A senior member of the Hare Kṛṣṇa movement tells how Kṛṣṇa consciousness has gone from East to West and back again.

Last March, when hundreds of devotees from all over the world gathered in India for a pilgrimage to the holy cities Mayapur and Vrndavana, I had the opportunity, after four years, to again have the association of my senior Godbrother, His Holiness Tamala Krsna Gosvami Maharaja. The ISKCON temple in Vrndavana was then under construction, and Tamala Krsna Maharaja had a small grass-and-adobe hut nearby, which he used as a headquarters for chanting, reading and executing his various Krsna conscious duties.

After Srila Prabhupada, our spiritual master, first brought some of his devotees to India in 1970, he entrusted to Tamala Krsna Maharaja the responsibility for overseeing the Society's various preaching programs in India. I knew something about these programs from pictures, news clippings and letters I'd received from devotees, but still I felt that I didn't have a clear picture of what we were really doing there. However, Tamala Krsna Maharaja is always eager to talk about Krsna consciousness, and so he kindly agreed to tell me about what our movement has done in India during the past four years.

So, there in his hut in Vrndavana, the transcendental land where Lord Krsna Himself had appeared 5,000 years ago to display His transcendental pastimes, Maharaja and I spent several mornings simply talking about Krsna consciousness-and especially Krsna consciousness in India. Here is an excerpt from our conversations, which we taped to share with readers of BACK TO GODHEAD. We will print more in a future issue.

-Jayadvaita dasa, Editor, BACK TO GODHEAD

TAMALA KRSNA GOSVAMĪ: Srila Prabhupada has said that originally, after he took sannyasa [the renounced order of life], his program was that he wanted to preach to the Indian people; that was his intention. But although the original culture of India was a culture of God consciousness, the difficulty was that when Westerners took over India, they introduced their own materialistic values and impressed upon the Indians that the Indian spiritual culture was backwards, primitive, inferior. After years of Western domination, these ideas began to take hold, and the Indian people began to think that real progress was to be found in industrialization and Western materialism. Therefore Srila Prabhupada found that people were reluctant to again seriously take up the principles of spiritual life.

So Srila Prabhupada decided to go to America. He thought that if he could get some of the materialistic Westerners to appreciate the science of devotional service as found in the Vedic scriptures-and to actually become sincere devotees of Krsna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead-then the Indians would also realize the importance of the spiritual culture they had given up.

In India people are just starting to get enthusiastic about materialistic life, but in the West many people are frustrated with empty materialism. They are starting to realize that just to have bigger and bigger cities, more cars and more television sets will not necessarily make them happy. So Srila Prabhupada thought that if he could get some of these Westerners to become spiritually pure, they could inspire the Indian people and in this way set off a spiritual chain reaction.

JAYADVAITA DASA: So Srila Prabhupada sees great spiritual potential in India.

TAMALA KRSNA GOSVAMĪ: Yes. Srila Prabhupada always used to say, "My main business is in the West." But at the same time I could see that he was spending much of his time here in India. So I could understand that India must also be very important.