What they probably won’t know is that the unnamed guru is a hugely controversial figure who has disappeared from public view amid allegations of manipulation, financial misconduct and intimidation. And as that guru’s organization, the Siddha Yoga Dham of America (SYDA), has come under fire, her own guru (yes, gurus also have gurus), the “old lion,” has been accused of sexual abuse, molestation and sexual intercourse with minor girls.

The film, like the Elizabeth Gilbert memoir on which it is based, doesn’t name the real-life ashram or guru, and Gilbert has never revealed the guru’s identity. Readers of the book are instead treated to breathless but abstract passages like this: “Then I listened to the Guru speak in person for the first time, and her words gave me chill bumps all over my whole body, even across the skin of my face. And when I heard she had an Ashram in India, I knew I must take myself there as quickly as possible.”

But if you’re somewhat familiar with India’s spiritual landscape, it’s easy to figure out that this “feminine, multilingual, university-educated” guru is Gurumayi Chidvilasananda — the head of the SYDA. For starters, India doesn’t have very many female gurus, and fewer still that speak impeccable English and reside in the United States. Gilbert also dedicates a sizable chunk of the India portion of her book to the troubles she has with the “Gurugita,” an obscure 90-minute-long hymn that Gurumayi’s devotees are required to chant every morning. Having been to a Siddha Yoga meditation workshop myself, I’m well acquainted with the tedium that is the Gurugita, and as far as I know, Siddha Yoga is the only Hindu spiritual order to have made the Gurugita such an essential part of a devotee’s daily practice. The ashram in the book is located in a small village just outside Mumbai, while SYDA’s India ashram is tucked away in a rural idyll called Ganeshpuri, some 50 miles from Mumbai. The book is littered with other telling biographical details about Gilbert’s guru that match up with Gurumayi — that she joined the entourage of an Indian swami (a Hindu religious teacher) as a teenager, that she served him as a translator for years before being given guru-hood, and that she was only in her 20s when she became his successor. Earlier this week, the New York Post drew the same SYDA connection to “EPL,” as others have. When Salon contacted Gilbert’s publicist at Viking to confirm that Gurumayi was in fact her guru, we were told, “No comment. Liz has always made a concerted effort to respect the privacy of the ashram.” But the evidence is overwhelming.

Known to her followers as just Gurumayi, Malti Shetty is undeniably beautiful — slender and brown-eyed, with dimples that dig deep commas below her high cheekbones. Shetty says she is the sole successor to SYDA, a new Hindu religious movement that is based on the tradition of Vedanta. Her predecessor and guru, the man who appointed her to his throne, is Swami Muktananda.

SYDA is headquartered in a large complex in South Fallsburg, N.Y., a town set in the Catskill Mountains. In the 1980s and ’90s — the decades during which the SYDA reached its height of popularity — the foundation was said to have some 70,000 followers across the world. Its devotees, mostly the wealthy and well-educated, included celebrities like Melanie Griffith, Isabella Rossellini, Diana Ross and Don Johnson.

In 1983, an exposé by journalist William Rodarmor in CoEvolution Quarterly (a Stewart Brand magazine that eventually became Whole Earth Review) suggested that before his death, Muktananda had been having sex with several young girls in his ashrams. The septuagenarian guru, said the piece, used to stand behind a curtain and spy on girls in the female dormitory. He even had a special area equipped with a gynecologist’s table that was used for his sexual dalliances. In public, he announced that he was celibate, insisting that sexual acts took away from spiritual energy. But in private, a parade of girls would be trooping in and out of his bedroom all night. The story even describes the violence and intimidation used by Muktananda to control his devotees. There are accounts of him beating hapless Indian peasants outside the ashram grounds, of stabbing his valet with a fork, and of sending burly enforcers to take care of devotees who refused to toe the party line.

In an account posted on the website Leaving Siddha Yoga — which encourages former devotees to come forward with stories of their abuse and mistreatment — a former devotee, Joan “Radha” Bridges, describes her sexual encounters with Muktananda. Bridges, then 26, says she was slowly wooed by Muktananda’s translator, Malti Shetty. As the account reads: “I was given an invitation by Malti to come to the Boston Ashram with a small entourage. This was a privilege — I was thrilled to be included.” Soon, Muktananda started kissing her and grabbing her breasts, eventually pulling her into his room to inspect her vagina. The next night, she says, Muktananda brought her back into his quarters. “All the while he told me, ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ and, ‘Don’t tell your husband.’ Muktananda put me on a high table, pulled my legs back to expose my vagina and pulled out his flaccid penis. He placed his penis as far up inside me as he could and remained in that position a very long time.” It took years for her to accept that she had, in fact, been a victim of sexual abuse.

In 1994, the New Yorker revisited these accusations in the article “O Guru, Guru, Guru,” written by Lis Harris. Harris found several other women who said that Muktananda had forced them to have sex with him. But she also chronicled Shetty’s behavior as the new guru. Shetty displayed many of the same traits as her mentor. She ran a hate campaign against her brother, who had been named as a co-successor by Muktananda, beating him and isolating him until he finally gave up his claim on the SYDA’s spiritual mantle. She denied all allegations of Muktananda’s sexual abuse and shielded other sexual predators inside the ashram, including a man called George Afif, who was convicted of statutory rape. Harris’ piece even hinted that Shetty herself had had sexual relations with Afif. “While I was working on the story,” Harris told Salon, “I was constantly followed [inside the ashram]. Men with walkie-talkies wouldn’t let me go anywhere on my own. They were always asking my driver questions. A woman who I worked with in the ashram’s kitchen was even noting down every word I said. It was very Big Brother-like.”

The organization tried hard to keep the New Yorker from publishing the story, even threatening it with litigation. According to Marta Szabo, a one-time devotee of SYDA who wrote the book “The Guru Looked Good,” Shetty once called a secret meeting to chant and perform “weird Reiki” against Lis Harris and the New Yorker’s then-editor, Tina Brown. “When the article finally came out, they took every copy of the magazine that they could find and burnt them in a great pile,” Harris says.

Rumors also abound of untold millions stashed away in Swiss bank accounts. (Rodarmor’s exposé features Muktananda talking about just such a thing.) The foundation’s workshop fees run into hundreds of dollars, and devotees who work at the ashram are mostly unpaid. “Just the money I collected from a single intensive [meditation workshop] amounted to $14,000,” says Szabo. Daniel Shaw, a former devotee who now runs Leaving Siddha Yoga, says that using human conduits to ferry cash from the U.S. to India was a common practice within Siddha Yoga. “I’ve been asked to carry large amounts of cash under my clothes during several trips to India. Others used to carry jewelry,” he says.

Charges have never been pressed against the organization. Shetty stopped speaking to the press soon after she became Gurumayi and has not publicly addressed any of the accusations in a long time. But when Rodarmor spoke to her for his piece in 1983 — just after she had taken on the mantle of guru-hood — she denied all allegations of sexual abuse against Muktananda and of the existence of Swiss bank accounts. In Harris’ piece, the group’s swamis (high-ranking members) steadfastly maintained that Muktananda never broke his vows of celibacy. The SYDA did not respond to Salon’s request for a comment.

SYDA is now a shell of its former mid-’90s self, despite the bestseller and newfangled Hollywood associations. The South Fallsburg ashram, which once hummed with as many as 4,000 devotees, looks forlorn. Many defectors say that they left because of Shetty’s increasingly authoritarian behavior and her subtle attempts at control and manipulation. “She was just mean. She humiliated me in public. She certainly wasn’t enlightened,” says Szabo, who was once part of a team that edited and rewrote parts of the public talks for which Shetty was revered.

In 2004, presumably about a year after her encounter with Gilbert (whose book came out in 2006), Shetty disappeared from public life. Now followers only get an occasional video message from their master. Shaw believes that the appearance of websites like Leaving Siddha Yoga caused Shetty to retreat into a world where she has full control. Others say that she’s just tired of playing guru.

It’s anyone’s guess if “EPL’s” film release will cause a renewed surge in SYDA’s membership. Or if a new wave of popularity will force Shetty to come back into public view. But Gilbert’s account of her time in India, her naive view of her guru as a “compassionate, loving” and “enlightened” master, and her faith that Muktananda was a “world-changing” and “self-realized” leader are all a sad chronicle of the human need to find spiritual anchors, and then to believe that these ordinary, and often deeply flawed, men and women are the path to our salvation.

. . .

Read Siddha Yoga Dham of America’s response to this story.

It’s not Gilbert’s fault but I have an instinctive reflex reaction to books about white people discovering themselves in brown places. I want to gag, shoot and leave.

In a way I almost prefer the old colonials in their pith helmets trampling over the Empire’s far-flung outposts. At least they were somewhat honest in their dealings. They wanted the gold, the cotton, and laborers for their sugar plantations. And they wanted to bring Western civilization, afternoon tea and anti-sodomy laws to godforsaken places riddled with malaria and beriberi.

The new breed is more sensitive, less overt. They want to spend a year in a faraway place on a “journey.” But the journey is all about what they can get. Not gold, cotton or indigo anymore. They want to eat, shoot films (or write books) and leave. They want the food, the spiritual wisdom, the romance. (To be fair, Elizabeth Gilbert does help her single mom Balinese healer build herself a house.)

I recently read William Dalrymple’s “Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.” What I especially appreciated about the book was that it was really in the voice of his nine subjects. It was not about Dalrymple’s spiritual journey through the thickets of faith and faith healers. Dalrymple said in an interview he was suspicious of “journey” books.

“You mean like ‘Eat, Pray, Love’?” I asked.

That was a faux pas. Later I noticed that Elizabeth Gilbert had kindly given him a blurb: “honest, edifying, and moving.”

Actually, I don’t want to deny Elizabeth Gilbert her “journey.” She is herself honest, edifying and moving. I don’t want to deny her her Italian carbs, her Indian oms or her Bali Hai beach romance. We all need that sabbatical from the rut of our lives.

But as her character complained that she had “no passion, no spark, no faith” and needed to go away for one year, I couldn’t help wondering, where do those people in Indonesia and India go away to when they lose their passion, spark and faith? I don’t think they come to Manhattan. I wonder if there could be an exchange program for the passion-deprived, a sort of global spark-swap.

This is not to say “Eat, Pray, Love” just exists in a self-centered air-conditioned meditation cave and has no heart. It does have heart. It tries hard to be down with the people. So Julia Roberts rents a room in Italy whose ceiling looks like it might fall down any minute. And in India we see her with mosquito bites. Few Bollywood actresses would consent to such puffy indignities.

Of course, there is that slight problem: It is Julia Roberts.

It requires more than the normal suspension of disbelief when Julia Roberts announces she will eat that whole pizza and buy the “big girl jeans.” And we see her trying to squeeze her Julia Roberts body into her jeans, struggling with the zipper and we know this is a fine, brave actor at work.

She tries not to be the foreign tourist, but she does spend an awful lot of time with the expats whether it’s the Swede in Italy, the Texan in India or the Brazilian in Bali. The natives mostly have clearly assigned roles. Language teacher. Hangover healer. Dispenser of fortune cookie-style wisdom (knowledge is never so meaningful as when it comes in broken English, served up with puckish grins). The expats have messy histories but the natives’ lives are not very complicated (other than that teenage arranged marriage in India). They are there as the means to her self-discovery. After that is done, it’s time to book the next flight.

But all through the film this is what I was wondering. Why did Elizabeth Gilbert have to go to Italy, India and Indonesia to learn to eat, pray and love? Didn’t anyone tell her America was the one-stop shop for all of it?

The United States is where I learned about all-you-can-eat buffets (of Indian food, no less).

This is where I was constantly fussed over by kind helpful ladies in my university town who wanted to chauffeur us heathen foreign students to church on Sunday.

And this is where we finally had the independence (and the coveted room of our own) to love, away from the prying eyes of parents, cousins, servants and neighbors.

But Elizabeth Gilbert/Julia Roberts had to board three airplanes to find that in a piecemeal fashion in Italy, India, Indonesia. I wondered why she was drawn to those three countries.

Is it because they all start with I?

I, I, and I.

Not inappropriate for a film that is ultimately about I, Me and Myself.

Nothing drove that home better than what happened after the screening ended. I went down in an elevator crammed with radiant women, all discussing when they teared up during the film, and how much they related to it, and its message of opening yourself up to the world. There was one woman in a wheelchair in the elevator. After we reached the lobby, the women, still chattering, marched out into the chilly San Francisco night. The woman in the wheelchair remained stranded behind the heavy doors. 

This story was originally published by New America Media.

As almost everyone reading this will already know, “Eat, Pray, Love” is the autobiographical and presumably truthful story of a woman who “pulls a geographic” (as some 12-steppers say) on an epic scale, fleeing first her troubled marriage and then her relationship with a hot, younger boyfriend for a year-long voyage of self-discovery to Italy, India and Bali. Gilbert is a sharp and amusing prose stylist and an openhearted critic of her own foibles and failings. She’s aware that her personal and literary odyssey contains potential contradictions: The tale of a well-connected New York writer traveling the globe on somebody else’s dime and sampling an array of seemingly disconnected experiences might strike many people as a symptom of our cultural dislocation and commodity fetishism, not a cure.

(A personal note before continuing: I knew Elizabeth Gilbert some years ago, when we worked together at Spin magazine. (She was then married to the man she leaves at the beginning of “Eat, Pray, Love.”) She’s a wonderful writer and an even better human being. There’s no question that I think about her book — and the mediocre Hollywood movie resulting from it — differently than I otherwise might, because I have no doubts about the genuineness and generosity of Liz’s intentions. I’m not surprised that she ended up writing a bestseller, and she’s well suited to handle money and fame. I could speculate about her reactions to the merchandising campaign around “Eat, Pray, Love” — which encompasses clothing, jewelry, tea and candles — but then, many of her readers will have asked themselves the same question.)

At any rate, the secret of Gilbert’s book was not so much in the subject matter or the story but in the execution. Whether you find it captivating or maddening — and the marketplace has clearly voted for the former — it’s an artfully managed literary exercise, a thoughtful work of self-examination that’s designed to encourage the reader’s own. Movies don’t do that well, or at least not the kinds of movies people build around Julia Roberts. Inevitably, director Ryan Murphy’s version of “Eat, Pray, Love” (he also co-wrote the screenplay, with Jennifer Salt) is a shorthand romantic fiction, a pretty but hollowed-out imitation that’s one remove from Gilbert’s commentary on her experience and at least two removes from the experience itself.

Gilbert’s fans may enjoy the lovely locations and the appealing supporting cast — especially James Franco as her New York post-marriage lover and Javier Bardem as the Brazilian dreamboat who sweeps her off her feet in Bali — and Murphy works hard to incorporate snatches of her wry, warm prose without turning the project into an audiobook. But the story of “Eat, Pray, Love” isn’t really about people, places and things (although it has apparently done wonders for Bali’s tourist trade). The pasta dinners, the long sessions of Hindu meditation and the glorious, curtain-fronted Balinese gazebos are meant to be accoutrements that enable a questing consciousness to uproot itself from routine and make a crucial inward journey. That’s tough to convey when you’ve got Julia Roberts drifting around looking lovely and vulnerable in a succession of going-native costumes.

Roberts doesn’t look much like Liz Gilbert — although she has indeed absorbed some of her mannerisms — but after all she gets paid to look like Julia Roberts. She gives a nice performance here, ranging from brassy to vulnerable to drunkenly flirtatious. It isn’t her fault that the script tries to jam a memoir into the romantic-comedy template, spiced liberally with New Age nostrums, and can’t quite get it right.

Non-devotees of the book are likely to find Murphy’s “Eat, Pray, Love” an emotionally murky, inflated Lifetime Channel movie, alternately charming, cloying and dull. At 140 minutes, it’s much too long to tell a compact story, but not nearly long enough to explain itself adequately. Stephen (Billy Crudup), the suburban husband Gilbert ditches, appears in several scenes but is more like a personality-free ghost than a character; marrying him and leaving him seem like equally mysterious decisions, since he doesn’t exist. Her ensuing relationship with David (Franco), the underemployed, guru-devoted actor, appears to go instantaneously from hot late-night hookup to shacking up to angry, sexless unhappiness.

Murphy and Salt’s screenplay skips over logistical realities that Gilbert herself never conceals: She was a highly-paid freelance writer who financed her world travel with a substantial publisher’s advance; she had no job to quit because sampling Roman restaurants, Indian meditation centers and Indonesian oceanfront bars pretty much was her job. Gilbert’s first two travel episodes, sampling Italian cuisine and Indian religion, play out as reasonably diverting light comedy, the first frivolous and the second more rueful. Characters come and go quickly — Tuva Novotny as a Swedish gal-pal in Rome, Richard Jenkins as a heartbroken, aphorism-spouting Texan in India — providing Gilbert with teachable moments along the way.

Of course a few scenes in a movie can do almost nothing to explain why Gilbert spent months in an Indian guru’s ashram, or what it is she thinks she found there. And why should it? If the book flirted with the most hackneyed kinds of female escape fantasy, and dared itself to escape that genre, the film has almost nothing else to offer. When we finally get to Bali and rumpled Brazilian divorcé Felipe (Bardem) runs Gilbert’s bike off the road with his jeep, you can almost hear a collective sigh of relief from the filmmakers (and their audience). A lonely guy, a lonely girl, a comic pratfall and an exotic location — from here on in, we’re golden.

It’s not even ironic that one woman’s painful and almost desperate attempt to reconnect with herself and the world became a calculated publishing phenomenon that has spawned a Julia Roberts movie and lines of prayer beads and leather-bound diaries. It’s just the way the world is in an age when the most desirable commodities are private experiences that, at least at first, do not present themselves as commodities at all. (Am I wrong, or is going “off the grid” nearing critical mass as a hot lifestyle trend?) “Eat, Pray, Love” is a minor and superficial summer diversion that offers female viewers not much more than a two-hour escape fantasy, but that’s not a crime. The fact that we find it almost impossible to talk seriously about the pervasive emotional or spiritual or psychological yearning that a story like this represents — that’s a bigger problem.

We all know “Eat, Pray, Love” has hijacked book clubs worldwide, and will only become more popular with next week’s release of the Julia Roberts movie, but less is known of the way it has affected international travel, creating a kind of bourgeois sexual tourism. I feel bad for these women, who seem to think that by following the same steps as one writer, they can somehow graft her happy ending onto their own frustrated lives. My disdain was such that early in my trip, I wrote a story about how they were ruining Bali (the story recently ran on Jezebel).

At 29, I’m not looking for a man. I’m six months out of a nearly two-year relationship so void of passion and emotion that I might as well have been alone the entire time. For the past few months I have enjoyed traveling by myself in Asia, avoiding all offers of romance. One pale Englishman in Laos asked me, his eyes wide and moist, if I wanted to have a bit of fun with him.

“Fun for whom?” I asked and went to bed early that night with my book, happy that I only had to share my room with the large frog on the wall of my bathroom.

Spiritual types like to say that Bali is a great power center of the world and that the island itself is a woman. I am wary of assigning gender to land masses, but the place does feel different than the rest of Asia, almost nurturing, and it’s hard not to feel supremely happy when you are paying $15 a night for a ridiculously beautiful hotel with carved teak canopied beds and volcano views. One night on the shared balcony I become fast friends with Susi and Nicole, two independent travelers. In the mornings we share coffee and in the evenings we stay up drinking beer and rice wine, a cloying drink sold cheaply around the island that tastes good mixed with guava juice. We laugh loudly and talk about the things we’d change about the world — men should be more in touch with their emotions, people should be more tolerant. These are not new ideas, but watching the light sink behind the temples while nearby children practice Balinese music, the ideas feel, at the very least, worth repeating.

One night we go to a local warung, a popular food spot called Dewa’s. We sit at a communal table with an extremely tall Dutch guy with disheveled hair named Jorick, whom Susi engages in some intense debate that I am too drunk on local Bintang beer to care about. We all agree to go dancing the next night, but it’s raining, and so Jorick stays on our balcony with us, drinking wine and playing music from a tiny iPod speaker. We play question games like college kids, the kind of silly philosophical head-scratchers only enjoyed by those with the luxury of time to burn.

“If you had to choose, what would you give up for the rest of your life? Pasta, bread or rice?” someone asks.

“Easy, pasta,” I say.

“Sex or music?” Jorick asks.

“Music,” I say. “No, wait!”

He shows up on the balcony the following evening as well, his lanky frame ducking around the dangling light fixtures. That night, as the bats barrel past after the rains, diving at the insects clustering around our lanterns, we continue our conversations from the night before. I find myself agreeing with Jorick often, and understanding both his accent and his point of view when the others don’t. We have moments of prolonged eye contact, but I don’t think much of it until we go to the store for more beer. Inside he picks up a basket, and we walk together to the stand-up cooler. “How many do we get?” he asks. I know it sounds crazy, but there is something I love about the way we get those beer bottles together and the way the veins on his arm stand out a bit as he holds the basket. It feels almost carnal, like a prehistoric desire, as if holding a shopping basket were the modern equivalent of being able to club a woolly mammoth. All I know for sure is that as we check out I feel my first shiver of attraction for Jorick.

I could write what happens next, after the wine and beer bottles are all empty, but Gilbert already has done such a lovely and accurate job: “Yes, I did come to his bed with him, in that bedroom with its big open windows looking out over the nighttime and the quiet Balinese rice fields … It had been a long, austere season of solitude. I had done well for myself … What I remember most about that night is the billowy white mosquito netting that surrounded us.”

Here is my movie montage with Jorick: The impossible beauty of Bali becomes even more vivid, the edges crisper, like a two-week magic mushroom trip. We rent a motorbike and drive around the countryside, dipping into valleys and ascending to views of volcanoes. Children run out from homes built like temples to wave, kites fly above us, always airborne. It is so perfect that it almost frightens me, like stumbling upon a house made of candy in the woods. There has to be a downside to this. We stay in our room so much that the housekeeper tells me later she had no time to clean it.

Do I realize I have become completely, embarrassingly Gilbert-like? No, at this point my blissed-out body has overtaken the judgmental, cynical part of myself. The New York part of me — the part that sneers at romance and sincere, naked emotion — has disappeared in favor of an unself-conscious, googly-eyed sap. When Jorick leaves to meet a friend in Vietnam, I have a physical reaction so intense I think I might be pregnant. (I’m not.) Over the next days, I behave like a love-addled teen: listen to Coldplay, gaze meaningfully from the bus at the passing scenery, scribble in my notebook about the beauty of the sky reflected in the water of the rice paddies. Recently I reread “Eat, Pray, Love,” and I realized one sentence was almost a direct quote.

It is only when I arrive home that I fully comprehend the irony of the past month: Cynical writer goes to Bali to make fun of Elizabeth Gilbert wannabes only to become perhaps her closest emulator.

I feel stabs of guilt for being so harsh on those women, searching the island for their romantic bliss. Who am I to laugh at their longing? By all means, ladies, come to Bali, I want to tell anyone within smiling distance. Find a wonderful man in a wonderful place. But if I could tell those women one more thing, it would be that maybe they should stop looking so hard. Because if there’s a romantic cliché that’s held true — for Elizabeth Gilbert, and now, for me — it’s that bliss usually happens when you aren’t hunting it down.

These days, as I plan to go meet Jorick in Europe, my “Eat, Pray, Love” overlap still makes me a bit uneasy, like carrying around a book with an Oprah stamp on it. My spontaneous romance has a whiff of the already discovered, which is both annoying and embarrassing. I can anticipate future conversations with women.

“So. Where’d you two meet?”

“Bali, in Ubud. I was there alone having some time to ponder my life’s purpose and –”

A flicker of recognition spreads over the listener’s face. “Wait. Isn’t that where –”

“Yes, but it’s different,” I’ll protest, trying not to sound too defensive. “I’m not divorced, and he isn’t even Brazilian.”

Of course, there’s a good chance our relationship, like most, won’t work out. Not everyone is as gifted with happy endings as Gilbert, whose marriage to Felipe became the basis of her second tome of self-discovery, “Committed.” No, in the end, I’m just Jessica Olien, unknown writer and walking example of the Murphy’s Law of Relationships. But, like Jorick says, it would be stupid for us not to see what happens. You never know.

I just don’t expect a book deal out of it.

Jessica Olien’s writing has appeared in Slate, Bust, theatlantic.com and Jezebel.