The Hippie Trail Goes West: Sex and Settlement in Rajneeshpuram

In September 1981, the popular Indian guru Sri Rajneesh left his ashram in Pune, India and started on a journey that would lead to the establishment of the largest communal settlement in U.S. history. Rajneeshpuram brought a motley group of white counter-culturists and a small vanguard of Indian devotees together on sparsely populated land in central Oregon, adjacent to the land held by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs (consisting of the Wascoe, Paiute, and Warm Springs peoples). Rajneesh, who was known globally as the “sex guru,” encouraged his devotees to have sex with as many (“opposite sex”) partners as possible, promoting therapy sessions that often involved violent non-consensual sexual encounters.

This paper explores the Rajneeshpuram experiment through two lenses: the obsession of Western counter-culture with “Eastern sexuality,” and the explosion of Indian guru-led settlement projects during what some call the period of decolonization. I argue that South Asian guru-led settlement projects, in this case specifically Rajneeshpuram, have relied on what I call “settler utopianism,” a type of utopian thinking based in spiritual discourse that instrumentalizes the tools of settler colonialism, including land dispossession and the erasure of local Indigenous politics and history.

Amongst his many projects, Rajneesh called for sexual freedom for the individual, a sort of ego-based bodily sovereignty. Both the Rajneesh ashram in Pune and Rajneeshpuram in Oregon claimed space for the exploration of bodily sovereignty, a practice I argue was counter to widespread movements for collective liberation in India (anti-colonial nationalism) and the United States (movements for Indigenous decolonization and Black liberation). The history of Rajneeshpuram shows that instrumentalizing the language of freedom and liberation for personal gain was counter to collectivist projects of anti-colonial liberation. In this way, this project contributes to the study of global countercultures and histories of decolonization.