Monks in Manhattan review

Monks in Manhattan by Jnanagamya Dasa

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a remarkable, though flawed, book that deserves readers. What makes it remarkable is that it is one of only three novels about the Hare Krishna movement written by a devotee (current or former) in that movement. Even more remarkable, it is a love story. Devotees certainly fall in love, and non-devotees fall in love with devotees and thereby become devotees themselves, but telling a story like that is a challenge for any novelist.

Krishna devotees do not have sexual relations before marriage, and have a VERY limited amount of sex during marriage. At some point in that marriage they will have to split up and devote the remainder of their lives to perfecting their love for Krishna. I can attest that it is possible to want that kind of marriage as fervently as you might want the other kind, but how do you convince a reader of that?

It is clear early on that this novel won’t follow the normal romantic comedy plot (Boy meets Girl, Girl gets Boy into Pickle, etc.) and that there will be much discussion of Krishna along the way. Still, some of the conventions are followed. We get a “meet cute”, a heroine who is not who she pretends to be (and must keep this a secret from the hero), and a few other things.

I can appreciate this novel better than most because I was involved with the Hare Krishna movement in the late seventies. It was a much different movement back then from the one described in the novel (although I believe the novel describes the present day movement accurately). As a result of my own involvement, I have some observations on the novel, as well as some criticisms.

To start with an obvious criticism, the protagonist and the omniscient narrator (who are not the same person, as far as I can tell) both have an odd speech pattern where they make up nicknames for things. Manhattan becomes “Manhantinee”, human beings become “humus beans”, the subway is the “subworm”, museum becomes “mvsevm” and so on. You get a heavy dose of this at the beginning of the novel, but it eases up later on. The problem is, it’s annoying and adds nothing to the story. It just makes the earlier pages harder to read. Any editor would have fixed this.

Now some observations. There are many illustrations in the e-book, mostly head shots of devotees intended to represent characters in the story. This is kind of neat. Obviously a lot of people collaborated on this. It turns out that the story was intended to be the basis for a film, and that some trailers featuring these people were shot. They don't seem to be posted anywhere.

I learned things about the movement I didn’t learn in my almost three year involvement. For example, I learned that the Matchless Gifts storefront where the movement began still exists. (A few miles from my home is the very first franchised McDonald’s, preserved as a sort of shrine, so I guess it makes sense that Matchless Gifts should still be around). I also learned about the first Ratha Yatra parades in New York, which was interesting. I was involved in a couple of much later parades myself, in Chicago.

There are a lot of pop cultural references in the book, everything from Jane Austen novels to recent movies. When I was in the movement I had to give up novels, movies, and popular music. Some devotees made an exception for the movie Capricorn One, because it showed how the Moon landings could have been faked (which the more serious devotees believed at the time). The hero of this story reads and watches everything.

Another criticism: past life regression is an important part of the plot. While the author does explain that past life regression is not a mainstream Hare Krishna belief, it is used prominently in the story and I think it hurts it. According to Hindu scriptures people can sometimes remember previous lives but this is quite rare and doesn’t happen to ordinary people. A really great devotee might remember a past life, or even what role he had in the spiritual world, but in the novel the characters just get hypnotized and remember everything without effort. It would have been a better story if the characters had no proof of previous lives and had to at least sometimes think that their self denial might be pointless.

As C.S. Lewis has observed, the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. There is too much certainty in this story. Reading about the heroine’s conversion is a bit like reading about a sinner converting to Christianity after the Rapture has already taken place. The heroine becomes Krishna conscious way too fast.

To be fair, other than the two main characters nobody takes this past life regression stuff too seriously.

There is uncertainty, but it is, interestingly, on the part of the hero, who is already committed to Krishna Consciousness. To him this means a life of celibacy. He has the shaved head of a brahmachari (celibate student), even though he works at a regular job. He has experienced married life before and is not certain that trying it a second time wouldn’t lead him astray. On the other hand, he wants the heroine to be Krishna Conscious and isn’t certain she could do it without him.

I can relate to the hero’s predicament, indirectly, as my own experience was the opposite of his. I fell very hard for a mataji (female devotee), but was not sure I could ever be the kind of devotee she would want as a husband. She had already been in the movement six years and was serving on the altar, and I still had real doubts about the movement philosophy and my ability to follow all the rules. Being a devotee was a serious business back then. You had to be qualified to be married, which for men meant that before you could take a wife you had to prove you didn’t need one. In fact, in the Evanston, Illinois temple we had several married couples who lived apart, the husband in the men's ashram and the wife in the women's ashram. In the novel the question of who is qualified to be married doesn’t even come up.

If the heroine wasn't convinced about having a previous life, what kind of doubts might she have had? To begin with, while preaching to her the protagonist makes some arguments against Science that aren’t that great. In his place I would have argued that Science knows very little about consciousness, or even why it exists. Instead of doing that the author argues that scientists teach that the universe was created from a void. (The Bible teaches that. Science does not).

The scriptures of the Hare Krishna movement describe the universe as having a flat Earth, a mountain that the Sun goes behind at night, and much else that is doubtful. Devotees don’t actually believe that the Earth is flat, but they have to make a serious effort to read their own scriptures and not come to the conclusion that those scriptures describe a flat Earth. With all the reading that the heroine was supposed to be doing she would have run into this.

These same scriptures also describe allegedly historical events that about as likely to have happened as any in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They tell a compelling story, and the philosophy behind the story is attractive, but it isn’t history. Most devotees have to struggle with that at least a little.

These were the kinds of things that I struggled with myself.

Another observation: the hero spends surprisingly little time in the company of other devotees. (Towards the end of the book this changes). In the 1970’s I lived outside the temple and had a regular job, but I had to spend as much time as possible with the devotees in the temple. I visited the temple daily, both in the early morning hours and in the evenings. The protagonist practices Bhakti Yoga at home for the most part, and spends much time with his own thoughts, but we are supposed to think of him as being serious about his practice.

Yet another: the protagonist has a spiritual name, which must have been given to him by a guru as part of his first spiritual initiation. He also chants the Gayatri mantra, which is given by a guru at second initiation. We don’t hear anything about his guru. We do hear about Srila Prabhupada, the founder of the movement, but this character is not old enough to have met Srila Prabhupada (who died in 1978) and I would expect his own guru to be more important in his life than he is in the story. Instead of wondering if he’s doing the right thing, I would have expected him to ask his guru.

It would be plausible for him not to take his guru’s advice, or to deliberately not ask for that advice, but the devotees I knew would have at least considered asking and would have felt guilty about it if they had not. The protagonist uses his own judgment more often than a serious devotee probably would. His guru isn't even a character in the story. When I was just starting to get serious about Krishna Consciousness the guru I had hoped to receive initiation from (Tamal Krishna Goswami) loomed very large in my life.

Having said all that, the novel does give you a pretty good idea of what it is like to be a Hare Krishna. I enjoyed being a devotee while it lasted and this book gives you a taste of why people are willing to give up so much to have that kind of life.



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