The Brahma Kumaris and the Arya Samaj

I learnt something new which was further enlightening about Lekhraj Kirpalani's mentality ...

There are 9 religions originally mentioned in the BK "Knowledge" ... they are; the Suryavanshi (Sun Dynasty), Chandravanshi (Moon Dynasty), Islamic, Buddhist, Christian, Sanyas, Muslim, Sikh ... and Arya Samaj.

Notice, no Jews ... he called them Islam (not as absurd as it sounds, it's an Islamic view probably representative of a common view in Pakistan at the time).

But why Arya Samaj?

The Arya Samaj is a vigorous Hindu reform movement founded in 1875 by one Swami Dayananda Sarasvati (died 1883) in Mumbai.

I guess the simple answer why is because they were active in the little world of Karachi that for the BKs was the whole or centre of the world and therefore on his mind. Even moreso, the Arya Samaj took a stand against the Om Mandli.

I am thinking this is a significant detail and influential in the development of the BKs. The others being Swami Vaswani's mission (who also took a stand against Lekhraj Kirpalani and the Om Mandli), Lekhraj Kirpalani's wife's connection with the Vallabacharya sect, the Sadhu Lekhraj Kirpalani paid a fortune to be initiated into some spiritual/hypnotic/Siddhi (?) practise ... and possibly the mysterious elder partner who left or was pushed out of the BKs early and whom the PBKs consider to be the original medium and the BKs have mixed up with Lekhraj Kirpalani..

From The Story of the Sindh ...

The Om Mandali attracted mostly women --- and that too only those belonging to the Bhaibund business community of Hyderabad. The unmarried among them refused to marry; and the married ones gave it in writing to their husbands that the latter were free to re-marry. Meanwhile many stories --- ranging from mesmerism to merriment --- spread about the Om Mandali. Public organisations such as the Congress and the Arya Samaj denounced the Om Mandali as disturber of family peace. And Dada Lekhraj in turn denounced the Congress as "Kansa''. Under pressure of Hindu public opinion, the Sindh government reluctantly banned the Om Mandali, which went to court and had the ban order quashed.

Arya Samaj Core Beliefs

The belief in only One Supreme Almighty or creator known by name AUM
Infallible Authority of Vedas,
Rejection of idol worship & other forms of Hypocrisy,
Equality of all human beings.
Empowerment of Women

Students were not allowed to perform traditional idol worship at the school, and were instead expected to perform sandhya (a form of meditative prayer) and a fire ritual (yugya) around the time of sunset and sunrise ... all meals, lodging, clothing and books were given to the students free of charge ... study was opened to non-Brahmins. Dayananda, after having visited Calcutta, began lecturing in Hindi instead of Sanskrit allowing him to attract increasingly larger following.

Dayananda Sarasvati rejected all later accretions to the Vedas as degenerate ... the Arya Samaj has always had its largest following in Western and northern India. It ... opposes worship of murtis (images), animal sacrifice, shraddha (rituals on behalf of ancestors), basing caste upon birth rather than upon merit, untouchability, child marriage, pilgrimages, priestly craft, and temple offerings.

It has worked to further female education and intercaste marriage; has built missions, orphanages, and homes for widows; has established a network of schools and colleges; and has undertaken famine relief and medical work. From its beginning it was an important factor in the growth of Indian nationalism. It has been criticized, however, as overly dogmatic and militant and as having exhibited an aggressive intolerance toward both Christianity and Islam.

Lekhraj Kirpalani was anti-Indian nationalism/independence accusing Congress and Gandhi of being traitors (the later ignoring his invitation to join the Om Mandli) and sucking up to the British Viceroy and royalty instead.

Another astonishing "bad bet" for "God" to make that the BKs have since swept under the carpet and done a volte-face on.

Very interesting piece of research ex-l. Thank you

why Arya Samaj?
.....
I guess the simple answer why is because they were active in the little world of Karachi that for the BKs was the whole or centre of the world and therefore on his mind. Even moreso, the Arya Samaj took a stand against the Om Mandli.

My local cafe owner is a migrant from Cyprus, a Greek Cypriot. We once got onto discussing religion. He said that when he was young, in his "little world” there were only two religions anyone had heard of, the Christian and the Turk (what they called ”Greek Orthodox” or ”Muslim” because in that little world all Christians were Greek Orthodox and all Muslims were Turks). But later, in the 1960s, a third religion appeared which the G.O. church actively denounced, the Jehovah’s Witnesses!

They were considered worse than the Roman Catholics (whom every G.O. already knew were heretics, and anyway, were far away out of sight and out of mind) or the Turks (who were obviously not Christian) because the JW went door-to-door converting people to their heretical Christian views with some success, i.e. they gave attention to anyone who gave them the time of day, whereas the established church did nothing much for the congregation.

The Arya Samaj were the competition to the other, even newer kids on the block, the Om Mandli. Which one is the equivalent of the JWs and which one is equivalent of say, the Mormons?

[Arya Samaj students] ... were instead expected to perform sandhya (a form of meditative prayer) and a fire ritual (yugya) around the time of sunset and sunrise ...

The word Sandhya literally means twilight - so it refers to the time of the practice rather than the practice itself (a bit like ‘matins’).

The term is used in Buddhism to describe the articulated (verbal) teachings as ”Sandhya Bahasa” or "twilight language", i.e. not to be taken literally but to be understood in context, or metaphorically, as appropriate. No statement is absolute black or white. One must read between the lines - but ”between the lines” can only be done after you can read 'the lines' themselves and understand them. Like Dogen’s ”finger pointing at the moon” - do not get stuck looking at the finger - you'll miss ”the point” (boom tish) .

One thing that constant amazes me is how narcissistic, self-centred and small the BKs' world view was ... and to understand it, we have to go right back to their roots, put ourselves in their shoes and see the world as they saw it.

The white sari of today was not native to the Bhaiband Sindis. It, again, was borrowed from Ganhi's Indian nationalists. The women were known as "the one eyed ones" as traditionally, when they went out, they covered themselves from head to toe like Muslims do with only one eye left showing. They were individuals who only saw the world from behind a veil or shutters of a house and who were not educated about the world either. Except for the drama or boredom of their cloistered homes, the rest of the world consisted of, what, a visit to a temple and singing bhajans.

In comparison to the Om Mandli - which quickly retreated to its own cloister and night time visits to dance at Clifton beech by the moon light, both Saddhu Vaswani and the Arya Samaj did start education and vocational training for females.

Only a short time before the British arrived and built their palaces and markets, Karachi especially was mostly fairly poor housing in a mostly deserted region. Life was the village, a days walk out was death, certainly the women did not travel. And soon this was their DNA, never mind psychology. That and various survival modes to survive various relatively frequent invasions.

Now image such a mentality where one man, without any or rejecting any other peer and equal to challenge him, returns like a god from another dimension of unbelievable power, wealth, historic culture and organisation (Calcutta was the seat of British power in the East); and then elects himself to be god of 300 such bored and unstimulated women and their children.

(And note, basically all the male children of the Om Mandli left leaving only the optionless, unmarriable, unskilled and utterly dependent BK girls).

Now even despite all that, they and Lekhraj Kirpalani genuinely believed they were the centre of the world ... their petty debacles were blown up to be of global significance ... even, literally, the cause of WWII. A self-centre, grandiose indulgence that remains their style today. It's "global ... Godly ... unlimited" everything. And here we address god Lekhraj Kirpalani's religious world view ...

In real world terms, without wishing to voice disrespect, the Arya Samaj is a flea bite size on the philosophical ass of humanity. Yet, to Lekhraj Kirpalani, it was one of the 9 "seed religions" of the world ... whilst his societal peers - Gandhi, Congress, his bhaiband caste and its Mukhi leaders - are reduced to being literally comic book "devils" (Ravan and Kans etc) or carrion beasts (Congress crow race).

And this was the rest of the world view that the mesmeric, charismatic Lekhraj Kirpalani drummed into the narrow, short sighted, enamoured minds like Janki - who were refused all other stimuli like books, newspapers, movies whilst being held dependent on their existence by agreeing with him and conforming to his world view.

Do the current round of revised Sakar Murlis still refer to the Arya Samaj as frequently as they used to?

I cannot say. I suppose they have been edited out for the sake of political correctness but the PBKs still work to old 1970s versions and the references are all there.

It's just bizarre for me how and why such references entered into the stream of consciousness ramble the Sakar Murlis were, and how no one questioned its reason or relevance. I doubt a fraction of the so called teachers or in-charges did.

Of course, for followers there is just so much *stuff* to catch up with, service to do, efforts to make ... physical and mental exhaustion ... and such a desire to be accepted by conforming that asking why just does not come into question. In a sense it is all proof that religion just needs a certain amount of *some* kind of mythic shit to serve up ... but that it does not really matter what.

And all the leadership needs to do is deflect from showing they don't understand it either in order to sustain their mysterious authority.

I suspect we will find that the spat between the Arya Samaj in Karachi and the Om Mandli probably just boils down to bitterness at Lekhraj Kirpalani stealing someone's wife or daughter, a conflict between near blood relatives, and yet it is exaggerated into a huge *global* significance.

The Arya Samaj is *not* a globally significant religion. There are 100s of far more significant religious movements ... and yet because the uneducated Lekhraj Kirpalani did not know of them, and they did not exist in front of his nose, it is as if they did not exist at all.

Even Karachi, which was the world to them, was just a small dusty fishing village of 10,000 until the mid-19th century when the British conquered Sindh and developed it into a market city to support its army and the army's campaigns through the region and into Afghanistan ... perhaps the root of his "Shiv-Shakti Army" and all the drilling and marching stuff they got up to? It was the British colonialists who put in sanitation and transportation, gravel paved streets, proper drains, street sweepers, and a network of trams and markets etc.

Map, here (you can see how central the army base is and Clifton where they went dancing at night); photos, here (see also the churches and imagine the impact they must have had).

I am trying to grasp the mental lens through which Lekhraj Kirpalani saw the world, a framework within which the BKs largely still operate. There seem to be vast blind areas with pinpricks of extreme myopia or fixation behind which is an a hugely exaggerated sense of self-importance, or tendency to exaggerate.

What do we know of his early childhood experiences?

Karachi around the time of Lekhraj Kirpalani's birth

Hello,

My name is Roy.

I apologise for butting in on this thread. I have only just joined this forum. Read plenty of forums before but never registered with one. So, bit of a newby.

I am interested in communicating with ex-l. I saw you started this thread and took it as an opportunity to do so, couldn't work out using phone browser how to send PM.

I read with great interest and several times a rather long thread you were very much involved with last year concerning EH of the RA. Those are the initials and you should know what I am on about. Don't want to put any names in public. Could totally see what you were saying and only stumbled across it because I have someone very close to me getting deep into this organisation and my instincts based on all I know are giving me some concern.

If you could be as good to contact me, just need a little background knowledge- help- advice? I would be very grateful.

Thanks.