On a sunny morning, Bonnie Pressman sat in her office on the 10th floor of a gleaming Manhattan tower. The black-matte telephone on her desk looked big enough to route the calls of a small city, and it wouldn’t stop beeping and mewling.
But Pressman, the executive vice president and fashion director of Barneys New York, ignored the phone, asked an assistant to shut the door and stalled the waiting suits in a conference room.
Because Pressman _ calm as a yogi _ was talking about how India changed her life.
“It all started about three years ago,” she said, a forelock of blond hair dangling over one eye. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer and decided to visit an ayurvedic spa in Colorado.
“It was time to make some changes,” she said. She learned to meditate, became fascinated with Indian spiritualism and went on to take her first trip to India this year. “It restored my sense of peace,” she said of her Indian sojourn.
Pressman belongs to the growing number of trendsetters on the East and West coasts _ high-profile people from the worlds of fashion, entertainment and society _ who have taken passages to India, following to their source the popular interest in yoga, the writings of Deepak Chopra and the blissed-out look in fashion and cosmetics.
But the beautiful people are not alone. Tourism by Americans visiting India reached its highest last year, 244,329, up about 70 percent from four years ago, said Ronjon Lahiri, the assistant director of the India Tourist Office. “We’ve been very lucky this year,” Lahiri said. “In the ’60s and ’70s, there was the large influx of the so-called hippie movement. And we’re seeing something similar to that again. We’ve cornered the cultural market.”
From cosmetics to clothing, India has permeated American pop culture for years. Chopra, the best-selling spiritual author, has attracted followers like Donna Karan and Demi Moore. New cosmetics lines by Aveda and Origins have grown popular by emphasizing a mystical connection. Flip open any magazine _ Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, even People _ and you’ll find a page of starlets in Indian-inspired clothing with a block-that-pun headline like “Who’s Sari Now?”
Walk into a bookstore and witness the boomlet of literature by young Indian authors _ Kiran Desai, Vikram Chandra, Sanjay Nigam, Arundhati Roy _ who have published well-publicized novels in the past year. Turn on MTV and see Madonna’s Frozen, an elaborate video evocative of India, in which she shows off her hands, patterned with the painstaking henna designs popular with Indian women.
Of course, Western fascination with Indian culture has gone in cycles for a long time. Ever since Alexander the Great marched into northern India in 326 B.C. to persuade a yogi to return to Greece with him (the yogi declined, preferring instead to immolate himself on a funeral pyre), Westerners have periodically sought yogic counsel.
The most hard-core recent visitors _ Sting, director Andre Gregory, actresses Meg Ryan and Betty Buckley _ are devotees not only of India, but also of the ashram experience.
At Indian ashrams, “You see increasing numbers of Americans,” said Anne Cushman, co-author of From Here to Nirvana: The Yoga Journal Guide to Spiritual India (Riverhead Books, 1998). Comparing the ashrams she has visited, she said, “There are certainly places that are more Westernized _ wealthier ashrams associated with gurus who have followings in the United States.”
“When you go to India now, you see gurus with cell phones and ashrams with e-mail,” said Jerry Jones, Cushman’s co-author, who has visited more than 60 ashrams. “India is popular with everyone now, but we also have to realize when we _ Americans and Indians _ are overstepping each other’s boundaries.”
“Ashram” is a term for a community of seekers that grows up around a spiritual leader. “It can be anything from a couple of caves in a mountainside with cots, and you trek in with your own food, or it can be a quite comfortable building in the heart of a large city, almost like a hotel,” Cushman said. Visits can vary from a day to years, and prices are just as wide ranging: from $1.50 a day to as much as $250 a day.
“Ashrams are popular now, for a lot of different factors,” Cushman said. “Boomers are getting older. They’ve achieved a lot of the material goals they thought were going to make them so happy. They’ve discovered that they’re not as blissful as they should be with that house, that car and that second marriage. And we have a tremendous amount of information about these things now, so you’re not just stuck with the spiritual traditions of your ancestors.”
