The following is an excerpt from the anthology, again taken from the "On Vedic Culture" category:

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So what is Vedic culture? Try this test. Read the Sanskrit verses of the Srimad-bhagavatam as a philologist, which means to try to find out as much as you can about the material culture of the people. By material culture, I mean what they ate, how they dressed, what their houses looked like, what kind of music they played and listened to. What will be remarkable is how little information you will find. I personally am quite sure that the intention of the Bhagavatam, that Krishna has presented, through Vyasadeva, is to present a universal spiritual science and not an ethnic tradition. For example, what did people eat in Vedic culture? It depends. We know that they ate preparation made from milk products and grains and vegetables, and we don’t know much more. The edible things are sometimes interpreted as specific preparations such as puris or halava, but generally, you find a word like payasa which means, made from milk. As Prabhupada says, there are millions of preparations which are made from milk. Often, in our books, we translate it as sweet rice or sandesh or rasagula, but the word that we often find in the Bhagavatam is payasa, a milk product.

Or, what was the architecture like, what did buildings look like? The information we have from the Bhagavatam is that, at times, there were walls around cities, which was a custom up until World War I. At that point, the Germans had new cannons, by which they blew away the walls in Belgium, which was the end of walled cities. We know that there were beautiful entry gates, turrets and sometimes domes on buildings. There are some things we know about the building, but did they look exactly like Indian temples? We can’t say, at least from the Bhagavatam.

How did people dress? The words, dhoti and sari, are not Sanskrit words. Therefore, they are never mentioned in the Bhagavatam. Obviously people wore something. I am sure they wore something like a robe, appropriate for that climate and time of history.  We find statements of renunciates going back millions of years, who didn’t wear dhotis. They just wore a cloth, or nothing—or they might have worn pants.

There are ancient paintings in India, which are hundreds of years old, where Krishna is wearing pants. So what is Vedic dress? Did people wear kurtas, (shirts), which are exactly the same length as ours, with the same pockets which are designed to grab onto door knobs? I am sure back then, that either people didn’t have kurtas or they didn’t have door knobs, but I am sure that they didn’t have both.

You can see in our old Bhagavad-gita paintings, where people are dressed in these Aladdin’s Lamp slippers, which curl up at the top. So if you talk about dress, we know that women wore a top, and a bottom cloth, but there is not a single detailed description about that cloth. According to the Mahabharata, Duhshasana—which literally means ill-advised—tried to strip Draupadi, who had a cloth on. Leaving aside text-critical issues of the Mahabharata, one may say that this proves she wore a sari, but it also says that she was dressed unusually at that time because she was in her menstrual period. Therefore, she was staying in her quarters and was only dressed in a single cloth. In other words, Draupadi was not dressed normally when she went into the gambling hall. She had on a blood-stained, single garment. However, there are many ISKCON paintings where she is wearing a very nice Indian sari and choli.

So how did people dress and what kind of music did they listen to? We know that Narada has that vina, but who else played the vina? The scriptures usually simply mention that there were horns, trumpets and those kinds of instruments. There were drums and other instruments. Sometimes it is mentioned that there was a band of instruments. So what did it sound like?

So what is Vedic music, Vedic architecture, Vedic dress? There are devotees who are convinced that the way they do things in India, is the way they do things in heaven and in the spiritual world and if you go to the spiritual world, it is basically just like India, in the last few hundred years. So if we deviate from how they do things in India, then we are deviating from the spiritual world, but there are statements, from Prabhuapda, that what is appropriate in India may not be appropriate in the West. For example, you can read Prabhuapda’s purport to SB 4.8.54 [1] where he says that we must adjust things so that they are convenient for time and place.

My argument is that we should begin, more than we have, to understand Vedic culture in terms of principles. For example, what is Vedic dress for women? We can say, without question, that Vedic dress, for women, is dress which is chaste, clean and appropriate for the occasion—and the same thing for men. Is it Vedic for a woman to cover her head? Is there any statement, anywhere in the Bhagavatam, where a woman covers her head? Not that I know of. At the same time, chastity is Vedic, and when a woman covers her head, it often has the effect of creating a chaste environment. So is it Vedic? Yes, as a detail, but not as a basic principle. If we could start to understand what Vedic principles are and how Prabhupada applied them, and how he asked us to also find practical ways to present Krishna Consciousness, we will start to sound much more scientific to people, and less ethnic. In this country there is a real danger—to use well-known sociological terms—that we are coming off to people as much more religious, than spiritual.

(Lecture: “Why Should they become Hindus?" New Vrindavan, June 14, 2002)

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 “If we understand Vedic in an extremely detailed, ethnic sense, this movement is going to go nowhere in this country. If you are waiting for Americans to become Indians, don’t hold your breath, because you’ll die young.”

(Lecture: “Why Should they become Hindus?" New Vrindavan, June 14, 2002)

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[1] The method of worship -- chanting the mantra and preparing the forms of the Lord -- is not stereotyped, nor is it exactly the same everywhere. It is specifically mentioned in this verse that one should take consideration of the time, place and available conveniences. Our Krishna consciousness movement is going on throughout the entire world, and we also install Deities in different centers. Sometimes our Indian friends, puffed up with concocted notions, criticize, "This has not been done. That has not been done." But they forget this instruction of Narada Muni to one of the greatest Vaishnavas, Dhruva Maharaja. One has to consider the particular time, country and conveniences. What is convenient in India may not be convenient in the Western countries.

>>> Ref. VedaBase => SB 4.8.54