Dear reader, sorry for another big lapse in newsletters! But I’m back!
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Photo: Wikimedia Commons: Bhagwan Rajneesh with rapturous disciples
I was watching Wild, Wild, Country the other day. It’s a documentary about cult leader Bhagwan Rajneesh, who captured the hearts and minds of mostly white folks in the 70s and 80s who were looking for a religion that to me appeared to be a combination of ecstatic dance, orgies, art, and listening to an old Indian dude wax on about the hypocrisy of mainstream religions (that is, until he took a vow of silence). Vintage footage showed people falling at his feet convulsing in tears, flopping into his lap in surrender, and worshipping him as if he was a divine incarnation of some cosmic sex god. His compound in Antelope, Oregon featured three-by-five prints of a close-up glamor shot of him looking off into the horizon in contemplation while donning a fur-lined hooded parka.
Rajneesh was not Hindu, though his followers were called sannyasins, a term used for Hindus who achieve enlightenment after the renunciation of their earthly attachments. But watching the antics of this cult of orange and maroon-clad white people and this little old Indian man who kind of looks like my uncle triggered bizarre memories from my childhood.
I thought about the time I was in high school, when in what I can only describe as religious regret, my progressive and relatively unconventional Hindu parents decided to send me to Hindu camp. I can’t remember if I was excited about going or if I just agreed to indulge then. They sat me down one day with furrowed brows and asked me, “when things are really bad, what do you do?” I think they wanted me to say, “I pray that the Lord Venkatesha will shepherd me out of this crisis and I put my faith in him and tell myself that everything will be ok.” But instead, I said something like, “I listen to the Cure and burn incense and cry.”
That was not the answer they wanted. They looked at each other with worry and said, “Listen, Aparna, I don’t know if we’ve done the right thing raising you and Sudhi (my brother) to question religion. Because if you don’t believe in God, then when things are really hard, who will you turn to?” Come to think of it, I wonder if this decision was spurred by my younger brother Sudhi, who would curl up into what he called his “cocoon” sometimes and be unresponsive until I made him laugh or distracted him with a song or dance or whatever I did at the time to grab people’s attention. I was told I had a “center of attention complex,” so no doubt I had a full quiver of ways to make sure everybody’s attention was focused on what was obviously the most important thing in the room: me. Anyway, here I was in high school and my parents were looking at me like they had let me down in the worst way. Like, without proper religious indoctrination, I would be left to fend for myself in the wilderness, and that I might just die. So they sent me to Hindu camp in the wilderness.
Image: Me around the time I was sent to Hindu camp. Apparently I was really into Jesus Jones as well as the Cure.
Why is it that bearded Hindu/formerly Hindu leaders really like setting up camp in remote, rural areas that are hotbeds for white supremacy? Maybe it’s because it’s “God’s country,” but Swami Chinmayananda (like Bagwan Rajneesh) decided to establish his compound in Piercy, California, a town of about 200 people on the Eel River in Mendocino County. I looked up Piercy to see how to describe the town, because I thought maybe there would be another more well-known city close by to use for context or a landmark that folks would be familiar with. Well, Wikipedia describes the town as “north-northwest of Leggett.” So yes, Piercy is really in the boondocks, no offense to the good folks who live there. And my parents drove me almost 4 hours up there through the redwoods of Northern California to the boondocks because they thought I needed some help.
We pulled into the forested lane that skirted the Eel River. As we rounded the driveway at the end, I saw the camp. A long, low slung building sat closer to the river. It looked like a motel, with several equidistant doors facing the center of the clearing. I found out later that building would be our lodging. In the center of the clearing was a large tent with chairs and a stage underneath. There were some other scattered buildings around the tent, and then at the end of the camp was a large house. That was “Swamiji’s” house.
Hindu Camp was weird, and my memories of my time there are staticky, like an old movie reel. But there are moments of clear HD film in that reel. Like the time a bald white kid in his 20s wearing an orange robe walked out of the door next to mine and smiled, introducing himself as an ascetic who lived in devotion to Swamiji. And the time we all played out on the Eel River, trying to skip stones across it.
I clearly recall the afternoons—or maybe it was mornings—when we kids would spend a few hours with Swamiji’s second in command, Swami Tejomayananda, a “junior swami” if you will. All of these people had names before they became swamis. And when they achieved enlightenment they were anointed with these Sanskrit names that always ended in “ananda,” which means joy or bliss. We would sit around Junior Swami T on the ground in a booklined study while he regaled us with epic stories of the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon.
It was one of these mornings when Junior Swami T told us that the reason we have so many gods is that everyone needed a god they could relate to. Krishna is a cowherd because cowherds need a god. Rama is a king because kings needed a god. Shiva is a hunter because hunters need a god. What Junior Swami T didn’t tell us, which I learned years later, is that the reason we have so many gods and goddesses is that Hindus needed to convert all the people of India, so when they encountered tribes who worshipped a local god who was a cowherd, they cleverly said: “well, that guy is Hindu too!” So slowly, all the animist gods and goddesses and village divinities and their lore were absorbed into what became the Hindu pantheon.
Another part of our daily routine at Hindu Camp was to walk over to the tent and wait for Swami Chinmayananda to arrive to give his lecture of the day. A fancy car—maybe it was a Rolls Royce, or maybe it was just a Mercedes Benz, but it was fancy in my head—would slowly circle the tent and pull up. A driver would, with great solemnity and officiousness, step out and open the door for Swamiji. Swamiji would alight and stop, as people flocked to prostrate themselves before him and touch his feet. Then the procession led by him and his followers would walk the red carpet (I swear by all the gods and goddesses of the pantheon that I remember a RED carpet) up to the stage. Once everyone was seated, Swamiji would start talking. And that’s where I stop remembering anything because I think I either fell asleep or daydreamed through every lecture.
Within a few days, something felt very wrong about Hindu Camp. I had so many questions that nobody else seemed to have. Like, why does Swamiji have to ride in a car when he can walk the 30 feet from his house to the tent? Why don’t we ever have a chance to talk to him? Why doesn’t he share meals with us? Why does everyone melt into rapt adoration during his lectures when all I want to do was sleep or hang out by the river or ANYTHING but sit and listen to him?
During one of these wonderings, I found myself wandering to the outskirts of the compound, to his house. I skirted the outside walls and peeked in a window, wondering if Swamiji had something deliciously weird in his living room. Through the dusty pane, I saw it. A TV, and below it, row upon row of VHS tapes. I couldn’t make out all the titles, but I definitely saw Rocky. Snickering at the image of Swamiji settling into a couch and watching Rocky while his disciples outside engaged in spiritual discourse about Hinduism, I ran back and told all my new friends about it. I don’t remember exactly what happened next, but I do remember that it was the first time I was almost kicked out of Hindu camp. I’d like to think it was because of my mad teen negotiation skills that instead of getting kicked out, a few days later we all got to watch Rocky together in the gym on a rainy afternoon. I mean, what better incentive to hide Swamiji’s big secret, that he hung out watching action films while the rest of us were sentenced to solemn meditation? Whoops. The cat is now out of the bag now.
The second time I almost got kicked out of Hindu camp was even more egregious. On one of his standard slow circumnavigations of the tent followed by his standard sanctimonious exit from his vehicle, we youth were ushered to the very front of the doting crowd and asked to prostrate ourselves before him (basically, lie down and touch his feet). One by one, the kids did as they were told, and I refused-politely, according to my recollection. But oh, the blasphemy. The embarrassment. The SHAME. I was promptly dragged off to my room, where I spent the rest of the day in quiet contemplation a/k/a daydreaming about my escape.
I don’t think my parents were so much disappointed as unsurprised when they picked me up. And when I went home that summer, I promptly moved on to my classic “have fun in the sun” high school summer.
I haven’t thought much about Hindu camp until recently. See, I realize I’m in the same place my parents were in during that infamously ridiculous dining room conversation. My teenage son is struggling to figure out who he is. He’s depressed sometimes and doesn’t really look forward to anything except his friends. He is a teen in an era that would have seemed dystopian to 16-year-old me: a pandemic, international uprisings against colonialism and racial injustice, and a climate catastrophe. And I wonder, “when things are really bad, who can Kieran go to?” Not the Lord Venkatesha, because we’ve raised Kiearn to be pretty agnostic, with only a strong attachment to the cultural aspects of Hinduism like food and festivals and folklore and fables. We’ve raised Kieran to value concepts like honesty, humility, equity, and justice. But we haven’t instilled core beliefs around things like whether we have a soul. Or what happens when we die. Or our purpose in life. Or where we can go when things are really hard. And a couple of weeks ago, in our own version of the dining room conversation, we did what my parents did. We decided to send him on an outdoor education expedition into the wilderness to find himself, and hopefully to find something greater than himself that he could turn to.
I realize now that I did learn something from my experience in Hindu camp. It has nothing to do with Hinduism, or how dangerous it is to critique the establishment, or even where to turn to in dark times. I learned that we do the best we can raising children who are so completely different from the only children we have known as well our own: our younger selves. And that when we don’t have answers, we hope our children can find them, somewhere in the wilderness.
…just as much the second time through!
Loved this! Hilarious and poignant at the same time.