A review by Nityaprem of Sarito Carroll’s memoir
In the Shadow of Enlightenment
by Sarito Carroll – saritocarroll.com
Heroine Publishing LLC (13 November 2024)
Kindle and paperback, 314 pages
ISBN-13: 979-8991686617
ASIN: B0DM2LN2ZR
Links to buy from: saritocarroll.com/buy
In the Shadow of Enlightenment both is and is not an easy book to read. The writing is good, and the prose flows naturally and smoothly across the page. But the subject matter makes for somewhat uncomfortable reading – yet at the same time it is an important viewpoint of what happened in the Osho communes. It is the story of Ma Prem Sarito and her journey as a sannyas girl, through Poona One and the Ranch, starting at age nine – until at sixteen she ends up back in ordinary society.
First, for full disclosure, she and I are of the same generation, she being a few years the elder, and our living in some of the same places at the same times makes it easy for me to feel a certain kinship with her.
The early parts of the book, where she details her child’s eye view of the Poona Ashram in the late seventies, feel very familiar, and I’m sure would occasion a pleasant trip down memory lane for anyone who was there. She describes her energy darshan, and her time running messages for the front office, and also what it felt like when Osho suddenly left for America.
Sarito was sannyasin-arrival number 32 on the Ranch, well before Osho’s arrival. Her early days on the Ranch, and later as part of Sheela’s office, fill in a number of gaps in common knowledge – before leading into one of the main themes of the book, her early sexual experiences. She was seduced at twelve by a well-known adult sannyasin; I won’t name him here but she does name names in the book. She ends up sleeping with him more than a hundred times, her head filled with teenage romantic dreams of love and loyalty, until she gets her heart broken.
Now, the law considers sex between a minor (someone below the age of consent) and an adult, abuse and rape for good reasons; yet it seems to have been fairly common on the Ranch, and many people knew about it.
The brain and the hormonal system are not fully mature in teens, and the experience of adult sexual relations with a partner who has no intention of loving you for the long haul can be very damaging in terms of the ability to form future attachments. It can take a long time to adjust to a more normal relationship, and to gain the ability to reflect truthfully on these things. It is neither a coincidence nor a surprise that it has taken until Sarito was in her fifties for her to be able to write this memoir.
The book continues to mix the story of Sarito’s under-age sexual life with details about the development of the Ranch, plus Sheela and Osho. She tells what happened to her after the Ranch collapsed. She details some of the process of therapy, of hearing her therapist tell her she could read the signs of abuse in her body language. She talks of coming to see Osho’s movement as a cult. She talks about her feelings, and being diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. She also describes her struggle to be heard, of her contact with other ‘then-kids’ who had similar experiences, and at the very end, her reclaiming of the good things in her life.
It is a courageous book. Sarito has written with honesty and clarity about her life. I think it is up to us as past and present sannyasins to not look away, and to appreciate both the beautiful and the awful of what happened.
This book is a different perspective from an adult’s story of the communes — the children had no choice, existing among adult structures; and the teenagers were very much still learning about the world.
Not every teenager’s experiences will have ended up as life-altering emotional trauma. But to get a true perspective on what our shared time in the communes and with Osho was all about, we also have to include the stories of those who had a difficult time as children.
Comments are closed.