ABSTRACT
Hindu–Christian relations have been profoundly influenced by the legacy of European colonialism in India and by the growth of transnational Hindu organizations in historically Christian-majority regions. This chapter addresses one confluence of these major trends. ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, is a transnational organization founded in New York in 1966 by the Calcutta-born A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami. Its institutional structures and interreligious interactions cannot be understood apart from the impacts of colonial knowledge politics in twentieth-century India, including Christian missionary discourses, while its transnational character was also shaped by the rise of globalized Hindu spirituality in the US. An analysis of these forces provides context to discourses about the Christian “other” developed in this Hindu organization. Discrete “acts” in ISKCON’s relation to Christianity—that I identify as common cause, condescending comparison, and shared devotional interlocution—contest two-dimensional associations that undergird forms of religio-ethnic nationalism in India and the US.
