During a Fox News interview around September 1, 2025, Peter Navarro condemned India’s purchase of discounted Russian oil, accusing the nation of acting as a “laundromat for the Kremlin.” He controversially added:
“You’ve got Brahmins profiteering at the expense of the Indian people. We need that to stop.”
He tied this rhetoric to criticizing Prime Minister Modi’s alignment with Russia and China, and used it to defend the Trump administration’s 50% tariffs on Indian goods. But here is how the Brahmins are connected to America.
*THE BOSTON BRAHMINS*
Yoga, along with its ancient philosophy, was introduced to the American populace in the mid-1800s through the transcendentalist writings of the upper-class New England minds of the time. This elitist group was known as the “Boston Brahmins,” a name originating from an 1860 Atlantic Monthly article penned by physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes entitled The Brahmin Caste of New England. Many associates within this aptly named circle were exposed to and greatly influenced by Eastern religious ideas, including such iconic luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman.
Emerson was introduced to Indian philosophy through the works of the French philosopher Victor Cousin. In 1845, Emerson’s journals show that he was reading the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke’s Essays on the Vedas. He was strongly influenced by Vedanta and found within it ways of understanding and explaining his own spiritual experiences, as well as notions of the infinite.
Thoreau, an associate of Emerson, lived a very simple yet deeply absorbed life connected to yoga philosophy. When he borrowed books from his mentor’s library, among them was the Bhagavad Gita, the book of yoga, which became his constant companion. He wrote famously:
“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial.”
Walt Whitman, the progenitor of modern American poetry, came into contact with Emerson’s poetry, which heavily influenced his own compilations. In 1857, he wrote that India represents “meditation, oriental rhapsody, passiveness, [and] a curious schoolmaster-teaching of wise precepts.”
Modern-day scholars have compared the paths of these literary figures to the Gita’s various yoga systems: Thoreau’s renounced and simple lifestyle as Karma Yoga, Emerson’s intellectual pursuits as Jnana Yoga, and Whitman’s poetic expressions as Bhakti Yoga.
Certainly, these distinguished minds created considerable awareness among Americans regarding yoga and its philosophy. With the addition of great teachers from India visiting American soil, yoga became an integral part of life for many, many Americans.
– Govind Das (ISKCON MEMBER)
