Swami Bhaktipada Archives Cataloged

May 1, 2025: The Swami Bhaktipada Archives at the West Virginia University West Virginia & Regional History Center in Morgantown, West Virginia are now completely cataloged! It’s been a project several years in the making. Catherine Melillo, an Archives Processing Assistant for the West Virginia University Libraries, reports:

Hi Henry,

Great news! Your collection’s finding aid is officially available on our website. Here’s a link to check it out: Henry Doktorski, Compiler, Records regarding Kirtanananda Bhaktipada Swami and the New Vrindaban Commune.

Please feel free to share this with any researchers who may be interested, and of course, if you notice any factual inaccuracies, please let me know, and I will make sure they are corrected.

Again, thank you so much for all of your help over the phone. It is much appreciated!

The history of this archive is interesting. Henry explains the origin and acquisition of the archives in the Acknowledgments section of his Gold, Guns and God dodecalogy:

MANY KIND SOULS HELPED ME to research, write, edit and publish this book. But instead of writing a long list of names, I single out six very important people—Francis Gerald Ham, Chaitanya Mangala (Christopher Walker), Tapahpunja (Terry Sheldon), Madhava Ghosh (Mark Meberg), Radha Vrindaban Chandra Swami (Ronald Nay) and Mathura (Matthew Brian Berresford)’who made this book possible. Without the foresight and wisdom of these people, Gold, Guns and God could never have seen the light of day.

First, I thank Bhaktipada’s elder brother, Francis Gerald Ham (1930-2021), for allowing me to visit him at his home in Madison, Wisconsin, examine the Ham Family Archive, and interview him and his wife Elsie. They were extremely helpful and I am grateful for their support. A few years after my visit, Gerald donated the Ham Family Archives to the West Virginia and Regional History Center at West Virginia University in Morgantown where it will be preserved and protected for posterity.

Regarding the next five people: an explanation is in order. Bhaktipada had a secret archive locked behind bars in his basement at his house, which was meticulously cataloged and cared for by his secretary Radha Vrindaban Chandra Swami. I lived in the brahmachari ashram in the basement of Bhaktipada’s house for about a year (1986-87), and I never knew this room existed. The archive contained a nearly-complete collection of Brijabasi Spirit and other New Vrindaban publications. Other items included books, magazines, newsletters, hundreds of newspaper clippings, transcripts of devotee interviews with private investigators, transcripts of several court trials, photographs, negatives and slides, and hundreds of letters from Bhaktipada’s personal correspondence.

However, after Bhaktipada was confined to house arrest in Warwood in 1991, and again later in 1993 after the Winnebago Incident—when he went to live at his Silent Mountain cabin by the stone quarry near Littleton, West Virginia—his house was abandoned. Around this time, RVC Swami was evicted from New Vrindaban for physical and sexual molestation of gurukula boys, which occurred in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Then in 1996, Bhaktipada was incarcerated in prison for eight years. The house was locked up, and I don’t think anyone ever went there.

During this time, probably around 1996, a few young men who grew up at New Vrindaban broke into Bhaktipada’s former residence, vandalized the house, and entered into the secret fortified archive room in the basement. They ransacked the room and strew its contents about in large piles on the floor in the room and adjacent hallway. Items the vandals thought valuable, like large paintings, photographic prints, televisions, furniture, etc., were taken.

Another former New Vrindaban gurukuli, my godbrother Chaitanya Mangala, heard about the break in, went into Bhaktipada’s house, saw the papers and artifacts lying helter skelter and realized that, some day, somebody might want to write a history of the New Vrindaban community. He retrieved the artifacts and brought them to his cabin. Chaitanya Mangala remembered:

You may recall that this period was a free-for-all in New Vrindaban. Like many, including many of the “leaders” at the time, these Gurukulis were grabbing what they could before someone else did the same. In an effort to save the archive, I purchased large cardboard boxes, methodically went through the contents of the room, and picked up as much of the materials I thought salvageable. I also carted away a few filing cabinets as well.

After a few years, Chaitanya Mangala left New Vrindaban in the spring/summer of 2000 and gave the archive to Tapahpunja for safekeeping. About three years later, I think it was during the 2003 Festival of Inspiration, I visited New Vrindaban and spoke to Tapahpunja, who was in charge of the organic garden. I showed him the 300-page manuscript of my New Vrindaban history book-in-progress. Tapahpunja got excited and said he had something that I should see, and he took me up the hill just west of Prabhupada’s Palace, to the big gravel parking lot behind Sankirtan and Ruci’s house (formerly Vahna and Hladini’s house), where Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada stayed during his 1976 visit.

In the parking lot was a semi-truck trailer. Tapahpunja unlocked and swung open the double doors, and we climbed up inside. There, inside the trailer, were dozens of cardboard boxes and metal filing cabinets filled with books, magazines, newspaper clippings, photographs, negatives and slides, and Bhaktipada’s personal correspondence. I felt like I had discovered Captain Kidd’s buried treasure. The artifacts in the trailer were priceless, and some files (as I discovered later) contained confidential (and undoubtedly classified) information which may have been known only to Bhaktipada and his secretary/librarian. Tapahpunja gifted me the entire collection.

Five years later, on March 4, 2008, I visited Bhaktipada at the New York Interfaith Sanctuary a few days before he moved permanently to India. At that time, I asked Radha Vrindaban Chandra Swami to let me photocopy his personal collection of New Vrindaban Newsletters (1992-1996) and Srila Bhaktipada Newsletters (1996-1997), publications which he had written, edited and mailed out to Bhaktipada’s disciples.

A month later, on April 10, 2008, I visited Madhava Ghosh (1949-2016) at his home at New Vrindaban. We talked about New Vrindaban history. As I was preparing to leave, he opened a closet, pulled out a large cardboard box, and gave me a complete bound set of the court transcripts from Bhaktipada’s 1991 trial (ten volumes and thousands of pages).

Another devotee who shared with me hundreds of important New Vrindaban publications and documents was my godbrother Mathura dasa (Matthew Brian Berresford), who lived in East Berlin, Pennsylvania and worked as a kindergarten teacher at North Frederick Elementary School in Frederick, Maryland. How did he acquire such a huge archive?

This archive, I believe, came from the basement of Bhaktipada’s house, a couple years before the gurukula boys broke in and ransacked the archive. In 1994, RVC Swami realized that his days of living at New Vrindaban were numbered; the boys he had physically abused and sexually molested at Nandagram in the 1970s, and at the RVC temple complex in the 1980s and 1990s, were now aggressively campaigning to have him evicted from New Vrindaban. But before he was expelled, he managed to retrieve for safekeeping a considerable portion of his master’s personal archive. RVC Swami apparently arranged to bring this substantial collection to New York City where he kept it secret and safe at the Interfaith Sanctuary.

About fourteen years later, when Bhaktipada and RVC Swami left New York City in March 2008 and moved permanently to India, RVC Swami, it seems, entrusted these precious archives to Mathura Prabhu, because he was, at that time, one of Bhaktipada’s last disciples in America who remained faithful to his guru. The collection consisted of hundreds of items: original letters from Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, early issues of Brijabasi Spirit, dozens of cases of books written by Bhaktipada, such as The Illustrated Ramayana, two original type-written autobiographical manuscripts written early in 1966 by Howard Wheeler, and a voluminous collection of Bhaktipada’s personal correspondence.

While browsing through the materials one day, Mathura happened to find a letter Bhaktipada had written to one of the teenage boys he had molested in 1986. In the letter, Bhaktipada explained that actually he never broke any of the regulative principles because he never had an orgasm, and therefore what he did, giving fellatio to the boys, was not really “sex.” Mathura was bewildered by this letter. He had, of course, heard rumors that Bhaktipada had sexually molested boys at New Vrindaban, but RVC Swami had always reassured him that the rumors were rumors; not facts. Mathura, in great distress and confusion, contacted RVC Swami in India by email, who assured him that the letter was “a fake.”

Although Mathura loved Bhaktipada and RVC Swami, how could he believe that this damning letter was “planted” in the archive as “a fake?” It was an original letter with Bhaktipada’s handwritten signature. He began to doubt the alleged holiness of his “spiritual master” and his confidant, and soon lost his faith in his “guru.– Around that time, Mathura contacted me, as he had heard I was writing a biography of Kirtanananda Swami, and he asked me if I would like to come over and see his archives. He told me, “Needless to say, I lost all faith in Bhaktipada after seeing that [letter]. I tossed my beads in the river.”

I drove from Pittsburgh to Mathura’s home in East Berlin, Pennsylvania, on October 6, 2008, and brought my camera and laptop computer. I arrived in the morning; I had never met him before. (He was initiated in 1998, about five years after I left New Vrindaban, probably by a letter from Bhaktipada in prison.) Mathura showed me his extensive collection of New Vrindaban publications and documents, including two unpublished, typewritten autobiographical manuscripts written by Howard Wheeler around 1965-1966. Then he left to run some errands. I was there in his house about six or seven hours, and took hundreds of photos and downloaded them from my camera to my laptop, before he returned home.

Some time after my visit, a loyal Bhaktipada disciple, Prahlambari dasa, came to Mathura’s house and confiscated the entire archive and transported it to an undisclosed location. In a Gmail chat with me, Mathura explained, “And when Prahlambari came, that [damning] letter [by Bhaktipada] quickly vanished. Sadly I’m certain it has [been] burned or otherwise destroyed. He took it all, aside from what I had out of the boxes and was sorting. They moved it all to some secret location, I think offshore: Puerto Rico, I feel. All the boxes they took. All the books.”

Obviously, there were sensitive and confidential materials in the archives and Mathura could no longer be trusted to keep them secret. I am grateful that he allowed me to photograph this archive before it was taken away and possibly destroyed by RVC Swami’s henchmen.

I thank these six people for their generosity and for their vision. I sincerely hope that I have not disappointed them, as I have tried to utilize these resources to present an accurate (as accurate as possible, at least) history of what really happened at New Vrindaban. After my research was completed, I donated the archive I had received to Bhaktipada’s next of kin, his brother Francis Gerald Ham. In turn, Gerald donated the magnificent Keith Gordon Ham/Swami Bhaktipada Archive to the West Virginia and Regional History Center at West Virginia University in Morgantown, where it was added to the Ham Family Archive, and where both archives will be protected for posterity.

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