On December 7, 2021, the Conversations on South Asia Series at Dartmouth College hosted Nicole Karapanagiotis, Associate Professor of Religion at Rutgers University-Camden, for a discussion of her new book Branding Bhakti: Krishna Consciousness and the Makeover of a Movement (Indiana University Press, 2021).
Reiko Ohnuma, Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, and Mara Einstein, Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, participated as discussants. Elizabeth Lhost, Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College, moderated the event.
The author began by presenting the main question that drove her research for the book:
How do religious groups reinvent and rebrand themselves to attract new followers?
Karapanagiotis
The book, she explained, is the result of her efforts to answer that question by focusing on how the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) has embraced new strategies for outreach and participation over the past several decades.
Beginning in the 1980s, ISKCON’s devotional base began to shift from being a community of non-Indians to one dominated by Hindu Indians. This shift occurred partly because despite being “culturally different” from American followers of ISKCON, “many Hindu immigrants took religio-cultural comfort in ISKCON temples and felt an affinity to the ISKCON devotees with whom they shared much religious practice,” she explains in the book (41).
many Hindu immigrants took religio-cultural comfort in ISKCON temples and felt an affinity to the ISKCON devotees with whom they shared much religious practice
Karapanagiotis, Branding Bhakti, 41
But the shift in demographics was also one that went against the vision of ISKCON’s leaders, who wanted the movement for Kṛṣṇa consciousness to be truly global.
Following this introduction, Karapanagiotis then described how ISKCON’s self-presentation radically shifted, following this influx of Indian expats, to attract a broader audience. Rebranding the movement as one rooted in mindfulness, yoga, and meditation—and building yoga studios, mindfulness institutes, urban spiritual lounges, and meditative retreats in rural areas to support this vision—ISKCON’s leaders set out to attract new communities of so-called “Western” devotees. Such rebranding efforts were designed to attract younger people and those the community refers to as “Westerners,” efforts—Karapanagiotis relays—that also aimed to be inclusive of non-white devotees and to garner followers from Black and Latinx communities.
In her work, Karapanagiotis admits that moving away from religious ritual towards mindfulness and yoga clearly marks a change from the Gauḍīya-vaiṣṇava, temple-centric origins of ISKCON. Yet adding nuance to ISKCON’s activities, Karapanagiotis suggests that ISKCON’s rebranding has not led to the complete abandonment of traditional theistic worship for many of groups rebranding ISKCON. Rather, these new rebranding strategies, for some, are understood to be “just a stepping stone.” For example, the de-ritualized and de-theologized lounge space that some leaders like Devamrita Swami now use “is just a temporary resting place for them [devotees] to stop until [Devamrita Swami] and other lounge staff believe they are ready to be introduced to and participate in temple ISKCON—complete with its theologies of embodied divinity and the ritual worship of mūrtis (embodied forms)” (116-117).
Thus, Karapanagiotis concluded her introduction to the book by noting that while ISKCON’s rebranding does consist of de-ritualized yoga and meditation spaces aimed at appealing to a younger, Western audience, they sometimes still retain the theistic worship of Kṛṣṇa, rooted in the Purāṇic, temple-oriented Gauḍīya-vaiṣṇava milieu of ISKCON’s origins.
Commentary from media studies scholar Mara Einstein and religious studies scholar Reiko Ohnuma followed the author’s remarks.
Drawing upon her expertise in media and marketing, Mara Einstein, while noting ISKCON’s earlier rebranding from Hare Krishna, asked whether ISKCON’s rebranding, as Karapanagiotis frames it, is actually rebranding. The shift away from ritual activity toward yoga and meditation is not necessarily a rebranding of Gauḍīya-vaiṣṇavism or of Kṛṣṇa devotion. Instead, at least as Einstein’s reading of Branding Bhakti suggests, ISKCON’s marketing efforts have actually produced a new product—one that allows so-called “Western” participants to side-step or bypass Hindu religious content.
An expert in Buddhist traditions, Reiko Ohnuma’s subsequent discussion centered around the similarities between ISKCON’s rebranding efforts and those of Buddhist movements in North America. Similar to how parts of ISKCON are now dedicated to a de-ritualized mindfulness movement aimed at connecting with a Western audience, Ohnuma noted that Buddhists in America have employed similar strategies to adapt to this new context. In many ways, these efforts to make Buddhism fit with North American spirituality overlap with the efforts (and struggles) of ISKCON’s leaders, though these Buddhist movements tend to emphasize elements like scientific rationality over spirituality. These changing emphases, Ohnuma suggested, created divergent practices among “Western” converts to Buddhism and Asian immigrants practicing Buddhism in North America. How these differences manifest in efforts to define and determine who counts as “Buddhist” overlap with questions of race, nationality, identity, and authenticity that Karapanagiotis also observes in the ISKCON community.
These broader questions that arise from Branding Bhakti‘s examination of ISKCON’s efforts to attract more devotees speak to the continuing importance of race, religion, identity, and community in the twenty-first century—and demonstrate Karapanagiotis’s rich contributions to these debates.
If you missed the lively discussion we hosted in December, then we invite you to pick up a copy of the author’s Branding Bhakti: Krishna Consciousness and the Makeover of a Movement.
—Sri Sathvik Rayala (Dartmouth ’24, Bodas Family South Asian Studies Fellow, 2021–22)