In the middle of posting this, someone just told me that many previously colonized countries have to outport their goods at an uneven exchange, and India has their culture as a product. Is there a lot of white washing disrespectful appropriation? Are there lots of cults too?
Only the top like 5% of hippies travel to India. I think the peak of Indian spiritual export to the US was in the late 60s/early 70s. You had a lot of people looking for answers outside of their cultural norms. They did sex, drugs, rock and roll, and “eastern spirituality”. A bunch of Indian “gurus” capitalized on this interest and established branches of their cults in “the west”. Many persist to this day, though they mostly fall off pretty hard once the old Indian guy dies.