Patriarchy Across Cultures: All Things Must Pass
by Tapati
Keokuk is in the southeast corner of Iowa
“All things must pass, none of life’s strings can last.” –George Harrison
Previously I described how my mom and Aunt Gin came to take me back home to Keokuk, Iowa. I rode in the backseat, resigned, tearful, but filled with resentment. I had been assured by our temple president, Makanlal, that he would challenge my mother in court for custody. She didn’t know it yet but I hadn’t given up on going back to the temple for good.
Back home I tried to pick up from where I left off in terms of doing my own worship, chanting my rounds, and staying focused on service to Krishna. I started writing my friends from the registered membership program, Pastora, Allen, Wayne, and of course I wrote to Swarupa Das:
September 4, 1975
My dear Godbrother Swarupa,
Hare Krsna! All glories to Srila Prabhupada!
My mother changed her mind suddenly, so here I am out in material energy once again. I can’t believe how hellish it is out here! Everything’s crazy! If I stay out of maya it will only be by Prabhupada’s causeless mercy.
Makanlal Das is going to start legal proceedings immediately to get me back home. My mom thinks I’m going to stay until I’m 18 and go to college. Makanlal says I’m definitely not staying until I’m 18. So I’m simply praying for Krsna to get me out of here. Please pray for me. All I can do is the same things I did in the temple; rise at 3:30, offer arotik, chant 16 rounds, wear a sari, listen to tapes of Prabhupada giving class. But it’s so much harder out here without association of devotees. If I could see Carolyn more it would help, but even that is difficult if not impossible.
Life with my mom became even more of a Cold War situation with occasional outbreaks of overt hostility. I began to act out in various ways as well as try to avoid her by visiting my grandma, though she and my grandpa weren’t any happier with my involvement in the Hare Krishna movement. They loved to make fun of my diet and my nose piercing, and Grandma commonly referred to my beliefs as “that crazy religion.” [Read more →]
August 15, 2009 No Comments
Patriarchy Across Cultures: Summer of Transcendental Love
by Tapati
Japa or rosary beads made from the wood of the Tulasi plant, a sacred relative of basil. Devotees of Krishna chant the mahamantra on each of 108 beads, keeping track with the “Krsna” or 109th bead. Each day a devotee is required to chant 16 rounds on the japamala, an ancient form of meditation.
I was so relieved to be on the bus, headed for St. Louis. We passed through Hannibal, home of Mark Twain. I barely noticed because my mind was filled with memories of my brief visit to the temple back in November. I was also thinking back to the final few weeks with my mom, which had become very tense. In an effort to punish and isolate me, she had tried to yank my phone cord out of the wall, a phone I had paid to have installed. In the days before phones were portable and easily removed, it was a crime to rip them out of their wall socket. I struggled with her to stop, feeling that the phone was my lifeline and the only thing enabling me to survive living with her. Mom got a hold on the desk phone and hit me in the head with it. I managed to turn my head so it hit the side of my temple instead of my face. I ran out of the house and went to a neighbor’s and called the police, naively thinking they would protect me and tell her she couldn’t do that again.
When they arrived I was shaking like a leaf and could barely tell them what happened. My mother took over the conversation and told them that I had dropped out of school and wanted to join a cult and that I wouldn’t listen to her anymore. They looked at me with disgust and told me until I was 18 I had to do whatever my mother told me.
This took place just a few days before I was told I could go to the temple, in June 1975. I still had the painful lump on my head from the fight and was grateful for the miles the bus was putting between us. I had been so overwhelmed by her mental illness for so many years, alone in an apartment with an unpredictable woman buffeted by her many moods and fearful of her potential for violence.
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August 7, 2009 No Comments
Patriarchy Across Cultures: Living in the Material World
Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield, used on album by George Harrison
I can blame it all on George Harrison.
I and my friend Carolyn were teenagers of the early 1970s, devoted to the music of the Beatles and of George Harrison in particular. We were also searching for the meaning of life, like countless others before us. We combed the library for information on various religions and encountered books like A Soul’s Journey by Peter Richelieu (unfortunately out of print now). We learned about reincarnation, astral bodies, karma, and transmigration of the soul. This all made so much more sense to us when we thought about human suffering, far more sense than the mysterious “It’s all part of God’s plan” answer we usually encountered. George Harrison mentioned these concepts in some of his music and we listened with the intense focus of any teenage girl in the grip of a powerful crush.
George’s Living In The Material World album possessed the most frankly spiritual content and lyrics that couldn’t help but intrigue us. The interior painting of Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, where Bhagavad Gita was spoken, fascinated us with its unusual artistic style and the spectacle of a blue god named Krishna. We noted carefully that the photo was attributed to an organization named after Krishna: The International Society for Krishna Consciousness, ISKCON. We immediately wanted to contact this Society for Krishna and find out more, but no contact information was given in these olden days before Google.
George informed us that “I’m living in the material world/Living in the material world/I hope to get out of this place/By the lord Sri Krsna’s grace” and “Ommmmmm* My Lord/PLEASE take hold of my hand, that I might understand you.” George was clearly writing a series of prayers to be delivered from suffering in the material world and to see and understand God, seen as Krishna who was said to have incarnated 5,000 years ago in India. Not only were we learning about why we were suffering, here George was saying that there could be a permanent end to it if we had the grace of Krishna. (*Om is a sacred syllable that is said to be not just a name of God but actually God Himself in sound.) [Read more →]
July 19, 2009 No Comments
Connecting The Dots: Patriarchy Across Cultures
Hare Krishna temple in St. Louis, 1975. Tapati is in the center front row in a blue print sari.
When a friend referred me to the blog “No Longer Quivering,” she knew why I would resonate with the posts I found there. Like me, she had once belonged to the Hare Krishna Movement, though years after my own involvement. We immediately saw many parallels between the lives of Christian women following the Quiverfull teachings. Vyckie and Laura described their past lives in ways that sounded like many of the young Hare Krishna women of the seventies that I knew. I had the same “aha” moment as I’d had when I read Carolyn Jessop’s book Escape about the FLDS women in Colorado City, Arizona.
It seemed to me then that the mechanisms that control women easily transcend the surface differences in beliefs and culture. Anywhere you find a rigidly controlled social and religious system, you see women in modest dress behaving in a subservient manner and spending the bulk of their time rearing children with limited access to money of their own. You also fail to see women in roles of authority within the church or temple structure. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that the real goal of any such organization is in fact the control of women in order to elevate the men to unparalleled authority and power.
There I am, pregnant with my first child at age 19, wearing the all-purpose sari.
Like fundamentalist Christian women who follow the Quiverfull ideas, we Hare Krishna women were isolated from those who didn’t share our beliefs. The sole exception to our isolation was engaging in preaching activities: chanting and dancing on the street with the congregation, selling books (if we were single), or talking to visitors at the Sunday feast programs. In all of these activities we were not so much talking with outsiders (whom we referred to as “karmis” or those under the laws of karma) as talking at them. Our children were sent to religious boarding schools called gurukulas so they wouldn’t be influenced by karmi society. [Read more →]
July 12, 2009 No Comments
