(Interview with HH Krishna Kshetra Swami)
(Ljubljana, 30th May 2015)
Q: I’m sure a lot of devotees don’t know that in ISKCON in the area of academic development there’s something called the ISKCON Studies Institute. What are ISKCON studies and what is exactly the purpose of this institute?
The ISKCON Studies Institute started up a few years back, as a kind of unofficial group of devotees mostly based in Oxford who have been engaged in academics. The idea was to develop, as the title suggests, ISKCON studies, meaning academic study of any and all subjects related to what ISKCON is about – which means Vaishnava philosophy, theology, but also sociology, history and then specifically focusing on the mission, the organization etc. The aim is basically to create a kind of intellectual space for devotees and also those who are not Vaishnavas but they are studying our tradition to create a forum for coming together and discussing. We’ve had a few conferences over the last few years, not regularly. We just had one a few days ago. The one before that was a year and a half ago. We have a specific theme for each conference and we try to focus on that theme. The theme of this conference that we just held in Radhadesh was Vaishnava ethics. We had a kind of standard style of academic conference which means the presenters give formal presentations prepared in advance and then we discuss. So we had a variety of papers, some of them more, some of them less related to the subject. What I presented was together with Yadunandana Swami, we did a kind of duo of discussing ISKCON autobiography. First Yadunandana Swami spoke on the three-volume autobiography of Satsvarup Das Goswami in relation to the subject of ethics and then I spoke on the book of Tamal Krishna Goswami Servant of the servant, which is not a full autobiography. It’s dealing with about seven years of his life – from 1968 to 1975 – also in relation to ethics.
The ISKCON Studies Institute is actually in process of transition and it looks like we’re going to have three changes. One is the name of the institute, one is affiliation and one is the format of our conferences. It looks like we’re going to change it to something like Gaudiya Studies and it would be affiliated with The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies so it won’t be ISKCON. This enables scholar devotees to speak about these activities within their own academic work. So they could write in their curriculum vitae that they took part in this conference. If they wrote ISKCON some of them are fearful that it would go against their academic reputation because ISKCON is this ‘Hare Krishna thing’ (laughter). That’s kind of an ongoing discussion. Some devotees are saying we have to come out in the front sooner or later and establish that ISKCON is actually a respectable institution. Others say that’s alright, but not yet.
Q: You mentioned there are other scholars, not just devotees participating in these conferences…
Yes, sometimes we invite other scholars. This time we had a very interesting presentation from someone studying anthropology, doing his doctorate at Cambridge University and he is studying Mayapur from an anthropological perspective. He spent twelve months there so he got deeply into it and came out with some interesting observations. There is a website called iskconstudies.org and it gives a list of the participants and the titles of their lectures. There should also soon be recordings of the lectures on the website to download and listen to.
Q: How do these scholars who are not devotees respond to these conferences, how do they like it considering they are usually held in Radhadesh, next to the temple?
It’s difficult to generalize. The sort of scholars we deal with are always sympathetic to some degree. Some perhaps more, some perhaps less. I think they all have some form of appreciation and therefore they spend their time studying either us specifically or the broader Vaishnava tradition. This particular person, a young man, he seems to like devotees, he’s very comfortable with them. And we all feel comfortable around him talking about all kinds of things.
Q: You also mentioned The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, where there was also recently a conference on Gaudiya Vaishnavism. What was your presentation there about?
I gave a presentation, I don’t know if I can remember the name of it, but I examined two essays from the journal called The Harmonist. This was a journal started by Bhaktisiddhanta Thakur and existed for eleven years. It was in English. They had Sajjana-tosani in Bengali and they had The Harmonist in English. I took two articles from there – one from 1927 and one from 1933. One’s title was Idolatry and it was a kind of defense of deity worship by some devotee named Nimananda Brahmacari. The second one was called Gandhiji’s ten questions. It was also related to deity worship because Mahatma Gandhi had published, at the end of 1932, ten sort of challenging questions about untouchability. And one of the questions has to do with allowing so-called untouchables enter temples because there is a tradition in India that untouchables can’t enter temples. He was challenging this by asking where does all this come from, where does it say in sastra. As a response, probably Bhaktisiddhanta Thakur is writing – because they didn’t give a name for this article. He’s giving an answer to each of the ten questions from a Gaudiya Vaishnava perspective. It’s quite interesting how he deals with it. On one level he’s kind of saying anyone can enter the temple, but with a qualification. They have to take shelter of Vishnu. And to take shelter of Vishnu, you have to surrender to a guru and you have to be initiated. On the other hand, he says touchable – untouchable, everyone is untouchable (laughter).
So in my paper I was sort of analyzing the rhetorical ways these authors are defending Vaishnavism and Vaishnava deity worship. It was a little bit abstract in a way. I wanted to bring up the subject because it was a major thing. In this conference there were essentially historians and some of the devotee scholars are more theologically oriented so that was also there. The topic was Gaudiya Vaishnavism during the colonial period, so I wanted to focus on the idea that this was all being discussed in the context of colonial India, where they’re getting prepared for independence and the Gaudiya math is publishing articles in English and they’re kind of showing their muscles, saying – we’re ready for you, we’re ready for the world.
Q: You recently became a fellow of The Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. What is this Centre about and what got you interested to collaborate with them?
It started last year. They wrote to the director of the Centre for Hindu Studies and said that they’re having a conference and they would be very happy if one of your people would also present. That message got passed around. It went from the director to the academic director to the librarian and then he passed it on to me and said – do you want to do this? Nobody wanted to and they passed it on to me and I kind of felt like maybe Krishna wants me to do something since it came into my lap and it’s already passed from them. They had a conference last July and I presented about ashtanga yoga and tied it in the idea of developing yogic consciousness which allows one to understand that animals and oneself are the same. I told the story of Jada Bharata becoming a deer, but I told it in a slightly different way than we usually tell it in the Bhagavatam class. Some months later they wrote to me and invited me to become a fellow of the Centre. While I was at the conference, I was talking with some of the people and they all very much support animal protection and they’re very nice people. There are thousands of animal protection organizations, but this one is academic. They’re very focused on that. I had met the director some years ago and he’s a very nice person, so I thought why not? I’m giving another presentation which I still have to prepare. I’ve done some preliminary work but I need to actually do the work.
The subject of the coming conference in July is animal experimentation. I’m basically going to do a survey of the range of approaches that different Indian people, scholars, scientists have taken to this subject. Some say we need to experiment because we need it for science but we should be careful. There’s even one group doing animal recuperation. So animals are taken for experimentation, they damage the animals and these people rehabilitate the animals. Whereas they normally use the animals and then just kill them if the experiment itself didn’t kill them. There are a lot of ethical problems with that idea. I will just be mentioning different approaches and I want to do something on analyzing all of this in terms of the three modes of nature. It’s a kind of interesting way of looking at it.
Q: Today we have devotee scholars all over the world, even as far as Brazil where there was also a conference that you participated in. What was it about and what did you present?
Yes, there are some devotee scholars in Brazil, and one of them, Ramacharita Prabhu who attended our previous ISKCON Studies Institute conference, was inspired to do a conference in Brazil at his university where he teaches. He wanted me to give a keynote address at the beginning of the conference to set the pace and the mood. Their conference was very general, just to get as many people as possible. It was on Hinduism and Vaishnavism. That was in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, where also Danvantari Swami has a very nice ashram and he trains Bhakti Shastri, Bhaktivaibhava. There’s a very nice community of householders who built houses just outside Campina Grande. So they’re just starting up and this was a first event for them. They have a publication, a book which is a collection of articles on Bhagavad-gita in Portugese, dedicated to Hridayananda Goswami. He has been preaching in Brazil for many years.
Q: In all of these events there are parts of the philosophy as they were taught by Srila Prabhupada presented to the academic public. Why is it important that we focus on activities like these?
The point Srila Prabhupada made was that Krishna Consciousness should be presented to the intelligent class of people. From early on he was encouraging devotees to teach courses, usually as adult education course of some sort or auxiliary courses in universities. It’s all a part of developing a culture within ISKCON which makes space for scholarship which then can connect with a wider scholarship. Instead of non-devotees only studying our tradition, there will always be that; but it makes sense to have our own scholars studying our tradition, articulating, writing about it and presenting Vaishnava perspectives in a way in which a wider academic community will take it seriously. The news just came about one example of this about which we feel happy about.
In 2013 we published a book The Bhagavata Purana: Sacred Texts and Living Tradition. Now it’s out and gradually circulating and I just found out that we got an extremely favorable book review. What’s significant is that the review was from a particular journal called Choice, of the American Library Association. This is the kind of first-reference journal librarians look at to decide what books to buy for their libraries and they gave us a top recommendation. That’s exactly what we’re looking for. We didn’t expect it, but that’s the sort of thing that brings the Bhagavatam to the people who otherwise would never look at it. What to speak of read it. Related to that, it’s maybe also interesting to mention that in recent months our director of Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, Shaunaka Rishi Prabhu has made some very significant connections of scholars in India, specifically for helping us with our Bhagavatam research project. This is an extensive project everybody can read about on the OCHS website under Research. This is potentially really significant. He has seven institutions in India who are agreeing that we need serious scholarship on the Bhagavatam because it hasn’t been done. We have a lot of work to do. Some of it quite technical, but eventually some interesting stuff can emerge. All of that would be with myself and Radhika Raman Prabhu directing the whole research project so we’re kind of excited about this.