Abstract
Braj is a geographical region south of New Delhi. Tourists making the day-trip from New Delhi to Agra to see the Taj Mahal pass directly through Braj, the largest city of which is Mathura. Perhaps eighty miles in diameter, Braj encompasses numerous villages and towns in addition to Mathura, including Barsana, Govardhan, and, of course, Vrindavan, the spiritual center of both Braj and Krishna devotion. Still largely rural, Braj straddles the ancient and modern world. Countryside hovels without indoor plumbing are wired to satellite dishes. Laptop computers surfing the net on pirated phone lines illumine the paneless windows of one-room flats darkened by power failure. Large, grimy pigs snout around plastic Coke bottles and organic offal in untended, open gutters running past shops selling mobile phones and DVD players. Old and new around Braj coexist closely without acknowledging any distance between them.
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Notes
Charlotte Vaudeveille, “Braj, Lost and Found,” Indo-Iranian Journal 18 (1976): 199.
For a summary of several of the other relevant râs lila forms, see Donna Wulff, Drama as a Mode of Religious Realization: The Vidagdhamâdhava of Rûpa Gosvâmî (Chico: Scholars Press, 1984), 16–19.
Marjorie Boulton, The Anatomy of Drama (London: Routledge & Paul, 1960), 3.
John S. Hawley, “A Feast for Mount Govardhan,” in Devotion Divine: Bhakti Traditions from the Regions of India, ed. Diana Eck and Françoise Mallison (Groningen: Egbert & Forsten, 1991), 172.
For an eminently better translation of the panchadhyaya, see Graham M. Schweig, Dance of Divine Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
John Stratton Hawley and Srivatsa Goswami, At Play With Krishna (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1992), 14.
Barbara Stoler Miller, trans., Bhagavad-gita (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 98–99
Ganesh Vasudeo Tagare, trans., Bhagavata Purana, vol. IV (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1978), 1303–1304.
S. K. De, Bengal’s Contribution to Sanskrit Literature & Studies in Bengal Vaisnavism (Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadyaya, 1960), 115.
A. W. Entwistle, Braj: Centre of Krishna Pilgrimage (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1987), 71.
Avrum Stroll and Richard H. Popkin, Philosophy and the Human Spirit (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1973), 239.
Tyrone Guthrie said as much, commenting on the relationship between plays as they exists on the page and on the stage, during a speech in New York sometime before 1962. “Dramatic criticism of the classics,” he said, “is nearly always conducted on the assumption that there exists, probably in the mind of the critic, an ideal performance which completely realizes the intention of Shakespeare or Molière or Eugene O’Neill or whoever else. What they see on the stage is judged in comparison with that imagined ideal performance.” From J. Robert Wills, The Director in a Changing Theatre (Palo Alto: Mayfield, 1976), 88.
Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 66.
Margaret H. Case, Seeing Krishna: The Religious World of a Brahman Family in Vrindaban (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 366.
Joachim Wach, Types of Religious Experience Christian and Non-Christian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 32.
Richard Barz, The Bhakti Sect of Vallabhacarya (Faridabad: Thomson Press, 1976), 75.
Lance E. Nelson, “The Ontology of Bhakti: Devotion as Paramapurusârtha in Gaudiya Vaisnavism and Madhusûdhana Sarasvatî,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 32 (2004): 349.
David R. Kinsley, The Sword and the Flute: Kali and Krsna, Dark Visions of the Terrible and the Sublime in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 68–69.
David L. Haberman, Acting as a Way of Salvation: A Study of Râgânugâ Bhakti Sâdhana (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6.
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© 2009 David V. Mason
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Mason, D.V. (2009). Theatre Is God. In: Theatre and Religion on Krishna’s Stage. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230621589_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230621589_2
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