Holy Cow Swami

Excerpt from The Charleston Gazette:... Behind the exquisite stained glass, underneath the Marie Antoinette chandeliers, on top of 300 tons of Italian marble, Swami Bhaktipada delivered the word of Krishna and allowed his devotees to break the law... Later, while under house arrest, he granted a series of interviews to...

Excerpt from The Charleston Gazette:

Behind the exquisite stained glass, underneath the Marie Antoinette chandeliers, on top of 300 tons of Italian marble, Swami Bhaktipada delivered the word of Krishna and allowed his devotees to break the law.

Later, while under house arrest, he granted a series of interviews to filmmaker Jacob Young, the WNPB filmmaker who made Jesco White famous as part of the Morgantown public televisions award-winning Different Drummer series.

He represents a mixture of divinity and madness, says Young. I kept thinking about Rasputin, This must be what Rasputin was like. Bhaktipada does have a real charisma. He does have some kind of personal power.

When Young set out in 1992 to make a documentary about the beleaguered leader of the palatial New Vrindaban Hare Krishna commune near Moundsville, he thought his film would be a one-hour story about religious persecution. After all, Marshall County officials once put the Swami on trial after the community’s cows died during a bad winter. “A lot of people’s cows froze, but a lot of people didn’t go on trial for animal cruelty”, Young said.

But by the time Bhaktipada pleaded guilty to racketeering in federal court in Martinsburg, Young had changed his mind. The evidence is overwhelming. Exactly what Bhaktipada did remains, in the filmmaker’s words, murky.

Young’s three-hour documentary, Holy Cow Swami, explores the rise and fall of the Hare Krishna leader…
- Mary Wade Burnside - Copyright 1996 Charleston Newspapers

Program copyright 1996 Jacob Young
DVD running time: 3 hours
Each of 3 one-hour programs is offered as a choice in the DVD Menu.