Swami Prabhupada: bhakti in a New York storefront

The Jaladuta

In 1965, with three volumes printed and his guru's instruction unfulfilled, he simply went. The freighter Jaladuta carried him on a 35-day passage to America, landing at Boston before he continued to New York. He had no organisation, no money, and no followers.

A poet, a park, and a storefront

What he had was the chant — and an unlikely early ally. The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg befriended the elderly swami and suggested Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side as a place to hold kirtan. On 9 October 1966, Ginsberg joined Prabhupada for a now-famous public chant there; the next day's New York Times coverage was, Prabhupada felt, the real starting point of his mission. Ginsberg lent money, materials and his considerable reputation, and students rented Prabhupada a small storefront at 26 Second Avenue — his first temple.

Founding ISKCON

In July 1966 he formally incorporated the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), stating its purpose as "checking the imbalance of values in the world." The timing was perfect: the chant, the vegetarianism, the saffron robes and the rejection of materialism caught the rising counterculture, and the movement spread with astonishing speed to San Francisco, London and across Europe.

The Beatle and the manor

Its most famous convert was George Harrison, who carried the Hare Krishna mantra into the global charts with "My Sweet Lord," produced and funded the devotees' own hit single, and paid to print Prabhupada's book on Krishna. In February 1973 Harrison donated a country estate outside London — Bhaktivedanta Manor — to the movement, which remains its English headquarters. On his deathbed in 1977, Prabhupada took the ring from his finger and asked that it be given to George.

Circling the world

Through it all Prabhupada travelled relentlessly. In the last decade of his life he circled the globe fourteen times, lecturing and tending his disciples, and personally established more than a hundred temples, ashrams, farm communities and gurukula schools, initiating close to five thousand Western disciples — an organisational feat almost without parallel in the history of modern religion.

A library for the West

He never stopped translating, and he believed the books mattered most of all. "To distribute books is our most important activity," he insisted, founding the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust to publish them. His annotated Bhagavad-Gita As It Is became one of the most widely distributed editions of the text in the world, and the Trust he created has since placed over half a billion books into readers' hands across continents and languages.

The cargo-ship missionary

ISKCON today runs temples, vegetarian restaurants and one of the largest free-meal programmes on earth, and the chant Prabhupada brought to a New York park is now a familiar sound from Western high streets to Indian airports. It is a staggering return on a one-way ticket bought by an elderly man with seven dollars and a box of books. Of all the masters who crossed the ocean, none crossed it more literally — by cargo ship, at sixty-nine, against every odd — than the founder of the Hare Krishna movement.