T. S. Eliot and the Spirituality of Action: Journal of Vaishnava Studies

Abstract

If Ralph Waldo Emerson “owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita,” then perhaps I owe one to the Immigration Act of 1965, by the arrangement of which I was able to discover the Gita in the comfort of a New York Public Library cubicle. Vaishnava prophesies notwithstanding, it was this piece of legislation that opened America’s doors to A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (commonly referred to as “Prabhupada”) in 1965 and set the stage for his spearheading the worldwide Krishna movement in the eleven years
that followed.1 Thanks to that same Act, my mother arrived to New York—a tattered Hindi copy of the Bhagavad Gita packed among her medical textbooks—in 1968, the same year that Prabhupada published his Gita translation in English with Macmillan. By the time I was born in 1978, one of a few brown babies in incubators beside white and black skinned newborns in a Brooklyn hospital, Prabhupada had already passed away and his Gita waswell on its way to becoming the most widely sold version in the Western world.
My first encounter with Prabhupada’s Gita, in that quiet library cubicle, was something like meeting a long-lost sibling. Like me, the book seemed to be an attempt to straddle two worlds, a slightly awkward and self-conscious mash-up of ancient India and post-modern America. It was not the first edition of the Gita I ever read, and it would be far from the last, but it struck me as the most
impassioned, personal, and devoted version of Krishna’s song I would hear.