by Nori J. Muster
Published in the book
The Hare Krishna Movement:
The Postcharismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant
by Edwin Bryant, Ph.D., and Maria Ekstrand, Ph.D., eds.
Columbia University Press, 2004
From ages twenty-two to thirty-two I was a devotee at the Western world headquarters of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, located at 3764 Watseka Avenue in West Los Angeles. Although a native Californian, I dressed in saris, followed the four regulative principles, attended early morning services to chant japa [mantra repetition] and kirtan [musical chanting], and dedicated my heart to the beautiful Lord Krishna. Although there were some bright spots and good friendships, we women lived under a cloud of chauvinism and outright hatred of our gender. I look back on my ten years with regret.
I sum up my experience as a woman in the following way: it was about trying to remain as innocent as a child in a family with a lot of secrets. The elders never spoke about the drug money flowing through our zone, nor did they honestly discuss the gurus' various problems. They also hid the child abuse and made it taboo to criticize any leader for anything. I spent a lot of energy forcing myself to look straight ahead, ignoring gossip, rumors and my own gut feelings. I was like a horse with blinders on; a blind follower.
When I joined in 1978, ISKCON's leadership consisted of multiple patriarchs who divided the globe into eleven "zones." Each zone had an all-male retinue of gurus, commissioners, ministers, temple presidents, directors, trustees and department heads. In addition, the organization sponsored a priesthood of celibate men called sannyasis, who traveled around the world enforcing GBC doctrine.
The daily schedule on Watseka Avenue started at 4 A.M. with religious services in the temple building, including sermons from the scripture Srimad-Bhagavatam. The book contains chauvinistic purports, such as: Women's breasts are "agents of maya [illusion] meant to victimize the opposite sex."[1] Rather than attempting to minimize or modernize these sorts of statements, most Bhagavatam speakers embellished them with even more degrading statements about women.
They said it was our bad karma that we were born as women and that our only hope of salvation was through serving a male guru. They preached that our brains were half as big and that our bodies were ten times more lusty. They said it was a sin for a woman to look at a man's face, therefore some of us acquired the uninformed, humiliating and sorry behavior of turning to the wall if we were alone and a man passed by. They barred us from teaching the Bhagavatam class and leading the morning kirtans. With practice, most of us could have learned to handle these responsibilities, but our participation would have been a threat to celibate men. Their cruel words, reinforced with official policy, had a demoralizing effect. The words, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm wearing a sari," ran through my head for years after leaving ISKCON.
ISKCON had a concept of utopia they called Vedic civilization, which was based on ancient Hindu civilizations in India described in the Srimad-Bhagavatam and other scriptures. The ideals were lofty, but I never experienced ISKCON actually living up to any kind of utopian standard. One aspect of Vedic civilization that was completely lost on ISKCON was the culture of respect for women, nor did we women know anything about being genteel Vedic mothers. We simply had low self-esteem. The men were also off track. They thought it was Vedic to spit on the ground to demonstrate their resentment toward women. They got their cue from a stanza in the scriptures that said: "Since I have been engaged in the transcendental loving service of Krishna, realizing ever-new pleasure in Him, whenever I think of sex pleasure, I spit at the thought, and my lips curl with distaste."[2]
Ashram Life
In ISKCON, women were supposed to work obediently without questioning the leadership. If a woman acted out of character, the other women corrected her. All temples had self-appointed female monitors who went around correcting other women and telling them what to do. For example, once when I was a young devotee, I raised my hand and asked a question at the end of a Bhagavatam class. Afterward, a woman told me that my behavior was pretty brazen, considering the number of traveling sannyasis in the audience. The practice of women correcting and criticizing women was everywhere. Most of us did it at least part of the time. Sometimes women ended up in tears after receiving more corrections than they could handle in one morning.
When I moved to Watseka Avenue I lived in the new bhaktin [female devotee] ashram [dorm] with four other new women and a housemother called a bhaktin leader. I have terrible memories of the experience, which I described in my book, Betrayal of the Spirit.[3] The temple authorities moved us into another apartment, then gave us an ever-changing series of bhaktin leaders, and finally closed down the ashram. The few new bhaktins who were left were eventually moved into the newly opened women's sankirtan ashram. Sankirtan has become the common name for airport solicitation, even though the word historically refers to public devotional chanting.
The new women's sankirtan ashram consisted of two one-bedroom apartments on the top floor of a building, across the street from the former bhaktin ashram. They installed a door to join the two apartments that provided lodging for approximately sixteen women. The new ashram had female leaders, which was quite an improvement over the former arrangement where a man lived with and slept with all the sankirtan women.
Once, while I was still in college, I visited Watseka Avenue and met some of the sankirtan women who lived in the scandalous ashram. They took me back to their living quarters and introduced me to their male leader. At the time I had absolutely no idea of what was going on. In retrospect, I now remember the experience as scary, because of the disgusting way he looked me over. It was as if he thought I might someday become one of his victims.
Due to numerous complaints, the GBC passed resolutions in 1977 and 1978[4] to end the practice. The Los Angeles ashram closed down in 1978, but the arrangement of male leaders for women's sankirtan parties continued in Berkeley under the guru Hamsadutta Swami, with the addition of drugs and rock 'n roll, and in New Vrindaban, West Virginia, under the guru Kirtanananda Swami, with the additional features of prostitution and physical abuse. In 1998, I interviewed a former sankirtan woman from New Vrindaban who told me that her male sankirtan leader would drop the women off at bars, where they would wait by the exit and offer to do anything a man wanted in exchange for money. I used to hear "rumors" about it, but 1998 was the first time someone told me about it first hand.
The new sankirtan ashram closed down within a year, but the system worked eventually with good leaders like Gouri [now deceased], Vrindavan-vilasini and Jadurani. With passing years the specter of the scandals faded. However, back in 1978, most of my roommates had just come out of the abusive situation. I even knew a woman who had a child from her time in a sankirtan ashram.
After a few weeks of living in the sankirtan ashram, I caught the flu and had a fever for at least three months. The female sankirtan leaders told me to rest and chant instead of sending me to a doctor. When I finally got to a doctor, he gave me a shot of antibiotics and scolded me for waiting so long. Doctors cost money and the temple policy was that until a devotee could get on Medical (a public assistance program that was available to nuns and monks in California before 1980), they had to be satisfied with natural healing.
Srila Prabhupada and the Treatment of Women
Women who lived in India during the early days of ISKCON told me that Founder-Acharya Srila A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada always made sure that his women disciples were treated well and that they felt included. He personally took care of details like making sure that they had adequate living quarters, good food and even rides to events. When the devotees went places as a group, Srila Prabhupada invited the women to ride with him in his car to make sure they got there. He set it up so that women could stand at the front in the temples to behold the altars [darshan], he encouraged women to give Bhagavatam class and lead kirtan, and he nominated two women, Yamuna and Govinda, to the Governing Body Commission (GBC). Unfortunately, an elitist and rowdy band of male disciples, headed by the late Tamal Krishna Goswami, turned all this around so that women were counted out of GBC positions. Sannyasis received all the advantages, while women generally got the worst accommodations, waited at the end of the food line and prayed at the back of the temple. When these changes took place in the mid-1970s, people who resisted were either silenced or forced out. By the time I joined, the controversy was settled: Women's place as second class citizens was cemented and thoroughly institutionalized.
Although the organization was blatantly slanted in favor of men, many followers of both genders were in denial. The first time I met devotees and attended a lecture at their Sunday feast, I questioned the speaker, Radha Vallabha, general manager of the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust (BBT), about the place of women. He told me that ISKCON considered women to be spirit souls and therefore completely equal with men. Looking back now, I realize he was in denial and so was I most of the time.
In the P.R. department, where I worked for Mukunda Goswami, I was sheltered from the worst ISKCON had to offer. Our department was a close-knit family where we respected each other. Also, we had constant interaction with the outside world. I believed women and men were equal in ISKCON because the people I knew treated me well and valued my work. I started as a P.R. secretary and later became associate editor of the monthly newsletter ISKCON World Review. During my last two years, I did nearly the entire paper single handedly. However, I also knew that due to my gender, I was a thorn in the side of at least one guru, who protested: "The worst thing about this paper is that it's written by a woman!"[5] Actually, there were several women who wrote for the P.R. department so I had good company.
In Los Angeles, the BBT had women working in the publishing house, legal offices, photo department, ISKCON Cinema, and other art departments. Usually these women became successful through a combination of skill in their field and the right personality to navigate a chauvinistic bureaucracy. In my ten years on Watseka Avenue, I knew many of these women because the P.R. department and the BBT were financially linked. For several years after leaving the sankirtan ashram I roomed with other BBT women. One year I lived with the female artists who painted illustrations for the BBT books. Those were good times that reminded me of my college dorm experience. In another ashram I lived with Koumadaki, Ramesvara's secretary, and Sita, a typesetter at the Spanish BBT. These two dedicated and generous Prabhupada disciples were my strongest role models. They tolerated ISKCON's chauvinism with a mixture of tolerance, humor and rebellion.
My experiences in the BBT women's ashrams were good, but in the 1980s the BBT became more decentralized and its presence on Watseka dwindled. Whole divisions of the BBT left and all my artist and publishing friends moved away. After that, I shared an apartment with the other P.R. secretary, and then for about a year I had an apartment to myself. Meanwhile, the sankirtan women lived in over-crowded conditions. Another privilege I enjoyed was that I had constant contact with my father, who volunteered his time as a P.R. consultant for ISKCON. Having him nearby helped me keep my sanity and eventually his support made it possible for me to decide to leave the organization. Meanwhile, the other women on Watseka Avenue had to renounce their "material" families and accept ISKCON as their "real" family.
The sankirtan women woke up at 3 A.M. to chant, then worked long days at the airport. The ones I knew were genuinely dedicated to Krishna, but to please the gurus, they remained naive to ISKCON politics. Many of them were my friends. We danced and chanted in temple services, but on some levels I felt alienated from them. I dealt with top secret matters that Mukunda and Ramesvara told me I wasn't allowed to talk about with anyone outside the department.
Tragic Cases, Criminals and Victimized Women
During my years on Watseka I met many wonderful women and I've kept a few friends from those times, who have also moved on with their lives. But along with the relatively healthy women, I also met some clinically depressed and psychotic women. For several years in the 1980s there was a woman living in the sankirtan ashram who had a psychiatric disorder. She constantly exhibited eccentric behaviors, such as lying down on the floor during kirtans. Nevertheless the temple leaders tried sending her to the airport to solicit donations. I once saw her grab money out of a traveler's wallet, stash it in her bag and repeat Sanskrit phrases until the person walked away. She eventually left the temple to live with her relatives.
ISKCON also harbored criminal women and I met a few of them. One of the female sankirtan leaders ran away from Watseka Avenue with the airport shuttle driver to get married and deal drugs. Before leaving, they kidnapped his children from a previous marriage while he held the mother at gunpoint. The children were reunited with their mother years later when she was dying of cancer. Another woman I knew was convicted of enabling her husband to molest children at the Watseka Avenue nursery school. Both husband and wife served time in jail. She was a quiet woman; my sense was that she also had a psychiatric disorder. I interviewed another woman from the East Coast who told me that when she was a new bhaktin they trained her to shoplift for the deity department. She and an older woman would go on shopping sprees where they stole beaded saris, jewelry and other expensive items to decorate the altars and dress the deities.
Even though the vast majority of ISKCON women were not criminals, if they joined as adults, they willingly participated in a sick culture and took on dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors. It was a different story however for the girls born into the movement, or brought in as children. These innocent souls were often abandoned to the schools at the age of five. In certain schools during the 1970s and 1980s, children grew up communally, deprived of the bare necessities, including love, and they often received an inadequate education. Abuse of one's children was the worst thing that could happen to a woman in ISKCON. In addition to the children suffering long term trauma, many of the mothers have never recovered. I had one friend who confided that she felt she had alienated her new husband because of her constant grief over one son from a previous marriage who was hurt in ISKCON schools.
Girls and boys suffered physical and sexual abuse, as well as humiliating punishments. The schools taught girls to be ashamed of their bodies and young female minds. A dear friend named Subhadra who grew up under these conditions told me that she has a frightening image of her shame as a black hole in the center of a beautiful multi-faceted diamond.
Gurus and temple leaders also arranged marriages for girls who were barely eleven or twelve years old. The men, who were typically much older, emotionally, physically and sexually abused their child brides while the parents and everyone else in the organization looked the other way. One guru, Hridayananda Goswami wrote, "These early marriages show our concern for not letting women become polluted" and he promoted and defended the practice in GBC meetings.[6]
There were also instances of women who joined as adults who were forced into arranged marriages with abusive men. In my research I interviewed a family who lost their daughter to ISKCON in 1980. The people at the temple said she had moved to India with her "husband." The family accepted that and believed it until 1994, when they learned that their loved one had been brutally murdered and buried as a Jane Doe for fourteen years.
I had some degrading experiences as a woman on Watseka Avenue, but for some women, life in ISKCON was tragic. There is mounting evidence of an alleged conspiracy among the leaders to allow wife beating. One of the most outspoken proponents of spousal abuse was Kirtanananda, who explained on national TV that it's okay to slap a woman who disobeys. He compared it to training a dog. The culture of wife beating was widespread in ISKCON, although I never knew about it when I was a member.
Conclusions
In ISKCON temples, the deity of Lord Krishna is always standing side by side with his consort, Srimati Radharani. The Jagannatha deity (Krishna) appears with his sister Subhadra and brother Balarama. Lord Rama appears with the goddess Sita, and the scriptures say that Lord Chaitanya was an incarnation of Radha and Krishna in one body. Since the Deities themselves honor women, it's ironic that the women of ISKCON came to accept their inferior status as normal; as though it was mandated in the scriptures.
ISKCON could have up to fifty percent women kirtan leaders, Bhagavatam reciters and gurus. The GBC could resolve that women may go anywhere inside the temple room and participate freely in the cultural life of ISKCON. While it is possible that ISKCON may someday change, lingering attitudes ensure that change will be difficult: ISKCON is the way it is because a majority of the men want it that way.
In the 1990s there were hopeful developments, such as the formation of the Women's Ministry. The Ministry, along with some of the adult children of ISKCON, held open forums to air these issues. A tense moment came in September 1999, when men assaulted a group of women inside the ISKCON temple in Vrindavana, India, during a morning kirtan. Allegedly they did it because the women were trying to get to the front. The controversy over this incident brought women's issues to a head and nine women addressed the all-male leadership at the March 2000 GBC meeting. However, little changed. It's still rare to see women lead the pre-dawn kirtans or teach the morning Bhagavatam class. There are several women temple presidents now, but only one woman on the GBC and not even one woman guru. Attitudes have also remained fixed. Some devotees in ISKCON still try to argue that the child abuse was the victims' karma. Elsewhere, the practice of arranging marriages continues. A young college student told me that an ISKCON temple president tried to convince her to marry one of his "disciples" in December 2001.
In the thirty-seven year history of ISKCON, women have married, divorced, had children, grandchildren, lost loved ones, aged and suffered their humiliations in silence. In my opinion, ISKCON's policies toward women have been unacceptable. Even more destructive would be to manufacture a white-washed version of the history and try to pass it off as fact. These are real dramas that have affected families over several generations. It's a difficult history to observe, but the lessons are valuable. I believe it's important to study what happened, so that future generations of Srila Prabhupada's followers may be spared the grief that the first three generations of women have had to endure.
End Notes
[1] Srimad-Bhagavatam 4.25.24, purport.
[2] The stanza "yadavadhi mama cetasah . . ." appears in Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu 2.5.72, by Rupa Goswami (16th Century), to illustrate the transcendental sentiment of jugupsa-rati, love in disgust or ghastliness. Srila Prabhupada mentions the verse at least six times in his purports in Srimad-Bhagavatam and more than fifty times in his lectures, conversations and letters. However, in some of these instances (SB 4.24.25, 9.18.39, 9.19.16 and other places) he attributes the quote to the tenth century devotee Yamunacarya. The verse has also been attributed to the poet Bilvamangala Thakur in connection with his renunciation of material life after receiving spiritual instructions from Cintamani. Further, the quote is in Gaudiya-kanthahara, a Gaudiya Math verse book published in 1926 and used in the Gaudiya Math in India around the time Srila Prabhupada met his guru, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakur, founder-acharya of the Gaudiya Math. The literal translation is: "Since the time my mind was trained to enjoy the lotus feet of Krishna, which are the abode of ever newer rasas, whenever previous sex with a woman is being remembered - Alas! there is distortion of the mouth and profuse spitting [or: ". . . my mouth distorts and I drool profusely]." Special thanks to Ekkehard Lorenz and Dr. Maria Ekstrand, as well as members of the Dharma Mela discussion boards at HareKrsna.com, for supplying this information.
[3] For a description of life in the new bhaktin ashram, see chapter three of Betrayal of the Spirit (University of Illinois Press, 1997).
[4] The 1977 GBC resolution said: "Regarding [women's] sankirtan parties - Resolved: The philosophy that the man sankirtan leader is the eternal husband and protector of the woman in a women's party is rejected. The philosophy of the man sankirtan leader as the representative of the spiritual master - and not the husband - should be preached instead" (GBC Resolutions, item 22, 6). The following year, a GBC resolution called for a committee to "correct difficulties regarding women's [sankirtan ashrams] in Berkeley and Los Angeles within three months' time" (GBC Resolutions, item 4, 1). The same resolution also called for a committee to correct sankirtan irregularities in New Vrindaban.
[5] See description in Betrayal of the Spirit, p. 168. The guru Hridayananda was a consistent foe of ISKCON World Review's expanded editorial policy, 1986-88, and its editors.
[6] Hridayananda Goswami wrote this in a letter to the P.R. department and is quoted in Betrayal of the Spirit, p. 74.
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