by Syamasundara dasa Adhikari and Giriraja dasa Brahmacari (ISKCON—Bombay)
The tour of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada throughout India attracted much daily news coverage, and many major magazines ran features about Srila Prabhupada and his foreign disciples. The Times Weekly of Bombay published a long front-cover article inNovember, 1970, describing a 10,000 strong crowd who attended a meeting at which Srila Prabhupada spoke and where he induced everyone in the huge crowd including policemen and pressmen to join in chanting the Hare Krsna mantra. There were subsequent letters to the newspaper on the Hare Krsna movement. One man wrote in a letter, “As far as my knowledge goes, these foreign Hindus of the Hare Krsna movement cannot be equal to the native original brahmanas and Hindus. They will have to be relegated to the lower castes. It is significant to see one of the newly converted sadhus, Sri Gopala dasa, formerly Charles Polan of Chicago, stated that he was a construction worker formerly. Doing sudras’ work, it would thus become necessary to allot the three lower castes to these foreign converts according to their profession.” In another letter, an Indian gentleman wrote: “The Hare Krsna movement is just a sporadic fad of sentimentalists.” In order to rectify the misinformation of statements of this sort, answering letters were written by the disciples of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, which were duly published in the Times. The letters are published here in their entirety.
