Brahma Kumaris

The Brahma Kumaris Ishwariya Vishwa Vidyalaya (Brahma Kumaris) is categorized three ways by scholars: as a millenarian New Religious Movement, as a new religion, and as a Hindu sect. By contrast, the Brahma Kumaris members (BKs) identify their community as a spiritual movement. They do not see themselves as belonging to a religion, but to a teaching institution (primarily in Asia and the Russian Federation) or a spiritual path (primarily in Europe, North America, and Australia) that has been established to restore human souls to their original purity, thereby restoring the world to its Golden Age origins. The community was formally established in 1936, as a trust comprising young women, but its formation can be traced back to 1932. The founder was a middle-aged successful jeweler, Lekhraj Koobchand Kripalani (b. 1884–d. 1969), residing in Hyderabad (in pre-Partition India). He was of the Bhaiband caste and a devotee in the Vallabhacharya sect. Kripalani was in his fifties when he had a series of visions and internal realizations of himself as the god Vishnu and understood time as a five-thousand-year, ever-repeating cycle that would change the course of his life. During that period, those in his neighborhood—primarily women and children whose husbands were on extensive travel for work—would gather at his home in satsang. These 200–300 early devotees became known as “Om Mandli” because of their habit of chanting “om” after Lekhraj’s readings of the Bhagavad Gita. Many had visionary and transcendental experiences, and the group drew on Hindu mythology and Vedanta philosophy to make sense of their experiences. Brahmacharya (living a celibate and virtuous life to realize God) was the bedrock of the movement. In c. 1950 the small local group of kin that characterized the early gathering left Pakistan and moved to Rajasthan, India. After having been a cloistered community in the 1930s and 1940s, BKs started teaching throughout India in the 1950s, making their first international impression at the World Religious Congress in Japan in 1954. In 1971 the organization established its first overseas center in London. The early 1980s was a period of rapid expansion and legitimization: hundreds of centers were established internationally, and the Brahma Kumaris established itself as a respected nongovernmental organization (NGO) at the United Nations, a position the organization has held since 1980. The Brahma Kumaris is active at the United Nations and has several long-term NGO representatives to the United Nations. The organization now has approximately one million adherents in around 130 countries.