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The art of loving Krishna: Ornamentation and devotion
Abstract
Since ancient times, Hindus have expressed their love and devotion to their deities through beautiful ornamentation - dressing and decorating the deities with elaborate clothing, jewelry, and flowers. In this pioneering study of temples in Vrindaban and Jaipur, India, Cynthia Packert takes readers across temple thresholds and into the god Krishna's sacred domain. She describes what devotees see when they behold gorgeously attired representations of the god and why these images look the way they do. She discusses new media as well as global forms of devotion popular in India and abroad. The Art of Loving Krishna opens a universe of meaning in which art, religious action, and devotion are dynamically intertwined.
... Vaishnava temple rituals were codified in the Sanskrit text Hari Bhakti Vilasa compiled by Sanatan Goswami, and according to some, co-authored by Gopal Bhatt(Packert 2010). ...
Vrindavan in the Braj region in India, associated with Lord Krishna’s lila (play), evolved over half a millennium into a pilgrim town on the banks of the river Yamuna. The coded language of myths and their grounding in riverfront groves preserves collective memories that are retrieved by ‘finding’ places where events in Krishna’s life occurred. Oral traditions of storytelling with re-enactments involve place-making by devotees through active engagement with the physical environment. Thus, ‘finding’ and ‘making’ places are crucial in not only remembering Krishna’s one-time life on earth but also ensuring the possibility of divine encounters with living deities in temples and natural settings. Preservation practices in state-protected monuments in Vrindavan, in contrast, discourage place-making thus severing the connections between tangible and intangible forms of heritage. The historic core of monumental temples is currently facing many challenges as a result of increasing religious tourism. Preserving it as a historic urban landscape entails untangling the complex connections between tangible and intangible aspects of heritage, especially the important role of place narratives in shaping beliefs, values, and ritual practices. The proposed conservation framework draws upon a holistic understanding of heritage for sustainable planning and management of the historic core.
... At Radharaman temple for example devotees come to do darshan and participate in the eight-fold round of rituals (ashtayama lila) performed daily by the priests to wake up, bathe, feed and put to bed the living deity. They follow the Vaishnava temple rituals codified in the Sanskrit text Hari Bhakti Vilasa (Packert, 2010). Devotees sit on plinths extending from houses in the ghera along the street and at the temple entry (gokhe) for the temple doors to open in the mornings and evenings; when circumambulating the temple sanctum, they seek physical contact with the divine, some making swastikas (mystical diagram) with fresh cowdung on the exterior walls of the temple. ...
Vrindavan in the Braj region in India, associated with Lord Krishna's lila (play), evolved over half a millennium into a pilgrim town on the banks of the River Yamuna. The coded language of myths and their grounding in riverfront groves preserves collective memories and represents living heritage. The northeastern part of Vrindavan's historic core on the Yamuna Riverfront offers great opportunities for exploring such living heritage. In this context, this paper examines the Northeastern bank of the Yamuna, and its cluster of heritage sites to reveal the myths created and sustained in these places. The research employs participation observation and unstructured interviews as research tools to study the ways in which devotees perceived and interacted with places. Three sites-Nidhi Van, Radharaman Temple, and Keshi Ghat-each representing an urban type were the focus of detailed observations and documentation since they exist in the most visible and iconic section of the riverfront, lined by historic palaces and temples. The river can be accessed from there. It also employed literature review of published sources, mapping of heritage precincts in the historic core with the aid of satellite images, personal observations and visual documentation through fieldwork. Research revealed that myths are enacted by devotees in 'making' places through active engagement with the physical environment. Built environment and the riverfront are transformed in the process of producing the ephemeral landscapes, in making places and adding to the permanent structures already in place. These cultural practices are salient in sustaining collective memories of Krishna's play in Vrindavan. However, the historic core is currently facing many challenges as a result of increasing religious tourism. The paper argues that preserving it as a historic urban landscape entails untangling the complex connections between tangible and intangible aspects of heritage, especially the important role of place narratives in shaping beliefs, values, and ritual practices.
... One must also bear in mind that Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism is still very much a living tradition within the subcontinent and beyond the parameters of ISKCOn and related institutions, particularly if one is to avoid presuming the tradition's teleological fulfilment in these global developments (a narrative that creeps into some scholarship on the tradition). In this regard, Sukanya Sarbadhikary's sensitive and theoretically rich ethnography (2015) of the multiple and diverse facets of the contemporary tradition in its preeminent pilgrimage centre, nabadwip, is especially worthy of mention (other notable work on aspects of the broader contemporary Gauḍīya landscape includes that of Broo 2003;Case 2000;Haberman 1994;nicholas 2003: 28-61;Packert 2010). 4. I refer here to both Western-style critical scholarship and the invaluable detailed research of scholarly practitioners. ...
Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, which traces its origins to the ecstatic Bengali Kṛṣṇa devotee, Kṛṣṇa Caitanya (1486-1533), has indelibly shaped the socioreligious landscape of Bengal and significantly impacted other regions of the Indian subcontinent, such as Orissa, Bihar, Assam, Manipur, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan. The present article provides a current map of the field of the study of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition, from its inception to the early twentieth century, based largely on recent critical English-language scholarship. Adopting a thematic historical approach, it highlights the contextual specificity of recent scholarship and provides a heuristic framework for understanding the tradition and its historical dynamics.
Braj is a sacred place revered by Bengali Vaishnavas, followers of the bhakti sect of Vaishnavism, one of four branches of Hindu devotion. Followers of the sect worship the God Krishna, who it is believed manifested in Braj and carried out many divine feats and activities that are imprinted onto the land. Braj today is dotted with thousands of holy shrines, temples and natural places connected to Krishna. Devotees connect to Krishna through the landscape of Braj; it is where the transcendental and the physical realms meet. Braj has been transformed in a multitude of ways with the influx of money from Western sources, commercial enterprises and developers that wish to modernize and commercialize it for the new religious consumer. New infrastructure, condo developments and other changes illustrate both the challenge and the promise of modernity. This paper examines how these transformations are impacting the region of Braj.
Framed by recent interest in the agency of materiality, this essay analyses, through a performative-ethnographic lens, possibilities created and questions raised by the cement images of Ravan, the antagonist of the Ramayana epic tradition, found throughout the central plains of the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. While in Ramayan verbal narratives, Ravan dies, here in Chhattisgarh, materially he stands and is much more visible than the hero-god Ram. Why is this so? I suggest that the materiality of Ravan images creates the possibility of a spectrum of (often unarticulated) Ravan-dominant ideologies/theologies and identities: Ravan’s images stand as neighbours, boundary watchmen, or simply part of the landscape, often barely noticed; he is honoured as a Brahmin, a wise man, and a Gond ancestral king; he is integrated into a Gond cosmology unrelated to the Ramayan; and his material presence questions dominant variants of the Ramayan narrative.
This paper focuses on relics as indexical forms of remembrance that are powerful manifestations of the “presence in absence” of the Shiʿi saints and Imams. Examples of representational material religious culture in Shiʿism include relics, replicas of tombs (ẓarīḥ, tābūt, and taʿziya), battle standards (ʿalam), funerary biers (nakhl), sacred foot- and handprints, posters, and votive talismanic objects. Relics assumed a defining role in shaping a specific form of religious material culture that would find spiritual and political valence among the diverse religious and ethnic polities of the Deccan region of south central India during the Qutb Shahi period (ca. 1518–1687 ce). This paper describes how the Qutb Shahi sultans encouraged the translation of Shiʿism from an essentially Persianate form into an Indic and Deccani idiom through several complex processes of translation and indigenization that transformed the ritual-devotional, literary, architectural, and reliquary material practices into systems that were mutually intelligible to a diversity of Hindu and Muslim communities alike.
The 1981 publication of the first edition of Diana Eck’s Darcan: Seeing the Divine Image in India marked an important watershed in the scholarly understanding and interpretation of visual interaction with and experience of three-dimensional temple icons in Hinduism (and by extension, South Asian religions more broadly). While there had been previous publications on ritual visuality in India (most notably Jan Gonda’s Eye and Gaze in the Veda [1969]), and 1981 also saw the publication of Lawrence A. Babb’s article “Glancing: Visual Interaction in Hinduism,” 1 Eck’s monograph, especially in its 1998 third edition, has remained definitively central in all subsequent discussions of darcan. In the words of Philip Lutgendorf (2006: 233), Darcan is now the “key text” on the subject. It is usually the first source on ritual visuality to which scholars of South Asia turn, and its prominence is equally evident in comparative discussions of icons and visuality by non-South Asianists. 2 Due in significant part to Eck’s thin volume, darcan has become what we can call—to import a term John Carman (1985: 117) used in a different context for the concept of the ‘sacred’ or the ‘holy’—a “super-category” in the study of South Asian religion and visual culture. In this essay, following a review of the ways in which Eck’s definition has become standard in studies of South Asian religious (and in some cases, secular) visuality, I argue that thirty years after the publication of her slim monograph, it is now time to revisit the broadly phenomenol
This book offers a close-up view of the religious world of one of the most influential families in Vrinbadan, India's premier place of pilgrimage for worshipers of Krishna. This priestly family has arguably been the most creative force in this important town. Their influence also radiates well beyond India's borders both because of their tireless work in fostering scholarship and performance about Krishna and because the scion of the family, Shrivatsa Goswami, has become an international spokesman for Hindu ways and concerns. The author, who has been an occasional resident in the family ashram, gives a real sense of the atmosphere of daily life there, and the complete devotion of the residents to the service and worship of Krishna.
Contemporary Braj practice regarding yaksa worship invites us to reconsider notions of the interaction between the hegemonic Krishna-Gopal complex and the local traditions absorbed into this tradition. Practices comprising the nga-yaksa-Balarma continuum offer a counterpoint to the pastoral Krishna tradition that became dominant in the sixteenth century. Yaksas present an interesting test case, because, in contrast to Balarma-Śesa, they were not absorbed into Vaisnavism. Scholars and Vaisnava Brahmins have consistently privileged the pastoral Krishna as the center of the circle. However, attention to yaksa practices offers a re-visioning of the center-periphery image that has dominated Braj thought and necessitates a re-conceptualization of the relationships between these traditions. This article focuses our attention on contemporary yaksa worship to re-map the landscape to reflect these multiple circles. These multiple circles will more accurately represent the dialectical and mutually interdependent relationships between the different traditions in Braj.