From Utopia To Dystopia: The Wild Wild Story Of Osho’s Commune

A cult story is a love story. Like most romances, it has a honeymoon period. The documentary Wild Wild Country (2018), examining Osho’s commune in Oregon, shows the headiness and joy a guru inspires in his devotees. In mid-1981, after facing political resistance in India, his followers moved to Oregon to establish a utopian town. Through manual labour and scientific ingenuity, they built a self-sustaining community—replete with solar power, check dams, farmlands—“literally turning the desert green”, a “present for Bhagwan”.

He arrived a few months later. “I felt like a newly married bride,” says his secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, in the documentary, “prepared to receive her husband on the first night”. Others were excited, too, working day and night to roll out “4,000-square-feet of green lawn carpets around his house”, ensuring it was “spotless”. They brought animals, “like peacocks”. When Bhagwan reached the ranch in his Rolls-Royce, around a dozen devotees, dressed in maroon robes, sat on the lawn welcoming him with sitar music. Recounting the incident, Sheela keeps her hand on her cheek—her eyes washed with nostalgia—and says, “It was like a beautiful Fellini movie.”

The story of Osho’s commune indeed unfolds like a film—so much so that the documentary has six hour-long episodes—but it was neither beautiful nor Felliniesque. Because Osho didn’t just want to own his devotees’ mind; he wanted to own the whole town. Desperate to win the Wasco county elections, the Rajneeshees begin importing numerous homeless people. When the election commissioner refused to register them, the Rajneeshees tried to poison the Dulles City in Oregon—by contaminating salad bars at ten local restaurants with the Salmonella bacteria—to win the election.

The love story had become a murder story.

That wasn’t all. As the locals and law enforcement officials began to investigate the commune, it started to implode. The accusations of sham marriages and immigration fraud had hounded the Rajneeshees for long, but now the lovers had turned cannibals: Sheela wire-tapped Bhagwan’s room, Bhagwan accused her of bioterrorism and—with every conspiracy, every attempted murder—the utopia devolved into dystopia. Wild Wild Country documents all this in dogged detail, but the most revealing and affecting part about it is not the long litany of crimes perpetuated by the cult but how its once followers, even decades later, are still swayed by the mere mention of Osho. Even though battling betrayal and confusion, their faces soften—their lips curl into a smile—when they recount their happier days, their hope, their ambition. Some defend their Bhagwan; some erupt into tears, remembering his time in jail. The flame might have extinguished, but their hearts continue to burn.