With temples established on both American coasts, Prabhupada turned outward. Over the next decade he sent disciples to open centers on every inhabited continent and travelled constantly himself to visit them, installing deities, training leaders, and meeting anyone, from rock musicians to heads of government, who might help carry Krishna consciousness further. What follows is less a single narrative than a world tour, region by region, of a movement that grew almost as fast as one man could keep track of it.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| London temple opened | 1968, by three married couples sent from America |
| "Hare Krishna Mantra" single | August 1969, Apple Records, produced by George Harrison |
| First-day sales / UK chart peak | 70,000 copies sold the first day; reached No. 11 |
| Bhaktivedanta Manor | Donated 1973, a 17-acre estate near London formerly called Piggotts Manor |
| First visit to Kenya | 1970 |
| Visit to Moscow | 20-25 June 1971 |
| Bhaktivedanta Book Trust founded | 1972 |
A Temple in London #
In 1968, Prabhupada sent three married couples among his disciples to open a temple in London. Dressed in their robes and saris, they began chanting the Hare Krishna mantra regularly on the city's streets, and it worked exactly as it had in New York and San Francisco: passersby stopped, then newspapers noticed. Headlines like "Krishna Chant Startles London" and "Happiness is Hare Krishna" gave the fledgling London center a public profile within its first year that neither American temple had needed street theater to acquire.
George Harrison and the Radha Krishna Temple #
The London temple's most consequential connection was with George Harrison of the Beatles, who had already encountered the maha-mantra through Prabhupada's earlier New York recording. In August 1969, Harrison produced a single of the Hare Krishna mantra sung by the London disciples, who recorded under the name The Radha Krishna Temple, and released it on the Beatles' own Apple Records label. The single sold 70,000 copies on its first day, climbed to number 11 on the British charts, and put the disciples on the BBC's Top of the Pops four separate times. It also charted in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, as well as South Africa and Japan, an unlikely reach for a devotional chant with no melody written for radio.
Meeting the Beatles #
In December 1969, buoyed by the single's success, the London disciples met the Beatles in person, at the height of the group's fame. At Apple's own press conference, Harrison told reporters the Hare Krishna mantra was not a pop song at all but an ancient chant that awakened spiritual bliss in anyone who sang and heard it, an unusual thing for a rock star to say on the record in 1969. The following year, 1970, Harrison produced a further single with the disciples, "Govinda," and in May 1971 a full album, The Radha Krishna Temple. He also sponsored publication of Prabhupada's book Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, underwriting the printing of a full-color volume that neither the society nor an unknown publisher would otherwise have risked.
A Gift Called Bhaktivedanta Manor #
Harrison's involvement culminated in 1973, when he donated a 17-acre estate northwest of London, previously known as Piggotts Manor, to the society. Devotees converted the property into a temple and ashram and renamed it Bhaktivedanta Manor in Prabhupada's honor. It remains one of ISKCON's best-known centers outside India, a rural estate given by a rock musician to a swami he had never expected to meet when he first sang along to a record.
Across Continental Europe #
London became a base from which Prabhupada travelled repeatedly through Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands over the following years, leading kirtan, installing deities in new temples, and meeting scholars, religious leaders, and anyone else curious enough to seek him out. Each visit followed roughly the same pattern that had worked in New York and London: chanting in public, a lecture, a temple left a little stronger than he had found it, and then travel on to the next city.
First Journeys to Africa #
Prabhupada made his first visit to Kenya in 1970, the earliest of several. He found that the disciples he had sent there had been running spiritual programs mainly for the local Indian community, and he insisted the mission also reach out to Africans directly. On one occasion in Nairobi, scheduled to speak at an Indian Radha-Krishna temple in a largely African part of the city, he ordered the doors thrown open; the hall filled with local residents, and he held kirtan and spoke to them as he would to any other audience. He later visited Mauritius and South Africa as well, and sent disciples to open missions in Nigeria and Zambia.
Into the Soviet Union #
Prabhupada spent five days in Moscow, from 20 to 25 June 1971, marking the start of Krishna consciousness in the Soviet Union. Under a state that had no room for new religious movements, he managed to meet only two Soviet citizens during the visit, an academic named Grigory Kotovsky and a twenty-three-year-old Muscovite, Anatoly Pinyaev, introduced to him through the son of an Indian diplomat stationed in the city. Pinyaev went on to become the first Soviet Hare Krishna devotee, translating Prabhupada's Bhagavad-gita into Russian and distributing hand-copied editions underground, work that later cost him years of forced confinement in a Soviet psychiatric hospital.
Mayapur and Vrindavan #
From 1970 onward, Prabhupada directed much of his personal attention back toward India, arriving with a party of Western sannyasis and other disciples and spending much of the next seven years establishing temples in Bombay, Hyderabad, and elsewhere. Two centers mattered most: Mayapur, in West Bengal, the birthplace of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, where he built what would become ISKCON's world headquarters, and Vrindavan, where he established the Krishna-Balaram Mandir. Indians accustomed to seeing their own culture imitate the West found the reverse now happening on Indian soil, American and European monks in robes, and the sight made a strong impression well beyond the society's own membership.
The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust #
In 1972, Prabhupada founded the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust to manage the publication and worldwide distribution of his own writings. The Trust gave the movement, for the first time, a stable institutional means of keeping his books in print at the pace his own output demanded, and it remains the publisher of record for everything he wrote.
Circling the Globe #
By his own final decade, Prabhupada was circling the world more than a dozen times, moving almost without pause between the temples he had founded and the ones he still meant to found. The personal side of that relentless schedule is easier to see in his conversations and letters than in any list of cities visited, but the list itself, London, Nairobi, Moscow, Mayapur, and dozens of places between, gives some sense of what twelve years of continuous travel actually looked like for a man in his seventies.
