Lalita Madhava devi: “In Support Of Aniruddha”

Brattleboro, Vermont, USA, Nov 10 2009: I left ISKCON a year and a half ago after 30 years in the movement. At that time I stopped reading all ISKCON and ISKCON-related websites. Since then, however, I have made it a practice to peruse the Sun every few months just to gauge my changing perspective and my level of detachment from the organization and its hopelessly corrupt and dysfunctional goings-on.

So it was that I logged on to the Sun a few days ago and came upon the Hridayananda melee. Having joined the movement in 1979 and been initiated by Hridayananda in the heyday of the Zonal Acarya period, this subject is very significant for me personally. And, among all the articles and letters, Aniruddha’s letter particularly hit a nerve. Nevertheless, because I am no longer a part of the organization, I resolved not to get involved in the discussion in any way – with the one exception being unless someone attempted to discredit Aniruddha. For me, standing up for the truth is a value that transcends membership, or the lack thereof, in an organization.

I was Hridayananda’s personal secretary for many years back in the 80’s, including during the time when Aniruddha was his servant. I traveled in the “entourage” for years and transcribed all of Hridayananda’s Bhagavatam translations and purports. All of what Aniruddha wrote was vividly familiar to me (except, thankfully, his disturbing account of being made to wash the “guru’s” soiled kaupinas) and brought back a lot of really negative memories.

As Hridayananda’s secretary and loyal disciple, he used to force me to sit in the room for literally hours and hours and hours at a stretch (not being spoken to myself or interacted with as another human being present in the room, but ignored like nothing more than a piece of furniture) while he and Devamrta conversed in Portuguese in an extremely intimate mood (with the body language, facial expressions and intonation characteristic of lover and beloved). My presence, of course, gave the appearance of propriety, but since I do not speak Portuguese (except to understand a few words here and there, such as when she would flirtatiously address him as “gurinho,” the Portuguese diminutive meaning, “my little guru”), their conversations were completely private unto themselves. (Hridayananda bizarrely said once that she was a great yogini from a past life – as if such a concoction justified their whole appalling relationship and made it “transcendental.”) Recalling how, cumulatively, days and weeks and months of my human life were thus wasted, it makes me feel angry to have been used and to have had my naive sincerity grossly exploited in that way by my so-called spiritual master.

Aniruddha’s account of that whole disgraceful period is pitch-perfect and I applaud his courage and honesty in writing that letter. In fact, there are dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of equally inappropriate incidents which took place during the long, drawn-out Devamrta scandal. Yet while it is true that Dravida, Gopiparanadhana and many others knew the whole thing was off, there were really only a few of us who witnessed and indeed lived it from the inside. And as one of those few – always being told back then that I was “offensive” and “in maya” to question “Acharyadeva’s” activities whenever I confided in Brahmatirtha (who, sadly, continues to be Hridayananda’s ultimate enabler to this day) about my discomfort with the whole situation – reading Aniruddha’s brutally honest letter now, even though it’s 25-30 years later, was really cathartic.

For the record, before I continue, I want to honestly say that I am actually someone who agrees with Hridayananda’s liberal, progressive views which most other people on the Sun are condemning. Those are not the issues I have with him and I wish to be completely clear about the fact that I am not writing now in support of the conservative or fundamentalist viewpoint. The issue I have with Hridayananda is the fact that he is still keeping up the whole “guru” and “sannyasi” charade (I was shocked to learn of the existence of the “acharyadeva.com” website and to find out that he is still allowing people to call him that), which, in my opinion, is completely dishonest and shows no integrity whatsoever. And I am writing as a matter of principle because a truthful person (Aniruddha) is being publicly called a liar.

Nevertheless, despite what I have long perceived to be Hridayananda’s lack of integrity, and despite the old wound that was opened by Aniruddha’s letter regarding the Devamrta episode, I resolved not to speak publicly about any of it and I instead showed Hridayananda the courtesy of writing to him privately (not as my “guru,” but as one human being to another) on the day Aniruddha’s letter was published in the Sun, revealing to him my as yet unaddressed/unresolved issue over having been so egregiously used in the service of his relationship with Devamrta. I also told him that Brahmatirtha’s wife, Bhakti, once confided in me that she and another close woman friend of Devamrta’s, a mutual friend of all of ours, had personally seen and read love poetry that Hridayananda had written to Devamrta during that period and which Devamrta allegedly kept even throughout her marriages to Brahmatirtha, Jatayu, Garga Muni and Sadaputa.

But he did not reply to my personal letter and proceeded to put his latest groupie “secretary/mouthpiece,” the hapless and thoroughly deceived Malati Manjari, up to engaging in a disgraceful argumentum ad hominem attack on Aniruddha by having her write, “You may not be aware that Aniruddha Das has a history of mental illness, and is obsessed with being recognized as a Prabhupada disciple. The article is full of fantasies and lies that reflect the sick mind of the author.”

And in doing that, he went way too far.

This is the exact same tactic and abusive rhetoric, verbatim, that the Acharyadeva/ Brahmatirtha camp has been shamelessly employing over and over and over for 30+ years. Whenever anyone from the inner circle breaks rank and speaks out they say the person “has a history of mental illness.” And I am really sick of hearing it.

No, Aniruddha is not suffering from mental illness and his letter was not full of fantasies and lies. There are other people who witnessed these events (though most of them are probably long gone from ISKCON by now). I have not seen Aniruddha for over 20 years, but he was an intelligent, sincere, strict, conscientious Vaishnava and, as I have already stated, his account of all of these incidents (including Devamrta sitting just a few feet in front of Hridayananda during his massages when he was wearing only a gamsha – something I also personally witnessed on numerous occasions, though only the two of them know what they were thinking and only she knows what she was looking at) is pitch-perfect.

On the contrary, in attempting via his mouthpiece Malati Manjari to discredit Aniruddha (and his truthful recounting of events which factually took place) in such a blatantly dishonest and underhanded manner, Hridayananda is the one who is lying.

Lalita Madhava d.d.

P.S. I actually wrote the above article yesterday, but did not send it. Now today we have this appalling excerpt from Hridayananda’s online istagosthi with his followers:

“Srila Acharyadeva has asked me to alert you that there are individuals attacking him in non-ISKCON websites, writing all sorts of false, nasty things. Several of these people have a history of mental illness, and others belong to the ‘rtvik’ deviation and are trying to discredit all ISKCON gurus.

Please be aware of this and do not be disturbed if you come across any of these false claims.”

Here we go again with the hackneyed “history of mental illness” accusation! Except now it’s not just Aniruddha, it’s “several people”! I told you this is what they always say. In the decades that I spent with these manipulative, deceitful people, I heard it more times than I can even count. If one were to tally up all the people Hridayananda/Brahmatirtha have attempted to discredit over the past 33 years with their fabricated “history of mental illness” attacks, the sheer numbers would be staggering. (But although we are now older and wiser, it is disturbing to read that the young, naive followers like Giridhari, who don’t know the history, actually believe these things.)

And, sadly, here we go again with the lying, with Hridayananda dishonestly telling his followers that Aniruddha’s accounts are “false claims.” I guess since we all “have a history of mental illness,” we must all have been simultaneously “having a mass hallucination”! This should be documented in the American Journal of Psychiatry as a medical first! But all joking aside – because this is definitely not a joking matter – if truthfulness is the last leg of religious principles, Hridayananda has lost it completely.