you take something the metaphysics, the ideas, the practices, the rituals, and you move them from one context to another, what is retained and what is lost? And how does that look and feel similar or different from its original context? I think are all really interesting questions when we consider Hinduism over the last 100 years into the 21st century, in the West. The other part of this that I find really interesting is that Hinduism exists as a religion in very different ways than Christianity or Judaism, or Islam, which are the traditions that grew up in conversation with the category of religion, right, religio is a Latin word. And Christianity, for example, sort of grows up with the idea that, that that's a thing that that is a part of a cultural institution of cultural identity is religious identity. And something like Hinduism growing up, half a world away on the Indian subcontinent doesn't hold the category religion as native to its way of how you divide or how you think about cultural processes. And so it's really interesting, I think, to think about how much that term fits or doesn't fit, what it means for the public conversation when we talk about religion and religious diversity, when you have a tradition to which that that category doesn't always logically apply. So we talk a little bit about that as well. So I really enjoyed reconnecting with Abhishek Ghosh in this conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Abhishek Ghosh, thanks for appearing on ReligionWise.

Abhishek Ghosh: 5:14

Thank you for having me here. It's great to see you after a long time.

Chip Gruen: 5:18

Yeah. So I just want to start off and maybe you can talk about this a little bit. I want to start off with your biography. So as we mentioned in introduction, you're the director for the Institute for Vaishnava Studies, that is in Gainesville, Florida. But you've had a little bit of a winding path to get there. So can you tell us a little bit about your academic biography about your trajectory as you've moved through through the academic world?

Abhishek Ghosh: 5:44

Yes, absolutely. I went to Catholic school in Calcutta. And that's where also, I once met Mother Teresa when I was, I think, eighth or ninth grade. And I grew up in a very interfaith ambience. So on our way to school, there were a couple of mosques and my grandpa said, always bow down to any form of divinity, you see, right. And that was a very Hindu way of thinking. And after finishing Catholic school, I did my undergrad at the University of Calcutta. And then moved for my graduate studies to Oxford, where I did a project on divine emotions. After Oxford, I moved to the US and went to the University of Chicago, where I got a masters and a PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations that was the department. But my specialty was history of religions, and in particular, Hinduism's largest tradition Vaishnavism. And after that, I, you know, that's where I think we had met briefly, and I came over to teach for a year, which I enjoy, really, you know, quite a bit. And I have very fond memories, of Muhlenberg. And then I served as a tenure line professor, teaching courses in the world's religions, which was very eye opening, so that way kind of came full circle, you know, from growing up in a culture where you come across the world's religions, you know, in its lived shape, every day, you see the Zoroastrian temple, and you see the Jewish synagogue and you see the Jain festivals, and you see the Shiite procession processions, and you know, the, the Eid festivals, and then you come to the other side and look at it as a scholar. And very often, you know, we say that a scholar is like a pediatrician but a practitioner is like a mother. And it's dangerous to be both. And so my career has been a bit of a balancing act, where I kind of freely explore what it means for humans to be religious. That's what the discipline of Religious Studies is. And at the same time, I also kind of partake in it and experience it from the inside. Because as you know, mystics in the Hindu traditions say it, you can read all you want about a honey bottle, but you actually have to taste the honey to see what it is. So I find myself in a very interesting position of being some sort of an academic expert on what I've studied, I consider myself a lifelong student, to be honest with you. And at the same time, I relish going to curtains or going to masses and experiencing human religiosity firsthand as a, you know, as an outsider, but still as a participant of sorts. So that's been my journey, you brought up the issue of Vaishnava Studies. There, there is, again, that mystical dimension and a practical dimension to it. When I moved on from Michigan, I took on the role of a director of this institute. It was running since 1988. Got its first grant from the Smithsonian, to preserve almost 100,000 pages of rare Vaishnava manuscripts from across India. And over the years, it has served as a platform to bring visiting scholars to the University of Florida. And since I took it on, we applied to be a degree granting religious institute that's licensed by the Department of Education we are in our second year. We have research fellows working on their degree programs. And so it's, you know, it's it's been quite a journey. The mystical part of it is, once I took on this role, and I started going through all of the paperwork of the you know, the history and trying to figure out how things work here. I noticed that this trust was registered on the exact same day, I was born in Calcutta.

Chip Gruen: 10:01

Oh my goodness, wow.

Abhishek Ghosh: 10:06

You know, what serendipity. It's, it's, you know, who would have expected that. And so these are little things you can't explain, you know, with all our theorizing, and all our scholarship at all our data collection and analysis, you know, these little magical moments. And then we look back and interpret those, you know, how do we experience what we experience? And that's where the academic subject of Religious Studies comes in. And, you know, you and I are both partners in conversation, you know, so...

Chip Gruen: 10:41

Yeah, well, and this is why you're the perfect as you say, conversation partner for this. And you know, before we started recording, we were talking about what great conversations we always used to have when you are in residence at Muhlenberg. And there are going to be a number of I mean, there are a number of things. And I'll say, You've influenced me quite a bit from those conversations and thinking about, you know, religion, generally, but Hinduism in particular, about the way that it's translated and understood, you know, in the if I can use the generic term in the West, or we can talk about we'll talk mostly about the United States today. And so I want to kind of start there with sort of a general question about how does Hinduism, this is a very egg heady way to say this is a very nerdy way to say this, but participate in the conversation in the category of religion, different right than, say, Christianity in the US, or even Judaism or Islam, to some extent, it seems to me, like the history of Hinduism in the United States is, is fraught a little bit because it doesn't fit the mold of what sort of traditionally has been imagined as religion in the public conversation.

Abhishek Ghosh: 11:56

Right. There's a great book that's not particularly about Hinduism, but about the category of religion called The Meaning and End of Religion by the Harvard scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who points out the limitations of the of the term religion and how it applies in our imagination of how humans believe and behave. And Hinduism itself is a foreign term much like India, the landmass that is now considered South Asia. And within that India, kind of morphed into its present shape over 1000s of years. And different people have found that land, the flora and the fauna, to be quite rich, and therefore, you know, made that place their home or if not, they came, invaded, looted, and left. The word Hindu comes from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, which means a large body of water. And in the Vedic period, which is one of the periods in that land that we call India, there was a river called Sarasvati, and it had seven tributaries, and these seven rivers were called the Sapta Sindhus, the seven rivers. The Zoroastrians, who lived on the west of these rivers in what is now Iran, which was previously Persia, pronounce the s as an h, in their language. And so the Sapta Sindhu was Hapta Hindu in Avestan. And that's where the Hind... the word Hindu comes from. And there is an old Chinese word Xingtai, which is the same as Hindu. And the Greeks called the river Indus, which is now in present day Pakistan, and the land that lay on the other side of the Indus, including the Indus, as India. So the word India is a Greek word. And the word Hinduism is a British word. Indians became a part of the global conversation starting in the 18th and 19th centuries, and that's when Hinduism or Hindu concepts and the idea that there is a religion beyond Judaism, Christianity and Islam, with its own system of beliefs and own rituals, and so on and so forth, began to permeate in global consciousness, right. And that's where we really have the birth of Hinduism. And if I were a little poetic about it, there is a concept in Sanskrit called dvija which is the word for snakes, birds as well as enlightened beings. And the word dvi is cognate are cousins with the English word duo two and ja is cognate or cousins with the word genesis, janma, jan, to be born. So dvija means twice born. Birds are first born in an egg and then they come out of their egg, right? And so are, you know, so are snakes. And that's how the Vedic literatures describe a class of people who dedicate themselves to education called vedas, and they're also known as brahmanas, which later on become the top of the hierarchical caste system. I think that Hinduism had many second births like that, you know, there's the Vedic period, where things come up in kind of an egg shell, or inside an egg shell. And then in every period, one of these eggs hatch. And, you know, Hinduism gets a new life. And the version that we have today, was defined, explained and codified in the 19th century. But having said that, many of the practices that continue today, go back to the Vedic period. And in practically every household, every kid, at least hears the Gayatri, the, you know, the main mantra of the Vedas at least once, right? And the Gayatri mantra is the oldest mantra from the Vedas. Right. The syllable ohm becomes practically the DNA of all of the religious traditions that emerge out of South Asia that are indigenous to South Asia. So, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism have ohm right, and so, from a sociological anthropological point of view, Hinduism is a complex of religions, there is no Hinduism as such, much like there is no Oxford University. Oxford is a union of several colleges. So you have the Vaishnava traditions, you have Shaivas traditions, you have Shaktas traditions, you have yoga, you have Dharma, you have Tantra, you have all kinds of things happening. But it comes under the broad rubric of Hinduism. And there is a shared culture that also makes things very rich and complicated. So for example, presently Pakistanis would not identify as Hindus, even though their ancestors were, you know, most likely Hindus. But they would call themselves Desi. And the word des means land or country. So even though we have Pakistan and India and Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh and Nepal, and Bhutan, all the people from these places would, you know, at the drop of a hat call themselves Desi, right? explaining some kind of allegiance or connection with a motherland. But the religious traditions of these places, always kept changing. And what we call Hinduism happens to be the conglomerate of these set of cousins, right, that just stuck together with shared cultures and shared languages. And, you know, shared metaphysics. And whenever there was a problem, there was usually reformed movement. And that just branched off as another religion so much as, say, Jesus was a Jewish reformer, in a sense. The Buddha was a Hindu reformer. But then Buddhism branches out on its own, and so does Jainism. And so the Sikhism, right, and so Hinduism is in that sense, the mother religion, as much as the seven rivers of the Indus is the home of where it all kind of began. And the Sanskrit language is the basis in which the shared culture existed. Right. And so even if people spoke Prakrit, which is the language of Buddhism, or in later years, all these vernacular languages emerged, Sanskrit really still remained the common language of the elites and the intellectuals, right and, and that's what kept Hinduism going over the centuries. And in the 1920s to 40s Hinduism took a new shape in the public eye, because there were a lot of people utilizing these ancient epics and, you know, practices to leverage people for political movements. So for example, Mohandas Gandhi, who is also known as Mahatma Gandhi, considered himself a devout Hindu. And when there were critiques or problems surrounding the disenfranchisement of Dalits and other backwards classes, and so on, so forth. Gandhi tried to include them within the body politics of India by giving them voting rights and going on a fast to ensure that India doesn't get divided more than it is already divided. Right. And so Hinduism has played this dual role of people reacting against it to start their own thing, whether it's Buddha in ancient times or Ambedkar, in our times, and at the same time, it has always served as this unifying, you know, thread that brings things together. And I just conclude that train of thoughts by saying that, you know, I haven't met anybody in my life, who didn't have at least one complaint about their parent. And so and so it is with Hindus and Hinduism, there isn't I haven't met a Hindu in my life, who doesn't have at least some complaints about Hinduism. But, but despite that, you know, Britain with all my faults, it. So it is within those with all its faults, people who are born into Hinduism, of course, have the choice to follow whatever they want, or not follow whatever they want, or anything they want. And, you know, they just mesh into this open source, meaning making system that's, that's my way of putting Hinduism, it's an open source, meaning making system. People just take what they can and then, you know, molded the way they like it, and suit themselves.

Chip Gruen: 21:25

I liked that I liked the open, the open source, that's very 21st century.

Abhishek Ghosh: 21:30

Yes. It's a very technicological language.

Chip Gruen: 21:33

So you mentioned, you know, these eggs that hatch, right the twice born-ness of Hinduism, that there are these movements that emerge, I want to sort of go back in time and just deal with a couple that have always fascinated me. And the first one is, you know, we've talked a lot about this, we share, I think, a passion for the event, the phenomenon of the World Parliament of Religions in 1893 that happened in Chicago, in conjunction with the Columbian Exposition that celebrated the 400th year, you know, back when Columbus was not frowned upon in the public conversation. But one of the things that's really interesting about that is that the organizers and I'm writing about this, so so look for material coming out about this from me, but the organizers of this were somewhat open, right, so they invited Buddhists, they invited some Hindus, I mean, interestingly enough, they didn't invite people from the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints, so they were not 100% open, but they were some open. And one of the people who, who heeded this, this invitation was Swami Vivekananda, who came and spoke and we have, you know, his lectures, and we have the way in which he translated, I think that's a word I'm increasingly liking with, he translated Hinduism, for the world that he perceived, I mean, not only in Chicago, not only for this audience, but for the United States and the West. Tell us a little bit about about Vivekananda about what he represents about what he brings to those to those proceedings, and maybe what he doesn't bring to those proceedings as well.

Abhishek Ghosh: 23:19

Yeah, before Vivekananda the word Hindu, as far as I understand, was a pejorative term in the English language in the American psyche. There were a lot of immigrants who are coming in to, to work as laborers. And so the British word coolie or, you know, like a burden bearer, like, you know, people who carry your luggage from a railway station. So a Hindu in America meant a coolie. Right, it's the word Hindu was a laborer. It wasn't the name of religion, it wasn't name of an ethnic people. And with Vivekananda, that changes. The other thing that had happened is, before the 1893, Columbian Exposition, there was a whole rhetoric on how India is an uncivilized land. And it was the onus of the West to go and civilize Indians. And that was a whole civilizing mission where you know, people from the west goes to the rest. And with Vivekananda, and his articulate explanation of Vedanta, Advaita Vedanta, Monistic Vedanta, which is the tradition in which he belonged. That kind of tilts the scales. For the first time, you have newspaper reports, asking, why are we sending money to civilize these people who are already so articulate and they have, you know, and so that, that kind of is a watershed moment because after that, Hinduism began to permeate the American cultural, religious, and thought landscape. Now there were others too much before Vivekananda. For example, The thinker I worked on for my doctoral dissertation Bhaktivinoda taught and spoke about global yoga, much before Vivekananda came to the West. He sent his books to Emerson. He sent his books to Harvard and Chicago and Berkeley and Cambridge and Oxford, so, and he was in correspondence with some of the leading thinkers of his time, right? You will that attempt to explain Hinduism, to an audience that thought that there are only four world religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Pagans, was a task that Indian thinkers or Hindu thinkers took upon themselves. Vivekananda was a very courageous man who actually, you know, broke some of the norms of Orthodox Hinduism, that said, you know, once you cross the oceans, you lose your caste, you are no longer a Hindu. And he wasn't a Brahmin, he was a Kayastha, which is technically a Shudra. And so, for somebody from a caste that is not traditionally gives rise to religious leaders was a major issue in his time, but he had his followers. And I think that at a time he came, the political situation in India was very interesting. Because till the 1850s, the general Indian idea was that British rule is good for India. Right? It wasn't even the Queen, it was the East India Company that had raised an army to protect its commercial interests. And the princess had a great time. Right, essentially, a lot of the ruling elite outsourced their tax collection to the British, which I think was a lethal mistake, at least from, you know, from the vantage point of empire. And in 1857, the Company gave India as a gift to the Queen. And that's when Queen Victoria gave her proclamation saying that, well, Indians are equal citizens of the empire. And we respect Hinduism. Because between when the British came there in 1857, you know, the missionaries would go out in the bazaars and tell everybody, they're going to hell. And, you know, they must accept the miracles of Jesus. And Hindus had a lot more fascinating miracles to talk about from their books, right. And I'll tell you a little funny story about Rammohun Roy, who came to England was also kind of the, the inspiration behind the Brahmo Samaj, of which Vivekananda was a member. And in the 1893 Columbian Exposition, it wasn't just Vivekananda was representing he had his moment there but along with him came other people, including his longtime colleague, Pratap Chandra Mazumdar, who was a member of the Brahmo Samaj. And the Brahmo Samaj was considered this not quite Hindu reform wing of Hinduism. The Latter Day Saints of sorts.

Chip Gruen: 28:16

Yes.

Abhishek Ghosh: 28:17

And Rammohun was enlisted to translate the Bible from English or Greek to Sanskrit. And Baptists in Shyampur employed him to do that. And they are expected that he would become Christian by the time he finished. Except Rammohan, was also a very devout Unitarian by the time. And so he remained a Hindu, he wouldn't change his name. What he did is he took the Bible and much like Thomas Jefferson, he cut out all the parts where all the parts of miracles and compiled his own Bible, he said, This Bible that portrays the ethical Jesus is good for us. Right? And there was one Minister Charles Adam, who left his church and became a Unitarian, under the influence of Rammohan Roy. And so the Baptists kept telling, talking about it as a second fall of Adam, because, you know, they were already there a part of missionaries in India, and these Hindus were converting the Baptists into Unitarians. So it's a fascinating landscape and Vivekananda came out of that culture, right. And one thing that not a lot of people know, is that Keshub Sen who was one of the Guru's of the Brahmo Samaj, that sprang from Ramo...Rammohan, who was also a Freemason, and because Freemasonry and all other kinds of Western occult groups and movements permeated the landscape of 19th century India, and Swami Vivekananda who was Narendranath Datta at that point, met his mentor Keshub Sen at a Masonic Lodge, and then he was dabbling in all kinds of religious experiments. And Keshub Sen took him to Ramakrishna, who was an illiterate priest at Dakshineshwar and a mystic that a lot of people were really skeptical about, and Vivekananda too was very skeptical, skeptical about Ramakrishna, but somehow by the end of Ramkrishna's live Vivekananda was completely sold out. And, you know, he saw what the missionaries were doing, he saw what the Brahmo Samaj was doing. He saw that the, what he thought the root problem that needed to be addressed first, was the lack of self confidence among Indians about their own culture and heritage. And so that's why he decided he wants to come to America. And you know, he wants to write books and go on lecture tours. And again, I'll be a little poetic here. Indian intellectual history has a certain recurring pattern and I'm kind of channeling my University of Chicago Eliade training here, that you know, in religions there are these recurring patterns, and if you look at the last 1000 years, you first have this very towering figure called Shankara, who is the, practically the originator of the of the monastic monistic form of Hinduism, he was a monastic in the sense, you know, he started this monastic order, and he was also monistic, in the sense he professed the school of oneness. And after Shankara, you have all these devotional leaders, you have Ramanuja, who comes of...you know, few centuries after. You have Madhva, you have Nimbarka, right? So, the trajectory of Indian thought is that you first have ritual, then you have knowledge, and then you have devotion. And if you look at the last, you know, 120 years of American Hinduism, we see a microcosm of that recurrence. You know, there is the early Hindu settlers who are mostly laborers at ports, who just maintain their bare minimum rituals, they probably bow down to Ganesha, before they head out of the door to knowledge Vivekananda comes in and says, okay, here is what Hinduism is goes on lecture tours. And that's where the Vedanta Society springs up, and then to devotion. Right. And that's where people like Premananda Bharati and A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, they all come in. And so the fine balance between ritual and knowledge and devotion exists among Hindu diasporas, in practice, as well as the history of Hinduism in this country. Right. So if you go to an average Hindu temple on a Sunday, the people who visit these temples are not necessarily very knowledgeable about what they're doing. They have regular IT jobs or management jobs, or they're homemakers, right. But they go to the temple and crack the coconut, because their ancestors did it. They will bow down in front of Ganesha, you know, even if they don't know who Ganesha is, because it's custom. And then among them, some people start asking questions, and they go, you know, deeper and deeper into it. And then there is this other class of people who are very satisfied personally with their spiritual practice, which is mostly devotion. So the bulk of Hinduism is devotion. And the bulk of devotion is Vaishnavism. And that brings us back to where we started with the Institute for Vaishnava Studies, is both a forum that's in the forum for practitioners, as well as scholars, right, we kind of, you know, in secular academia, the field of Religious Studies has emerged out of a reaction against the church in a certain sense. But, you know, that's why we have say, theology, which is very different from religious studies.

Chip Gruen: 34:16

Yes.

Abhishek Ghosh: 34:17

Hinduism didn't go through that trajectory. And therefore, you have a lot of Hindus expressing themselves very confidently as experts. And they've never been to any training. They're just regurgitating whatever they have learned in their family. So, you know, if it's feeding crows early in the morning, as a spiritual practice, then feedings, feeding crows, it is. But for those who are devout bhaktas, you know, selling books on the streets and singing mantras and offering flowers. They wouldn't care about ritual or knowledge. For them, the existential satisfaction they get out of, you know, surrendering and dedicating themselves to God is, you know, is all that matters in Hinduism. So to bring that conversation to a close, you know, Hinduism, as I said is an open source system of, you know, meaning making and cultural traditions, at its center are the Vedas, and at the center of the Veda is the mystical sound ohm. And from there, it just kind of expands and goes different directions.

Chip Gruen: 35:29

So this trajectory, from ritual to knowledge to devotion I'm interested in because actually, I haven't, you know, heard it expressed that way. But as I was preparing for our conversation, it's interesting to note how, like the history of Hinduism in this country, like I was sort of able to chart that like ignorant of it, right, so that we have the Vivekananda first, we have the Venat...Vedanta society, it still exists today, the publisher, you know, that knowledge that you're talking about. And then sort of the next step, and I realized out of my ignorance, I only picked sort of maybe the well, most well known of each of these movements. But I've always been interested to get to the devotion side of somebody else you just mentioned, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, what also known as Prabhupada, right? I think that's a title rather than a name. Is that right?

Abhishek Ghosh: 36:25

That's correct.

Chip Gruen: 36:26

Yeah. And so he comes the United States in 1965, or there abouts. And kind of on the tail of some immigration reform that I would kind of like to talk about at some point as well. I think that that changes the face of Hinduism in the United States as well when you start getting a larger South Asian population. But you get, I'll call him Prabhupada for our purposes here, coming and he establishes the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, ISKCON. And interestingly converts among largely seekers, white, suburban, educated, middle class seekers, that who our listeners might be more familiar with, you know, they're referred to perhaps negatively as Hare Krishnas right because they chant the Hare Krishna, but he is sort of the next step the not only bringing knowledge of Hindu cosmology, but now thinking about devotion and practice. So tell me about that step.

Abhishek Ghosh: 37:29

Sure. Let me track back a little bit and you know, reflect on the two words Hare Krishna. If I had to redo everything that has, you know, redo history, I would introduce Hare Krishna as a love story. Hare is Radha and Krishna is Krishna. And it goes back to the epics of India. I mean, if you if you look at the mantra, it contains three words, Hare Krishna and Rama. And Rama is the hero of the epic Ramayana, which is the earliest Indian epic poem. And Krishna is the hero of the Bhagavad Gita, which is, you know, comes from the Mahabharata, which is the second most important epic poem, and hare is the name of Vishnu. Right. And so the Hare Krishna Maha Mantra is Vishnu incarnating, as both Rama and Krishna in these two eras, with the premise that whenever and wherever there is a decline of dharma. The dharma is law, right? The isness, justice, duty, whatever, and the rise of adharma, non-dharma that means a breakdown of law and order, right? Divinity descends. That's a grand Hindu theory. It's called Avatara and set things right. And therefore, from the Hindu vantage point, Jesus is an avatara. And for A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, that is the case and so krishna is considered the masculine aspect of divinity in hare is the feminine aspect of divinity. And so the chant Hare Krishna is, you know, is probably like, what the early Christians would, you know, greet each other saying Maranatha in Aramaic, and that's what say, you know, if I were to imagine, you know, Jesus Christ and his friends and followers, they would greet each other saying that, as far as I understand. And then the chanting of holy names, is a central practice in bhakti yoga, much like Judaism. And you know, if you look at the Lord's Prayer, our father thou art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, that those four words, hallowed be thy name is the central theological focus of bhakti right. It, the name of God somehow has these healing and redeeming features. And that's what Prabhupada brought to the west. That, you know, here is a form of meditation that doesn't require to sit for a long hour, close your eyes, or, you know, chant anything complicated, there is just this one mantra, you sing and dance, and, you know, hear and speak stories. And that is the form of meditation in bhakti yoga, that is the form of yoga. So, no complicated stretches and stuff. And that really caught on. And in terms of the timing, lot of schol, lots of scholars have pointed out the timing was like, absolutely right. You know, it was, it was that moment where you put the cherry on that cake.

Chip Gruen: 40:34

Yeah.

Abhishek Ghosh: 40:35

Because between the First and Second World Wars, there was the American, the Asian Exclusion Act, that banned Asian immigration, immigrants on American soil. And then in 1965, that law was repealed. And it opened up the new immigration laws that saw a whole group of, you know, teachers and economic migrants move to the United States. And so, Prabhupada comes at that point in history. Right. And, of course, between Vivekananda and Prabhupada, was also Paramahansa Yogananda and many others, we shouldn't forget them.

Chip Gruen: 41:14

Sure.

Abhishek Ghosh: 41:15

But in terms of the public face of Hinduism, in a sense, Prabhupada takes over Vivekananda. On the streets, it's very, it's very festive and colorful, and, and I, for my work, I actually sat down and looked through the numbers. And there is some peer reviewed source that points out that about 68% of Hinduism is Vishneva in orientation. And so if Hinduism has about 1.3 billion people, about 800 to 900 million people profess Vaishnavism, at least nominally in one form or another. And so Vaishnavism is the third largest, you know, traditional religious demographic, if you think about it, after Sunni Islam and Roman Catholics, you know Roman Catholicism. So Vaishnavism is quite big. It's just that, you know, there is no self consciousness about it. And what Prabhupada does here in America, turns Gaudiya Vaishnavism, which is very specific school of thought, and culture from Bengal as the face of Vaishnavism. So Vaishnavism is a much longer tradition going back 1000s of years, the earliest archeology, archaeological records go back to a column called the Heliodorus column, which was erected by a Greek Ambassador to India in I think 300 400 BCE. And so there were Greek vaishnavas, who would come to India and worship Krishna, right. And then there was Ramanujacharya spoke about in South India, Madhva, there so many Vaishnavas but with ISKCON, you have that cherry on the cake in terms of how Westerners understand Hinduism. So if we were to put imagine it kind of provisionally, as concentric circles, there are these people who are Indu files or Hindu files who like Hinduism, India, practice some meditation, maybe you've gone vegan, you know, the actress from Eat, Pray, Love, who says, I'm a Hindu, I forget her name, Julia Roberts, I think, you know, there are those people kind of marginally, then there you have, then you have the bulk of diasporas. And people like myself who go back and forth from you know, kind of straddle two walls and then you have religious institutions and authorities and things like that. And after some time, it becomes like a kitchari, which is like a you know, like a lentil soup with rice, and vegetables, that by the time it all gets cooked, you don't know what's what.

Chip Gruen: 44:04

Yeah, it's funny, like, whenever I ended up sort of touching on Hinduism, with my undergraduate students at some point, at some point, I have to say, look, it's complicated, right? It's very complicated.

Abhishek Ghosh: 44:17

It's like calling Buddhism a religion. And you know, when you say, when you use the word religion, people think, okay, there must be a God.

Chip Gruen: 44:25

Yeah.

Abhishek Ghosh: 44:26

And Buddhism has no God. It's like, you know, if you have no God, how can you be a religion and you look at Hinduism, you know, you have no scripture. When it comes to God, it's a personal choice trumps everything else.

Chip Gruen: 44:38

Yeah. This, I think, is one of the things that as we think about, like Hindu Hinduism, in the public conversation in the United States specifically, it's really hard for that pub... and I'm not gonna leave anybody on the hook here, but for the public conversation generically, to track with Hinduism and sort of understand what's going on there because it doesn't rhyme, you know? Exactly with what people perceive religion to be, which I think provides certain kind of social, political, cultural problems of translation on how Hinduism is imagined by people who aren't within those concentric circles that you mentioned.

Abhishek Ghosh: 45:16

Yes. And that's a very, very important point. The word dharma often gets translated as religion. It is anything but. The dharma of water is to flow. The dharma of sun is to shine. The dharma of human beings is to love and be loved. And that is done through acts of service. Right? Now, how do you translate that concept as religion?

Chip Gruen: 45:44

Yes.

Abhishek Ghosh: 45:45

You can't! And so how do you express your love? Well, you, you know, keep your word when if you, if you have aging parents, you take care of them. That's dharma. If you have a government go vote, that's dharma. So it's a very porous concept. And even the Buddha found it very useful because in Buddhism, dharma means the teachings of the Buddha, not all of the other things that the Hindus say. And so to translate that, I often use metaphors. And I say that, you know, back in the day, in the early one period, for a lot of people, salt and pepper were considered spices. When Columbus was trying to come to India and he ended up coming to the Americas. He was looking for silk and spices and gold. And of all spices, he was looking for pepper. That's that was. But now if you go to an average Indian restaurant, you would get this plethora of flavors comes from at least 50 different spices. So for somebody who thinks salt and pepper is spices, how do you explain garam masala? You can't, the only way you can really translate it is to create an experience. And since you asked me about, you know, started by asking about my trajectory, you know, I thought long and hard about what is my role in all of this. And one of the things I started here, after coming to Gainesville, is a project called the yoga seminary. And it is housed in a small liberal arts college called Santa Fe College. And, you know, we run classes and seminars very small. But the idea is to present indigenous authentic yoga in its own terms. And so things that I need to tell people often include, you don't need to buy yoga pants to do yoga. You don't necessarily need to go to a studio to do to yoga, I didn't even know what a studio was till I came to America. Right? Yoga means to connect with who you really are. And when you know the classical definition of yoga, is in, there are two definitions and they're kind of two sides of the same coin. The Yoga Sutras say yoga is pausing the var...varying cycles of one's mind that our minds are constantly in, you know, fluctuating. We imagine new identities, we have new ideas, we experience different emotions. And so we are constantly in flux. And to pause that we will see ourselves as yoga. And the Bhagavad Gita's definition of yoga, is that it is expertise in action. So when you Chip walk into a classroom, and I've seen you teach, and it's marvelous class, right? It just flows, the students were engrossed, you know, you're really enjoying it. And so what I saw you doing was yoga, in my language, because I see expertise in action, where the fluctuations of your mind has stopped, and you are being you. And what we have turned yoga into is very different. There might be a component of expertise in action when you're doing your downward dog pose. But it's not necessarily expertise in action. So yoga is a much broader term that encompasses a lot more things. So somebody you know, who is a Wall Street investor, focusing on the digits on the screen for hours at end, is actually meditating. They might not know it, but that's what they're doing. And that connection with one's best self, where one enters a state of flow, or Samadhi is yoga. Right? And this is what in a sense, Vivekananda and Prabhupada and all these teachers were teaching, and then comes another wave of adoption of Hindu practices by, as you know, like you pointed out American suburban middle class people where they tailor Asana, which is one out of eight parts of yoga, into all of yoga, right? And the next thing you know, is that there is beer yoga and goat yoga. And all kinds of...

Chip Gruen: 50:23

Yes, let's let's stop and think about that for a minute. Because when I think of that, it's almost as if this this one element of Hindu practice is a victim of its own success, right? Like that there is a way in which Hinduism and going all the way back to Vivekananda, like he is described, I mean, maybe we wouldn't say it in 19th century this way. But we would say it now as the rock star of the World Parliament of Religions, everybody wanted to talk to him. Everybody wanted to see him and to experience him. There's something sort of hip right about, about him about Prabhupada about, you know, many of these teachers who come I mean, I think you've probably experienced this as well. Teaching Hinduism in a contemporary American university, there is a certain sort of cachet to that where people want to come and talk to you like, there's something very attractive, right about that. But then it miscarries right, or I don't know, maybe that's disingenuous, right? Maybe that's not the right way to say it. But it certainly gets translated into something less complete, right, then then it's intended to be, and I'll just kind of sort of put a semicolon here and ask you to think about this at the same time. But yet you say if the cycle is ritual, knowledge, devotion, you know, from a Hindu worldview, Hindu perspective, is that just well, the ritual comes first, right? And maybe by virtue of doing that, admittedly impoverished form of ritual that involves, you know, pants from Lululemon. Right, that there will be a thirst for knowledge, right, that comes later. I mean, help me understand whether this is a something that we should be down on or not?

Abhishek Ghosh: 52:05

Well, I'd like to approach that, through the words of T.S. Eliot, who was also very influenced by Hindu thought. And in fact, the book that won him the Nobel Prize had lines from the Upanishad, in The Waste Land, and he explains how between the desire and its expression, you know, there is a gap, there is between the intention and the action, there's always a gap, right? It's, it's human. And so and I, so it is, with Hinduism, or yoga or anything else, I think that you know, I mean, I've been around, you know, in a Catholic school long enough to know that, you know, between surrender, and things that are of the flesh, there is always this gap. There's, you know, and so is there something disingenuous about it? I think it's a part of evolution, it's a part of, you know, Hinduism was never static. It was it was always dynamic. There are core elements that remain the same. And that what, that's what gave, you know, some stability to ideas over generations. With its migration to the United States, that basic DNA is changing a little bit. But then when I look at, say, Buddhism in China or Japan, Buddhism in China is different from Buddhism in India. And Buddhism in Japan, is different from Buddhism in China. So what says that the Hinduism in America has to be the same as Hinduism in India. This is a different land, it has a distinct history. So if two different rivers meet into a stream, you know, the colors remain intact. But somewhere, you know, the currents merge and play with each other. And so, in the United States, you've had a long history of fascination with an exploration of Hinduism. And that had nothing to do with the Vivekananda. In the West, broadly speaking, the Oxford Orientalists and then the Boston Transcendentalists were fascinated with Hinduism. And, at a point in American history, again, I'll invoke Freemasonry. Masonic lodges were big. They were all across the country. And one of the founding fathers of American Masonry is a gentleman called Albert Pike. And if you look at the works of Albert Pike, he basically goes back to the Upanishads and he reads through them and he, he translates them into, you know, kind of practices and ideas that get incorporated into masonry. Now, if you look at the publications on masonry, it has barely any acknowledgement of Hinduism. But the fact is, once you transpose or juxtapose the texts and you read them side by side, you see what came from what? Right? And the same thing with American psychology, you have Freud and then you have Carl Jung. And Jungian psychology is deeply rooted in Hindu traditions, except right after Jung's lifetime, you know, most of the references to the Hinduism were efaced, till many years later, his notebooks were published and people saw for themselves, where Jung is ideas from and a lot of Western psychology is actually influenced by that and same thing with literary theory. So, for example, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, he came up with structuralism right, which is like a foundational theoretical concept in Western philosophy, language, literature, history, you name it. Now, structuralism comes from the idea, you know, some grammatical ideas in Sanskrit, Saussure's doctoral dissertation was on the genitive case in the Sanskrit language. So a lot of Western intellectual traditions have actually drawn from Hinduism and Hindu scriptures. But there isn't necessarily acknowledgement. And you know, that is cultural appropriation, when we see that happening. Just for the sake of sanctity of knowledge, we must put on record where things come from, right, just as much as we acknowledge the West for having made airplanes, even though airplanes are not necessarily Western. It's our responsibility to have that intellectual integrity and epistemic humility, when we approach knowledge making and knowledge dissemination.

Chip Gruen: 56:52

So I want to be mindful of your time here, we're coming up near the end. But one of the questions I always like to ask and particularly because ReligionWise is so far ranging, that I get out of my depth, you know, relatively often, what are we not talking about? What am I not asking you about? What have we not touched on? That you think is really important for somebody living in the in the 21st century? And we think about Hinduism, not just in India, but as a sort of global phenomenon, right? What are we not talking about that we need to understand that would help us understand those trajectories better?

Abhishek Ghosh: 57:29

I would say the, the first thing that comes to mind is the existential dimension, which is pretty universal. Right? Set aside, the fact that this is these ideas come from a foreign land, or at least in our generation, as a foreign culture. And just look at the bare bones ideas on, you know, how, why we are here, how we are how we got here, what are we meant to do, and these core concepts can help anybody irrespective of whether they're atheists, or Hindus, or Christians or Muslims, you know, that's the gift of Hinduism to the world. You know, which is that life is precious, the first thing that I would say that we live in a universe, that's pretty broad, it is pretty big. And the fact that we have human life on this planet, is a rare thing. And this idea is repeated again and again and again, in a variety of Hindu literature. And to know our connection with our, with the world is to know our connection with ourselves. Right, to be is to be with. But once once we do that, how do we live our lives, and that's where, you know, each of us have a unique gift that we have come into this life with. And we must fulfill that potential. And it's a very Paulo Coelho kind of a thing. But again, you know, those ideas have a root, right, and it's pretty universal. And then, the most important question, I think, that we either shove under the carpet or you know, we delay is, you know, we are all going to die one day. And in the face of death, what does life mean? What is the meaning of life? And there is no singular answer. But there are questions, and that's how Hinduism functions. You know it won't give you an answer, you ask a question, you will have more questions. Right? And I will end with a poetic passage from the Rigveda which says that in the beginning, and that rings a bell. In the beginning, there was neither existence nor non existence. No one knew what was there. Anybody who presumes to know or say anything, is, you know, that's their perspective. Even the gods came after creation. Right? Maybe whoever is there in the highest heaven that person knows, or maybe that person doesn't. So, it's, it's, it's to conclude, it's the, you know, the point is to marvel at this little thing we call life, you know, the food we eat, and the air we breathe, and the relations we have, and, you know, every little thing that we take, you know, to have tremendous significance in our lives. And you know, when people have a difficult time, and they're thinking of dying is much better than living. And they, sadly, and unfortunately, contemplate taking their lives. You know, Hinduism gives an answer that, you know, it's it's, if you don't have an answer, yet, you still have questions, and the answer is yet to come. So I hope that I could answer your questions, and I could question your answers. And...

Chip Gruen: 1:00:55

Yeah, well, obviously, you know, we could we could just have a weekly podcast running, just talking about all of the ins and outs of all these things, but I'm afraid. I'm afraid we don't have time for that. So I Abhishek Ghosh, the director of the Institute for Vaishnava Studies. Thank you so much for coming. This has been great.

Abhishek Ghosh: 1:01:12

Thank you. It was good to catch up after a long time and have this wonderful conversation. Thank you.

Chip Gruen: 1:01:19

This has been ReligionWise a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement. Please visit our website at religionandculture.com. There you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you next time.