Testimonial letter from Ma Deva Waduda (1)
This letter is one of a remarkable series of over 2650 letters amassed in 1983 to support Osho's attempt to get permanent resident status in the US at the time of the Oregon ranch. The image is reproduced here with the kind permission of The Oregon Historical Society. Information about their collection of these letters and other supporting material -- the "Jeffrey Noles Rajneesh Collection", named for Osho's immigration lawyer Jeffrey Noles, who compiled them in 1983 and donated them to the OHS -- can be found at this page. The wiki is grateful to the OHS for making access available for these documents. For more information and links to all the letters, see Testimonial letters.
This letter is from Ma Deva Waduda. It is "Exhibit A-111" in the Noles collection.
To speed up page creation, this page has been temporarily created without a text version, which will be coming soon. The image below links to a pdf file of the whole original letter, which has 2 pages.
 This is one of two letters written by Ma Deva Waduda. The other is at Waduda (2). The numbering is according to their appearance in Noles' collection, not chronological. Waduda's other letter was written the same day as this one, but apparently lacked something which commune authorities wanted for a particular angle in some of the letters and so had to be re-written. That it lacked something can be readily surmised from this letter's presence in a unique, focused subgroup of letters, from "important" members of the commune, each stating their religious titles and/or educational positions in "Rajneeshism". These letters ran in a series from Exhibit A-97 to A-114, and in fact were not precisely letters but fairly formulaic affidavits, all beginning with: "I, [name], being duly sworn, do depose and say as follows". The series included two other such "re-writes", from Ma Prem Divya and Sw Anand Maitreya. In this letter, Waduda declares herself to be "a Siddha (Minister) of the religion of Rajneeshism". It is not known why both her letters were kept, but likely only this one was submitted to the INS. See also Testimonial letters#duplication for more on this. Transcription is still to come .... |
(Please note: We assume that the above letter is still copyrighted, but we regard its historical interest to constitute a Fair Use exception for publication in this wiki.)
