AMRITSAR, INDIA -- Rama Ranjit Mehra watched cancer take her husband’s life and nearly take her own. Mehra turned to Ayurveda—a 5,000-year old Indian holistic system of healing—after Western science failed her husband. She beat her cancer and opened an Ayurveda clinic and hotel with her two grown twin sons near the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhism’s holiest site in northern India. Her customers are mostly Westerners who come to this red-brick spa clinic with 20 lemon grass-scented rooms to escape the ever-present crowds in India. Ranjit’s Svaasa, as Mehra’s clinic is known, is a curious mix of old and new; it is housed in a 250-year-old colonial mansion, for instance. Yet it also offers Wi-fi access and the latest glossy-boxed herbal yogi tea.

Rama Ranjit Mehra speaks with guests at the Ayurveda hotel and spa she opened in Amritsar in northern India. (Courtesy: Ranjit’s SVAASA)

Ranjit’s Svaasa is one of many places throughout India that uses savvy modern marketing techniques to repackage ancient Ayurvedic practices. As a result, Ayurveda is attracting an increasing numbers of followers both in India and cosmopolitan cities like New York. Foreigners either travel to India to stay at Ayurvedic spas and attend courses on Ayurveda. Or they sit in their homes abroad and get Ayurvedic treatments over the Internet. Celebrities like Deepak Chopra - who swears by it - and beauty companies such as Aveda—an abbreviated form of Ayurveda—also help generate interest.

“Our focus is on natural healing, self-consciousness and self-improvement of the body and spirit,” said Mehra. Many come to Ayurveda for the nutrition or yoga aspect, which become gateways to the spiritual side, she said. She often recommends meditating on ancient Sanskrit scriptures as a way of creating and maintaining concentration.

While Ayurveda is a centuries-old tradition in India, it is only in the last 25 years that is has made real inroads in Europe and North America. To be sure, there are many traditional biomedical doctors who remain skeptical. But patients are more keen to “talk about their health and how it connects to spiritual rituals and the cosmos,” said Dr. Vincent Silenzio, a medical doctor at the University of Rochester, New York, who has set up a Web site on complementary and alternative health and guest-edited an issue of The American Journal of Public Health on the same topic.

In 1992, Congress established the Office of Alternative Medicine within the national Department of Health and Human Services and allocated $2 million to this new initiative. In 1998, this organization became The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. In 2006, Congress allocated $122.7 million to NCCAM. While the number of Americans who specifically use Ayurveda is not reported, 62 percent of Americans use complementary and alternative medicine, including prayer for healing, according to a recent study by the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The word Ayurveda comes from the Sanskrit words “ayus” meaning life and “veda” meaning science or knowledge and is roughly translated as "the science of living." At roughly 5000 years old, Ayurveda is nearly as old as Hinduism. It was created by the rishis, enlightened Indian sages, from Vedic scriptures.

Ayurveda rests on the belief in the need to balance the physical body, the spiritual soul and the psychological mind. It does so by balancing three biological forces, it calls doshas. Ayurveda includes diet and herbal remedies and emphasizes the use of body, mind, and spirit in disease prevention and treatment.

An Ayurvedic clinician in New Delhi,India with the latest herbal remedies and a Hindu shrine to Ganesh, the Elephant god. (Aili McConnon)

Ayurvedic clinics like Ranjit’s Svaasa can be found in many hotels throughout India, often run by families because it is a system of healing some learn from their grandparents and pass on through the family, and through family businesses. Madhu Mahor, for instance, works as an Ayurvedic masseur at the Best Western in Agra near the Taj Mahal. Her two sisters work in Ayurveda at other hotels nearby and she is training her 9-year-old son in the art as well. Many Indian practitioners realize the growing interest in Ayurveda abroad and plan to spend time in Europe or North America. Mahor is planning to move to the United Kingdom to try her trade there.

Ranjit’s SVAASA, an Ayurveda clinic and hotel in Amritsar, India. (Courtesy: Ranjit’s SVAASA)

Ayurveda is also reaching foreign shores through online clinics such as Ayunique, the first online Ayurveda clinic, created by Dr. Partap Chauhan. Chauhan is considered by many to be the world’s leading Aryuvedic physician and has also created an online college. Ayunique currently sends out packages of medicine to clients in 150 different countries, according to Steve Rudolph, a director of its umbrella organization, the Jiva Institute. Being based in India allows Ayunique to avoid the barriers to entry it would encounter based in the United States for instance. “Our products are classified as dietary supplements and so they go under the FDA radar,” said Rudolph, referring to the Food and Drug Administration.

An Ayurveda massage bed in the Jiva Ayunique Clinic & Panchkarma Centre, New Delhi, India. (Aili McConnon)

In recent years, there has been concern about the lack of regulations for preparing the medications. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2004 found that out of 70 Ayurvedic remedies purchased over-the-counter (all were manufactured in South Asia), 14 (one-fifth) contained lead, mercury, and/or arsenic at levels that could be harmful. Such studies understandably concern customers and make it all the more important to research the specific company behind Ayurvedic remedies. Ayunique, for instance, rigorously tests all of their products for heavy metals, said Rudolph.

Ayunique has improved life dramatically for Sheila, who did not want to give her last name for reasons of privacy. Sheila is an assistant at an Evangelical bookstore in Virginia and had had severe migraines and stroke-like episodes that plagued her for years. She has been an Ayunique patient since December 2005 and her symptoms have already decreased. “The episodes are basically gone and I’m beginning to sleep much better,” she said. She receives her medication package in the mail every two months and lifestyle guidelines from her Ayunique doctor over e-mail more frequently.

Meditation is an area Sheila feels she particularly needs help on. She has found this spiritual side of Ayurveda complementary to her own religious practices. “The Bible tells me to meditate on God’s Word,” she said. So when she receives her online instructions from her Ayunique doctor in India, she finds a quiet spot in her home and begins with breathing exercises to quiet herself. Then she envisions a candle and meditates on the name of God or a piece of scripture. “I’m working to make this a ritual,” she said. Ayunique personalizes its healing guidelines for every patient, so the spirituality it emphasizes can be tailored to any individual’s existing religious rituals or it can introduce customers to ancient Sanskrit scriptures.

The Jiva Institute is also using other technology like telephones to spread the benefits of Ayurveda through India. In its Teledoc program, village-based healthcare workers record and transmit diagnostic data through mobile telephones. Jiva’s Ayurvedic doctors analyze the data, and then prescribe medication and treatment. Jiva hopes to reach 12 million villagers over the next five years.

As Ayurvedic doctors reach out to the West through lecture tours and online clinics, Western doctors are beginning to envision a larger space for alternative medicine within their medical communities. This is partly because there is more patient demand for Ayurveda, said Dr. Silenzio, the doctor in New York. “Spirituality has been so thoroughly excluded in traditional biomedicine, so the religious dimension of Ayurveda is certainly a big draw,” he said. The profile of medical doctors in powerful positions is much more ethnically diverse now than it was 25 years ago. This, in turn, contributes to an openness to incorporating healing philosophies from all over the world, said Silenzio.

“Ayurveda makes people feel intensely light in the body, mind and spirit,” said Mehra, the Ayurvedic clinician in Amritsar. “Who isn’t looking for that?”

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AMRITSAR, INDIA -- Here, in the spiritual center of the Sikh faith, one man stands out. He appears to be a walking contradiction: he is both taller and fairer, but also much more visibly "Sikh" than almost everyone around him, even the Punjabis who have practiced the faith for generations. He is Sada Sat Simran Singh Khalsa and he is over six feet tall, with pale skin, a towering turban, ruddy beard, and floor-sweeping blue robes. As he walks the perimeter of the Golden Temple, he attracts stares from Punjabis and Westerners alike—all trying to classify him, all coming up short. India is rife with Westerners who adopt an Eastern philosophy and begin dressing and practicing like their Indian counterparts, but few are like Khalsa.

He was born and raised outside of Washington D.C, in a decidedly American community, but also in the Sikh tradition, albeit the particularly American variety of the Indian faith. At age eight, he was sent to Miri Piri Academy to study and now, on a warm spring evening some 18 years later, Khalsa can be found in the school’s music room, giving lessons to a group of young devotees.

At the Miri Piri Academy in Chhertha Sahib, outside Amritsar, India, the students faces look American, they speak in American English, and many of them have all the trappings of American youth: iPods, cell phones and reggaeton ringtones, but nobody could mistake these kids for the average American student. Neither could they be mistaken for the Indians among whom they live, pray and serve. Their white turbans are tied more elaborately, their robes are longer and their symbolic swords, kirpans, are bigger and less, well, symbolic.

Sada Sat Simran Singh Khalsa looking at a book of photographs of ancient Sikh warriors. (Erik Wander)

Located on 17 acres in a village in the Indian state of Punjab, Miri Piri Academy is a school for the children of Western, mostly white, Sikhs who are followers of Yogi Bhajan, an Indian Sikh who brought the faith to the west in the late 1960s. They are often called “American Sikhs,” but the group bristles at the distinction, asserting that Sikhism in the East and Sikhism in the West are one and the same and there is no such thing as an “American” version. Nevertheless, the school’s students are mostly the children of Americans who converted to the faith in the 1970s, often after becoming practitioners of Kundalini Yoga and eventually studying under Bhajan. Bhajan—who is alternately known as Siri Singh Sahib Bhai Sahib Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogi Ji, Siri Singh Sahib, and, simply, Yogi Ji—founded the school, and his influence is everywhere.

Bhajan’s philosophy is rooted in discipline. He taught, “Without discipline you achieve nothing. With discipline the doors of life are open and yours to choose.” That principle is echoed constantly in these words beneath the school’s emblem: “School of Royalty and Reality. Our first principle is the Love of Discipline.” The school’s mission is “to train the future leaders, teachers and healers of tomorrow through rigorous discipline, quality academics and strong self-discipline.”

At Miri Piri, students begin their day two hours before dawn with an hour of Kundalini yoga and meditation followed by physical training. “The reason, scientifically, is because your mind is calm then,” Sada Sat says. “The world hasn’t started. You can meditate and you can conquer all your demons at that time. There’s a whole science behind it. You have to experience it to really understand.” Twice a year, for 40 days at a time, they arise even earlier, at 2:30 in the morning to do their sewa, or service, at the Golden Temple. There, they wash the marble floors surrounding the “pool of nectar” upon which the temple appears to float.

Khalsa’s fiancée, Guru Das Kaur Khalsa (most followers of Yogi Bhajan take on the last name Khalsa), only came to the school as a high school junior, but she credits the rigorous structure with transforming her life. “When I was in school in America I drank and I partied,” she says. “But when I came to school here I decided not to. I think I just became happier.” She credits this happiness to the rigorous discipline the school enforces. “They pack the schedule in. One of Sri Singh Das’s philosophies was to be really disciplined in your life. He said, don’t leave room for them to be, like, rebellious. Keep them busy and disciplined and working hard and doing all that stuff and then kids won’t have time to do stupid stuff. He says that kids rebel because they’re unhappy and if you create a solid home for them that makes them feel secure in themselves then they won’t need that.”

Most of the school’s 130 students start young, some as early as age six and seven. Bhajan encouraged his followers to send their children at a younger age, teaching that when a child is one to three, their mother is their teacher; when they are three to seven, their father is the teacher; and after that, their peers and God are the teacher.

“He liked it when kids would come here when they were younger,” Guru Das explains of Bhajan’s philosophy. “He thought when you’re young, it’s so important for you to have good parents and for them to give you a good structure. But then send them to boarding school and let the environment be their teacher. Because kids get too attached to their parents and then they take on their parent’s issues, and then they might get divorced or whatever, it’s good to be separate.”

Guruka Singh Khalsa is representative of the older generation of Sikh Americans. He began to practice the faith in the 1970s, after a roommate who practiced Kundalini yoga moved into his home in Berkeley, California. “We called it Berserkly at the time,” he says. “We were a raggle-taggle bunch of gypsies.” Now a webmaster for the site sikhnet.com, he sent both of his sons, who are now 26 and 16, to Miri Piri Academy, even as he chose to stay in America as part of Bhajan’s core group of leaders, who are concentrated in Espanola, New Mexico.

Guruka’s elder son was sent when he was just 6 years old; it was his first trip to India. “The whole process of sending a child that young halfway across the world totally freaks a lot of people out,” Guruka says. “It freaked me out too. But for most of these kids, the overall experience of being in a third world country, not protected by your parents, having to face who you are much earlier in life, allows you to test your own grit, your own strength.”

Guruka says that part of the appeal of sending his children so far away for so long was the larger influence of spirituality and faith in India. “Overall when I look back, what does the experience of being at a school like that give to a child?” he says. “A deep grounding in a spiritual energy that simply isn’t present in America. To be in a culture in whose central values are steeped in spirituality is very different than to be in America and be part of a religion.”

He also believes that the distance between himself and his children has been beneficial to their relationship, noting that “When you live with your parents, you get fed up with your parents. There’s a theory called distance therapy. When my son is halfway around the world, I meditate on him every day. And he meditates on me. It’s very different to have an image of your parent. It leads to a very helpful experience when the kids grow up.”

Guruka maintains that aside from the occasional bout of homesickness, his children loved their years at Miri Piri. Still, when his older son graduated, he was, as Guruka says, “disoriented.” He spent a little over a year in Amritsar, working odd jobs and living with his friends, much like Sada Sat and his friends.

Guru Das went to the University of Oregon following her graduation from Miri Piri and on one recent day in Amritsar, she wears a “Sikh Student Association” t-shirt from her alma-mater. Other graduates have gone on to Yale and Harvard, but many more go to work immediately in one of the businesses founded by Yogi Bhajan, such as Akal Security in New Mexico or Golden Temple Foods in Oregon.

The school is accredited according to the U.S. educational system, and offers most of the same curriculum offered in America, supplemented with yoga, meditation, and Sikh studies, including music, sword fighting, and Punjabi language classes.

Aside from some Punjabi teachers, the students are largely separate from the local community. It is at the Golden Temple where Western and Eastern Sikhs truly come together. Equality is one of the founding principles of the faith and during the sewa, or temple service, American and Indian Sikhs work alongside one another, washing the temple’s floors with milk and honey, participating and serving the free communal meal, langar.

Sometimes the students play music in the temple itself as part of the daily evening ritual in which the sacred text, the Guru Granth Sahib, is put away for the evening. The golden temple glows, its reflection mirrored in the still water surrounding it, as pilgrims and tourists file slowly down a thin walkway leading across the water into the temple. Music resonates from an inner chamber inside the temple, where musicians seated cross-legged on the floor chant and play the tabla, a traditional Indian instrument. The crowd of devotees is often dense, but calm, as they walk through the small inner temple and then sit or stand outside its perimeter.

It was here at the temple that Sada Sat met and befriended Hardeep Singh Khalsa, a Punjabi Sikh, who one day playfully challenged Sada Sat’s knowledge of the faith. Sada Sat answered the challenge correctly and then challenged Hardeep in turn. Soon, the jousting led to a friendship and now, some seven years later, Hardeep is one of the few Punjabis who is closely aligned with the American Sikh school and community.

Hardeep Singh Khalsa and Sada Sat Simran Singh Khalsa at Sada Sat's home in Amritsar. (Erik Wander)

Hardeep admits that many of his friends and family are confused by the community of white Sikhs. “They see whites, they say, ‘What are they here for? They want to rule over India again or something?’” he says, referencing the extended history of the British rule of India. “Every single person asks me this question, ‘Do you know why they’re here?’”

Sunit Singh, an Indian Sikh pursuing his PhD. in theology at the University of Chicago echoes this concern. “They’re isolated. It’s not clear to me that they have much contact with people other than American Sikhs. What kind of experience are these kids having? Of India? Of Sikhism?”

Indeed, some of the graduates of the academy seem to belong neither here nor there, and are neither fully American nor fully Indian. Ram Das Singh Khalsa, 21, returned to Amritsar after having lived in America for a year after he graduated from Miri Piri. He admits a certain fear of returning to the States again, where the rituals of his faith are less diligent. “Here, we have to do it,” he says. “We don’t have the choice to do anything else. Going back to the States, you have to do it on your own. That is a big test, that’s why I came back. Here, the practice is every day. It’s just a matter of building myself until I don’t need to have that inspiration, until I can do it on my own.”

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Two sikhs sit before the pool surrounding the Golden Temple. (Dikla Kadosh)

In a land of differences—religious, political, economic, and social—India’s history is in some ways defined by murderous conflict. Amritsar is the spiritual center for Sikhism as well as the staging ground for some of the country’s bloodiest battles, and our trip there highlighted the violent legacy borne of a billion people and centuries of colonial rule.

Last night we visited the Golden Temple, known as Sri Darbar Sahib in Sikhism. Though the religion shares many Hindu traditions such as rebirth and dharma, Sikhism was founded in the 15th century as a response to the caste system and focuses on equality. Despite comprising less than two percent of India’s population, Sikhs are known for their disproportionate influence on the nation’s politics and military. The temple is their holiest site.

At the temple, pilgrims performed rituals of purity outside the compound’s white marbled walls. We took off our shoes, washed our hands, covered our heads, and stepped through two shallow pools of water before we could enter the inner courtyards.

Inside, hundreds of Sikhs queued up to enter the Golden Temple, and some bathed in the water that surrounded the building. Nestled inside the protective white walls, the temple shined like the gleaming yolk of an egg.

The temple was built in 1589 in the spirit of unity, and worshippers flow through the doors in each wall. “The meaning of the four walls is people are welcomed from the four corners of the world,” said Jaswinder Singh, the temple’s assistant information official who greeted our delegation. “All are welcomed.”

But the walls of the Golden Temple have also invited bloodshed. In 1984, a Sikh separatist rallied outside the temple in the name of Khalistan, a secessionist campaign for an independent Sikh state. After the separatist locked himself inside the Golden Temple, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sent military troops into the temple to kill him. The separatist’s martyrdom led directly to Indira Gandhi’s assassination later that year by two of her own Sikh bodyguards.

We saw another reminder this morning of the high cost of Indian freedom at the Jallianawalan Bagh, a public park in Amritsar where in 1919 a peaceful gathering of 3,000 Indian Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus were massacred by British troops. The open field where the victims were gunned down is now a memorial, with potted flowers lining the sidewalks and pillars marking the spot where the soldiers took aim.

On one side of the park, tourists peered into a 20-foot-deep well that 120 desperate souls jumped into, seeking refuge from the gunfire but finding only death. General Dyer, who led the British troops, was later murdered by a Sikh who had witnessed the massacre as a boy.

The site is now a focal point for Sikh pride. “It’s a historical place, and I feel proud,” said Gurpreet Singh, a 23-year-old Sikh who had traveled 250 kilometers to visit Jallianawalan Bagh. “A lot of Indians have sacrificed here.”

Still, the spirit of unity lives on in Amritsar. At the Golden Temple, we watched Sikh men carry the holy book Guru Granth Sahib from the nightly prayer service back to its resting spot, in a ceremony marked by rhythmic song, prayer and reverence. Though women traditionally do not carry the holy text because of its weight, any Sikh man who is able to hustle his way into a prime spot can help transport the book in its golden carriage.

But the Sikh emphasis on "ek oankara"—the idea that God is one—was most apparent in the Golden Temple’s community kitchen, where every day 45,000 worshippers eat as part of the holy experience.

Inside the massive kitchen, we sat in rows on simple jute mats as volunteers slopped lentil stew onto our plates. We humbly cupped our hands to receive bread. At the Golden Temple, Mother India’s embrace was large enough to include 20 visitors from America, and we ate that night in unity.

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Indians join in an impromtu dance during the flag lowering ceremony at the border with Pakistan. (Aili McConnon)

After putting our bags down in our hotel in Amristar and feeling rested from a five-hour train ride from Delhi, our group drove to Wagah to observe the ceremonial closing of the border with Pakistan.

In the last several years, the border between these two rival nations has been opened up; transnational train service was launched this year and people pass through the border crossing here on a daily basis.

On Sunday, the gathering of several thousand Indians to watch soldiers from both countries lower their respective flags, was a moment of celebration. The ceremony has become more of a tourist attraction in recent years rather an epicenter of international hostility.

Nirmal Singh Bishad drew cheers from the crowd when he ran back and forth down the road leading to the border with an Indian flag larger than his adolescent body. But his act of joyous patriotism was not an act of aggression toward Pakistan, he insisted.

“They are our friends,” he said, “not our enemies.”

As the Indian troops prepared to approach the gate, the crowd chanted “Hindustan Zindabad,” which in Hindi means, “Long live India.” The Pakistani crowd just yards away chanted in Urdu, “Pakistan Zindabad,” or “Long Live Pakistan.”

Men danced in the path leading up to the border to Indian music before the flags were pulled down just before sunset. The Indian troops stomped with such ferocity and marched with such exaggerated exuberance it drew chuckles from the crowd.

“It is fake aggression,” Delhi-based journalist Mannika Chopra said in reference to the stern faces the Indian troops give to their Pakistani counterparts. “It’s a tourist thing.”

The arbitrary border between the two countries was designed by the same colonial force, Britain, which exploited the subcontinent for its resources. The two countries inherited these borders when they gained independence from Britain in August 1947. The riots that resulted from partition ended in nearly 2 million deaths in this part in India.

While many people on both sides of the border today came to celebrate their countries rather than to show aggression toward one another, Chopra explained that there are deeper tensions. Pakistani President Pervez Musharaff and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have both worked to open up this border due to the post-9/11 political climate and international pressure, but both have to appease important constituents to maintain their political power. Musharaf must play to the interests of Islamic extremists and Singh must recognize the interests of right wing, Hindu nationalists.

That is why there are two faces of the ceremony on the border. For the Indian tourists coming from as far away as the capital of New Delhi and the southern city of Chennai, the meeting of green clad Indian soldiers with black clad Pakistani soldiers is a source of both entertainment and national pride. But with India’s new nuclear deal with the United States there is the possibility for a rise in tension that would give the soldiers seemingly acted hostile nature a little bit of sincerity.

"It’s bizarre,” Chopra said.

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