Thinking Like a Monk in the Hollywood Hills: New Frontiers of Hindu Identity and Practice

For over a century, elite and middle-class audiences in the United States and elsewhere have engaged with Hindu traditions, but today new frontiers of Hindu religiosity are increasingly negotiated through digital platforms, podcasts, and motivational media. This paper examines the work of prominent wellness figures including Jay Shetty, Shubh Vilas, and Gaur Gopal—public personalities whose teachings draw on their connections to the Vaiṣṇava tradition of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). While they invoke secular wellness idioms, their teachings subtly extend one form of modern institutional Hinduism into new global publics. The paper analyzes how they navigate tensions between representing a specific devotional lineage and cultivating a marketable brand of corporatized spirituality. In doing so, their public personas reconfigure power relations that have long structured the figure of the “Oriental monk,” mobilizing global wellness discourses and persistent tropes of “virtual Orientalism” to position Hindu traditions as sources of universal wisdom and spiritual expertise.