This study seeks to illuminate the logic of embodiment that is integral to many Hindu bhakti traditions and is concerned more specifically with the multileveled models of embodiment and systems of bodily practices through which divine bodies and devotional bodies are fashioned in bhakti traditions celebrating the deity Kṛṣṇa. My explorations of the connections between bhakti and embodiment are grounded in an analysis of two case studies: the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the consummate textual monument to Vaiṣṇava bhakti, which expresses a distinctive form of passionate and ecstatic bhakti that is distinguished by its embodied nature; and the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition, an important bhakti tradition inspired by the Bengali leader Caitanya in the sixteenth century CE, which articulates a robust discourse of embodiment pertaining to the divine bodies of Kṛṣṇa and the devotional bodies of Kṛṣṇa bhaktas that is grounded in the canonical authority of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa.
This study stands at the intersection of three categories that have been the principal focus of my research in recent years: the body as an analytical category in the social sciences and humanities; sacred space as a category of perception and practice in South Asia; and bhakti as a canonical category in Hindu traditions.
My first research trajectory centering on the body developed out of my earlier comparative historical work on Hindu and Jewish traditions in which I emphasized the distinctive nature of the brahmanical and rabbinic traditions as “embodied communities” for whom the body constitutes a site of central significance. This inspired me to undertake a sustained interrogation of the analytical category of the body in two domains: first, an analysis of the contending categories of the body that have been theorized by scholars in philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, and feminist and gender studies; and, second, a mapping of a broad terrain of Hindu discourses of the body across various registers, including different historical periods, geographic regions, and sociocultural locations. This in turn led to a series of studies, culminating in my forthcoming book The Body and the Self: Hindu Contributions to Theories of Embodiment, in which I interrogate five distinct Hindu discourses of the body: ritual bodies in the discourse of yajña in the Vedic Saṃhitās and Brāhmaṇas; ascetic bodies in the discourse of jñāna in the Upaniṣads and later post-Vedic ascetic traditions; purity bodies in the discourse of dharma in the Dharma-Śāstras; tantric bodies in the discourse of tantra in the Pāñcarātra and Kashmir Śaiva traditions; and devotional bodies in the discourse of bhakti in the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition.
In the meantime I developed a second research trajectory alongside the first that has entailed a different kind of mapping: the mapping of sacred spaces in South Asia. This has involved an investigation of the categories and practices deployed by South Asian communities to represent, experience, and shape their natural, social, and cultural landscapes and mark spaces as “sacred”: through architectural structures such as temples and shrines; through pilgrimage maps and other cartographic representations; through ritual performances such as festivals, pilgrimages, and temple rituals; through literary forms such as mythological narratives, eulogistic literature, and pilgrimage guidebooks; and through ritual images, paintings, sculptures, and other forms of visual art. During my tenure as the Director of the Center for the Analysis of Sacred Space (CASS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 2000 to 2008, I fostered research and instructional initiatives concerned with the analysis of sacred space, with a principal focus on the religions and cultures of South Asia. One of my objectives was to expand the research and instructional applications of geographic information systems (GIS) and technologies beyond the earth sciences and the social sciences into the humanities by developing geospatial digital models for mapping cultural and historical data pertaining to sacred sites in South Asia. My own research has focused in particular on one of the most important pilgrimage centers in India, the region of Vraja—known today by the Hindi designation “Braj”—which is celebrated as the sacred terrain in North India where the deity Kṛṣṇa unfolded his līlā, divine play, during his sojourn on earth. My investigations, which are grounded in field research conducted in the area between 2000 and 2003, have involved sustained analyses of the religiocultural landscapes of Vraja-maṇḍala, as expressed in mythological narratives, theological formulations, pilgrimage networks, ritual traditions, and visual art representations, and have found fruition in a geospatial, multimedia digital volume, From Geographic Place to Transcendent Space: Tracking Kṛṣṇa’s Footprints in Vraja-Maṇḍala.
My third research trajectory has focused on the nature and functions of bhakti as a “canonical category” that provides “explanatory power, traditional legitimacy, and canonical authority.”1 The category of bhakti has operated in many Hindu traditions as an authoritative network of signifiers that, once divested of its delimited significations tied to a particular religiocultural complex, has been mapped onto a variety of discursive domains, becoming invested with distinctive new significations in each domain. My abiding research interests in the category of bhakti have found expression in three principal forms: polythetic mappings of the category of bhakti grounded in a range of exempla from distinct religiocultural, historical, geographic, and linguistic environments; interrogation of the multivalent significations of bhakti in Purāṇic traditions, with particular focus on the Bhāgavata Purāṇa; and, most recently, sustained investigations of the bhakti-śāstra, formal discourse of bhakti, developed by the early authorities of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya in the sixteenth century.
These three research trajectories—the body, sacred space, and bhakti—converge in the present study. In contrast to my broader study of Hindu discourses of the body, in which I interrogate five distinct discourses pertaining to ritual bodies, ascetic bodies, purity bodies, tantric bodies, and devotional bodies, in this book I narrow my focus to an analysis of devotional bodies in dynamic engagement with divine bodies in the discourses of Kṛṣṇa bhakti that are expressed in seminal form in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, are richly elaborated by the sixteenth-century Gauḍīya authorities, and are instantiated in the bodily practices of Kṛṣṇa bhaktas in the religiocultural spaces of Vraja-maṇḍala to the present day.
The following essays contain some of my earlier reflections on themes that are addressed in this book: “From Purāṇa-Veda to Kārṣṇa-Veda: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa as Consummate Smṛti and Śruti Incarnate,” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 15, no. 1 (2006): 31–70; “The Embodied Aesthetics of Mystical Realization: Enraptured Devotion and Bodies of Bliss in Kṛṣṇa Bhakti,” in Essays on Mysticism and Phenomenology, eds. Jeffrey Keiser and Michelle Rebidoux, special issue, ARC: The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University 35 (2007): 55–92; “From Nāma-Avatāra to Nāma-Saṃkīrtana: Gauḍīya Perspectives on the Name,” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 17, no. 2 (2009): 3–36; and “Vraja-Dhāman: Krishna Embodied in Geographic Place and Transcendent Space,” in The Bhāgavata Purāṇa: Sacred Text and Living Tradition, eds. Ravi M. Gupta and Kenneth R. Valpey, 91–116 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
It is not possible to acknowledge everyone in the international network of scholars in North America, Europe, India, and elsewhere who have contributed to my reflections on the body, sacred space, and bhakti that are brought together in this book, many of whom I have referenced in the text or Notes. Rather, I will limit my acknowledgments to those colleagues with whom I have actively engaged in reflecting on one or both of the categories that define the principal focus of my study: the body and bhakti.
My studies of the body have been particularly enriched by scholars of South Asian religions who are committed to bringing contemporary theories of the body in the Western academy—in particular, those that derive from seminal theorists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Judith Butler—into conversation with discourses of the body that derive from South Asian religious traditions. This conversation is not limited to a one-way monologue in which Western theoretical models provide the default epistemological framework for interpreting or explaining South Asian datasets but is rather envisioned as a two-way mutual engagement between worthy interlocutors who both have something significant to contribute to theorizing the body and reimagining our categories and models of embodiment. In this context I am particularly indebted to Sushil Mittal, who invited me to contribute to a special issue of the International Journal of Hindu Studies on The Study of Hinduism and the Study of Religion, which led to my first article reflecting on the contributions of Hindu discourses of the body to scholarship on the body in the history of religions and in the human sciences generally, “Body Connections: Hindu Discourses of the Body and the Study of Religion.” Sushil later invited me to contribute an essay on “Body” to a collection of essays that he co-edited with Gene Thursby, Studying Hinduism: Key Concepts and Methods. Among my colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I have benefited in particular from ongoing conversations with José Cabezón and Vesna Wallace, whose insights on issues of embodiment, sexuality, and gender in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions have contributed to my own reflections on these issues in Hindu traditions. I have also benefited from the many graduate students who have participated in my Seminar on Hindu Discourses of the Body in its various incarnations, whose fresh perspectives on the material have challenged me to re-vision my arguments in significant ways.
Among the broader community of scholars with whom I have engaged in fruitful exchanges at conferences and other forums over the years, three collaborations have been particularly important in stimulating new directions in my thinking about South Asian theories of embodiment. The first collaboration developed out of a Conference on the Study of Religions of India on Religion and the Body at Albion College in September 2007, hosted by my dear late colleague Selva Raj, which inspired a productive ongoing conversation among a number of the conference participants—in particular, Carol Anderson, Kendall Busse, Andrew Cerulli, Steven Hopkins, Harshita Mruthinti Kamath, Karen Pechilis, Tracy Pintchman, Michael Radich, Kerry Skora, and Liz Wilson—that has borne fruit in a collection of essays, Refiguring the Body: Embodiment in South Asian Religions, that I co-edited with Karen Pechilis. The second collaboration emerged out of the first and has involved an ongoing series of illuminating exchanges with Michael Radich, beginning with his invitation to me to present my research on Hindu theories of embodiment at a Seminar on the Body in the Study of Asian Religions at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand in March 2008 and my return invitation to him to present his research on Buddhist theories of embodiment to our South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in June 2008. More recently, a third collaboration emerged out of a Conference on the Study of Religions of India on Altered and Alternative States at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in June 2011, hosted by Christopher Chapple. This conference inspired a fruitful ongoing conversation about the sex/gender distinction and alternative bodily identities with Elaine Craddock, my doctoral student Anya Pokazanyeva, and two of my previous collaborators—Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and Tracy Pintchman—that has resulted in a collection of essays, Sex, Gender, and Alternative Bodily Identities in Hindu Traditions, to be published as a special issue of the International Journal of Hindu Studies that I am guest editing.
My abiding research interests in the category of bhakti were initially inspired by two of my mentors during my doctoral studies at Harvard University: John Carman, whose groundbreaking studies of Śrīvaiṣṇava theology and other bhakti traditions have helped to define the field of bhakti studies, and Diana Eck, whose landmark studies of Banaras (Vārāṇasī) and other pilgrimage places in India have had a formative influence on pilgrimage studies. During this period I pursued my ongoing studies of Purāṇic traditions under the guidance of Diana Eck, and I also made my initial forays into the study of Indian aesthetics under the guidance of Gary Tubb, which led to my first encounters with the Gauḍīya theory of bhakti-rasa. During my doctoral studies I had the good fortune to engage with other pioneering figures who have helped to shape the field of bhakti studies and of Vaiṣṇava studies more specifically, including Charlotte Vaudeville, Norvin Hein, Jack Hawley, and Vasudha Narayanan. My subsequent collaborations with Jack Hawley and Vasudha Narayanan at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and in a variety of other venues have been pivotal to the development of my thinking, and I was delighted to explore with both of them, along with Steven Hopkins and Tracy Pintchman, the connections between bhakti and embodiment in a session on “Embodying Bhakti: Devotional Bodies, Fertile Bodies, and Bodies of Desire” at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego in November 2007. Within the more specialized field of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava studies, I have benefited from illuminating conversations with David Haberman, Graham Schweig, and Jonathan Edelmann, with whom I collaborated most recently in a session on “Bhakti and Yoga” convened by the Dharma Academy of North America in San Francisco in November 2011. My work has also been enriched by the insightful comments of Ravi Gupta, June McDaniel, and Kenneth Valpey, with whom I have collaborated in various contexts. I have also benefited from the many graduate students who have participated in the Seminar on Bhakti Traditions that I teach periodically, whose perceptive comments have contributed to the refinement of my reflections on the category of bhakti.
I am especially indebted to Gavin Flood, Editor of the Routledge Hindu Studies Series, for including my book in his series. Special thanks are also due to Routledge (in particular to Leanne Hinves, Dorothea Schaefter, Jillian Morrison) and Jessica Stock at Sunrise for their steadfast commitment and patient efforts in shepherding the book through the final stages of production.
Beyond the many scholars in the Western academy who have enriched my studies of the body and of bhakti and of the connections between embodiment and bhakti, I am grateful to the many bhaktas who welcomed me into their worlds during my field research on the contemporary pilgrimage traditions of Vraja-maṇḍala. It is these bhaktas, whom I met in the villages and towns and at the temples, wayside shrines, bathing places, and other pilgrimage sites that interweave the region, who enabled me to move beyond the worlds of the texts and to enter, albeit temporarily, into the living worlds of Kṛṣṇa bhaktas in Braj—from the local Brajbāsīs to the contemporary representatives of the various Vaiṣṇava sampradāyas to the pilgrims visiting Braj from Rajasthan, Gujarat, Bengal, Maharashtra, and other parts of India. Among contemporary exponents of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya, I am especially grateful to Shrivatsa Gosvami and Giriraja Swami, whose insights have inspired me to penetrate more deeply into the teachings of the early Gauḍīya authorities.
Finally, I thank my husband, Eric Dahl, my bashert, my śaktimat, and my muse, who has nurtured, sustained, and inspired me at every stage of this project and, through his unwavering love, has taught me the true meaning of devotion.