THE GOD OF LOVE:
Baba Premanand Bharati and the Society of Krishna (1902)
Baba Premananda Bharati was born Surendranath Mukherj in 1858 to an influential Calcutta family. His uncle was a judge on the same Calcutta High Court on which John Woodroffe would sit between 1904 and 1922. Surendranath became a journalist and worked for a couple of newspapers before starting one of his own, the Gup and Gossip–gup means “idle gossip,” as opposed to, I suppose, the hard-working kind–that reported on the comings and goings of Calcutta society. He was also involved with a group of Bengali intellectuals attracted to Ramakrishna, a group which included Narendranath Datta.
In 1884, Surendranath had his requisite life-changing experience. It happened as he watched a performance of Chaitanya Lila (“Play of Chaitanya,” which can mean “soul” or “intellect”), [1] a bio-play about the Bengali monk and Bhakti Yogin, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486-1534). Known as the “Golden Avatar,” he’s identified to this day by millions of faithful as the most recent (and next to last) incarnation of Krishna. Chaitanya founded what’s known as Gaudiya Vaishnavism, [7] a kind of Bhakti Yoga involving intense devotional worship of Krishna as the one true God. [8] Powerfully affected by the play’s depiction of divine love, Surendranath resolved to abandon his relatively successful secular life and devote himself wholeheartedly to the spiritual. For reasons that aren’t clear, it took him six years to get it done, but in 1890 he was officially initiated by his guru, one Swami Brahmananda Bharati, and spiritually reborn as Baba Premananda Bharati. [4]
Before leaving on a a two-month pilgrimage across India that covered 1000 miles–sound familiar?–Baba met with his guru’s guru, another Baba by the name of Lokanatha Brahmachari. In 1890, Lokanatha was in the last year, all 160 of them, of his life. He supposedly left home at 11, practiced Raja Yoga for 25 years and then spent the ensuing 50 years meditating in the Himalayas ... in full ascetic regalia, which is to say, naked. He finally achieved enlightenment at age 90–better late than never–and at 136 settled in a place called Baradi where he spent the rest of his days. He must have been an imposing figure: seven feet tall and very gaunt, he never slept or, for that matter, closed his eyes–he didn’t even blink.
After completing his pilgrimage, Baba then spent the next 10 years spreading the Gaudiya Vaishnava gospel. In 1900 he had a vision of Krishna, who directed him to retire from the world and become a hermit, which he dutifully did for the next two years. In 1902 Krishna was back with another visionary assignment, which essentially spun Baba around 180 degrees: he was instructed to go teach in the “Far West,” which everybody assumed meant the US.
And so in 1902, like Vivekananda before him and Yogananda after, Baba bravely headed West. He stopped for a while in Paris and then London, where to earn a few extra pounds to help finance his trip, he briefly resumed his former occupation as a reporter, contributing to a London paper. Finally, in October of that year, three months after Vivekananda passed on, Baba landed in New York City, becoming the first Gaudiya Vaishnava missionary in this country. While he hadn’t aroused much media interest in Europe, three New York papers, the Times, the Herald, and the Tribune, reported extensively on his arrival and intentions, though at least one befuddled reporter pegged Baba as a Buddhist missionary.
Over the next couple of years, Baba kept busy organizing and lecturing. He established the first Krishna Samaj (Society) in the US shortly after his arrival. In 1903, he spoke at Green Acre in Maine (where Vivekananda had taught a decade earlier), sharing the stage with another of our bit actors, Rama Tirtha (more on him next). Hoping to make a Vivekananda-like impact on the American public, he attended the St Louis World’s Fair [2] in 1904, but apparently his appearance fell flat, and no wonder: how could he compete with exhibits like the Hereafter, where visitors could tour mockups of Heaven and Hell, admission 25¢, children 15¢, or Mysterious Asia, which featured Princess Rajah–like Little Egypt 10 years earlier in Chicago–performing the scandalous Hootchy-Kootchy.
From St Louis, Baba made his way to Boston, where he invited himself, a la Vivekananda, to an International Peace Conference. After wrangling a place on the program, by all accounts his presentations were considerably more successful than those in St Louis. In 1904 Baba also published his first book, Shri Krishna: the Lord of Love. It was more or less a retelling of the Bhagavatam Purana, [9] a bhakti text focusing on Krishna as the God of gods. Baba’s ambitious goal was to recount the “history of the Universe from its birth to its dissolution,” and to embody “true Hinduism,” or “purely Eastern thought in purely Eastern dress.” [carney xci].
Surprisingly it seems, for the first decade of the 20th century, the book was reviewed in major newspapers like the Boston Evening Transcript, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. And maybe even more surprisingly, it was taken seriously and generally favorably reviewed. The Evening Transcript, for example, praised the “remarkable ... completeness with which it covers the subject ... a clear, succinct history of the origin, nature, and evolution of the universe as the Oriental mind perceives it.” The reviewer finished with a “conviction that there is more, far more of truth and wisdom in the ideas of the so-called Pagan East than perhaps he had dreamed of.” [carney lvii] The Oriental Review went way out on a limb–considering it was not even 1910–and deemed Shri Krishna to be the “greatest book of the century” [carney lxi]
But not everybody thought so. As reported in the Baptist Missionary Magazine in January, 1906: [113]
There came into our office the other day a short man, wearing a long, black coat, and long, gray-black hair. Baba Premanand Bharati wished us to have a copy of his famous work, “Sree Krishna,the Lord of Love.” Supposing that it was for review, and not having it in our library, we said that we could make reference to it and some statements concerning its nature–a frank one, of course–and thanked him for his gift. “O no,” he said; “I came to sell it.”
We did not flatter ourselves that the far-famed Baba Bharati , while “fulfilling his great mission to the benighted Back Bay of Boston,” had seen our editorial comment on his “needed work.” It gave us, however, reason to regret that one of the confreres of our visitor had pulled down the sign in front of the elevator: “No agents allowed in this building.”
Despite all the positive press, by 1905 Baba was beginning to attract the scowls of various Christian clergymen and other morality watchdogs. It’s not hard to figure out why. In his lectures, he’d taken to comparing Jesus with Krishna, railing against the West’s “Christianizing” of Indians, and claiming that Hinduism was the “soul” or “parent” of all religion. And in yet another bizarre parallel with Vivekananda, one day on his way to a lecture, he was chased by a gang of unruly boys–the newspaper report called them “urchins”–who tore at his clothes.
Seeing that a Parliament of Religion-type event was being held in Los Angeles, Baba decided it might be the right time to head even farther West. So in August, 1905, he arrived in LA and spoke almost daily at the religion gathering, which was covered daily by two LA papers, the Times and the Herald. He must have liked the atmosphere, because after a brief visit back East, he returned to LA and set up shop. In the next two years, before his return to India in 1907, he established the first Krishna Home in the US and began publishing and writing for a house magazine, the Light of India. After three years in India, Baba revisited the US and stayed for about a year, his goals to build a permanent Krishna temple–he did but it failed soon after Baba departed–and solicit contributions for the Zenana Society, an organization he founded aimed at “de-Westernizing” and “de-Christianizing” Hindu women and educating them in traditional Hindu ways. [5] He went back to India in 1911 and left his body in 1913 at the relatively young age of 56.
TEACHING
Like Vivekananda, Baba blasted the West for its treatment of India and Indians. I won’t say much about this, except to note that, as he considered himself the guardian of authentic Hinduism, he had particularly choice words for the Western “thieves”–read Christian Scientists and Theosophists–who had “stolen” Eastern thought. Interestingly thought, Baba also went after the Neo-Vedantists, beginning with Ram Mohan Roy and including Vivekananda. He accused them of “Christianizing” Hinduism and Vedanta, making it “scientific” and “rational,” simplifying and “sanitizing” it to make it more palatable India’s British overlords.
Biographer Carney notes that, like Vivekananda again, Baba adapted his spiritual message to suit the needs and understanding of his audience. The foundation of his teaching was non-sectarian New Thought, the edifice a blend of esoteric Christianity and devotional Vaishnavism. It’s no wonder Baba riled the Christian establishment: according to him Christianity was properly an Eastern religion, misrepresented, even “crucified,” by its Western proponents. He didn’t stop there. Essentially, he continued, Christianity is the same religion as Vaishnavism, the one “true” religion, Jesus being none other that an incarnation of Krishna, relaying the same “Eternal Truths” as the Veda, which he simply adopted to the needs and understanding of his time and place.
Baba Premananda Bharati was born Surendranath Mukherj in 1858 to an influential Calcutta family. His uncle was a judge on the same Calcutta High Court on which John Woodroffe would sit between 1904 and 1922. Surendranath became a journalist and worked for a couple of newspapers before starting one of his own, the Gup and Gossip–gup means “idle gossip,” as opposed to, I suppose, the hard-working kind–that reported on the comings and goings of Calcutta society. He was also involved with a group of Bengali intellectuals attracted to Ramakrishna, a group which included Narendranath Datta.
In 1884, Surendranath had his requisite life-changing experience. It happened as he watched a performance of Chaitanya Lila (“Play of Chaitanya,” which can mean “soul” or “intellect”), [1] a bio-play about the Bengali monk and Bhakti Yogin, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486-1534). Known as the “Golden Avatar,” he’s identified to this day by millions of faithful as the most recent (and next to last) incarnation of Krishna. Chaitanya founded what’s known as Gaudiya Vaishnavism, [7] a kind of Bhakti Yoga involving intense devotional worship of Krishna as the one true God. [8] Powerfully affected by the play’s depiction of divine love, Surendranath resolved to abandon his relatively successful secular life and devote himself wholeheartedly to the spiritual. For reasons that aren’t clear, it took him six years to get it done, but in 1890 he was officially initiated by his guru, one Swami Brahmananda Bharati, and spiritually reborn as Baba Premananda Bharati. [4]
Before leaving on a a two-month pilgrimage across India that covered 1000 miles–sound familiar?–Baba met with his guru’s guru, another Baba by the name of Lokanatha Brahmachari. In 1890, Lokanatha was in the last year, all 160 of them, of his life. He supposedly left home at 11, practiced Raja Yoga for 25 years and then spent the ensuing 50 years meditating in the Himalayas ... in full ascetic regalia, which is to say, naked. He finally achieved enlightenment at age 90–better late than never–and at 136 settled in a place called Baradi where he spent the rest of his days. He must have been an imposing figure: seven feet tall and very gaunt, he never slept or, for that matter, closed his eyes–he didn’t even blink.
After completing his pilgrimage, Baba then spent the next 10 years spreading the Gaudiya Vaishnava gospel. In 1900 he had a vision of Krishna, who directed him to retire from the world and become a hermit, which he dutifully did for the next two years. In 1902 Krishna was back with another visionary assignment, which essentially spun Baba around 180 degrees: he was instructed to go teach in the “Far West,” which everybody assumed meant the US.
And so in 1902, like Vivekananda before him and Yogananda after, Baba bravely headed West. He stopped for a while in Paris and then London, where to earn a few extra pounds to help finance his trip, he briefly resumed his former occupation as a reporter, contributing to a London paper. Finally, in October of that year, three months after Vivekananda passed on, Baba landed in New York City, becoming the first Gaudiya Vaishnava missionary in this country. While he hadn’t aroused much media interest in Europe, three New York papers, the Times, the Herald, and the Tribune, reported extensively on his arrival and intentions, though at least one befuddled reporter pegged Baba as a Buddhist missionary.
Over the next couple of years, Baba kept busy organizing and lecturing. He established the first Krishna Samaj (Society) in the US shortly after his arrival. In 1903, he spoke at Green Acre in Maine (where Vivekananda had taught a decade earlier), sharing the stage with another of our bit actors, Rama Tirtha (more on him next). Hoping to make a Vivekananda-like impact on the American public, he attended the St Louis World’s Fair [2] in 1904, but apparently his appearance fell flat, and no wonder: how could he compete with exhibits like the Hereafter, where visitors could tour mockups of Heaven and Hell, admission 25¢, children 15¢, or Mysterious Asia, which featured Princess Rajah–like Little Egypt 10 years earlier in Chicago–performing the scandalous Hootchy-Kootchy.
From St Louis, Baba made his way to Boston, where he invited himself, a la Vivekananda, to an International Peace Conference. After wrangling a place on the program, by all accounts his presentations were considerably more successful than those in St Louis. In 1904 Baba also published his first book, Shri Krishna: the Lord of Love. It was more or less a retelling of the Bhagavatam Purana, [9] a bhakti text focusing on Krishna as the God of gods. Baba’s ambitious goal was to recount the “history of the Universe from its birth to its dissolution,” and to embody “true Hinduism,” or “purely Eastern thought in purely Eastern dress.” [carney xci].
Surprisingly it seems, for the first decade of the 20th century, the book was reviewed in major newspapers like the Boston Evening Transcript, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. And maybe even more surprisingly, it was taken seriously and generally favorably reviewed. The Evening Transcript, for example, praised the “remarkable ... completeness with which it covers the subject ... a clear, succinct history of the origin, nature, and evolution of the universe as the Oriental mind perceives it.” The reviewer finished with a “conviction that there is more, far more of truth and wisdom in the ideas of the so-called Pagan East than perhaps he had dreamed of.” [carney lvii] The Oriental Review went way out on a limb–considering it was not even 1910–and deemed Shri Krishna to be the “greatest book of the century” [carney lxi]
But not everybody thought so. As reported in the Baptist Missionary Magazine in January, 1906: [113]
There came into our office the other day a short man, wearing a long, black coat, and long, gray-black hair. Baba Premanand Bharati wished us to have a copy of his famous work, “Sree Krishna,the Lord of Love.” Supposing that it was for review, and not having it in our library, we said that we could make reference to it and some statements concerning its nature–a frank one, of course–and thanked him for his gift. “O no,” he said; “I came to sell it.”
We did not flatter ourselves that the far-famed Baba Bharati , while “fulfilling his great mission to the benighted Back Bay of Boston,” had seen our editorial comment on his “needed work.” It gave us, however, reason to regret that one of the confreres of our visitor had pulled down the sign in front of the elevator: “No agents allowed in this building.”
Despite all the positive press, by 1905 Baba was beginning to attract the scowls of various Christian clergymen and other morality watchdogs. It’s not hard to figure out why. In his lectures, he’d taken to comparing Jesus with Krishna, railing against the West’s “Christianizing” of Indians, and claiming that Hinduism was the “soul” or “parent” of all religion. And in yet another bizarre parallel with Vivekananda, one day on his way to a lecture, he was chased by a gang of unruly boys–the newspaper report called them “urchins”–who tore at his clothes.
Seeing that a Parliament of Religion-type event was being held in Los Angeles, Baba decided it might be the right time to head even farther West. So in August, 1905, he arrived in LA and spoke almost daily at the religion gathering, which was covered daily by two LA papers, the Times and the Herald. He must have liked the atmosphere, because after a brief visit back East, he returned to LA and set up shop. In the next two years, before his return to India in 1907, he established the first Krishna Home in the US and began publishing and writing for a house magazine, the Light of India. After three years in India, Baba revisited the US and stayed for about a year, his goals to build a permanent Krishna temple–he did but it failed soon after Baba departed–and solicit contributions for the Zenana Society, an organization he founded aimed at “de-Westernizing” and “de-Christianizing” Hindu women and educating them in traditional Hindu ways. [5] He went back to India in 1911 and left his body in 1913 at the relatively young age of 56.
TEACHING
Like Vivekananda, Baba blasted the West for its treatment of India and Indians. I won’t say much about this, except to note that, as he considered himself the guardian of authentic Hinduism, he had particularly choice words for the Western “thieves”–read Christian Scientists and Theosophists–who had “stolen” Eastern thought. Interestingly thought, Baba also went after the Neo-Vedantists, beginning with Ram Mohan Roy and including Vivekananda. He accused them of “Christianizing” Hinduism and Vedanta, making it “scientific” and “rational,” simplifying and “sanitizing” it to make it more palatable India’s British overlords.
Biographer Carney notes that, like Vivekananda again, Baba adapted his spiritual message to suit the needs and understanding of his audience. The foundation of his teaching was non-sectarian New Thought, the edifice a blend of esoteric Christianity and devotional Vaishnavism. It’s no wonder Baba riled the Christian establishment: according to him Christianity was properly an Eastern religion, misrepresented, even “crucified,” by its Western proponents. He didn’t stop there. Essentially, he continued, Christianity is the same religion as Vaishnavism, the one “true” religion, Jesus being none other that an incarnation of Krishna, relaying the same “Eternal Truths” as the Veda, which he simply adopted to the needs and understanding of his time and place.
