Author: Mahamaya Dasi
Publisher: Holy Cow Books, Alachua, 2000

I met Mahamaya Dasi in 1974, six months before she went to India and began the adventures she describes in the second half of this, her new book. We both worked at ISKCON Press, the publishing house of the Hare Krsna movement, in Brooklyn, New York. Twenty-five years later she asked me to be her literary 'back-seat driver' - to edit two books she had written about her inspiring experiences in India: a short diary called Ganga Safari and her new book, Srila Prabhupada Is Coming!

Mahamaya lived in India more or less full-time from early 1975 to mid-1977. In those years, Srila Prabhupada, the founder-acarya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (and a world traveller from 1965 to 1977), often stayed in India, especially Mayapura, West Bengal - the upcoming world headquarters of the Hare Krsna movement. Whenever he stayed in Mayapura, his sister visited him for long periods. Mahamaya usually took care of 'Pisima' (meaning 'auntie' or 'the father's sister'), as she was known to the devotees there. Mahamaya and Pisima often attended Srila Prabhupada's evening meetings with devotees and guests. Mahamaya later travelled with Srila Prabhupada and his disciples to Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Vrndavana and Bombay.

Mahamaya describes those two intense yet satisfying years in India through more than a hundred detailed anecdotes. Readers familiar with any books written by ladies of the British Raj in India will probably find similarities between their stories of acculturation and Mahamaya's.

Srila Prabhupada Is Coming! is the first memoir about Srila Prabhupada published by one of his female disciples. (According to Mahamaya, who manages the database of Srila Prabhupada's disciples, only twenty-eight percent of these were women) Previously, biographies about Srila Prabhupada were histories not 'her stories'. We now have a rewarding book about him from the viewpoint of a woman in the Hare Krsna movement, and Mahamaya's authentic accounts of the early days of ISKCON will certainly have historical value.

Women's issues in the Hare Krsna movement were less pronounced in the 1970s than they are today; and Mahamaya provides a low-key treatment of this subject, limiting her voice to that earlier time. She also outlines some of the decisions and factors that defined the Western devotee women's transformation into conservative Vedic ladies and reveals how she personally aspired for cultured relationships, becoming tired of 'being used by non-devotee men'.

Mahamaya's book opens with a description of her early life - how she grew up in a Jewish family in a New York suburb, did well in school, started college, got married, became a hippie, and finally left her husband in 1971 to join the Hare Krsna movement in Boston. She writes this section as a regular narrative, not through anecdotes. The pictures she presents of mundane American life can amuse.

Once Mahamaya became a devotee, she encountered Srila Prabhupada. She gained experience by serving in nine American temples and going out on the Transcendental Road Show. After a failed marriage to another devotee, she returned to New York (where I met her) and from there went to India.

Mahamaya's husband of twenty-two years, Jnanagamya Dasa, has written the introduction to this book, and Nitya-trpta Dasi, a talented photographer and graphic artist, has designed the covers, endpapers and colour photo section, which includes two dozen pictures.

Tattvavit Dasa