Nicole Karapanagiotis, Branding Bhakti : Krishna Consciousness and the Makeover of a Movement

In this accessibly and engagingly written monograph, Nicole Karapanagiotis makes several excellent contributions to the study of Hindu and Hindu-inspired movements in the United States and the study of religion more generally.In terms of the study of Hindu movements in America, this work addresses a very central, timely, and controversial issue: namely, the relationship between those practitioners who were born to a Hindu tradition and who are primarily of Indian or other South Asian descent and those practitioners who have come to the tradition from outside and who are non-Indian.In discussing these two sub-groups within Hindu and Hindu-inspired movements in America, it quickly becomes evident that there is a great deal of awkwardness, as well as capacity for causing offense, in describing these groups simply as "Indian" and "non-Indian," or "Indian" and "Western."Given that a growing number of these movements are multigenerational (including the subject of this study, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON), there are, today, non-Indian practitioners who were born into and grew up with their tradition, no less so than those practitioners who may have immigrated from India.For the same reason, practitioners are also present in these movements who were born and who grew up in America and who may never have been to India but whose parents or grandparents were Indian immigrants.Are these practitioners "Indians" or "Westerners"?Are they not, in some sense, both?Amanda Lucia (2014), in her work on the devotees of Mata Amritanandamayi-popularly known as Amma-has helpfully coined the terms "adopters" and "inheritors" to refer to the respective groups we are discussing.These terms help to identify these two quite distinct sub-groups while at the same time avoiding the awkward and often inaccurateand perhaps even inadvertently racist, or at least racially insensitive-designations of "Indian" and "Western" devotees.In Branding Bhakti, Nicole Karapanagiotis delves into this issue as it is being worked out in real-time in the contemporary ISKCON community in America, in all its messiness and its very real potential offensiveness.Specifically, Karapanagiotis's book is focused on a conscious trend among certain ISKCON practitioners to make their movement more ethnically diverse.She traces the history of ISKCON, a Vaishnava organization established by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada in the 1960s, from its founding to the present.In the early years of ISKCON, most members were not of Indian descent.Indeed, Swami Prabhupada saw his mission as being primarily to bring Krishna consciousness to Westerners.However, as Indian immigration to the United States grew, so did the number of ISKCON members who were devotees of Indian descent: Hindus who had grown up with Vaishnava devotion and who found a home in ISKCON that enabled them to adapt to living in a foreign land.As Karapanagiotis narrates, these Indian devotees did a great deal to help the organization survive when it fell on hard times after the passing of its founder.They also helped to normalize ISKCON and enabled it to be seen as a more