Sometime in 1993 in Dubai, my good friend Ranganathan was driving me back after an evening lecture program when he started telling me about his childhood in a traditional Śrī Vaiṣṇava village in South India. Encouraged by my interest, he went on talking even after we reached my apartment, and it was well after midnight before I finally got out of the car. I lay down to rest thinking of what a pleasing life these people had led, and how even now people could live like this, if they would simply agree to.

My memory wandered over the years I had spent in India and Bangladesh. In the course of preaching Kṛṣṇa consciousness, I had travelled throughout the Indian subcontinent and experienced the varieties of Hindu culture prominent in each area.

Having stayed in the homes of many pious and cultured Hindus, I had gradually come to learn something about what real culture means. I thought of the many cultured people I knew throughout the Indian subcontinent, living representatives of a dying way of life. I resolved to make a book based on interviews with such people, to try to convey a feeling of what life in the old India was like, and what it could and should be like even now. I started thinking deeply on where man had gone wrong in his quest for technological development, what traditional societies had that we now lack, and what the actual criteria of civilization should be.

A principal goal of enlightened civilization is to elevate its members to their ultimate capacity. A truly advanced society does not strive simply for the ephemeral requirements of eating, sleeping, mating, and defending, for even the animals do that. Real human civilization begins with philosophical inquiry into the nature of God, the universe, and the ontological position of the living beings.

Therefore, spiritually oriented civilizations throughout the world practiced a realistic approach to life that catered to all aspects of the individual–physical, mental, intellectual, and spiritual–while stressing the responsibility of each person to the rest of society. And as man has to live with, and by, the mercy of nature, traditional land-based cultures stressed respect to all life and co-operation with nature. They sought to take from nature only as needed, and to give back proportionately as they took out.

In traditional societies, man fulfilled his needs in a simple and eco-friendly way. Material requirements were fulfilled without undue struggle. There were no industrial complexes producing endless varieties of unnecessary accessories to an artificial way of life. Nor were there huge shopping plazas for touting such unwanted goods. Nor was there an advertising industry goading the public into buying things they did not need. The economic system was based on need, not greed. Trade was limited, and mostly by barter: “I give you something you need; you give me something I need.” There were no stocks or shares, market crashes, currency speculation, budget balancing, inflation, mass unemployment or strikes.

Life’s basic necessities – food, clothing, housing materials and fuel – were available from the land. Cotton was spun at home. Every village would have a potter to make vessels for cooking. Larger villages would have a blacksmith, who would make simple farming and cooking utensils, razors (one razor would last a man for life), and other such items using either non-locally produced or recycled metal. Rope and string were produced locally from fibers of plants such as coconut, jute, and flax. Water was available from rivers, wells, and ponds. There was no need for waterworks, sewage systems, water closets or taps. Nor was there a need for electricity, for people were accustomed to living without complex machines. Lamps burning home-produced vegetable oil supplied light. The heat of summer would be tolerated, with bamboo hand fans giving a little relief. Winter would be met with extra blankets and wood fires. Medicines, cosmetics, and dyes were made at home from plants. There was no need for furniture, for people would sit, eat, cook, study and sleep on the floor.

Those leading such pristine lives tended to be innocent and unpretentious. They didn’t have strong negative emotions. Bitterness, depression, and the like were practically unknown. People tended to be satisfied with what they had and considered advancement not in terms of surrounding oneself with material possessions but in becoming detached from such objects. Life based on these values was simple, natural, and pleasing and tended to foster good qualities such as honesty, respect for others, kindness, and so on.

Of course, simply living in the country does not automatically bring peace of mind and spiritual wisdom. Some villagers are little more spiritually enlightened than the dogs and buffaloes they live among. And city dwellers who try to “get away from it all” by moving to the country simply bring their passion and problems with them. After all, the very nature of the material world is that it is miserable. Either in the town or the village, human life without God consciousness is little better than that of the animals.

But the simple agrarian life certainly lends itself to God realization more naturally than the complex urban society of today.  Everything in nature speaks of God for those with the eyes to see it. Therefore, sages traditionally preferred to live far from the hubbub of urban life. Breathing fresh air and drinking pure water, they could peacefully meditate upon God as the cause and upholder of nature.

But industrialized man has strayed far from such innocent existence. Modern city life is highly artificial, being far removed from its source of sustenance. City dwellers, even if of theistic bent, tend to have very little idea about the relationship between man, God, and nature. They think food comes from a shop, light from a switch, and health from a pill. Multinational corporations rape mother earth, exploit her resources, stick people in factories and sell all kinds of junk to them. Industrialization and consumerism influence people to become selfish, ignorant, and grossly materialistic. Secular education teaches man to consider himself master of his own destiny, and nature an adjunct to “progress”—a beast to be hacked and tortured into submission.

For all their advancement and economic development, modern city dwellers cannot even get decent drinking water, what to speak of peace and contentment. In modern cities, drinking water is often bought, because the tap water is repeatedly recycled sewage mixed with chemicals. Even then, bottled mineral water has no taste or vigor like fresh river water or well water.

People in big cities drive out to the country on weekends just to breathe some fresh air, whereas in the village, air means fresh air. What a nasty civilization, that crowds people into unhealthy, crime-ridden cities, has them work in horrible, dangerous factories, and provides them with poisonous air and food.

City dwellers do not have to walk a lot, carry water, or work in the fields, and tend to look down upon villagers as backward and primitive. But for all their modern conveniences, city folk have to exercise artificially, or otherwise end up with diseases like diabetes and piles.

Such artificial living makes for artificial people, who may smile on the outside but are hollow within. The modern city dweller is constantly overstimulated with a bombardment of information, advertisements and so-called entertainment. But his heart remains spiritually and emotionally empty. Although modern man can hardly envisage life without TVs, cars and innumerable diversions, this plethora of gadgets is a meager substitute for peace of mind.

Most villagers in the Third World still rise early, go to work in the fields, and hardly ever go far from home.  Despite their apparent poverty, they are often more content than others who have more money than they need. They tend to be better mentally balanced than those who live life in the fast lane, divorced from the simple pleasures of stable family life and mutual sharing.

But village life throughout the world is under threat. The demands of consumer society are fast standardizing the planet into one vast urbanized megacomplex. Traditional cultures and values are being destroyed and people reduced to screws in a massive economic machine. The charm has even been removed from agriculture; now it is agribusiness. Sanity is being civilized out of existence.

Modern life is a ridiculously over-hyped grovel for sense gratification. Mindlessly, people dedicate themselves to the pursuit of wealth, luxury, power, and sexual gratification, although these have never brought anyone satisfaction. Lust, greed and anger are promoted as desirable and indeed indispensable to the modern man and woman. There is constant pressure to live up to the foolish ideals imposed by the entertainment and advertising industries. Consciously or unconsciously, people try to cut profiles shaped in a movie studio. They do not know their own identity because they are too busy trying to be someone else. They are anxious to “get ahead” by any means. Unfortunately, they do not know where they are getting ahead to.

In the Bhagavad-gītā, Lord Kṛṣṇa describes lust, greed, and anger as the three gateways to hell. Modern men do not like to believe in hell, but they are busy creating it on earth. Their habits are unregulated, imbalanced, unhealthy, and sinful. Their bellies are filled with junk food and animal corpses. People cannot trust even their spouses, children, or parents. Their values are perverted. They are proud of their big buildings and fast cars, but their minds are so agitated that they need a pill to go to sleep. The “advancement” they are so proud of is simply a ploy to make them work like beasts for the sake of sense enjoyment. Gorging on flesh and becoming intoxicated are considered normal by modern “civilized” man. People live in a fantasy world of sex, violence, and nonsensical sports. Psychosis, neurosis, child abuse, homosexuality, divorce, and the threat of nuclear holocaust are all part of everyday life.

Genuine spiritual culture, or the quest for God, is almost completely absent in modern society. The materialistic world view is so deeply embedded that the cultivation of transcendental knowledge is not only not encouraged, but is hardly even thought about, even by leading intellectuals. The slaughter of millions of animals is considered so normal and acceptable that it continues year after year without protest. Governments not only sanction, but support divorce, contraception, abortion, and homosexuality. The godless society is so fallen in every aspect that many books could be written describing its moral decrepitude. Succinctly, one word describes it all: insanity.

As noted by Sir Arnold Toynbee, the late English historian: “The cause (of the world’s malady) is spiritual. We are suffering from having sold our souls to the pursuit of an objective which is both spiritually wrong and practically unattainable. We have to reconsider our objective and change it, and until we do this, we shall not have peace either amongst ourselves or within each of us”.

Many books have been written about the harm man has inflicted on himself and other living beings in the name of progress. The more enlightened victims cum participants in this catastrophe are looking for solutions to the mess man has landed himself in as well as the planet. Traditional societies and values, once rejected as primitive and useless, are again being reexamined, at least by some.

People talk of going back to nature without knowing that most of the world never left it. For instance, in America, if someone drives a bullock cart into town, he is likely to be photographed for the local newspaper. He would probably need police permission to bring bulls into an urban area. Yet in most areas of India bull power is still as common as that nasty, noisy, only seemingly better replacement called the tractor.

The original culture of India is Vedic (i.e., based on the Vedic literature). The Vedas present a vast body of knowledge, covering all manner of subjects from astronomy and mathematics to architecture, economics, and even the proper uses of warfare and sex. The essence of Vedic culture is the quest for freedom from birth and death, based on profound metaphysical philosophy and culminating in highly developed love of God. In India, religion was never compartmentalized as one aspect of life. It was life. Everything in life was ultimately directed towards a transcendental goal. Although a religious ethos is also present elsewhere in the world, the degree to which it has been developed in India is outstanding.

Unfortunately, the past few centuries have seen the Vedic legacy become infiltrated by so many non-Vedic ideas.  The original Vedic culture has been gradually modified, diluted, and contaminated in various ways, until it has become what is now known as Hinduism. Still, whatever real culture remains in India is valuable and worth learning from.

For even today, bits and pieces of traditional India still survive. See the Saurashtrian cowherd man leaning on his ornamental wooden stick, his feet adorned with curled-up ornately designed shoes, his face with a similarly curled-up mustache and his head covered with fifty meters of ribboned white cloth, intricately wrapped as a huge turban. And see his son, calling each cow of his herd by name, and playing his flute to gather them. Meet a small band of pilgrims walking from one holy place to another, on perhaps a thousand-kilometer journey to visit places of God, singing bhajanas as they walk, taking provisions from pious people along the way and stopping on the path at midday to cook chapatis in the open air on a fire made from twigs and leaves. Then there are groups of village women walking several kilometers to the nearest well or river, their brass water pots stacked one on top of another on their heads, with colorful clothing reflecting the early morning sun, their thick silver anklets just visible under their saris, their bracelets jostling up and down as they march along, singing to Kṛṣṇa with guileless simplicity.

However, the essence of Indian culture goes far deeper than its external manifestations. It is based on a subtle spiritual philosophy that is impenetrable to those not prepared to enter its intricacies. The difficulty in comprehension is compounded by the negative propaganda that Western scholars have inflicted upon Indian culture and religion for over two hundred years.

The Europeans have attempted to justify their forceful domination of India, which they called “civilizing the natives,” by labeling her great heritage as superstition. An example is found in Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies by Abbe Dubois, a French missionary who lived in South India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  Dubois minutely observed and recorded the intricacies of life in India, and his 770-page volume is so interesting that it is still in print. Dubois, however, was a bigot who saw only with the eye, not the heart. He mixed intimately with the people, yet inwardly held them in utter disdain. He considered the sole hope for their improvement to lie not merely in conversion to Christianity, but in wholesale Westernization and rejection of their tradition.

Sturdy Christian that he was, Dubois could have hardly foreseen Western man’s becoming more heathen than the pagans he sought to civilize. Yet Western man is no less enthusiastic to benevolently impose his latest fetish on the uncivilized peoples in the form of science and technology.

Until recently, it was widely believed that scientific progress would usher in paradise. A book published in 1965 by the United States Information Service declared: “In the short space since she won independence, India has taken huge strides toward assuring the blessings of modern life for her citizens. In health, education, industry and development, India is forging ahead. The changes are coming and will come to India’s villages, too—not to destroy the peace and dignity of rural life, but to enhance it with more security, more of the good things of the world. Change is beginning to come. In the villages, hope shines through.”

Nowadays, however, at least some in the West are realizing the mistake of foisting their economy and values on the so-called undeveloped world. As man gropes for alternatives to the soul-killing civilization, the significance of Indian culture is emerging from under the mud the West sought to bury it in. Westerners themselves are taking leading roles in promoting this oldest of human civilizations.

Śrīla Prabhupāda, the Founder-Ācārya of ISKCON and the greatest exponent of Vedic culture in the modern age, was keenly aware of the discrepancies in human society and strived to establish Vedic culture as a blueprint for reviving spiritual values throughout the world:

“Vedic culture is perfect for human society, perfect culture. You have to adopt it. Then you become happy. The whole human society becomes happy, never mind where it is. It is a science, how to live just like human beings, not like cats and dogs. That is Vedic culture. Everyone is happy. Still, those who are following Vedic principles are happier than others.

“Because it is the society of śūdras everywhere, there is confusion. No brain. Simply ‘want, want, want, want, want.’ And in brahminical culture, you will find even a very poor brāhmaṇa – no source of income, no fixation of foodstuff even – he is happy. He is happy by his knowledge. He’ll satisfy himself. If he does not get his food, then he will think that ‘This day Kṛṣṇa desired that I should not have my food. Oh, it is Kṛṣṇa’s pleasure. It is Kṛṣṇa’s mercy.’

“We are just trying to introduce the real civilization. Actually, there is no civilization at the present moment.  They are simply cats and dogs fighting one another. This is not civilization. Atheists and demons are predominating. And because they have got big, big skyscraper buildings and many motorcars, India has become victimized: ‘Oh, without this motorcar and without this skyscraper building, we are condemned.’ So, they are trying to imitate. They have forgotten their own culture, the best culture, Vedic culture. So, this is the first time that we are trying to conquer the demonic culture with this Vedic culture. This is the first time. So, it is very pleasing that you have joined this movement. If you want to make the human society happy, give them this culture of Kṛṣṇa consciousness.”

During my travels in India, I was often amazed at how high class some of the families I stayed with were.  Having been brought up as an uncouth mleccha, I sometimes felt embarrassed to be among such elevated people, especially as they respected and served us as sādhus. They were naturally well-behaved and cultured, yet humble, without artificial sophistication or snobbishness. Their family life was ordered and content, to a degree I had never seen in the West.

For example, the Indian children obeyed their parents without question. I have more than once stayed as the guest of prosperous businessmen who, although they had grandchildren, were unhesitatingly and ungrudgingly obedient to their fathers.

I occasionally visited a Sanskrit professor who had mentored thousands of students during his long career.  Although widely known and highly respected throughout Orissa, he would insist on bowing down before me as a monk (sannyāsī), despite my attempts to stop him. And he would try to stop me from returning his obeisances, although he was clearly pleased that I had imbibed the impulse to do so. My family background and previous activities were low class and abominable, particularly compared to his. I could speak but a few words of Sanskrit and was young enough to be his son, yet he saw the positive: “Whatever his past may be, he is a sannyāsī and therefore worshipable. He has renounced all prospects of material enjoyment to serve Śrī Hari. For all my learning, I am a householder, bound up in the material world. I must bow down.”

Moving among such people gave me an inside perspective on Indian civilization and brought it to life for me.  Indian culture was for me no longer a theory in a book, quaint and antiquated customs for the wistful and for anthropologists. I came to develop an appreciation of the value of true human culture, and to understand that even the high philosophical ideals I was professing and practicing were incomplete without culture.

In taking a look at life the way it was not so long ago in India before modernization, we find a more or less contented people with no serious social or psychological problems. Life was going on in basically the same way it had for thousands of years. Most importantly, we find a society with knowledge of the soul and God at the base of its moral codes, family ideals and educational values.

Śrīla Prabhupāda often stressed that all necessities of life could be had by living on the land. He wanted ideal farming communities to be established all over the planet. Such communities would have Kṛṣṇa consciousness as their basis, dependence on the land, the cows and Kṛṣṇa as the means of sustenance, simple living and high thinking as their motto, and Vedic culture as their way of life.

This article was originally published as the introduction to Glimpses of Traditional Indian Life.