The chanting starts at five in the morning. The windows of the temple room are open and the cries of its congregants drift out into the pre-dawn. Across the street, dew has settled on the manicured lawns of the University of Florida campus. The Krishna House, a cream-colored duplex in Gainesville, is one of two main centers of worship for the city’s Hare Krishna community – the religious group’s largest outside of India. Four additional properties surround the main house, comprising a traditional ashram setting where devotees live rent-free, studying scripture, chanting and cooking vegetarian meals in service of Lord Krishna.
An altar at the front of the temple room features a lineage of gurus – all men – spanning centuries, shrunk down to the size of action figures. In an adjoining room is a life-size wax statue of AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, dressed in traditional saffron garb with African iris petals sprinkled at his feet, his bald head and broad, downturned lips immortalized in fiberglass and resin. In 1965 in Manhattan’s East Village, he founded the Hare Krishna movement – formally known as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or Iskcon – which is based on an ancient monotheistic strain of Hinduism and whose followers worship Krishna as the supreme being, the highest form of divinity. They chant his name thousands of times throughout the day.
Sitting at the base of the statue are Kalakantha Das and Brahmatirtha (birth names Carl and Bob, from Albuquerque and Newark, respectively), who met Prabhupada in the early 70s. By then, the guru’s following had grown from a critical mass of disaffected youngsters to tens of thousands of people from all walks of life at communes across America, including Gainesville, where land was relatively cheap and abundant. He told a small group of devotees to start a lunch program on the university campus there to attract interest. It has continued for 48 years, serving roughly 1,000 students, faculty members and Gainesville residents vegetarian meals for a five-dollar donation every day school is in session.
Devotees proliferated in Gainesville and a neighboring rural town called Alachua – home to the Alachua Hare Krishna Temple, a 122-acre ranch with its own cattle pastures, eco-farms, housing, elementary and high schools – buying property, opening temples and starting families. Carl and Bob have been recruiting devotees since 1977, the year Prabhupada died. Carl is now a guru himself, and the Krishna House chaplain. Bob sits on its board of directors.
Carl recently returned from India, where he discussed with fellow clergymen a topic that has starkly divided the close-knit, ascetic group: whether or not women will ever be allowed to become gurus, one of the highest callings in their faith.
A resolution was supposed to be reached during Carl’s trip to Mayapur in February for the annual meeting of the Governing Body Commission (GBC), which functions like a board of directors with 35 members, two of whom are female. Instead, “they kicked the can down the road another six months because of pressure from the Indian temples”. Those temple leaders threatened that if women are allowed to become gurus “they’re going to separate from the organization”.
The role of women in Iskcon (about half of devotees) has been a bone of contention since its founding. “Many of our sisters grew up feeling like they have to be in the back, like they couldn’t be public speakers,” Carl says. “My honest opinion is it’s latent misogyny. It reflects some sort of hostility to women in general.”
In the last two decades, women’s voices have grown more conspicuous.
Opinions are evenly split between the east and west, with disciples in India representing the conservative arm of Iskcon and those in the western temples having a liberal bent.
“All the early disciples and leaders of the movement were primarily Americans,” Carl says. Now that they’re either retiring or dying, “the Indians feel like they’re coming of age and need to reformat the movement without all that American influence”.
Controversy and infighting are nothing new for the Hare Krishnas; rather, they’re a common denominator for most guru-worship circles exported from India in the last century, such as the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Swami Muktananada, to varying degrees. In the early 90s, the sordid tale of an Iskcon community called New Vrindaban in West Virginia, formerly the largest in North America, threw the entire religion into crisis after news broke of the temple leader’s involvement in racketeering, sexual abuse and a strongman murder plot. After New Vrindaban more allegations surfaced, and Iskcon elected to internally investigate and disclose its findings of systematic child abuse at various boarding schools across the globe. The organization nearly folded. Members went to jail or declared bankruptcy; others lost their faith.
But Iskcon remains the most successful of the various 20th-century religious movements centered around guru-worship and built upon the disillusionment of well-heeled westerners. With roughly 9 million followers worldwide, and wealthy, powerful donors (including Gainesville resident Ambarish Das – born Alfred Ford – the heir to the Ford Motor Company) opulent temple sites are still being erected in India today, such as the Temple of the Vedic Planetarium, currently under construction in Mayapur, that was funded in part by Ford’s $35m donation.
Alachua, once the site of mass lynching during Reconstruction, is much like any pastoral southern town, with verdant pine forests, rolling glades, and Baptist spires prodding a temperamental sky. But there’s also the mystical side, the less kitschy Cassadaga, with multiple “healing” centers, the Hare Krishna Temple, and the Temple of the Universe, run by bestselling self-help guru (and friend of Oprah) Mickey Singer. The town is filled with seekers. Locals will say one major draw is the convergence of artesian springs, which carries the 10,000-year-old artifacts of Paleo-Indians and some of the purest water on earth.
I’d come to speak with one of Iskcon’s venerated female elders. Visakha Dasi, an early disciple of Prabhupada’s – tall and willowy, with streaky gray hair pulled back tight – lives with her family in a jungly neighborhood five minutes from the Alachua Temple.
In 2017, she published a memoir about giving up her career in New York as a photojournalist, meeting Prabhupada in India, and joining the movement. She is thought of by fellow devotees as one of the first to be nominated for the guru position should it be permitted.
But she quickly dispels this: “I don’t want to appear like I’m self-serving,” she says. “There are many qualified women, let me speak on their behalf.”
The official position of Iskcon on female gurus was put forth by Anuttama Dasa, global minister of communications and GBC member. “The role of guru is very sacred,” he says, “and trying to balance a religious tradition with modernity is complicated. The GBC is still trying to come to a consensus, but hasn’t yet.”
For now, Anuttama says, there are scarcely any women who openly seek the role, in part because the religion abhors self-serving individualism. But there are plenty of advocates, and younger disciples fighting for women to be their guru. In response to those who claim Visakha is motivated by her own self-interest, Anuttama says: “That’s nonsense.”
In his nigh 50-year career, “I’ve rarely, if ever, seen a woman who was motivated by power or position. I think they’re motivated by the fidelity of the tradition and their concern for future generations of women.” He adds there is parity between men and women in every country where Iskcon operates besides India, which happens to be the spiritual and administrative axis of the religion.
Visakha has been arguing for female gurus for 20 years, and has endured all manner of rebuff, constantly parrying the criticism that she’s a sell-out, a heretic, or, worst of all, a feminist – a term deeply maligned in the religion. “If a woman is qualified to lead, then she leads. It’s not very complex,” she tells me. “However, there’s all sorts of pushback, very complex pushback.”
A main point she makes is the existence of female gurus throughout Indian culture, contemporary and historical. But their presence is often construed as provisional, supplementary, or licentious. One of her most outspoken critics, an American living in Mumbai called Krishna-kirti Dasa, claims that the advanced role of women in Vaishnavi culture corresponded with the sex cults of the 17th and 18th century.
He worries that allowing the influence of women to grow will result in similar sexual indulgences. “If you do allow the unrestricted mixing of men and women, then this is what happens,” he told me. “This” meaning deviant sex, gender parity and “all sorts of abominable things in the name of religion”.
Visakha has compiled an arsenal of passages and quotes over the years from Prabhupada’s writings and lectures, which includes his now infamous response to an inquiry about female gurus in 1976: “She can become guru.”
But for every quote that Visakha offers, her critics have a counteracting one, either from Vedic scripture or Prabhupada himself. Prabhupada repeatedly emphasized the importance of gender roles, and the notion that young women needed to be protected in ways that young men didn’t.
In 1972, Prabhupada wrote to a female disciple: “You are married and your husband is striving to become a devotee of KRSNA, so you become his devotee, that is the position of husband and wife … the wife will take benefit and advance in spiritual life by serving her husband.”
Krishna-kirti Dasa recently published a book-length essay full of various other examples. He argues that the meaning of Prabhupada’s words are lost on Visakha, that a woman might be able to become a guru, but she must be an order of magnitude greater than the rest of mankind in order for that to occur. “It’s that rare,” he says.
Kira Janock, now 25, joined Iskcon and moved into the Krishna House three years ago, after eating lunch on the University of Florida campus and sharing a few encounters with devotees, which she describes as her awakening.
She is more optimistic than her fellow disciple Shyamala Engelhart, 33, about the guru impasse. “There’s people in the movement who want women to become gurus,” she says, “this actually sounded hopeful.”
It’s possible that Engelhart, who was born into Iskcon, shared that optimism in the past, but she has since developed a coolness towards the subject that can’t be helped. “Ever since I was young I would notice the ways in which men and women are treated differently in Iskcon,” she says. “That was the world I knew. The fact that we’re still so behind on this issue, that there’s so much opposition to it, disturbs me.”
In 2016, Engelhart moved out of the Krishna House and went back to school to pursue a master’s degree in women’s studies. Her thesis is about how women lose social value as they age. “Growing up in this movement contributed to my interest in the subject,” she says.
For Engelhart, the most difficult part is watching the first generation of female disciples age, and potentially never get the chance to lead in the way that she thinks they’re qualified to. These women inspire younger devotees, who would want to be initiated by them if they were allowed. “If it doesn’t get resolved soon,” she says, “that would be kind of tragic.”
Admittedly, the role of women in her religion is not one of Visakha’s favorite subjects to discuss. Everyone is fatigued by this minute bickering over hermeneutics. Threats of defection come from both sides of the argument. Carl says that in 47 years of devotion to Iskcon, this is the first issue that’s given him pause, which says a lot, considering the organization’s recent history. To think that a religious order – believed to be eons in the making, and which at its core preaches that all physical distinctions are illusory – could splinter on the altar of women’s liberation is nothing if not richly ironic.
Early in Visakha’s book she quotes Prabhupada, one of the first times she encountered him. He says: “Simply by arguing and reasoning you cannot make spiritual advancement … you cannot understand the absolute truth by argument, by material dealings.”
But consensus eludes them, and now they resort to arguing and reasoning. With this passage one also gleans the inner conflict: how isolating and difficult it must be for Visakha and the others to uphold these spiritual principles yet also fight for cultural progress. In other words, to nourish the soul, while at the same time litigate for the body.