When Hinduism was put on Trial: The Case of Mrs. Sara Bull

After Swami Vivekananda delivered his now famous speech at World's Parliament of Religions in 1893, he would go on to found the Vedanta Society in America, establishing centers in New York City, Washington D.C., Chicago, and San Francisco. Vedanta quickly gained a following among the urban elite, particularly well-heeled women. The reasons for Vedanta's sudden success were manifold. One cannot discount the importance of Vivekananda's personal charisma, which helped draw in a dedicated set of volunteers and devotees who would help establish and grow chapters across the country. More importantly, however, Vivekananda did not present Vedanta as a distinctly "Indian religion", but rather a universal one.

Vivekananda adapted the teachings of his guru Sri Ramakrishna to the prevailing religious climate, borrowing extensively from the wave of American metaphysical religions that had emerged in the decades prior to his arrival. His theory of yoga, far from being a straightforward translation of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, was a modern construct that reflected Vivekananda's disparate influences, both east and west. And like Raja Rammohan Roy before him, Vivekananda attracted attention by attacking Christianity head-on. Vedanta was not just an exotic alternative to Christianity, but in fact a rival universalist creed that was superior to establishment Protestantism. Naturally, this drew the ire of the religious establishment. Missionary journals from this period are replete with attacks on Vivekananda and his national tour, accusing him of disseminating "heathen propaganda" on American soil (Altman 76).

One of the most prominent adherents of the new American religion of Vedanta was one Mrs. Sara Bull, the widow of Ole Bull, a celebrated Norwegian violinist. Mrs. Bull lived in Cambridge and was a central figure at Green Acre, a rural retreat located in Eliot, Maine, dedicated to interfaith dialogue and a key congregation spot for the adherents of American metaphysical religions. Bull would host salons in her Cambridge home, featuring prominent east coast intellectuals-- William James was one of her guests-- and visiting swamis from India, including Swami Vivekananda himself. After Mrs. Bull died in 1911, it was revealed that she had left the bulk of her sizable estate to the Vedanta Society. Her daughter challenged her will in court, arguing that she was mentally incompetent at the time it was produced and signed. The specific argument forwarded by Mrs. Bull's daughter and her attorney (a man named Sherman Whipple) was that the Hindus had driven her late mother insane.

The case was a national sensation and was covered widely, including in the New York Times. In a paper titled "Hinduphobia and Hinduphilia in U.S. Culture", Professor Stephen Prothero notes that over the five-week trial, Whipple called a number of witnesses, "including a cook, a maid, and a 'psychic barber,' in an effort to build a case for Mrs. Bull's religiously induced insanity" (Prothero 14). The main argument of the petitioner's lawyers was that the late Mrs. Bull's brain had been "inoculated with the bacteria of faith taught by Indian swamis", and although Mrs. Bull approached the swamis as a genuine seeker, she fell prey to a "psychic conspiracy of Hindu swamis who put her under a spell, coerced her into taking a variety of Indian drugs, and stripped her of her morals, her mind, and her money" (Prothero 14).

The "Raja Yoga" taught by Swami Vivekananda was characterized by Whipple as a malign influence that "brought not only shattered health and loss of reason, but death to members of the band of Yogis and students who executed the psychic gymnastics in the home of Mrs. Bull." (Prothero 15). The lawyer's argument did not emerge from a vacuum. Indeed, the sudden rise in popularity of Hindu philosophy and Vedanta in particular had long been a cause of consternation among the religious establishment and the media. In reporting on the trial, the New York Times called Hinduism a "strange cult" and in popular culture the Hindoo swami or "fakir" had long been derided as a charlatan at best, and at worst, a predator who was out to steal the money and devotion of innocent American women. Prothero quotes an editorial written at the end of the trial in the Boston Herald, which attacked the purveyors of Vedanta for being "fakers", arguing that "Real Hinduism" was not about the worship of a formless divine, but rather about "public prostitution, idol worship, antisocial ascetics, child brides, and the caste system" (Prothero 16). These attitudes were not confined to rabble rousing editorials, either. Elizabeth A. Reed, a prominent scholar of religion, published a book titled "Hinduism in Europe in America" in 1914 wherein she gives credence to this view, arguing that "the Guru is a modern money-making invention" and that the Swamis in America "creep into houses and lead captive silly women" into slavish devotion and-- eventually-- insanity.

The notion that swamis exercised a corrupting influence on the minds of their followers dovetailed neatly with popular images of the "Hindoo" as a magician or mystic who was adept at hypnosis. Some of the earliest references to the "Hindoo" in American newspapers are found in ads for magicians who traveled the country claiming to have learned "Hindoo magic" from the wandering fakirs of India. Crowds across the country attended these shows to witness the famous "rope trick". The hypnosis and illusions of the Hindoo magician seamlessly transformed into the pernicious and corrupting mind control of the Hindu swami.

As Prothero points out, however, there is also an anti-Catholic antecedent for this prejudice. Anti-Catholic tracts in the 19th century often depicted the Catholic priest as a lecherous and manipulative figure, and the Catholic convent as a place that drove people insane (Prothero 29). Catholicism and Hinduism alike were characterized as inversions of the ideal social and political order, an "offense against democracy, republicanism, and individualism" (Prothero 28). The case of Mrs. Sara Bull is a landmark event in the history of the American encounter with the "Hindoo".

Over a century later, we can look back on the trial and the sensational media coverage around the trial with a degree of detached amusement, but we should not let that blind us from the intellectual and cultural currents that made such a trial possible in the first place. That Mrs. Sara Bull's sincere dedication to Vedanta was itself accepted as evidence of her "Insanity" is a striking testament to prevailing attitudes at the time. Daggett in her essay the "Heathen Invasion of America" describes how yoga was "proving the way that leads to domestic infelicity and insanity and death" and cites Mrs. Sara Bull as an example, reflecting a widespread fear that the "Hindoo" and his religious ideas were seen as a threat to the American women in particular. But this fear, as Professor Altman notes, "fit within broader arguments and conflicts in America at the time about the proper roles of white women, their independence, and their social and political power" (Altman 100). The fixation around Mrs. Sara Bull's mental state, in other words, were symptomatic of deeper anxiety about the stability of the American family in the face rapid societal and cultural change. In understanding the interplay between the influx of Hindu culture and thought and shifts in the domestic cultural and social landscape can help illuminate how this encounter between east and west continues to play out in the current day.

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Altman, Michael J.. 2022. Hinduism in America (Religion in America). Taylor & Francis.

Prothero, Stephen. 2004. “Hinduphobia and Hinduphilia in U.S. Culture.” In The Stranger’s Religion: Fascination and Fear, edited by Lännström, Anna, 13-37. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press.

Reed, Elizabeth. 1914. "Hinduism in Europe and America." G. P. Putnam's Sons.